Getting to school shouldn’t require dodging speeding cars, yet that’s what students have to deal with on many Brookline streets. As someone who regularly walks and bikes around town, I see this problem every day: cars and trucks driving well above the speed limit, swerving around parked cars, driving aggressively on residential streets, and using neighborhood streets as cut-throughs. These conditions make me feel unsafe even on simple strolls.

As a result, Brookline parents hesitate to let their children walk or bike to school on their own, and people with mobility issues have expressed concern about their safety at a recent town meeting for the Washington Street Complete Streets Project.

People driving at higher speeds discourage active forms of transportation, like biking and walking, because they make near misses more alarming and increase the likelihood of a fatality or serious injury in a collision.

Speeding is driven by design. When lanes are wide, pedestrian crossings spaced far apart, and signals timed to favor cars, drivers drive faster and disregard safety and speed limits. I walk to school every day, and I’ve noticed that if a street is designed for 40 miles per hour (mph), drivers will drive at that speed, even if the speed limit is actually 20 mph. Therefore, Brookline must commit to designing roadways townwide that discourage speeds above 20 mph. This can be done by implementing narrower lanes, raised crosswalks, speed humps, and curb extensions (which bump out the curb to narrow the roadway at crosswalks and provide better visibility for pedestrians). Measures such as these discourage speeding and reduce fatalities by introducing geometry that makes speeding difficult and uncomfortable.

To Brookline’s credit, the town has made progress over the last decade by implementing many of these road safety measures. The town recently adopted a Vision Zero Action Plan, which aims to eliminate all traffic-related fatalities by 2035 through physical changes to roadways like those discussed above and the use of vehicular and pedestrian crash data to prioritize high-risk locations.

However, the implementation of these measures remains slow and piecemeal, as the town’s previous efforts were prohibitively expensive and presented significant construction challenges. For example, raised crosswalks required relocating drains, and the town couldn’t afford to carry out such changes en masse.

One less expensive solution for the speeding problem could be increasing police presence around town. I’ve observed that most of the crossing guards are located only near schools, but not elsewhere around town. However, this is not sufficient for the safety of students who are walking or biking, as several students come from parts of town that are not near a school. In the near term, until physical roadway changes such as speed humps can be made, increasing police presence elsewhere in town could deter speeding for a significantly lower cost compared to physical roadway changes, such as installing speed humps.

Speeding in Brookline should not be easy just because of overbuilt streets. The way forward for Brookline is both ensuring that streets limit drivers to 20 mph by design and utilizing vehicular and pedestrian crash data to improve roadways through the Vision Zero Action Plan.

We, students, should advocate for safer streets by reaching out to town staff and the Transportation Board to raise awareness that there is a need to improve roadways. The town must treat roadways and roadway safety as a basic health and safety issue, not something to be used for a faster drive. Brookline residents will need to cope with adding a few minutes to their daily commute, but in return, they will not have to fear biking and walking to work or school every day.