‘Why Aren’t They Listening?’: For Many Black Residents, This Blue Hill Avenue Transit Plan Repeats Old Problems

By Emma Platoff Globe Staff,

June 24, 2026, 5:30 a.m.

Heavy traffic filled Blue Hill Avenue on a spring day. (VIDEO BY RAPHAEL CHINCA/GLOBE STAFF, DRONE BY DANIELLE PARHIZKARAN/GLOBE STAFF)

In the middle of Blue Hill Avenue’s weeknight chaos — the triple-parked cars and the scooters zipping around them; the parents gripping their children’s hands as they step off the sidewalk to cross; the city bus lumbering along, belching and hissing — one segment of the street is stagnant: the wide, empty median.

On a street where everyone is battling for space, and every inch is contested, this barren strip sits right in the center of everything, in most places entirely useless. The cracked concrete is a reminder of the inaction and disinvestment that’s made this crucial artery through Black Boston so frustrating and dangerous to navigate.

“Cambridge has beautiful streets and bike lanes, beautiful bus stops, all that,” said Glorian Lee, 18, who lives near Franklin Park and takes the 28 bus down Blue Hill Avenue every day. “Why can we not have the same thing?”

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City and state officials say they finally have a plan to make things better. They see the neglected median as the key to transforming Blue Hill Ave. into something like the functional, even pleasant boulevard it was 80 years ago. The pitch is this: Take the beleaguered buses out of the side lane of traffic, where they get stuck behind the double-parkers and right-turners, and put them in the exclusive, unencumbered center, in new dedicated bus lanes. There, they can move more swiftly, ferrying the people of Mattapan, Roxbury, and Dorchester — who are some of the heaviest users of public transit, but suffer through some of the least reliable service — to and from their schools, jobs, and dentist appointments. It’s the anchor of a larger plan for the avenue that also includes trees, crosswalks, streetlights, and new sidewalks.

After decades of stops and starts, the money for improvements is finally there. The federal government has come through with grants totaling $95 million, while the state and city are set to kick in $51 million and $18 million, respectively. But Mayor Michelle Wu has gone quiet on the center bus lane proposal, caught between competing pressures to remake the city’s streets for the better and to avoid alienating the Black voters already frustrated with her.

The trouble is, many people in the neighborhoods branching out from Blue Hill Avenue are deeply opposed to this plan, a skepticism wrought by decades of broken promises and worse. They fear that adding a bus lane and removing some dedicated travel lanes would slow car commutes that are impossible already, or that street improvements could limit parking and gut the local businesses that are the spirit of the corridor. Alongside promises of better lighting and safer crosswalks, the latest version of the plan also includes bike lanes — which to many represent the first, galloping horseman of the gentrification apocalypse. Some neighbors have gone so far as to ask the Trump administration to rescind $80 million in federal funding, an effort to halt the project.

Supporters say they do not anticipate any harmful effects on businesses, and officials intend to preserve as much as 90 percent of parking. But those assurances do little for communities that have every reason to doubt what the government says. The MBTA in 2025 spent $300,000 on a traffic analysis, but never released it to the public, adding to worries about what officials have planned.

When a corridor is neglected for so long, promises to improve it can feel like something nefarious. Many in Mattapan, Roxbury, and Dorchester say they feel like the plan for a center-running bus lane — along with other government efforts to increase housing and boost businesses along the avenue — is being forced on them despite protests.

Mac Hudson, who lives on Blue Hill Avenue, spoke at a March community meeting addressing the Blue Hill Avenue center bus lane proposal.

Which is to say, the current debate is about much more than a bus lane. It’s about trust, and what happens when the government has done so little to help and so much to harm a neighborhood that it has little credibility left. It’s about who gets a say in Blue Hill Avenue’s future.

“Why are we even here tonight? They already know that we don’t want this,” said West Ward, 25, at a March community meeting on the bus lane. “Why aren’t they listening to the people who live here?”

The story of Blue Hill Avenue is a story of disinvestment. Once home to Jewish neighborhoods, the corridor swiftly transformed in the mid-20th century when racist housing policies funneled Black residents there, as banks refused to give them home loans elsewhere in the city. Now, its neighborhoods are home to some of Boston’s most diverse communities, Black families who trace their roots here back generations and newer arrivals from Haiti or Cape Verde.

Linda Tibere danced along with the music on Blue Hill Ave. during the 20th Haitian-American Unity Parade in May 2022.  

A century ago, a streetcar ran between down Blue Hill Avenue all the way to Mattapan Square. Families queued up to ride it through a vibrant cultural corridor with meat markets, furniture stores, synagogues, and historic theaters. But in the 1950s, as cars became more prevalent and white families left the city for the suburbs, authorities ripped out the streetcar and redesigned the avenue to add a traffic lane in each direction. The new setup made it easier for commuters to travel in and out from the suburbs in their cars. But it also made Blue Hill Avenue less of a destination for shopping and dining, and did little for the people who lived there.

