Tag: Dorchester YMCA

  • City tells aggrieved resident that it will address intersection safety in Codman Sq.

    Dean Toulan and city officials take the measure of things at the intersection of Washington and Armandine streets on March 11. Karyna Cheung photo

    Dean Toulan hit the new crosswalk button at Armandine and Washington streets that was installed by the city in the Codman Square neighborhood a few weeks ago and waited for the signal to change.

    The crosswalk has special meaning for Toulan, a resident of Armandine Street, who months ago sent a message to city government about his concerns for pedestrian safety after he was nearly hit by a driver trying to run a red light at the corner in November. The fact that there was no button on one side of the crossing was one safety issue that Toulan cited in a series of emails to city officials.

    Toulan spoke to The Dorchester Reporter in February about the lack of pedestrian infrastructure along the Washington Street corridor, which is used as a thoroughfare by students, parents and children at TechBoston Academy, the Dorchester YMCA, Roberts Playground and Ashmont Nursery School, where a driver alleged to have had an invalid license, a loaded gun, and drugs in his vehicle crashed into the side of the building in January. 

    Days after The Reporter published the article on pedestrian safety, including Toulan’s complaints, a city neighborhood liaison contacted the newspaper to connect with him. Now, the city has proposed fixing the issues he raised over time, beginning with minor tweaks and escalating toward major changes.

    “I think a lot of people don’t know where to start, or they feel overwhelmed, and even if you get to a certain point, what if you don’t send the invite?” Toulan said. “What if that doesn’t happen because I didn’t push?”

    Members of the Office of Neighborhood Services and other city officials, including City Councilor Brian Worrell, joined Toulan for a site walk on March 11 to examine intersections along the corridor and determine what to do.

    They suggested the work would begin with simple improvements, such as repainting crosswalks and installing new signage if needed. More significant improvements, such as traffic signaling changes, would need to involve multiple city departments. Major changes — curb bump-outs, new traffic islands on the road — would come last.

    Toulan said he is optimistic that the city is willing to move forward on the project, but it took months of emails and receiving minimal responses before there was any significant movement. Following the article and the city’s initial contact with him, Toulan emailed multiple times before finally inviting officials to a site walk.

    The Office of Neighborhood Services did not respond to The Reporter’s repeated requests for an interview. Toulan has yet to receive a formal message about what the government will do next, but he hopes the city will act quickly — not for his sake, but for the elderly and young children who use the crosswalks daily to get from one place to the next.

    “It’s about safety and making an ideal environment for that volume of foot traffic,” Toulan said.  “Why not just do it all right, once? Why do it halfway? And I think that this is an area that deserves a lot more than halfway, because we’re not even getting that.”

    •••

    A walk along Washington Street; a near miss at Armandine

    The first thing Dean Toulan points out are two spots on the road flanking Armandine Street. There used to be pylons to discourage drivers from cutting too close to the sidewalks.“It’s actually better that they’re not there anymore,” he said. “They’re just going to get run over again.”

    What hasn’t been replaced and should be, Toulan said, are the words painted in white that are meant to alert drivers: “20 MPH SLOW ZONE.” The paint on the road was not redone after Armandine Street was uprooted to install a natural gas line. That project also stripped the crosswalk of half of its paint.

    Toulan gestures to a bus stop that two cars are using as parking spaces. The stop, which services the students and elderly in the area who take the No. 26 bus, is marked by a weathered wooden bench. There is no bus shelter. As we wait for the crosswalk light to change, one of the cars pulls out of the stop and drives away. Less than 30 seconds later, another car takes its place. 

    Toulan said that the bus has to stop in the middle of the road to pick up passengers. There is nowhere else for it to go.
    He continues one block down Washington Street, stopping in front of the Ashmont Nursery School at the Ashmont Street intersection. There are plywood boards covering the side where a driver ran through the building in January.

