Announcement – WalkMassachusetts

Upcoming walk audit trainings: Randolph & Holliston

By WalkMassachusetts | March 20, 2026

This May, join us for a hands-on Walk Audit Academy training in Randolph (Saturday, May 2) & Holliston (Tuesday, May 5)! This academy is designed to empower municipal staff, community members, and regional stakeholders to identify pedestrian safety and accessibility issues, gather valuable community insights, and advocate for infrastructure improvements. You’ll come out of this training with the knowledge to lead your own walk audit. RSVP today.

This event is part of the Boston Region Vision Zero Action Plan, brought to you by WalkMassachusetts and the Boston Region MPO in partnership with the Town of Randolph (Mass in Motion) and the Town of Holliston. You do not need to live or work in either of these communities to participate in either training / walk audit; we encourage you to attend whichever is more convenient for you.

We believe that community-driven walk audits are a powerful tool for making our roads safer and more accessible for everyone. Your participation will help inform planning efforts and apply pressure to secure funding for necessary changes.

This builds on a North Shore walk audit training program we offered last winter in Beverly in conjunction with the Beverly Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee, as well as our Walk Audit Academy videos.

What is a walk audit?

Walk audits are a tool for getting community input about walking conditions based on observation and your own lived experience. This firsthand information can add important detail to more technical information, and help improve traffic safety in your area.

This training will familiarize you with existing walk audit materials and protocols which will enable you to conduct audits in your own community. Learning materials and videos are also available on WalkMassachusetts’ website.

Dates & Locations

Randolph Walk Audit Academy
When: Saturday, May 2nd, 9:30am-12pm
Where: starting at Randolph Town Hall, 41 South Main Street, Randolph, MA

Holliston Walk Audit Academy
When: Tuesday, May 5th, 9:30am-12pm
Where: starting at Holliston Town Hall, 703 Washington St, Holliston, MA 01746

Process: We’ll gather for group introductions and a brief learning session(s), then we’ll head outside for a 1 mile walk audit route, and then we’ll return for a group debrief back at our starting location.

These walk audits will take place rain or shine, unless severe weather; the learning and debrief sessions will take place inside each respective town hall building thanks to our local partners.

RSVP for a walk audit training

Learn more about the Boston Region MPO Vision Zero Action Plan at: https://bostonmpo.org/visionzero
Info on how you can lead a walk audit: https://walkmass.org/walk-audit-academy/
Look up previous walk audits (or submit yours): https://walkmass.org/walk-audits/

Whether you’re a municipal staff person, an elected official, part of a municipal bike/ped committee or other volunteer position within your community…or just interested in making your community in Massachusetts safer for walking, we’d love you to join us at one of the walk audit trainings in May!
Please RSVP today.

For any questions that are not answered above:

Reach out to the whole team at WalkMassachusetts (staff@walkmass.org) or Brendan Kearney, our Executive Director (bkearney@walkmass.org). We look forward to seeing you soon!

WalkMassachusetts is a 501c3 nonprofit organization that works to make walking safer and easier in Massachusetts, to encourage better health, a cleaner environment, and more vibrant communities; consider supporting our efforts with a donation.

Enough with the snow: We deserve clear sidewalks

By WalkMassachusetts | February 6, 2026

When the mega-snowstorm ended on January 26, we were all asked to be patient. Plow crews were working around the clock; in the meantime, we should do our part by clearing the sidewalks and curb cuts along our homes and businesses.

Yet remarkably few property owners actually cleared the 3-foot-wide paths required by local ordinances. Those who ventured out found many sidewalks full of snow or with just narrow paths cleared, and tall snowbanks often blocking passage. Crossing streets was particularly perilous, as few curb cuts were cleared, and just reaching the crosswalk often required squeezing between traffic and tall piles of snow and ice, hoping for the best.

Parents with infants in strollers, older adults, and people with disabilities or limited mobility? They couldn’t go out at all. More than 35 years after passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, our communities had apparently decided it was OK to just trap them at home.

On February 1, six full days after the end of the storm, this travesty cost a 57-year-old woman her life. She and a companion were walking along Cranberry Highway in Wareham, a two-lane road. The sidewalk wasn’t cleared, so they had to walk on the road. She was using a walker. A motorist came around a bend and saw them in his path, but couldn’t avoid hitting them due to an oncoming vehicle.

It’s a miracle that we haven’t had more casualties, because over 10 days since the storm ended, sidewalks across Massachusetts are still blocked and dangerous. But it seems like officials have decided to let nature clear the remaining snow and ice, when it gets around to it.

Enough already. This is a matter of basic public safety, and it’s a matter of justice.

When snow isn’t cleared promptly and effectively from sidewalks, we’re all forced to navigate around snow piles, try to avoid ice, and often walk alongside cars just to go about our lives and meet basic needs. It’s scary and dangerous for healthy adults, nerve-wracking for parents with small children, and simply impossible for the most vulnerable members of our communities.

Worst of all, it’s this way by design.

