Enough
is Enough

Dear Mayor Wu,

Enough is enough.

We are parents, families, and neighbors from across Boston. Many of us have met you — at safety walks, at community meetings, on Hyde Park Avenue and on corridors like it across the city. For years, we have told you, in public and to your face, that continued delay on street safety would cost lives.

Last week it cost the life of Louisa Gag — a transportation planner in your own administration, a person who devoted her career to making our streets safe. Louisa was killed on her bicycle blocks from an intersection your administration has studied and stalled. She was not the first. We have been losing neighbors to these streets for years, and we have been warning you, specifically and repeatedly, that more deaths were coming.

You know as well as anyone how beloved Louisa was. She began her career in public service on your own staff, when you were a city councilor, and she spent it working tirelessly for the residents of Boston — beside the advocates she organized, her colleagues in City Hall, and neighbors across this city whose streets are safer because of her. She was killed on the very streets she was working to improve. Years ago, one of her professional responsibilities was keeping the list of people killed by cars in Boston. Now her name has been added to it.

For at least eighteen months, your administration has paused, re-studied, and slow-walked safety projects that were designed, funded, and ready. You have told us these projects need more process, more consensus, more perfection. But consensus never arrives for the dead. A study protects no one. Delay is a decision, and its costs are measured in lives.

Budgets are moral documents. The budget you put forward placed safety projects on hold and cut transportation funding at the very moment the city needed the opposite. That, too, was a decision.

We are asking you to lead — not to adjust your communications strategy, not to speak in lofty generalities, but to act:

1. Unpause every stalled street-safety project within 30 days, with a published, dated construction schedule for each.
2. Restore the street-safety and transportation funding cut in your budget.
3. Build fast and fix later. End the practice of holding projects hostage to perfect designs and unanimous approval. Use quick-build materials now; refine as you go.
4. Appoint a permanent, qualified Chief of Streets with a broad public mandate to eliminate traffic deaths.
5. Be accountable. Publish a public timeline for every high-crash corridor — including Tremont Street and Hyde Park Avenue — with a named official responsible for each.

None of us is willing to raise our families in a city whose leadership will not answer for preventable deaths on its own streets. We are asking you to do what is right. And if you cannot or will not, you will have forfeited the trust a mayor needs to govern — and no study, no statement, and no consensus process will win it back.

Signed,
The people of Boston who walk, bike, and cross your streets — and who are done waiting.