    As we make our way back to Washington and Armandine, Toulan is talking about a bus stop that was never replaced when he breaks off mid-sentence and lunges toward the crosswalk, grabbing the shoulder of a boy on a scooter and stopping him from riding into the path of a red sedan making a curving turn onto Armandine, barely stopping.

    The boy’s mother, another kid beside her and one more in a stroller, catches up to her son. Toulan waved off her thanks and the family continued on through the intersection. He sighed, shook his head, and spots one of his neighbors and waves, pointing at the traffic.

    They laugh about it. It’s just another day.

    This story is part of a partnership between the Dorchester Reporter and the Boston University Department of Journalism.

  • Despite the emphasis on pedestrian safety, Dot, Mattapan residents still don’t feel safe

    Dorchester resident Dean Toulan says that in the seven years he has lived in and walked around his Armandine Street neighborhood, close to Tech Boston High School (formerly Dorchester High School) and the Dorchester YMCA, he has had around 20 near-misses with vehicles on the move.

    In November, he was in the middle of a crosswalk on Washington Street when two cars raced down the road right at him.

    He was too far across to turn back, and in that moment, Toulan thought: “I’m going to die.”

    But both cars slowed down, but they also blew past a red light. The second car narrowly missed him as a scream rang out from another pedestrian. The driver who nearly struck Toulan rolled down his window and yelled at him.

    “I don’t want to see a kid get hurt, I don’t want to get hurt, and I almost have been,” Toulan said. “I figured maybe as the neighborhood got better, which it has, there’d be some changes. And it’s worse. It’s just worse.”

    Pedestrian safety is an ongoing issue for residents in Dorchester and Mattapan and other city neighborhoods.

    A driver struck and killed a pedestrian Jan. 12 in South Boston’s Andrew Square.

    Eleven days later, a car crashed into the Ashmont Nursery School in Dorchester, a block from Toulan’s home. Back in December, a woman living nearby was killed by a car while traversing the crosswalk in front of the nursery school. The list goes on.

    In 2015, Boston adopted Vision Zero, a national initiative that aims to eliminate fatal and serious traffic accidents by 2030. Since then, the city has increased pedestrian signage, redesigned intersections and lowered speed limits, among other measures. In 2023, it began implementing speed humps throughout city streets.

    Vision Zero data show that crashes involving pedestrians have dropped since the initiative began, down to 588 in 2023 from 783 in 2015. But in some high-trafficked areas, residents still don’t think the city has done enough, particularly when it comes to protecting children and older adults.

    Vehicles have crashed into Ihorma Breneus’s Mattapan home on busy Cummins Highway three times since 2005. In 2017, she witnessed a car crashing into her porch. The impact shook her home and cracked the foundation.

    “When these car crashes happen, they end up on the sidewalk,” Breneus said. “I have kids going to school, people walking to go to work. I mean, for goodness’ sake, I walk every morning, right in front of my house.”

    At times, Breneus said, she felt like she was seeing accidents “every day” in front of her home at Cummins and Rugby Road – an area that is in the midst of a major, multi-million dollar roadway reconstruction project aimed at making the corridor safer.

    Breneus said she and her mother wrote to the city advocating for better lighting on their streets and guardrails to protect their home, but she felt that nobody was listening, even when they heard of concerns during the re-design process prior to construction.

    Above, a view of the Ashmont Street and Washington Street intersection shows the boarded-up section of the Ashmont Nursery School where a car slammed into the building and forced the school to re-locate. Seth Daniel photo

    Toulan also wrote to multiple people in city government about what he said was a lack of proper infrastructure at the intersection of Washington and Armandine where he was almost hit. That corridor has several intersections and crosswalks without signals, including at three schools (Henderson Upper School, Codman Academy, and Tech Boston) and the Codman Square library.

    “This has been an issue since I moved in, but has gotten progressively worse,” Toulan wrote in December to his city councillor, Brian Worrell. “It is a real danger with the amount of residents and kids moving back and forth between the school and the YMCA on a daily basis without proper infrastructure.”

