Memorial Drive is dangerous for everyone

On Monday, 62-year-old John Corcoran was killed while biking on the path on Memorial Drive, when an SUV hit him at a dangerous speed, jumping on the sidewalk. A pedestrian is killed on this road every few years, including in 2020, 2017, and 2014 among others, and many vulnerable road users have also been injured in crashes.

Driving on Memorial Drive isn’t safe either. In 2024, a car ended up on its roof in a crash. In 2023, a driver drove off a ramp in a storm. In 2021, in two unrelated incidents, cars crashed through the railing and into the river.

Memorial Drive has an outdated 1950s-era highway design that encourages travel at dangerous speeds; tragedy inevitably follows. It is both unsafe and grossly inequitable, providing most of this state parkland for regional highway travel, and just a few feet for everyone else. After decades of neglect, we need to act, and act now.

Converting Memorial Drive from highway to parkway

Hidden behind this dangerous road is the park that Memorial Drive ought to be: state conservation and recreation space. People picnic, walk, bike, and enjoy the calm of the river. And when the roadway is closed to cars on Sundays, a dangerous road suddenly becomes a welcome and immensely popular shared space, used by everyone from people in wheelchairs to children learning to bike.

Wide roadways encourage unsafe driving. Unless we fix this, illegal speeding will continue, whatever the speed limit. That’s why we need to expand the park, with a design that has been used in NYC, Baltimore, and Seattle, and has been proven to improve safety:

1. Expand the park using Jersey barriers, reducing the extra space that encourages speeding. In many locations this can be two travel lanes, and in others turning lanes can be maintained to preserve safe traffic flow. The new space will become an expanded, safe area for people on bikes and pedestrians.

2. Re-stripe the remaining lanes for two-way traffic, with most travel carefully guided through one travel lane in each direction. The significantly narrower space and adjacency to traffic going the other way will encourage drivers to slow down and obey the speed limit.

Here’s an example from Baltimore of quickly and cheaply using Jersey barriers to create a safe space, via Streetsblog:

We can make Memorial Drive safer for everyone: people walking, biking, and driving. And we can do this right now, without the years or decades that it will take to get full road reconstruction.

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