annual meeting Archives - WalkMassachusetts

Meet Kyle Robidoux: WalkBoston’s 2022 Annual Celebration Keynote Speaker

We are pleased to announce that our 2022 Annual Celebration Keynote Speaker this year is Kyle Robidoux!

Kyle is a tireless advocate who has focused his professional and personal career on building community. He has spent 20 years working in the nonprofit sector, including as a housing advocate helping individuals staying in shelters find permanent homes and as a community organizer. Most recently he has directed three programs for a local blindness organization.

Accessibility is a matter of great importance to him, not just as an advocate, but as an individual who was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a degenerative eye disease that first affects your night vision and often leads to complete blindness, at age 11 and was declared legally blind at 19.

Kyle can also personally attest to the power of walking and why access to safe walking environments is crucial. In 2010 Kyle was close to 250 pounds, heading down the path to type II diabetes, and having a hard time playing with his young daughter. He began to walk. Then he began to run. Today he has completed over 25 marathons and ultramarathons, including five Boston Marathons and three 100-mile races.

Kyle now works for the City of Boston as the Assistant Director of Housing Stability for the Mayor’s Office, after a short stint as Chief of Staff for Boston Mayor Kim Janey’s District Council/President’s Office. Prior to working for the city, over the last 15 years Kyle has worked for three mission-driven nonprofits: the Director of Volunteer Services and Community Planning for MAB (Massachusetts Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired), the Director of Community Planning and Leadership Development for Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Corporation, and the Director of Civic Engagement for United South End Settlements. In addition Kyle is an active volunteer, serving as Board Chair for FriendshipWorks and a member of the Commission for People with Disabilities.

Want to hear what Kyle has to say about accessibility and walkability? Join us on Wednesday, March 30 at 5:00pm on Zoom.

Stay tuned for the announcement of our 2022 Golden Shoe Awards winners!

One minute, one slide: March 2019 Presentations

Below are the “One Minute, One Slide” presentations shared by members of the WalkBoston staff at the March 18, 2019 Annual Celebration.

Joey Santana – Introduction

Adi Nochur – Age-Friendly Walking in Boston and beyond

Dorothea Hass – Safe Walking for Healthy and Connected Lives

Brendan Kearney – Language defines a story

Stacey Beuttell – Walkable school campuses

Bob Sloane – I-90: #UnchokeTheThroat was just the beginning

One Minute, One Slide: I-90: #UnchokeTheThroat was just the beginning

Below is a “One Minute, One Slide” presentation shared by a member of the WalkBoston staff.
Text provided is as prepared for this year’s annual event on March 18, 2019.

Bob Sloane

Unchoke the Throat was just the beginning! It turns out that it was getting a tiger by the tail, and now we’ve found that the tiger has more than one tail, and we have to catch them all! The I-90 project stretches a mile in each direction – most recognizably from the BU Bridge to the River St. Bridge.

It involves making a new interchange for I-90 and several miles of public street to access the 100 acre development parcel surrounding the roads. It involves pedestrian access to a major transit station – West Station – from all directions, along with several off-road paths – the most well-known now being the ones through the throat.

The paths through the throat are now going to be two separate paths – one for peds and one for bikes – thanks to our Unchoke the Throat effort. The paths are in place in all current options.

Turn to Page 17 of your hymnals to see where we are right now.

There are still 2 options for the Throat being worked on. Neither has a very good riverside park, and both involve terminating the use of the riverside path – the Paul Dudley White – for up to 10 years (!) – and diverting walkers and riders
to Cambridge. We’re working on that – we hope to have a temporary boardwalk out in the river through the Throat so that the paths will still work for all of us and we are working on a better park along the river’s edge.

To learn more, check out our project page.

One Minute, One Slide: Walkable School Campuses

Below is a “One Minute, One Slide” presentation shared by a member of the WalkBoston staff.
Text provided is as prepared for this year’s annual event on March 18, 2019.

Stacey Beuttell

Belmont, Arlington, Springfield, Somerville, Lexington, Brookline, Lowell – these are just a few of the cities and towns building new elementary, middle or high schools right now. With the construction of so many new schools in Massachusetts, WalkBoston is busy working to ensure that the students walking to school have a voice.

It’s tough because there has been a dramatic increase in driving children to school. And those drivers are loud! In 1969, almost half of kindergarten through eighth grade students walked or biked to school. In 2009, it was down to 13%.

And school campuses are being designed to accommodate these cars rather than dedicating that space to places where our kids can learn and grow.

WalkBoston is working to make school campuses more walkable. And that doesn’t mean just adding sidewalks! A walkable campus considers the needs of walkers first when organizing the movement of people, bikes, buses and cars on the school grounds.

Walking rarely enters the conversation when new schools are planned. And that needs to change. It’s time to design our schools’ front yards for our kids to run in circles, rather than for our cars to drive in them.

One Minute, One Slide: Language defines a story

Below is a “One Minute, One Slide” presentation shared by a member of the WalkBoston staff.
Text provided is as prepared for this year’s annual event on March 18, 2019.

Brendan Kearney

Language matters when talking about crashes: A recent study shared at the TRB (Transportation Research Board) Conference titled “Editorial Patterns in Bicyclist and Pedestrian Crash Reporting” examined ways that media coverage of crashes could influence public perception, looking at word choice and agency.

An example from a crash in Boston: You wouldn’t know someone was driving this truck by the initial news report, since “a city-owned truck struck a pedestrian.”

We (politely) reached out to the reporter and station on Twitter, and asked them to clarify that a person driving was behind the wheel in this crash. The news station was responsive, & made changes to the story.

Just as road design influences behavior, media coverage & local reporting influences public perception.

About 40,000 people in the United States die as a result of car crashes each year. This isn’t just about drivers hitting people walking, it includes people both in and outside cars – roughly 350 people die in crashes each year in Massachusetts alone, while many thousands more are injured. We need to reduce illegal speeding to help prevent and/or reduce the severity of these crashes. So a big THANK YOU to all the reporters and news organizations that are willing to take a look at how they are presenting crashes. Local reporting helps shine a light on common-sense ways we can make our streets safer for people: fixing the way our roads are designed.