As of mid-April, many of us have probably seen the reporting by the Globe and others about what's been going on—or rather, what hasn't been going on—behind closed doors at City Hall. Street improvement projects have been stalled, funding jeopardized, reports hidden, "consensus" and explicit approval from the mayor required. One such project is speed humps. In 2023 Mayor Wu set a goal of installing 500 speed humps per year in the city, but the initially strong speed hump installation effort has practically dried up. It seems as though Faneuil Street in Brighton was one of only a handful of roads to get them in 2025. Frustratingly, I can't substantiate this claim because I have been unable to find any reports giving year-by-year data. The interactive map of installation progress has also not been updated recently; Faneuil Street still shows as “Eligible” rather than “Installed” even though the speed humps were installed back in October.

I am a strong supporter of speed humps and I didn’t realize that they might be seen as controversial. In my community I hadn't seen them provoke the same heated debates as bike lanes. Speed humps are one of the cheapest and most effective ways of slowing cars down. The city website states that Boston's speed humps were designed to encourage drivers to travel at 20 mph or less. Statistics vary somewhat by study, but data from the National Traffic Safety Board indicates that a car traveling 20 mph will kill a pedestrian 5% of the time inthe event of a crash, but if that car is traveling 30 mph then the fatality rate shoots up to 45%.

I decided to check my assumptions about speed hump support via a poll with the Allston-Brighton neighborhood's Facebook group. The results were very positive; of around 150 people, 73% of people wanted to keep the Faneuil Street speed humps. 6% were indifferent, 8% had mixed feelings, and 13% said they wanted the speed humps removed. There were some important criticisms: the installation had happened without enough warning and the humps could be marked more clearly. But on the whole, my neighbors said they thought safety outweighed any mild inconvenience and several said they wanted speed humps on their own streets. One person used a gif of the Grinch to express their schadenfreude at watching unsafe drivers catch air when going over the humps.

Advertisement

It’s true that this is technically not a consensus. If one person in a town of 5,000 decides to not evacuate before a hurricane arrives, that isn’t a consensus on evacuation since consensus is usually used to describe a decision that no one opposes. But that one person’s refusal shouldn’t mean that FEMA stops helping everyone else leave. Similarly, a few influential anti-humpers with the mayor's ear should not be enough to halt the kind of necessary, proven safety measures that many Bostonians support. If our mayor is not willing to push forward something as popular as speed humps next to playgrounds and schools, will she be brave enough to do anything of consequence ever again?

Sarah Randall

Brighton