Cambridge Will Consider Restoring Two-Way Traffic Along Garden Street

The Cambridge City Council unanimously passed a policy order Monday asking the city to devise a plan to restore Garden Street to two-way automobile traffic while retaining its two-way bike lanes by April 2025.

The move follows years of complaints from residents about a 1.25 mile stretch of Garden Street, which was made one-way in November 2022 as a part of the city’s project to construct a 25-mile separated bike lane network throughout the city. The shift came as an effort to preserve parking on the street while allowing for the construction of bike lanes.

During public comment at the meeting, more than 30 residents said the shift had increased congestion on Garden Street and surrounding side streets, causing headaches for drivers and safety concerns for pedestrians.

Councilor Paul F. Toner, who sponsored the order, said he had received more than 5o0 emails from residents calling to restore two-way traffic to the one-way stretch, which runs between Huron and Concord Avenues.

“I have been listening for almost three years consistently from residents of the area, from all the side streets, from people on Garden Street regularly that they feel that the one-way traffic pattern is not working, that they would like to see it restored to two-way,” Toner said Monday.

The stretch has long been a source of contention in the City Council. The Council first asked city staff to meet with neighbors and “discuss strategies to mitigate and reduce overflow and cut through traffic” in November 2022 after residents complained to the body about the change.

And in April 2023, the Council passed a second policy order asking the city to follow through on a series of traffic safety recommendations derived from resident feedback on Garden Street and report on the impacts of returning part of the street to two-way traffic.

While the policy order initially requested that the city fully restore two-way traffic by April 2025, City Manager Yi-An Huang ’05 raised concerns that the Council was moving forward with the reversal without a thorough community engagement process.

“I am a little bit reluctant to say that we have gone back to the community, and particularly those who we first heard from and said we are going to prioritize parking on your street, and say we’re going to make a different set of prioritizations now since we have heard from so many people in the neighborhood,” Huang said.

Huang also said the April 2025 deadline was impractical for city staff.

“Being able to not just process options, do the design, but then also get through implementation by April, is not something that we would consider feasible,” he said.

“We do have a lot of other projects related to the CSO and the pipeline that are going to go through the same folks,” he said. “And Garden Street was not a small project in terms of staff time.”

In response, Toner amended the order to request only “analysis and implementation options” by the April deadline.

Still, he defended his push to reevaluate traffic along Garden Street, saying that he was not “just doing this to torment the Traffic Department.”

“I'm not a traffic engineer, but I am an elected official, and I don’t know what the point of being an elected official is if I don’t listen to the people who elected me to talk about these issues,” Toner said.

— Staff writer Benjamin Isaac can be reached at benjamin.isaac@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @benjaminisaac_1.

—Staff writer Avani B. Rai can be reached at avani.rai@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @avaniiiirai.