I was in the room. Or more correctly, rooms. Many, many rooms. Archer Avenue was in my region when I was asked to volunteer to collect community input for the first generation of Chicago’s Streets for Cycling in the mid to late 2010’s. I spent a little over a year with my multilingual project partner under Active Transportation/ CDOT; organizing, promoting, holding and documenting public meetings to collect input, which the planners used to begin Chicago’s network. What does that have to do with Northampton right now? Plenty, in a way.

Is the Archer lane the proverbial “vegetables” the neighborhood needed to eat? No. Good cycling planning doesn’t have an answer before the community has asked and answered all the questions together. It’s not top down, and our work for CDOT wasn’t, either.

Just to give a quick picture, Archer Ave is an extremely long, flat, wide, truck-filled diagonal avenue in classic midwestern city form. It runs from the Near West Side at the edge of the Loop for miles of treeless stoplight asphalt, dividing the hearts of neighborhoods — from Chinatown, through a huge mix of many kinds of Chicagoans, all the way to Midway Airport and beyond. Biking or walking Archer Avenue was literally a hectic, dangerous, dust-eating experience. And it hasn’t changed a ton.

Invisible in a lot of today’s national and international reporting about Archer Avenue are the schools, churches and shopping areas where our first generation of input documented that people wanted to be able to walk or ride to more peacefully. The infrastructure was designed after the input was done. Not the other way around.

As the avenue cuts neighborhoods in half along its path, it has to be dealt with by all ages and mobilities multiple times a day. People were angry and frustrated about the impact on their day-to-day lives of living near such a dangerous street. Accidents and fatalities were a painful community norm. Speeders using the street as a route to Midway, to avoid the highway, especially complicated residents’ ability to get from their homes to daily needs across the street.

Meetings were hosted in the most friendly community-owned spaces we could find. We organized at various times of day to meet the schedules of every kind of worker and at-home attendee. Breakfast, lunch and dinner hours, in as many languages as we had resources. We were lucky to gather tons of good information for the city about where people wanted the streets to change. Larger business organizations and the airport staff typically worked directly with CDOT, but individual shop owners were usually at our meetings to share their many kinds of opinions. We used mapping to let attendees show where and how people wanted to move across and around the neighborhoods near Archer. We never introduced models of what could be used.

While some of the reporting this week gives a picture of a car-only area, many people I met could not afford cars. Safely getting to public transportation — from waiting for buses to getting to trains — was constantly shared as sadly complicated and extremely wearing.

The images in the Journal story are from a combination of the first set of input in the 2010s and the second generation of the Streets for Cycling program, which is more recent. That built on more data and study. The bollard lanes (like plastic wiffle bats) pictured in the WSJ article allow CDOT some flexibility, as they adapt the lane to meet the community’s needs. We were sad the area was not chosen in the first phase, because the need for changes was strongly and emotionally expressed by so many people we met.

None of the reporting I have seen investigates any quality of life benefits gained for the people I met. A half generation after that first input, I hope that changes on Archer that we are not hearing about in the Journal, that were less controversial, made life better for the people who so emotionally shared the changes they wanted.

Why mention any of this in a newsletter where we talk about Northampton?

We are obviously in a place that echoes the tensions reported in the news. At the first city hosted information meeting for Picture Main Street, for example. I wish the businesses and other “stakeholders” had had tables and posters too, expressing their concerns and questions in an open, risk-free forum.

The loudest message I myself hear at times in our community process is, that bike lanes in general, with or without Picture Main Street, are the “vegetables” our community will eat and like. I deeply love bike lanes, but I’m not convinced that this way of having a town conversation is ideal.

We all notice annoying or dangerous places as we ride around Northampton. Mapping and sharing those places together might help us help each other be safer right now.

Where are the streets that make getting to your places most dangerous? How do you make it work?

Safe Routes/Healthy Minds is an initiative to encorage the idea that all kinds of cyclists in Northampton deserve a place to be safe traveling on their bikes regardless of their age or comfort as a rider.

Schools, community, and transit are inextricably linked. We want to help create safer routes for riders from schools in each part of the community, respecting the different challenges each school faces with bicycle accessibility.

All ages and abilities of cyclists should be able to easily get to the community centers they use every day. Schools are one especially important kind of center. Many of the daily trips in our city are to and from schools that are the meeting place of their little communities in Northampton. Friends, shopping and home represent other centers. This is a wider way of thinking about a city rideable by every kind of cyclist in Northampton, with or without the City’s “Picture Main Street”.

