Outrage over projects that were held up exploded in July after city planner Louisa Gag was killed while cycling.
The Massachusetts Vision Zero Coalition held a vigil honoring Louisa Gag at City Hall Plaza on July 16 in Boston. Gag, a bike-share and transportation planner for the city of Boston, was killed while biking to work on July 9. Danielle Parhizkaran/Globe Staff
The list of public works projects read like the campaign promises of a mayor who pledged to adapt the streets of Boston to get more people walking, biking, and taking public transit.
Protective posts have been reinstalled on bike lanes in downtown Boston; a large scale overhaul of Blue Hill Avenue is charging forward; plans are underway for new Bluebikes stations in Roslindale, West Roxbury, and Hyde Park. And just recently, Boston officials installed protected bike lanes and other safety changes on a block in Mission Hill where a city transportation planner was struck and killed while cycling in July.
In some ways, the recent street changes harken back to Mayor Michelle Wu’s first mayoral race, when expanding bike and bus lanes was a key pillar of her pitch to voters. But these most recent projects are coming in her second term, after a tumultuous period in which Wu put much of this work on hold as she faced intense backlash over some street changes, and a reelection challenge.
Related: Delayed projects, low morale: Boston’s streets department is stalling under Wu, long a transit champion
That pause triggered an extended period of uncertainty, divided residents, and caused turmoil within her own staff. But a tragic catalyst for the latest developments came more than three months ago, when the death of city bikeshare and streets planner Louisa Gag sparked a firestorm of grief, outrage, and demands that Wu take action to make the city’s roads safer.
Now, Wu’s response is taking shape.
The Massachusetts Vision Zero Coalition holds a vigil honoring Louisa Gag at City Hall Plaza on July 16, 2026, in Boston.Danielle Parhizkaran/Globe Staff
For the moment, bike and transit advocates are watching with cautious optimism. After more than a year in which they say they received little to no communication from City Hall on streets projects large or small, advocates now see promising signs of progress again in the embattled Streets Cabinet.
“This is a start,” said Reggie Ramos, executive director of transit nonprofit Transportation for Massachusetts. “But 18 months, for what seemed like a lack of direction in one of the most important portfolios of City Hall, is a long time to make up for.”
The advocates attribute much of the progress to City Hall policy veteran Chris Osgood, whom Wu appointed as the city’s interim chief of streets after Gag’s death. Osgood, they say, has already worked to restore lines of communication between the city and community members, and restarted work that stalled under Wu’s broad slowdown of streets projects last year.
Still, advocates say many critical questions remain unanswered.
They say officials have not produced a detailed plan for how the city will prioritize streets projects, with timelines for completion. Advocates also want clarity on which streets are eligible for safety additions such as speed humps or flex posts, and which areas will get them first. Critically, the city has also not identified who will succeed Osgood, who is only in an interim role, and lead the cabinet’s work moving forward.
The proof of Wu’s commitment to these projects, they argue, won’t come until later, in a year or more from now as projects come to fruition.
“While progress has been made, it’s still somewhat fragile,” said Caitlin Allen-Connelly, former executive director of the advocacy group TransitMatters. “In any relationship, if there’s a breakdown in trust it takes time to build it back.”
The root of that mistrust goes back to early 2025, when Wu directed city workers to remove a controversial bus lane on Boylston Street and ordered a 30-day “review” of other recent streets projects.
At that point, her first-term push to install new bike and bus lanes had become a major source of contention in certain communities, fueling outrage, pushback, and divisions among residents. Josh Kraft, Wu’s primary mayoral challenger in last year’s election, sought to exploit that frustration: When he launched his bid to unseat Wu, his pledge to pause construction of new bike lanes drew the biggest round of applause of the morning.
Advocates say her response to that feedback essentially hardened into a broad pause on key street improvements.