Municipalities and the Mass. Department of Transportation take care of clearing roads, but for the most part, sidewalks are the responsibility of property owners. The fact that many property owners are not physically capable of clearing 2 feet of snow, especially after a municipal plow has piled ice and slush on top of it, doesn’t seem to matter. (Indeed, many street corners have been left with such huge snow and ice piles that only a plow truck could clear them.)

Our local leaders also seem to forget that especially in cities, there are large numbers of rental properties. It’s great that state law protects tenants from being saddled with snow-clearing responsibilities – but no, a landlord who lives in Framingham isn’t likely to show up with a shovel at his Everett triple-decker. Not unless there are real consequences.

As Angie Schmitt, author of Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America, put it: “It’s one of the more remarkable double-standards – or inequities – in transportation. Clearing streets of snow is a non-negotiable priority for public agencies, but safe routes for pedestrians are left to a piecemeal private system that mostly fails.”

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Massachusetts isn’t as snowy as it used to be, but we still have winter every year. Buying snowblowers or small plows to clear sidewalks, at least in high-traffic areas such as business districts, near schools, and around MBTA stations, makes plenty of sense. The equipment can also be used to clear protected bike lanes, many of which are still blocked.

Actual enforcement of snow-clearing requirements would also help. Municipalities can show some compassion and understanding when there are exigent circumstances, but how many property owners whose stretch of sidewalk remains dangerous have still to be fined?

Municipalities also know which properties have been the subject of repeated complaints, and can reach out to them proactively before storms, warning the owners to avoid further fines.

Small grants to neighborhood associations and local nonprofits could also help them buy snowblowers for shared use – an efficient use of resources and a big help after major storms. Grants could also support low-cost neighborhood shoveling services.

A recent Globe editorial highlighted Somerville’s municipal shoveling assistance program, which matches seniors and people with disabilities with local teenagers. It’s a nice idea, but just 62 homes are enrolled – in a city of 82,000 people. Residents have to register in person at City Hall and fill out a background check form. It shouldn’t have to be this difficult. At WalkMassachusetts, we’re agnostic on solutions: try different things and see what works best. But get those sidewalks cleared, and do not let this happen again!

Marion Davis is a board member of WalkMassachusetts and lives in Somerville.
Brendan Kearney is executive director of WalkMassachusetts and lives in Framingham.

Hyde Park Avenue Site Visit Key Concerns

By WalkMassachusetts | February 3, 2026

Re: Hyde Park Avenue Site Visit Key Concerns
November 3, 2025 Report

We are ‘Shared Spaces’, a coalition of advocates from the community, Boston Center for Independent Living (BCIL), Riders’ Transportation Access Group (RTAG), Transportation for Massachusetts (T4MA), WalkMass, Boston Cyclists Union (BCU), and MassBike.

Our mission is to promote collaboration and understanding of the challenges associated with shared spaces – such as bike lanes, sidewalks, crosswalks, and bus stops statewide. We are committed to advocating for safety and accessibility in the design of these shared spaces, with a focus on the unique experiences of individuals with disabilities. Through education, outreach, and active engagement, we will advocate for and support inclusive policies that enhance the safety and accessibility of shared spaces for all people with disabilities, pedestrians, bicyclists, drivers, and transit riders.

We organized this site visit to bring together individuals from the city and provide them with a firsthand understanding of these shared spaces, their limitations, and potential conflicts—this initiative aimed to promote more informed decision-making. Additionally, the visit facilitated relationship-building between our communities, allowing for a more authentic and accurate experience of these shared spaces.

Please find at the link below a summary of the key observations from our group’s site visit of Hyde Park Avenue on November 3, 2025. We have included photos and can provide more examples if that is helpful.

Read the PDF Report

Walk audits with a climate focus on the way to Danvers, Melrose, Salem, Stoneham, and Wakefield

By WalkMassachusetts | September 25, 2025

We’re happy to announce that WalkMassachusetts has been awarded a $75,000 Accelerating Climate Resilience Grant from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC). See the press release here. This is a huge win for our mission and a major step forward for pedestrian safety in the face of climate change. With this grant, we’re officially launching our Climate-Safe Walk Audit Initiative: Enhancing Pedestrian Resilience in a Rapidly Warming World.

What This Means for Massachusetts

We’ll be working directly with five communities—Danvers, Melrose, Salem, Stoneham, and Wakefield—to make walking not just safer, but also more resilient and “climate-ready.”

Alongside community members, our goal is to identify and address the challenges that a rapidly changing climate presents to vulnerable road users. Through walk audits, we’ll be working with them to help find short term actions that advance bigger climate resilience goals they’ve already identified. This could mean finding solutions to make crosswalks more visible during heavy rain, or creating more shaded pathways to help everyone walk, run, or roll comfortably during extreme heat.

Especially if you live, work, or play in one of those five communities, make sure you are on our email list so we can reach out and loop you in as we get the ball rolling in the coming months!

