Election 2025 Questionnaire

I get around by an even mix of driving and public transit. Especially in nice weather, I walk in the Fells and to the train and downtown. While I’ve formerly commuted by bike, I now ride recreationally for fun, exercise, and in-town errands and meetings. I commute by orange line to my full-time job in Downtown Boston. Our family recently went “car lite,” downsizing to one shared vehicle, and our tween daughter walks independently around the city from school to sports and activities. Although my day job has to do with urban planning, what really made me a transportation advocate was navigating around our city when my child was much younger and with my aging mom, who has a mobility impairment. I realized how hard it is to get around when you rely on a wheelchair, cane or stroller. My first volunteer role in Malden was joining the Mayor’s Walkability Committee in 2012, where we conducted walk audits and flagged dangerous intersections. I found that so many of our streets weren’t designed for safe or accessible walking. And, I found that the voices of caregivers, elders and youth were often ignored in community meetings. I got involved in politics to elevate those voices and to hopefully show that improving safety for our most vulnerable residents could actually improve safety for everyone, including those in cars. While Malden has come a long way since 2012, adopting a Complete Streets policy, lowering the speed limit and adding more bike lanes, curb bumpouts, signalized pedestrian crossings and improved trail crossings, I believe aggressive driving is at an all-time high, and we can do much more to slow cars down and make Malden a place where parents really feel safe letting their kids walk to school. Slowing car speeds is probably the #1 constituent concern that I am contacted about as a Councillor. Parents in our community very much want their kids to be independent and to be able to bike, walk, scoot and meet friends and socialize off screens, but their biggest fear is speeding cars. I believe that for our children’s health we need to find a way to make our streets and sidewalks safer.

I have been working for the past several years to try and bring speed tables or humps to the area around the Beebe School, working with our Traffic Commission, police, crossing guards and city staff, and I think we are very close to implementation, especially with the success of new speed humps on Bainbridge serving as a model. This is a hyper-local intervention that we can adopt without state approval and pay for with city resources. I think that traffic calming around our schools is probably our most pressing safety issue, especially with the rapidly growing popularity of e-scooters among young teens. To help understand trends like this, I would like to survey how our youth actually get to our schools, so that we have real data to utilize when making transportation decisions in the coming years. We know anecdotally from school staff that families cite transportation problems for chronic absences, and we see in the city’s traffic data that areas around schools can be hot-spots for accidents, but we have not asked families how they are getting to school, why they choose the transportation options they do, and what they’d like to see change. We need good data to make informed choices about safety improvements, and potentially also to improve attendance. Finally, I would like for the city to conduct a curb-use study to understand how the rapid change in ride-share apps from delivering passengers to delivering food is affecting our traffic, parking and pedestrian safety, especially in our downtown area and especially as it relates to keeping seniors and youth safe. I recognize that app-based deliveries make up a large percentage of restaurant revenue, but we have to find a way to balance helping our restaurants succeed with ensuring sidewalk safety and a healthy rate of parking space turnover in our business district.

I think that Malden could more aggressively communicate its bike and pedestrian goals, and move quicker on completing projects. I do believe that we are starting to do so now that we have invested in a Transportation Planner, and I would like to see us take advantage of more of the state and private grants that are available for transportation projects now that we have that position staffed. We could be seen as a leader if we moved a little faster and were willing to try pop-up projects or new ideas a little more often, and I think we will get there soon. I believe that Malden is already naturally a place that people move to for its proximity to public transit and trails and for its walkable downtown, but I also think new residents are surprised by the volume and speed of traffic here. In particular, the aggressiveness of folks who are using our community streets to get to the train stations and to cut to and from major highways such as I-93 and Route 1 can be shocking. There are some key areas where Malden should make changes to keep transit riders and pedestrians safe by minimizing conflict between users, namely the MBTA station areas and the blocks surrounding our schools. These are places where we should be creating safer dropoff zones for people not in cars, and find ways of flowing car traffic to the perimeters. We are literally moving thousands of people an hour in non-vehicular modes through these areas at rush times, and our priority should be on keeping our local children getting to school, and residents getting from home to work, safe. Our role should be to use real data to understand who uses our streets and design them appropriately. Data-based design is the reason that I continue to support the bus lanes on Route 60. Data from the MBTA and from the City of Malden show that we have increased reliability of the buses on one of the busiest bus corridors in the state, while also reducing car congestion and backups for vehicles. These were the stated goals of the project. While I believe the bike infrastructure and traffic light timing in this area can still be improved, data show we achieved our goal of getting MBTA buses out of the way of motor vehicles, sped up commutes for bus riders, reduced accidents and reduced travel times for cars on Route 60. As we look to future roadway designs, responsible planning will incorporate a balance of community input, data-informed decision making, and climate goals.

