Lessons from Boston’s Streets

Cities around the world are rapidly growing.  By 2050, experts expect 70 percent of the world’s population will live in cities, up from 50 percent today. As cities become more densely populated, municipal governments will need to grow and adapt city infrastructure and services to meet the changing needs of residents. This summer, interning at the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM), the City of Boston’s innovation team, I had the chance to learn how Boston’s civic leaders are trying to adapt to meet one specific emerging challenge: the rapidly changing dynamics on the city’s streets.

Transportation in Boston is getting increasingly complex as new methods of shopping, getting around, and accessing services are having a profound effect on congestion and safety. Over the last 10 years, online shopping has grown dramatically leading to a significant increase in home deliveries.  The United States Postal Service, FedEx, and UPS have all seen substantial growth in the number of packages they deliver. In addition to deliveries, there are now approximately 22,000 Boston drivers for ridesharing services Uber and Lyft who make 2 to 3 million trips a month. Lastly, the number of bicyclists is rapidly growing as biking infrastructure improves.  All of these added delivery vans, ride-share cars, and bicyclists are causing the streets to become more congested and difficult to navigate.

During my internship, I was tasked with a number of projects focused on making Boston’s streets safer and easier to use. Embedded in the transportation department, I specifically worked to decrease unsafe driving behaviors of taxis and ride-share vehicles, as well as developing strategies to lower speeding and double parking.

Through these projects, I had an up-close opportunity to see how municipal government can respond to the emerging challenges of a growing city. I spent the summer shuttling between meetings with advocates, residents, transportation planners, and City Hall staff members. As the summer progressed, I began to see the transportation department as a great microcosm for understanding how change happens in City Hall.  Below I share two of my takeaways about change making in municipal government.

1. Start small and iterate quickly. On Cambridge Street in downtown Boston, there have been significant problems with double-parked commercial vehicles causing traffic jams that also force cyclists to navigate around vehicles causing safety risks. I was tasked with running an experiment to test interventions to lower the amount of double parking. During the three weeks of the experiment, we expanded and standardized the commercial vehicle parking spots and increased the enforcement of illegal double parking. By the end of the experiment, the average number of double-parked commercial vehicles decreased slightly although double parking continues to be a serious problem.

However, there were other benefits to running the experiment. Through observation and data collection, I started to identify some of the root causes of the double-parking problem. I learned that the myriad delivery trucks on Cambridge Street do not have exact schedules. This means that always having a spot open for them when they arrive is very challenging. Moreover, many contractors stay in commercial parking spots the whole day taking away spaces for short-term parking for deliveries. Lastly, many delivery companies like FedEx and UPS see parking tickets as a cost of doing business and would rather have their drivers deliver more quickly than spend time searching for a space.

Although the experiment was not successful in ridding Cambridge Street of double parking, we were able to uncover some of the underlying causes. We gleaned real insights from trying out a small-scale short-term experiment that could be used to inform larger policy fixes for double-parking in the future.

2. It’s all about relationships. It was not hard for me to imagine that an innovation team might struggle to be effective in a municipal government setting. I envisioned long-term city workers distrusting the “smaht kids” from MONUM who think they know everything but actually understand little about the challenges that departments face.

However, to my surprise, I found a very different attitude in the City of Boston. When I introduced myself to transportation staff members as a member of MONUM, I was welcomed as a resource for helping develop new and interesting initiatives. Throughout the summer, I saw many front-line transportation staff go out of their way to support my projects.

I asked both MONUM and transportation staff members how such a positive relationship had developed. Their explanations hinted at years of careful relationship management and an intense focus on getting things done to improve the lives of Boston residents.

MONUM leaders shared with me how they had slowly won trust over the years by treating people with respect, listening to concerns, and getting their hands dirty in the specifics of the projects.  They never had a big idea and then left department members to figure out the details. They only proposed projects that would have tangible benefits for residents of Boston. MONUM staff positioned themselves as ‘risk aggregators’. They would take the blame if a project failed, but the department would get the credit if the project succeeded.
Over time, transportation staff members were won over as they saw MONUM transportation projects succeed. They built relationships with the MONUM staff and over time grew to appreciate them.  In the last two years, the collaboration between MONUM and the transportation department has led to car share vehicles placed throughout the city, the Park Boston App, and the expansion of bike routes to name a few.

Over the next thirty years, Boston’s population is expected to grow as people and companies return to the urban core in search of dynamic communities. There is a likely scenario where poor people, and especially people of color, are forced out into the distant suburbs without affordable transportation to good paying jobs. Boston’s civic leaders need to aggressively act to make sure all residents are able to take advantage of the thriving economy. Transportation will play a key role in helping Boston reach its potential as a vibrant city with a socioeconomically and racially diverse population.  Small scale experiments, iteration, and cross-departmental relationship building will be a few of the tools needed to reach that goal.

This post was written by Dan Lesser, the Initiative on Cities’ 2016 Boston Summer Fellow

About Dan Lesser

Dan graduated from Oberlin College with a Bachelor’s Degree in American Government and Politics. He went on to pursue a Master of Business Administration at Boston University Questrom School of Business, where he graduated with high honors. Since his internship at the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, he has been hired full-time as a Program Director at the organization.