They “pull the trolleys out, and create this road, that is a huge road, that’s designed to get people through my neighborhood and not to my neighborhood,” said state Representative Russell Holmes, a Mattapan Democrat.

As long ago as the 1970s, city and state transit officials recognized that removing the trolley had condemned the neighborhoods to poor public transit — a “major [factor] contributing to the deterioration of the Blue Hill Avenue community,” according to a city report from that time. Archival documents show officials wanted to restore the trolley and even weighed extending the Orange Line beneath the corridor.

“Fixed-rail trolley service is the preferred technology,” a 1979 report concluded. “It has to be made easy for Corridor residents and others to reach these important destinations.”

The plan for rail was ultimately rejected as costly and infeasible.

An outbound streetcar passed inbound passengers waiting on Blue Hill Avenue at Arbutus Street in October 1929.

As the decades wore on, trains and trolleys expanded elsewhere in the MBTA system, including an extension of the Green Line into Somerville that took three decades and cost $2.3 billion. But rail never returned to Blue Hill Avenue.

It was not the only time such transit was taken from Boston’s Black communities.

“When they took the Orange Line away from Nubian Square, we were supposed to have a replacement, and we never got that,” said City Councilor Brian Worrell, who argues his constituents deserve subway service, not just buses. “It’s like we’ve been redlined out of the rapid rail infrastructure — and you’re talking about one of the highest transit rider corridors. Why doesn’t Blue Hill Ave. get what Dorchester Ave. has?"

By 2009, when at last federal funding was available for a project to refurbish the street, the proposal was for “bus rapid transit” called the 28X, after the 28 bus route that ran up the corridor.

Rail “was never feasible,” said Jim Aloisi, who shepherded the effort as transportation secretary under Governor Deval Patrick. “I heard those voices back then, and we had plenty of discussions about it, but I just had to politely say, ‘I know that’s what you think you want, or what you want, but that’s not feasible.’”

Instead, Aloisi said, he wanted to prove to residents of the corridor that the 28X bus could be “really, really, really good, and function as well as light rail.”

Skeptics in the neighborhood felt like they were being presented with a fully formed plan — one with no room for their feedback to shape it, said Vivien Morris, a longtime community leader in Mattapan who recalled the opposition.

“That’s been our history — being treated negatively and pushed around town,” she said. “That’s why if the initiative came through the city, then people feel like, first we have to push back in order to make sure that our voices are heard.”

The 28X quickly fell apart. Facing widespread opposition from neighbors, Massachusetts turned down the federal money, leaving Blue Hill Avenue’s problems to fester.

Not everyone in the community was happy to see the 28X project die. Its collapse inspired Holmes to run for state representative. Now, he keeps a rendering of the rejected route in his office.

“I’m still just in disbelief that we made that decision,” Holmes said. Elected officials had turned down tens of millions of dollars, he said, when “what we should be doing is bringing resources back to our Black neighborhood that has been under-resourced and under-delivered to for decades.”

In 2019, Boston officials decided to try again. Recognizing the failures of the previous, state-run effort, the city under Mayor Marty Walsh took a more active role in planning the bus project, hoping to rebuild trust in the skeptical communities around Blue Hill Avenue.

“This is a part of the city that has been underserved over the last several decades,” Vineet Gupta, the city Transportation Department’s planning director, told GBH News at the time. “We really want to start learning from people who live in the corridor.”

But after seven years, hundreds of survey responses, and thousands of public comments, trust is still frayed, and residents remain dubious that the plan will help them. Meanwhile, the consequences of inaction on Blue Hill Avenue plague everyone who lives near it.

The corridor is one of Boston’s most dangerous, with a collision requiring EMS transport every three days on average, according to city data. For pedestrians, crossing the wide street can be treacherous. And driving it is a singularly maddening experience.

“I do whatever I can to avoid Blue Hill Ave.,” said Ihioma Breneus, 42, who lives in Mattapan.

Residents and commuters complain about the traffic, particularly during peak times; they gripe about double- sometimes triple-parking; they fear for their safety, and their kids’ safety, when they cross the street or, God forbid, ride a bike.

“Blue Hill Avenue is as unsafe today as it was 50 years ago,” said Tiffany Cogell, who grew up in Roxbury and now heads the Boston Cyclists Union. As a kid, she recalled, she was never allowed to cross the wide street — meaning though she lived just a few minutes away, she couldn’t get to Franklin Park on foot. “There is no reason in the world that I’m about to be 57 years old, and Blue Hill Avenue doesn’t feel any different or safer than it did when I was a little girl.”

