On a scorching morning in late June, Josh Kraft gathered his supporters and the press on a sidewalk in West Roxbury to talk about a hot issue in Boston’s mayoral race: bike lanes.
Mayor Michelle Wu’s chief challenger spoke a few feet away from bustling Centre Street, a thoroughfare the city narrowed from four lanes to two for about a mile stretch in 2023. The overhaul was meant to slow traffic; a pedestrian was fatally hit by a car in the area a few years earlier. And, like in many Boston neighborhoods, bike lanes were installed as part of broader street-safety projects.
Kraft, the son of billionaire New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, called Wu’s street safety measures a “mess of flex posts, speed bumps, raised crosswalks, traffic lanes that abruptly shift to become turn-only and confusing pointed arrows.”…