Waltham Needs a Transportation Planner

Residents recently offered their views on the proposed development at the Watch Factory. Safety on Crescent Street for pedestrians and drivers was a recurring theme, and several residents spoke of nearly being hit by “drivers flying around the curve of Crescent Street”.

How many of these residents know that seven months earlier, at the September 18, 2025, traffic commission meeting, Treasurer Thomas Magno suggested that the speed limit on Crescent Street might be too low? The commission was discussing the Crescent Street speed cushion placed 700 feet south of the Watch Factory in April 2025, as a traffic calming measure to slow drivers, and the traffic engineer’s findings that it had reduced speed in the immediate area by 15%.

Magno: “I really think we should know what that street really should be. We arbitrarily picked 25 because the city accepted 25. I really think we should know what the speed limit should be on this street before we start quantifying whether we went over significantly or not. If the street should be 30 miles per hour because of the type of street it is and because of where it’s located, then we reduced it by two miles per hour which is good news, but it’s different than seven.”

How many residents know that the treasurer, the city official whose name is on your property tax statement, has any say in the safety of your neighborhood’s streets?

Fire Chief Randy Mullin added, “Any vertical deflections in our streets are an impediment to our response and therefore I am against it and I will not be able to support it.”

On May 21, the traffic commission finally approved several modest changes to nearby Lowell Street. Per the state’s crash database, both Crescent Street and Lowell Street see a car crash on average twice a month. Ward 8 Councilor Cathyann Harris first put Lowell Street safety on the February 2018 traffic commission agenda, right after she was sworn in as the new ward councilor. The previous ward councilor petitioned the traffic commission as early as June 2014 about Lowell Street safety.

A street’s safety shouldn’t depend on a councilor’s ability to take time off from work on a Thursday morning once a month to plead her case. (City councilor is a part-time job.) Yet, Crescent Street and Lowell Street are microcosms of our city government’s inability to make our streets safer for all users — drivers, pedestrians, cyclists.

The Waltham traffic commission was created by state law in 1965, and its makeup has been amended several times, most recently in 1998, with the addition of the treasurer, who is also the parking clerk (neither role requires knowledge of street design and safety). The police chief chairs the commission, which meets once a month. While its meetings are open to the public, they meet on Thursday mornings, and residents can only speak on matters added to the agenda by a commission member, a councilor or the mayor. Waltham has a professional traffic engineer who advises the commission’s members, but who does not vote.

From watching and attending dozens of meetings over the past few years, it is clear that the traffic commission prioritizes vehicle throughput, for example, the minutiae of traffic light timing, over safety. As shown on Crescent and Lowell streets, its members consistently reject traffic calming measures such as raised intersections that cities as close as Watertown and Newton have implemented in recent years, over concerns of emergency response time and snow plowing that other cities have long figured out. The commission will call for endless studies without committing to concrete action. 

It is a reactive body, only looking into streets and intersections upon a councilor’s request. There is no one on the traffic commission equipped to proactively look at crash and vehicle speed data citywide and propose interventions to force drivers to slow down. Our residential streets are overly wide, often one-way with parking on only one side, which placates the fire chief, but which encourages unsafe driving speeds.

Unlike other cities such as Cambridge, which require certain streets to be redesigned with traffic calming measures when they are repaved, in Waltham, when we repave a street, we leave its geometry untouched. The city is currently repaving Charles Street, but is adding no traffic calming to reduce the crash rate from its current average of one crash every 20 days on a street under a mile long. The street will retain its straight, slightly downhill 17-foot-wide travel lane, in a dense neighborhood with adults and children walking.

Unlike Watertown and Newton and most other nearby cities, Waltham does not have a transportation planner, whose job is to look at our streets holistically, as public places where we live, and not just through the lens of how many vehicles per hour a street can move.

The same 1965 state legislation that established our traffic commission also gives the city council the authority to dissolve the commission, and create a new government body whose members represent all of our street’s users, with a long-term vision on how to make our streets safer.

SECTION 6. At any time after the expiration of two years from the date of acceptance of this act, such acceptance may be revoked by the affirmative vote of a majority of the city council of said city.

Our city’s elected councilors should not need to harangue unelected city officials, often with little knowledge of street design and safety, the third Thursday morning of each month to address their constituents’ concerns about their streets’ dangers. It should be the job of those officials to learn best practices from cities near and far, and apply them to our city, to improve our neighborhoods and streets and make them safer for all of us. 

Saul Blumenthal