City Planners
MetroBridge turns students into policymakers
With 46,000 residents and 42,000 registered automobiles—not to mention the thousands of commuters lining its streets on the way to Boston—Everett, Mass., has a congestion problem. Even after adding a rush-hour bus-only lane and improving bus stop infrastructure, the city has struggled to convince residents to ditch their cars for public transit. To find a solution, it turned to an unlikely group: a CAS undergraduate political science class.
The city submitted a proposal to MetroBridge, a new program created by BU’s Initiative on Cities that pairs municipalities with classes to collaborate on real-world problems, and was accepted for the spring 2019 semester.
MetroBridge, which launched in fall 2018, had projects in seven cities, engaging classes at CAS, Questrom, and Metropolitan College, during the spring 2019 semester. The topics ranged from Everett’s congestion problem to housing insecurity in Chelsea, Mass., and city website design in Quincy, Mass.
Two spring 2019 projects landed in Topics in Public Policy, a CAS course taught by David Glick, an associate professor of political science and MetroBridge faculty director. His students were divided into teams to address homeshare rental regulations in Watertown, Mass., and Everett’s transit project. They spent the semester researching policy ideas, meeting with city officials, and drafting recommendations.
There’s so much that you can accomplish at the local level.
Helen Houghton (CAS’21, GRS’21), who worked on the transit project, signed up for Glick’s course because she wanted the real-world experience MetroBridge offered; she’s planning to study law and wanted to see how local government works.
Chris Alexander (CAS’21, GRS’21), a member of a second Everett team, was attracted by the opportunity to work directly with local governments to solve a problem. The political science major was impressed by the reception the Everett officials gave the students. “They were very candid with us about the issues that they were having,” like their inability to attract more riders to public transit, “and the fact that they weren’t sure how to move forward,” he says.
Among the teams’ ideas for Everett: an advertising campaign emphasizing the personal benefits of bus transit, like time to read or work; email and text message campaigns promoting public transit; and improving the efficiency of the bus system with new maps and trip-planning tools. The students working on the transit problem presented their recommendations to city officials in April and, over the summer, MetroBridge staff compiled their reports into a nearly 50-page document they delivered to the city.
Which recommendations Everett adopts—and what effect they have on congestion—remains to be seen, but the project has already had an impact on the students involved. “There’s so much that you can accomplish at the local level,” Alexander says. “If you’re thinking about just improving people’s lives on a daily basis, a lot of that happens there.”
Though MetroBridge began as a CAS project, the program could expand. “We don’t see it having any limitations,” says Emily Robbins, the program manager. “It can be across the University. The agenda is going to be driven by what the partnering city really needs.”