The city has had explicit policy since the early naughts to reduce car usage.

Echoing another comment — if you like this and other changes it is extremely important to a) let the city council know… email them! and b) VOTE in local elections.

Honest to god I appreciate what you are saying and how it affects you, but then you are only for sustainability and livable neighborhoods in theory and not in practice.

You mention multiple times that you want to buy a house, which I presume means a SFH. That is a choice that you make, but inherently imposes your car and its associated pollution and deadliness on the population of the city whose housing isn't acceptable and/or affordable to you. This is a systemic problem over the entire region -- and fighting Cambridge over making its municipal roads safer for its local residents isn't the way to change things.

Its because drivers licenses are (incorrectly) assumed to be bona fide citizenship IDs, in large part because the US has no actual national ID.

Because drivers have proven themselves to be incapable of discretion

The absolute worst are people who try to wave you on from the left lane of a 4 lane road (where you are making the left turn). Great way to get T-boned

Well, in other parts of the world that isn’t allowed. Pedestrian cycles are separate from car cycles. But in the US we place cars above everything, and so we have this system.

Fair enough. There are people trying to get it on the books but MA has a very car obsessed culture. I always stop and stay stopped at red lights because I don’t want to be “that cyclist”, but that is really the only reason. I have frequently had to deal with very unsafe scenarios (an uber car blocking the bike lane) that would have been much safer if I had been able to get out ahead of the stopped cars.

I believe MA law also empowers cyclists to do what they need to do to preserve their safety — and frequently getting out ahead of parked cars to get around an obstacle i.e. an uber car parked in the bike lane, makes things safer for everyone.

Turning right on red is incredibly dangerous and allowing it to be normalized into society should never have been done. You will be hard pressed to find a person who frequently walks around the city who would disagree with this.

My whole family was almost hit by an SUV that came to a perfunctory rolling stop and then immediately gunned the right turn without looking, while we were already in the middle of the crosswalk.

Inexcusable then and now. All about racial segregation without saying it out loud, and there is a lot of historical records available that prove this. Cambridge should be 2-3 family zoned by right.

They are plowed, as is the linear park and other designated bike commuter ways.

Because every last square foot of public land has to be used for cars, and if you try to re-allocate that space you’re evil. I honestly think the only reason we still have sidewalks after the 60-70s is because car drivers still had to walk a few dozen feet from their parking spot to the store/house.

If cars were operating in a way that was safe for pedestrians, in some sort of utopia where everyone behaves nicely, it would likely congest the roads just as much as requiring no turn on red. The “lack” of congestion is caused by allowing cars to do things that are statistically proven to be unsafe for pedestrians.

Probably because these accidents happen all over the city and not just at dangerous/busy intersections.

“I would imagine”

The city provided statistics in their presentation demonstrating reductions in accidents following posting no turn on red signs, and an increase in compliance (not turning into pedestrians) following the signs being posted.

Please. My whole family was almost run over by a guy who turned right on red into us after coming to a stop, after we were already in a crosswalk. Car drivers are fundamentally incapable of safely coexisting with the city.

Saying people accept it is a bit extreme. 40,000 people die every year in the US and over 1 million are sent to the hospital. My mom was rear ended (she was in a car) over a decade ago by a car going 30mph and had neck pain that lasts to this day from the whiplash.

Their convenience inside a dense city like Cambridge is questionable at best.

Finally, I appreciate that you are proposing a solution, but I don’t see any plausible way that is going to happen. Everything in our society follows a bell curve — and driving is no different. There is always going to be shitty drivers and in a city that means there are hundreds or thousands of shitty drivers.

Probably some boomer nimbys complaining about the much safer intersection there

The danger that a bike poses to a pedestrian is not even an adjacent order of magnitude compared to a car.

It is a problem. Cyclists should not be reckless. But this constant line that bikers are some how a massive threat to pedestrian safety is not backed up by data or rational thought

You could take the T, but suburban NIMBYs have left it to rot because they prefer driving in their GMC suburbans and running over children on their way to work.

Then there is demand for city life, while pretty much every town in the country that isn’t already a city has made it illegal to upzone/densify, leading to massively inflated prices in the few cities that are available to live in.

But then, the same people who make the point that you just made will turn around and throw a hissy fit when people propose relaxing zoning restrictions

There are a large number of policies, including the one being discussed in this thread, that individually don’t move the needle much, but when combined will move the needle in the right direction. However, every single time one of these policies come up, the above argument is used to oppose such policies. “This won’t move the needle on housing, and it will inconvenience me, so I oppose it!” So the policies don’t get enacted, or get neutered, and then the needle never moves because nothing ever gets done.

There are millions of people and hundreds of thousands of homes in the greater boston metro area. Any developer trying to fix prices is just going to be undercut by another developer to make money. The market is too big for the type of collusion (at the scale of the whole region) you are describing.

And yet, here we are living in a region with artificially constrained housing supply with incredibly high demand for that housing. Sounds like “high school economics” to me.

When you are forcing people to live 50 minutes away just to work at a minimum wage job because you expect to have a parking space in every home in a city… I think that is worthy of scorn.