MAPC Awards $800k in “Accelerating Climate Resilience” Grants to Municipal and Community-Organization Led Projects

Help MassBike & WalkMass evaluate heat stress in Chelsea, Everett, Framingham, and Revere

By WalkMassachusetts | September 15, 2025

MassBike and WalkMass are working with the Boston MPO to analyze corridors in Chelsea, Everett, Revere, and Framingham that have been identified as places that have both high heat and are places where lots of people walk and bike. A series of walk and bike audits took place in August 2025 to help understand how heat impacts people walking and biking along streets in our neighborhoods. To add to our data collection we’re asking people to take self-audits through the forms available for each community so you can walk or bike a route and send in your experiences.

Are you interested in adding to our data? Please follow these links to access the walking and biking feedback forms:

Chelsea | Everett | Framingham | Revere

(click footnote for other language options)¹

What’s a walk/bike audit?

An audit is a process where a person or group walks or bikes through a designated route (a neighborhood or commercial district) to assess pedestrian/bike accessibility and safety. Various factors are observed and evaluated, including the condition of sidewalks, crosswalks, and pedestrian signals, as well as the presence of amenities like benches, lighting, and landscaping. The goal of a walk/bike audit is to identify barriers or deficiencies that may hinder walking or biking as a mode of transport. Learn more about the walk and bike audit routes in each community below!

Why are we doing this?

Neutralizing Onerous Heat Effects on Active Transportation (NO-HEAT) is a project focusing on reducing the heat that people experience while walking, biking, or rolling. It’s a collaboration between the Boston Region Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO), the cities of Chelsea, Revere, Everett, and Framingham, and several community partners, including WalkMass, MassBike, Bike to the Sea, and Mystic River Watershed Association.

Why should I do this?

We appreciate your time and feedback, and we are offering gift cards to local establishments for anyone that takes part.

Audit Routes

Chelsea

Go to the form

Everett Ave (Broadway to Everett Border) – The route is just under a mile, and crosses from the dense urban area of downtown Chelsea to the Silver Line and Commuter Rail MBTA stop, and newer residential developments along the Everett border.

Broadway (City Hall to Revere Border) – This stretch connects the businesses nearby Chelsea City Hall to the neighborhoods and parks out to Revere and the Mill Creek park. This route also crosses the Chelsea Greenway Community Path, and is a major corridor for trucking and MBTA buses.

Spruce Street (2nd Street to Route 1) – This route travels along the commercial section of Spruce St, connecting to Mystic Mall and passing by government and healthcare buildings.

Everett

Go to the form

2nd Street (From Revere Beach Pkwy to rail road tracks) – This route travels 2nd St through an industrial and commercial area that features a large apartment building.

Northern Strand Community Trail (Wyllis Avenue intersection to Waters Avenue intersection) – The Northern Strand Community Trail is the key corridor for bicyclists and pedestrians that connects Everett, Malden, Revere, Saugus, and Lynn. This section focuses on a particularly open segment with little shade that is susceptible to higher temperatures.

Main Street (Oakes Street to Malden Border) – Beginning at Meadows Park / Kearins Playground, this route travels through a residential neighborhood, passing through a few small commercial areas. You can also RSVP here to join a walk on September 25, 5pm.

Framingham

Go to the form

Beaver/Waverly to Beaver/Leland (Seabra Foods to Harmony Grove Elementary) – This travels Beaver & W Harmony Grove Elementary School, connecting Dennison Playground to the area near Sunshine Farm.

Irving/Loring Street (corner of Waverly Street to corner of Herring Ave) – From the major thoroughfare of Waverly Street, this route heads through the residential and business district and heads towards the South Middlesex Correctional Center, to highlight a recent ‘complete streets’ project.

Waverly Street (2nd Street to Cedar Street) – This travels major commercial corridor Waverly St, beginning near the Framingham MBTA station.

Cochituate Rail Trail – Cochituate Rail Trail is a multi-use trail that runs between Framingham and Natick, in the western suburbs of Boston. There may be a site visit to the Framingham end of the trail in late September. Email Brendan Kearney bkearney@walkmass.org to be kept in the loop.

Revere

Go to the form

Revere Street (Route 60 to Revere Beach) – This route focuses on the major destination to/from Revere Beach, and is a heavily used corridor for bicyclists to reach Wonderland MBTA station.

Washington Ave (Beach Street to Fuller Street) – This route connects the Washington Ave corridor to the Northern Strand Community Trail, passing through residential neighborhoods, religious centers, and municipal ball fields.

Malden Street (Route 1 to Vinny’s Food Market) – This route follows Malden St down a residential neighborhood between Disalvo Park at Susan B Anthony Middle School and Route 1. You can also RSVP here for a walk audit on September 17, 3:30pm.

Please send any feedback or questions to bkearney@walkmass.org or bikeinfo@massbike.org.

Other Language Options
اَلْفُصْحَىٰ Chelsea | Everett | Framingham | Revere
Español Chelsea | Everett | Framingham | Revere
आधुनिक मानक हिन्दी Chelsea | Everett | Framingham | Revere
Kreyòl Chelsea | Everett | Framingham | Revere
简化字 Chelsea | Everett | Framingham | Revere
Português Chelsea | Everett | Framingham | Revere ↩︎