This is an issue that resonates deeply with me as a public school parent and as a Councillor. I believe we need to make our roads and sidewalks safer, encourage walking and biking, and educate and empower students about bike, scooter, and walking safety. I am often called upon by parents looking for help getting their child placed in their neighborhood school – something Malden was able to essentially guarantee for the first time just this year – or to assist families in finding transportation once they enroll and discover we do not offer transportation. The district I represent, Ward 3, is 100% zoned for Beebe for our K-8 students, and safety around the school is the issue I hear from constituents about extremely frequently. We are also largely not served by an MBTA bus, unlike the rest of the city, and a large percentage of our children are bisected from the school area by state-owned roads that the City has little control over improving with lights, better crosswalks, or offering crossing guards for safety. Despite this, I am working with our legislative delegation to make changes to the Fellsway to address these pervasive safety challenges, and I have worked with the Traffic Commission these last few years to get enforcement of speeding, new signage around the school zones, to write grants for more lights, and to request speed humps/tables and studies for additional traffic calming areas around the school. I also have written grants and sourced funding to increase bike racks not only at my own school but others as well, and I also led the effort to have Malden join the state’s “Safe Routes to School” program last year, a long-standing goal that finally succeeded thanks to a partnership with Malden Safe Streets, and thanks to the strong buy-in of our new Superintendent who has identified transportation as a key pain point families are asking the district to solve. I’m proud to say we’ve re-registered every Malden school for the program this year as well, and I think it will be the beginning of a permanent trend.

Malden does participate in a regional meeting with neighboring communities to discuss this exact issue. Up until recently this group was convened by State Senator Jason Lewis’s office every month, and now has switched to quarterly meetings hosted by Bike to the Sea. I’ve been a participant since these meetings started, typically joined by city staff such as our Transportation Planner. They are an excellent forum for sharing local projects and the interconnected visionary projects that can benefit multiple communities, such as the Mystic Highlands Greenway. The Mystic Highlands Greenway is designed to connect the Northern Strand Trail to the Tri-Community Greenway in Stoneham, Woburn and Winchester, as well as the Wakefield-Lynnfield Rail Trail, all through on-street signage. It is funded by Mass Trails and only involves street signs, so there is no city money involved or changes to Malden’s roads, but it helps people on bikes find their way between off-road bike paths, so I’d really like to see us complete installation of those signs, which are printed, ready and waiting. I believe we have a supportive legislative delegation and are surrounded by communities in Medford, Everett and Melrose that have made great progress on their own local on-street infrastructure as well as participating in regional projects, so I think Malden is well-positioned to work with neighbors on those bigger projects. And there are funders at the state level and at private foundations who are very eager to see these types of projects come to fruition, so we could likely find resources to do so as well.

As someone who represents a largely residential area in Ward 3, what I hear often from my residents is that they’d like easier connections to the business district – a cross-town bike lane on Route 60, Highland or Clifton so they could leave their car at home instead of driving downtown, especially since the Route 99 MBTA got cut back so badly that it’s no longer really an option for West End folks to get to Malden Center reliably (though we are always fighting for better bus service!). For those who do want to drive downtown, I believe the best thing we could do is market our garages better. The City of Salem provides a great example in my opinion. They have effectively priced their parking and have installed clear, compelling signage that you can’t miss when you enter the city; it makes it easy to see they have abundant and safe garage parking very close to all their restaurants and attractions, reducing the compulsion to search for on-street parking. We have plenty of off-street parking in our two garages and in scattered, smaller surface lots around the downtown, but still cars can be seen circling and double parking next to our meters. I believe we need to be pricing our meters higher and our garages lower (as they currently are now), potentially implementing a maximum stay at street meters to discourage all-day parking, which is what garages should be used for, and heavily marketing our garages as the better option. The behavior on display shows us that our pricing is off base and that there’s a lack of awareness of available parking within walking distance of every business downtown. Our garages should not be empty, leaving revenue on the table. I would also like to see us do a fresh study of our on-street spaces to update the one we completed before City Hall was rebuilt, to make sure we are taking a professional lens at how we plan for things like Zipcar, EV parking, handicapped parking, 15-minute food pickup parking, scooter parking, and metered parking. We have a lot of “exceptions” to our rules downtown right now that allow cars to sit for extended periods of time, which hurts our businesses and makes it difficult for patrons to visit where they want to go. The trends are changing very fast in curb use and micromobility, and I want to make sure our downtown is planning for all of it.

In my view, Canal and Charles are very oversized streets that can easily support a variety of uses and users without sacrificing safety or economic development. The challenge is that, because they are so large, they will be expensive to repave and reconstruct, but they can absolutely support a fresh design to accommodate all users. I believe that well-designed, safe streets in fact support and encourage commercial investment and therefore tax revenue. Micromobility is likely to be the transportation option of choice for folks living in Gateway Communities in years to come, so I believe Malden is wise to plan for it now. I think that the best way to achieve safety for all users is to assume the trends in micromobility such as scooters and e-bikes will continue to grow in popularity, and to find a way to substantially separate them from cars, to minimize unsafe interactions. I think that if we can find the funds to do so, expanding the width of the sidewalks on these streets could create a shared space for non-car users, while allowing vehicles to still travel including turning lanes at intersections. Keeping trees would allow both roads to stay boulevard-like in appearance, and the existing businesses would maintain the same turning radius they currently have for truck traffic into any industrial parcel. Both roads abut one of our greatest regional assets, the Malden River, giving the area huge potential for beautification and future redevelopment as an entry point into the city and a connector to the downtown. And, in the future, both roads are key connections to both the bike path and the east and west sides of the city, making them very important roadways in our broader network of streets. This area for too long has felt cut off from the downtown by the Stop & Shop plaza and a thoughtful piecemeal approach to enlivening this area could start to weave it back together, and I believe better road design can be one component.