Boston’s progressive leaders insist the city is safe, but after a city transportation planner was killed cycling to work and pedestrian injuries spiked, even the liberal press admits the streets are out of control.
When both the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe agree that Mayor Michelle Wu’s governance has failed to keep ordinary people safe, the progressive experiment has officially hit a wall. Residents just want to cross the street or ride a bike without getting run over, but city bureaucrats are prioritizing word salad over action, and the mayor is caving to wealthy interests.
The human cost of this failure is Louisa Gag, a 36-year-old transit advocate and planner for the city’s Transportation Department, who was struck and killed last week when a truck hit her bicycle on Tremont Street. Gag spent her career pushing the city’s “Vision Zero” goals to eliminate traffic deaths by 2030. Instead, she became a victim of the very system she tried to fix.
The numbers paint a grim picture of Wu’s Boston. Pedestrian injuries jumped from 465 in 2024 to 571 last year. According to Allstate’s 2026 America’s Best Drivers Report, Boston drivers are 189% more likely to be involved in a crash than the national average. One in every five traffic-related death in Massachusetts in 2025 involved a pedestrian. Yet Mayor Wu continues to insist Boston is a safe city.
The reality on the street tells a different story. City Councilor Sharon Durkan admitted that important street safety projects have been “slowed down or stalled without clear evidence of what’s happening or why.” Interim Chief of Streets Nick Gove denied the pause, offering classic bureaucratic deflection about shifting away from a “one-size-fits-all mindset” and prioritizing “state of good repair” over new safety infrastructure.
The Globe, hardly a friend to conservative critics, buried the lede but ultimately admitted the root cause: Wu’s administration “backed away from making streets safer for bikes and pedestrians, following pressure by a wealthy opponent in last year’s mayoral campaign.” Follow the money, and you find a mayor willing to stall vital safety projects to appease a deep-pocketed political opponent. Meanwhile, the city continues to subsidize car travel, handing out free residential parking permits worth hundreds of dollars a month while ordinary cyclists and pedestrians pay the ultimate price.
Even the Globe’s readers are demanding an end to the soft-on-enforcement status quo, pointing to vehicles blowing through red lights, trucks double-parking, and e-bikes swarming sidewalks. The progressive vision for Boston’s streets has devolved into lawless chaos. Gag spent her life fighting for safe streets, only to die on one her own bosses refused to fix. How many more ordinary Americans have to pay the price for progressive posturing before the basic right to travel safely is restored?
