Where does biking in Cambridge fall short?

Cambridge, Massachusetts is home to 120,000 people. In the Cambridge Bicycle Plan, published in 2015, Cambridge has committed to increasing the share of commute trips by bike to 10% by 2020. The U.S. national average in 2014 was 0.6%.

The city has also set a goal of decreasing bike crashes by 50 percent. The path to achieving this safety goal is by improving roads to support cyclists. Here's what the bicycle network looks like on the streets today and where improvements are needed.

Samuel Clay
May 13th, 2020

Bike Lanes of Today

As of 2018 there are 92 miles of bike lanes across the city of Cambridge. The proposed Cambridge Bicycle Plan 2020 calls for adding 75 more miles between 2013 and 2019. And reaching 350+ total miles by 2043.

Cambridge is creating a world-class biking city, and to accomplish that the city needs to do more than add bike lanes. Improving safety is what leads to increasing usage of the bike facilities in the city and to do that Cambridge needs to consider several problem areas.

Cambridge has many great streets for biking

Cycleways and separated bike lanes are prominent in the city, but there's no connection between major transit hubs that a person can take on a bicycle without going through dangerous street designs.

"Networks of protected bike lanes" is the mantra of safer biking. Even with the Cycling Safety Ordinance, which ensures the gradual building of separated bike lanes, the rate at which crashes are lowering means we will see ten more years of unnecessary deaths caused by lack of safe biking infrastructure.

Oxford Street is a bottleneck

But there remains a handful of parking spots even though there are numerous bikes and lightweight two-wheeled vehicles rolling through. This map shows where the street is hazardous for bikes due to unnecessary parking.

Most crashes in Cambridge are caused by drivers not seeing cyclists, whether or not the bicycle was in a bike lane.