Two ways to begin discussing riding in Northampton right now regardless of how confident you feel right now are to share your experiences and ideas here in our comments, or come to the Lilly Library meeting 2-3:30 on Saturday Aug 29th! We’ll start slow — kind of like learning to riding a bike — and see where our momentum can take us.

Safe Routes/Healthy Minds Questions:

Here are some questions for anyone in Northampton — for bike riders and not riders! Please share your thinking in our comments section or at the Lilly Library meeting. Here are some prompts to help. Please feel free to share your thoughts right here in the comments.

What is your personal experience as a cyclist in Northampton? Your experiences matter.

What “centers” do you think we have in Northampton and Florence? Where are your centers?

How can we as a city (with or without Picture Main Street) serve these centers without further investment in transit?

What else do we need to make riders safe to travel on bikes to these places?

What creates safe routes to schools, shopping, or other community centers for you if you are, or are not, on a bike path?How safe are the routes to and from your home, or to and from any school, from other parts of town, even from the future Picture Main Street lanes?

As you travel around the city and look at the bike lanes (like those that connect from the proposed lanes of Picture Main Street) are they continuous or do you have to get off the street and use the bike trail?

How do you envision community input into transit?

What is your experience of sharing with the City of Northampton using a bike in our city?

How do you feel about citizens sharing their transit experiences with the City of Northampton?

Sharing your experiences even if you do not ride much at all is extremely valuable. Sharing why you don’t ride is also very important.

Currently the City of Northampton collects very little real information from any kind of rider. Opportunities to share experiences may be limited to the Bike/Pedestrian committee public comment which meets at times when most people cannot attend.

Where can you, as a rider or would-be rider in town, look for writing about bikes or about how safe routes can look, beyond the Gazette or City of Northampton:

Two places that are interesting for very transity intros are the website Streetsblog (streetsblog.org, and for Massachusetts-specific articles, Mass.streetsblog.org) and the City of Somerville Bike Plan (https://www.somervillema.gov/content/somerville-bicycle-network-plan)

City of Somerville Bike Plan:
Why look at another city’s bike plan? Our city government likes to identify itself as moving in the leagues of Cambridge and Somerville in terms of climate action. Let’s take a look at the City of Somerville’s Bike Plan to see how Northampton compares. Observe just the way they take input and talk about getting feedback from everyone in the community. See the lanes that are typical there that are protected, not just painted like here. The mix is typical of the many kinds of lanes in forward moving cities. There is a lot to take in and see on their plan but it’s really informative in terms of what a city moving towards good infrastructure looks like.

Streetsblog.org:
Streetsblog is a transit blog that is national and local. It’s a great place to learn about transit vocabulary and how projects are funded. There is a tab on the top just about Massachusetts (mostly Boston). It’s a great place to dip your toe into how transit is talked about, some of the typical vocabulary and issues that are important and up to date for our communities. They are lighter on Western Massachusetts articles but that can change.

We’ll be writing more here about SafeRoutes/Healthy Minds all week. So Stay tuned and please don’t wait to start sharing your ideas about safe routes in Northampton.

See you on Sat Aug. 29th 2026 at the Lilly Library from 2 - 3.30 pm!

Bikes Now Northampton had a chance to get to the big “Picture Main Street” meeting this week held by the city. “Picture Main Street” AKA “PMS” is the City’s controversial downtown redevelopment plan. Well. It gave us a chance to say hello and share a lot of our thinking on the plan not only with Northampton City Planner Carolyn Misch but also with the Mayor’s second hand Alan Wolf. Though we had no idea who he was.

We shared our long-thought-out experience reviewing and commenting on the plan, which started when the city collected input from households in the earliest days of feedback.

Looking at the map with Ms Misch, we shared deep concerns that the map of the plan itself was too focused on downtown; that it lacked a citywide focus. That schools, and shopping and travel in the different parts of the city should all be connected. Older riders didn’t even have a safe passage to the Senior center or even to downtown from any of the major connectors — Elm St, South St, Bridge St… — or the smaller routes at the edges of the plan.

The chat with Alan Wolf was a much longer and more in-depth conversation where we got to share Bikes Now Northampton’s thinking about the idea of community and safe routes for all riders in town and getting the chance to share the idea of creating real safe routes to the smaller community connectors— especially schools.

To elaborate on those conversations we welcome anyone thinking about bikes, transportation on bikes, and Northampton to connect here at Bikes Now Northampton. We will also be posting meetings soon to be held at our public libraries to provide a comfortable safe place for discussion together in person as well.

What does riding a bike for transportation in Northampton — or not — look like for you right now?

This is Bikes Now Northampton. Biking to school, work, shopping, and friends. Family Cycling, utility cycling, transportation cycling. Good lanes and good routes making a network of community.

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