When Vickie Henry — a resident of Jamaica Plain — bought her home, the quiet, tree-lined residential road of May Street seemed like the optimal spot. May Street, with its Victorian and Colonial revival-style houses and lush lawns, is relatively close to the Arborway, a major historic roadway running through the neighborhood that connects the area to other parts of Boston. 

Since 2019, the state’s Department of Conservation and Recreation, or DCR, has been working on a sweeping reconfiguration of the Arborway’s multi-lane roadways. In the spring of 2020, they debuted preliminary designs. 

The DCR’s Arborway Improvements Project’s goals, according to DCR officials, are to improve safety, accessibility and connectivity, implement a low-impact and climate resilient design, and better honor the famous American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted’s initial vision for a green, recreational space. The Arborway, which is part of the Emerald Necklace park system, has had over 100 sideswipe crashes at Kelley and Murray Circle between January 2020 and January 2025. 

“[The crashes are] clustered near the entry and exit points of the circle where vehicles need to merge and diverge from one another,” said Teren Wong, a DCR senior civil engineer. 

On Jan. 14, 300 attendees and stakeholders attended a virtual DCR meeting held by the engineering firm Howard Stein Hudson and Halvorson Design Partnership to discuss the reconstruction plans. The main components of their plan included adding dedicated bike and pedestrian pathways and removing Kelley Circle and Murray Circle. These two rotaries will be turned into six-lane, signalized intersections that pedestrians can, in theory, cross. Murray’s slip lane, a road that allows vehicles to make a turn onto the Southeast Expressway from the rotary without having to merge into the main traffic flow, will also be removed. 

In November 2020, via the DCR Online Comment Portal, Henry began asking questions. Mainly, she worried about side streets like hers being impacted by cut-through traffic if the changes are implemented. 

“I understand that DCR thinks reducing eight lanes to four will not cause backups, but I am deeply skeptical,” she wrote to DCR on the online comment portal. “If you are wrong, I might have to move.”

Henry, who was in attendance at the Jan. 14 meeting, reiterated her concerns. 

“It’s going to be clearly shorter to go through May Street,” she said. “With all due respect, all the people [living] on the Arborway knew they were buying with 50,000 cars going by, but we didn’t.” 

In response, DCR said that their intersections have been designed to adequately handle the volume of cars and that shortcuts wouldn’t be necessary. Other attendees commented that making the Arborway into a “bigger highway” is not the solution. 

Eric Herot, a resident of Hyde Square, mainly traverses the intersection on a bike. He also often walks, with a stroller, to access the Arnold Arboretum. 

“Waiting a minute and a half for a time to cross the street is really a miserable experience, especially next to a six lane road,” he said during the meeting. 

Additional concerns community members voiced included ensuring pedestrian walkways were fully lit, raising and broadening intersections and crossings for safety, adding curbs along bike paths, the number of trees being cut down or added and the enforcement mechanism for the posted speed limit. 

“Let’s make sure we can get this done, even if the plan isn’t perfect. It’s so much better than the current design,” wrote Liz Poole, who lives near Murray Circle, in the Zoom meeting’s chat. Others echoed her sentiment, happy with the current design plans and frustrated with how long it has taken to complete the project. The DCR hopes construction will commence in 2026.