    In an interview with The Dorchester Reporter, Worrell acknowledged Toulan’s concerns, saying that construction crews were not active year-round, and that the city needed to be more transparent about communicating timelines to residents.

    “I do hear people calling for more to be done, but there is a process,” Worrell said. “So, I hear the concern, and yes, we should be able to move faster when it comes to pedestrian safety. However, there is a process.”

    While walking along Blue Hill Avenue every Sunday, Mattapan resident Fatima Ali-Salaam says she has seen problems that worry her.

    “You’ll have some crosswalks that are painted and then some that are almost nonexistent because they haven’t been updated in 80 years,” she said. “Sometimes signals don’t get timed right. In fact, we had one where one side of the street, the button for the traffic signal worked, and then directly across the other side, it didn’t work at all.”

    Cummins Highway, Washington Street, and Blue Hill Avenue were all included in Vision Zero Boston’s High Crash Network between 2015 and 2017, on a map that displays the city-owned streets with the “highest density of injury crashes” within the given time period. 

    City government has begun to act on some of these roads, particularly Cummins Highway where street work is ongoing.

    On its website, the city acknowledges the lack of improvements there since 1955, and promises better street lighting, repaved roads and wider sidewalks, green infrastructure, safer crosswalks and designated bike lanes when construction is completed next year.

    Cummins Highway “is the biggest transportation project at the moment in the entire system, worth up to $33 million,” said City Councillor Enrique Pepén. “So, there is a lot of attention to that area.”

    Along with speed humps and other ongoing projects, Councillors Ed Flynn of South Boston, Pepén, and Worrell each cited multiple measures that they felt would improve safety, including raised crosswalks, traffic bump-outs, and speed cameras that are included in Gov. Healey’s fiscal 2026 budget proposal.

    Flynn has specifically pushed to end concurrent pedestrian phasing traffic signals, where cars are allowed to turn while pedestrians are also crossing. The council approved his resolution on the issue unanimously Jan. 15, the same day that Flynn filed a hearing order on the matter of pedestrian safety. If implemented, pedestrians will receive an exclusive block of walking time in crosswalk cycles.

    “Right now, the signal allows the pedestrian to walk across the street, and at the same time it allows the vehicle to drive,” Flynn said.

    Brendan Kearney, executive director of the pedestrian safety organization WalkMassachusetts, said he disagrees with Flynn’s resolution, saying it will disrupt the flow of traffic and cost too much. He said he does support Flynn’s intention for crosswalks to have appropriate signaling.

    “There are 850 signalized intersections in the city of Boston,” Kearney said. “There is some old computer equipment out there that runs some of these intersections, and some of those old signal computers can’t do everything that we want it to do.”

    Kearney instead mentioned green infrastructure, which was included in the Cummins redesign. Adding landscape features to the edges of sidewalks would absorb rainwater and reduce “massive amounts of pavement” on the roads, making it safer for pedestrians to cross by shortening crosswalks, he said.

    “[The government is] trying more deliberately to think about how we make it safe for all sorts of people to get around, and sometimes that means slowing everyone down,” Kearney said. “That can be a good thing, if we’re doing it thoughtfully.”

    For now, most of the suggested plans remain ideas without timelines.

    “The neighbors had asked about these speed bumps, specifically on Itasca Street. And I haven’t seen them over there yet, and you still have cars speeding down that small street,” Breneus said. “I haven’t seen them everywhere yet, especially where they were being asked for.”

    Toulan does not have children, but he keeps a “Slow Down for Dorchester” sign in his yard for drivers – an idea that communities like Savin Hill pioneered in 2023.“At some point it needs to be escalated to real action here, because it’s just gone on too long,” Toulan said. “Kids are getting out of school. It’s almost dark. They go to the Y; the parents are double parking. They’re running across the street. It is an absolute nightmare waiting to happen.”