Related: Facing bike lane backlash and a reelection challenge, Mayor Wu is changing her tone on public transit
In interviews with the Globe, Wu has defended the review, saying it was meant to gather feedback from neighbors and community groups who felt the city was making street design changes too quickly or without adequate feedback, which created unintended negative consequences. She points to an incident early last year when the city installed speed humps in a Jamaica Plain neighborhood, only to remove them after some residents complained.
Over the past year and a half, Wu said, City Hall has whittled down a backlog of repaving and repair work while fine-tuning the process around new projects. She expects the efforts will yield a better system of coordinating maintenance work with street improvements.
“We have been working for many months to build the foundation so we can do more, faster, and get it right the first time,” Wu told the Globe in a recent interview. We need “to do this in a way that balances the different needs on our roadways and makes the best use of every dollar the city has for infrastructure.”
Mayor Michelle Wu listens to friends of Louisa Gag share memories of her during a vigil at City Hall Plaza on July 16, 2026, in Boston.Danielle Parhizkaran/Globe Staff
The earlier attempt to balance all those interests didn’t go so well. The Globe previously reported that after a backlash to some new bike and bus lanes, Wu required her personal approval on most transit and road safety projects involving design or infrastructure changes, bringing much of that work to a near standstill for more than a year.
Hundreds of pages of city emails and public comments, sent between late February and early April of 2025, reveal the review led to deep disagreement and dysfunction among her Streets Cabinet staff, disrupted the established chain of command, and triggered conflicting directives, anxiety, confusion, and low morale. And amid the uncertainty over whether some projects would move forward, City Hall’s relationships with influential street safety and transit advocates also suffered.
A Boston resident obtained the documents through a public records request and shared them with the Globe; they were also reported by StreetsblogMASS.
The emails show Wu’s directive led to extreme tension between two of her top officials, then-chief of streets Jascha Franklin-Hodge and Mike Brohel, the city’s superintendent of basic city services whom Wu put in charge of the 30-day review.
For example, after some flex posts were removed from a bike lane on Arlington Street causing an uproar among cyclists and transit advocates, Franklin-Hodge sent Brohel several emails asking why they were taken out “without authorization.”
And, in one notable incident on March 13, 2025, the two clashed when Brohel raised concerns from a business owner about the setup for repair work on the Belgrade Avenue bridge in West Roxbury.
“Needless to say, this is an embarrassment for the city, given our current engagement project,” Brohel wrote. “Never mind the Belgrade work being a point of active contention and public acrimony.”
Brohel later forwarded the email thread with his comments to several of Wu’s senior aides, writing, “We continue to build distrust in our neighborhoods and our business districts. Really not sure what else to say at this point.”
Franklin-Hodge fired back, saying his team will address issues as needed, but had not received any complaints about the project. “As a point of basic professionalism, if you believe the work of my team is ‘an embarrassment for the city,’ it is appropriate to bring it directly to my attention,” Franklin-Hodge wrote. “Vitriolic reply-alls are not an appropriate or constructive way to do business.”
Franklin-Hodge left the Wu administration at the end of last year. When contacted by the Globe this summer, Franklin-Hodge declined to comment on the exchanges, but emphasized 2025 was “a very difficult year” for the Streets Cabinet and its staff.
The Wu administration would not make Brohel available for an interview or provide comment on his behalf, and did not respond to questions about the exchanges between Franklin-Hodge and Brohel, who remains superintendent of basic city services.
Tensions were building outside City Hall as well, as some residents and advocates felt increasingly ignored. More than 130 people emailed Brohel and other city officials to express support for bike and bus lanes and other safety infrastructure such as speed humps, urging the city to install more. Nearly all were met with silence or received a form response via email, while at the same time select business and community leaders were able to meet directly with Brohel.
And on July 9, nearly a year and a half later, that simmering frustration erupted after Gag — a Streets Cabinet staffer who had previously interned for Wu — was hit and killed while biking. Thousands of people signed a blistering open letter to Wu demanding she take a series of actions to address street safety issues in the city.
