Cycling and farmers markets go together like avocado and toast. Wakefield’s Farmers Market even offers a bike valet service for the convenience of its cycling customers during the market season.

And now, Wakefield‘s first true bike lane begins right next to the Farmers Market location at Hall Park.

A match made in heaven, right?

Perhaps not.

A few weeks ago, the town installed a line of 4-foot-tall flex posts as a visual barrier between the new bike lane and the now shrunken automobile travel lanes on North Avenue. The idea was to give residents a taste of the North Avenue redesign before the posts were taken down for the winter to facilitate snow plowing.

As fate would have it, the flex posts were still in place on Saturday, Dec. 14, during the Holiday Farmer’s Market, affording market management and attendees a chance to become acquainted with the new bike lane.

You might say things got off to a bumpy start.

If the Town Council wanted feedback on the new bike lane and flex posts, Farmer’s Market manager AnnMarie Gallivan was happy to provide it.

“While working the market, we heard a large bang coming from North Ave, then another, and another,” Gallivan wrote to the board. “A barrier was hit into the road and cars were trying to avoid it while also avoiding the oncoming traffic as they drove into the wrong lane. Some drivers decided it was better just to hit the barrier, which caused some damage to cars, as there are small pieces of vehicle body strewn around the area,” Gallivan added.

One of the Farmers Market volunteers finally had to drag the errant flex pole out of the automobile travel lane.

Gallivan shared some additional observations related to the bike lane and flex posts.

“Also during the market, we witnessed an ambulance with their lights on struggling to get down North Avenue heading towards Reading,” she wrote. “No one knew what to do and where to go. The ambulance just went slower – I’d be upset if someone I loved needed emergency services and that help was too late because of these barriers.

“Coming home from the grocery store on Thursday while driving along North Avenue, people came into my lane 14 times,” Gallivan added. “What will happen when the Ladder Truck is responding to a fire and has to drive along North Avenue on a beautiful day?”

Town Councilor Jonathan Chines dismissed these concerns as “anecdotal,” but after receiving Gallivan’s letter, the board voted to remove the flex posts immediately. The composition of the board hasn’t changed since it voted 4-3 last June to install the bike lane, so expect the flex posts to return in the spring. They depend on the public’s short memory.

Meanwhile, sans flex posts, northbound cars on North Avenue are straddling the bike lane as drivers try to maintain a comfortably safe distance from oncoming traffic.

Are the new 11-foot automobile travel lanes wide enough? Maybe for a residential back road like Oak Street or Butler Avenue. But reducing a major thoroughfare that connects directly to an interstate highway to the size of a residential side street is a legitimate safety concern. Pretending that North Avenue is no different than Yale Avenue isn’t reality.

The endgame, of course, is the elimination of automobiles – at least the gas-powered ones that normal people drive.

That’s what the state’s MBTA multifamily zoning mandate was all about. The theory is that more housing near the choo-choo train will attract people without cars. But that theory is rooted in the pre-COVID world where people actually had to go to the office and took the train into Boston. And never mind the fact that most rail commuters own cars anyway.

It’s the same thinking that has given us the recent trend toward allowing housing developments with little or no parking on the theory that carless tenants will use public transportation. In reality, they will just park their nonexistent vehicles on the street.

Reality is a stubborn thing.

Through their relentless advocacy, the tiny but very vocal bicycle lobby got its one-way bike lane to nowhere on North Avenue. The vast motoring majority that the road was meant to serve is left with an 11-foot-wide travel lane in each direction.

All the recent social media outrage over the new bike lane is admirable, but the time to speak up was BEFORE the bike lane went in.

There were multiple public meetings on the North Avenue redesign over the past year and extensive coverage in the Wakefield Daily Item. The cycling minority spoke at those meetings. They contacted town officials. They wrote letters.

Imagine what could have happened if the motoring majority had done that.
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[This column originally appeared in the December 26, 2024 Wakefield Daily Item.]