If there is consensus on the problems, though, there is still no consensus on the solution. Neighbors are sharply divided on, if not overwhelmingly opposed to, the center-running bus plan. An analysis prepared for the MBTA found the plan would speed up the 28 bus by as much as 15 minutes at peak times, while slowing down cars by as much as six minutes during the morning rush, in part because the latest version of the plan would get rid of some traffic lanes. Critics fret over that increase, and argue officials should make other improvements — more trees, safer crosswalks, better lights — without changing the bus path.

“Nobody’s asking for it,” Breneus said of the center lane. Many fear the revamp could bring gentrification, and say the city isn’t doing enough to prevent that.

Two city councilors who represent Dorchester and Roxbury are still pushing for rail, not bus service, along Blue Hill Avenue. Worrell and Councilor Miniard Culpepper on Tuesday unveiled a plan to extend the Orange Line beneath the corridor. Officials owe their neighborhoods faster, better transit, they said.

“We want them to live up to their promise from 40 years ago,” Culpepper said.

Glorian Lee took the 28 bus from Franklin Park Zoo to work in Mattapan Square in May.  

But even if political leaders were to embrace the idea — and Wu has already sounded skeptical — any rail expansion would be costly and time-intensive. For some, the bus lane at least offers a quicker answer to Blue Hill Avenue’s problems.

Lee, the 18-year-old, lives in Dorchester, just a few miles from his part-time job in Mattapan Square. The bus ride should take about half an hour, but one recent Thursday, Lee left home two hours early, knowing he could be delayed. Once, he said, he was so late for work that he missed his two-hour shift entirely.

At his stop near Franklin Park, Lee tracked the bus on an app, knowing that the schedule is merely a suggestion.

“Another bus bunching!” he lamented, referring to delays that made his bus arrive at the same time as the one scheduled for 15 minutes later. That day, he made it to work before his shift started. But he often thinks about all the things he could do with the luxury of a bit more time.

There is a clear generational divide between younger transit users who take the bus and want a better one, and older commuters who drive. At a public meeting this spring, former state senator Dianne Wilkerson described the center bus lane as yet another unwanted change that officials were inflicting on her community.

“Nobody takes a bus to go pick up the pizza,” she said. “Nobody takes a bus to go pick up their kids. … That’s not how anybody lives. So we will not have this forced on us.”

It hasn’t helped that the Blue Hill Avenue plan is being debated alongside two other controversial developments nearby. Wu is pushing to turn Franklin Park’s White Stadium into a professional soccer venue, and the mayor also caused uproar when she shelved a plan for a life sciences and affordable housing project in Roxbury in favor of building a new high school on the site.

“You have three projects affecting a really marginalized community, and at this point they feel really unheard,” said Chevanese VanDyke, 46, who lives in Dorchester. “No bus is going to make up for that.”

For transit officials who want the project to go forward, the next few months will be about persuading people like VanDyke. The MBTA has promised more public engagement, and planners emphasize the design is far from final, meaning some of the more unpopular features in early sketches may change. The MBTA won’t go ahead with the project if Wu doesn’t want it, and for the mayor, there are landmines everywhere. Elected with the support of Boston’s Black communities and its transit advocates, she has now alienated swaths of both. Any choice she makes on Blue Hill Avenue could further incense at least one group.

Aloisi blamed critics for exaggerating how much parking might be lost, and how much businesses might suffer.

“Do you want to condemn those bus riders, those transit-dependent residents of the city, to a lifetime of substandard transit access on the altar of false information?” he said. “This is really a moral responsibility to make something like this happen and not to let it fail again.”

For Blue Hill Avenue to get better, Holmes said, it has to change. Beautifying the streets and leaving the traffic setup as is will not solve the problems, he said.

Alongside the bus lane, he’d like to see two traffic lanes in each direction, and as much parking retained as possible. He can live with losing some trees from the plan.

“We’re not going to have any bike lanes,” Holmes added. “Forget that.”

Those tweaks could assuage some fears about congestion and gentrification.

“So much of this is the Black community saying, ‘We don’t trust that this is for our community,’” Holmes said. “‘Is this for us?’ And I say the answer is, ‘Yes. Don’t move.’”

The distrust is hard to get around. But if the city and state don’t have a record of doing right by Black neighborhoods, Holmes said, “at least I do.”

He can see a future where the government, with the support of the neighborhood, fixes a problem it helped create. “You’re going to see young folks going to and from school on the buses,” he said. “You’re going to see those who are in most need.”

That’s who the improvements are for, Holmes emphasized. “We’re looking to serve the people who live in our community.”

Now, he just has to convince them, too.

Emma Platoff can be reached at emma.platoff@globe.com. Follow her @emmaplatoff.