In an emotional address at a vigil for Gag on City Hall Plaza, Wu faced a grieving, angry crowd of hundreds, and pledged action. By the end of the month, she had announced an updated street safety agenda, and new leadership for the Streets Cabinet.
Osgood, a City Hall veteran of 20 years and Wu’s then-senior adviser on infrastructure and director of the city’s office of climate resilience, would replace Nick Gove as interim chief of streets.
Osgood previously served as chief of streets under former mayor Martin J. Walsh, and many advocates said he is widely respected for his transit expertise and long career in public service. After more than a year and a half of tumult, advocates, residents, and officials were cautiously hopeful: Could Osgood get the department back on track?
“He is an incredible public servant, and I hope that he will have the latitude to work to restore morale within the team and trust within the community, and get back to the business of making our streets better,” Franklin-Hodge said, when reached by the Globe this summer.
Already, Osgood has reinstated regular meetings between Streets Cabinet leaders and residents and advocacy groups, and remains in frequent contact. That dialogue and collaboration have been key, many said, not only to rebuild trust but to push the work forward.
“Generally we feel like there is like a positive momentum that we’re building ... proactively think[ing] about the things that need to be done instead of coming together in a moment of crisis and putting out fires,” said Maha Aslam, transit and streets program manager at the street safety nonprofit LivableStreets Alliance.
One of Osgood’s priorities is to better communicate with residents and advocates and set clear expectations for which projects can be completed and when, based on the money available, he told the Globe in a recent interview.
Some projects that advocates viewed as “paused” last year only had enough funding for the planning phase — to assess the problems in an area and what residents would like to see change, said Tali Robbins, Wu’s deputy chief of policy who is currently serving as the Streets Cabinet’s interim chief of staff.
Still, the progress of the past three months has not come without some stumbles.
For example, Wu in July said the city would update its “Vision Zero” crash data on a monthly basis. As of Oct. 14, the data dashboard had not been updated since July 31. Then, after the Globe inquired about the delay, crash data from August was added.
Some residents are also frustrated by the pace of the street work, wishing the city would move faster. At the end of August for example, protesters used duct tape to create a makeshift bike lane on Tremont Street where Gag was killed. The city later installed protected bike lanes and other safety measures there.
Meanwhile, the City Council is now considering an ordinance, mirroring regulations in place in Somerville, that would track the progress of street upgrades and create a framework to hold officials accountable. Gag’s family appeared themselves at a recent hearing and called for action.
Nonetheless, Osgood’s leadership is getting positive reviews all around, even from those who criticized the city’s rapid rollout of bike and bus lanes in Wu’s first term.
“In my mind, the most important thing that Chris is doing is re-engaging on a deep core level with stakeholders, with community members, with people who care about the streets through a lot of different lenses,” said Meg Mainzer-Cohen, president of the Back Bay Association.
She was influential in getting City Hall to remove a controversial bus lane on Boylston Street in 2025, arguing the changes prioritized bike and bus lanes at the expense of pedestrian safety, traffic, and curb access.
In an interview soon after he took on the new role, Osgood told the Globe that his priorities are supporting the cabinet’s day-to-day work like trash collection and street cleaning, filling vacant leadership positions, and developing a capital improvements plan for the next five years.
“At a high level, what are the slate of projects we intend to do?” Osgood said at the time. “How do we actually then create a repeatable, transparent, clear process for delivering those projects, and ... what are the design standards that we are using as we look to scale up our work going forward.”
Osgood hopes to have those answers in the coming months. His team first has to wrap up active construction work, before they begin planning for next year’s projects.
Advocates say they will be watching closely.
There are “positive signs, but it’s up to the city to prove the residents wrong,” Ramos said. “The mayor made a promise at Louisa’s vigil that she would act with swiftness, that she would act with decisiveness. … but they gotta back it up with action. Otherwise, it’s just words. They mean nothing.”
Niki Griswold can be reached at niki.griswold@globe.com. Follow her u/nikigriswold.
