Pete Stidman

JAMAICA PLAIN GAZETTE

The Town of Brookline’s planning department is seeking to mend a few gaps in the bike path that runs along the Muddy River section of the Emerald Necklace. The path, leaving Olmsted Park at the northwest corner of Jamaica Plain, is a critical link to Longwood, Boston University, Cambridge and beyond for hundreds of JP cyclists and pedestrians who travel it every day.

One of the largest gaps in the path is the absence of any crosswalk or signal where the path crosses Route 9 coming out of JP. The situation has brought the ire of bicycle activists since the early ’90s and seems to be a perennial local story.

Now Brookline’s planners are hoping to procure the aid of the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) in solving the riddles of the complicated intersection as part of a larger redesign of the streets in Brookline Village. Federal money is already earmarked for work in the area, according to Jeff Levine, director of Brookline’s planning department, but the location, lying on the border between Boston and Brookline with the state-controlled Riverway and a historic park running through it, presents a complicated design challenge.

“There’s a lot of interest in making a better connection there,” said Levine. “We’ve talked about a striped crosswalk, but we feel there is some more analysis to be done. And, since Boston’s so integrally involved, we really feel it needs to be a regional design.”

The MPO is selecting several urban intersections across Greater Boston as part of its Bicycle and Pedestrian Improvements in Urban Centers study in fiscal year 2007. Levine hopes Route 9 and the Emerald Necklace path will be one of them. The study will choose six to eight different urban centers that are problematic for pedestrians in the Greater Boston area.

“We look mostly at the pedestrian and bicycling environment rather than a full-blown traffic analysis,” said MPO’s Jared Fijalkowski, a transportation planner. “We focus on identifying ways to improve that environment, generally low cost things that can be implemented quickly.”

A separate plan for improvements along the path on the North side of Route 9 may include narrowing River Road and adding a bike lane or path that would also travel down Brookline Avenue, Aspinwall Avenue and Netherlands Street, reconnecting with the bike path near Parkway Road, said Levine. But those potential changes, being designed by Brookline as part of overall improvements to Brookline Village’s streets, haven’t yet been finalized.

Levine held a meeting with JP resident Don Eunson of the Emerald Necklace Conservancy, Jeff Rosenblum from LivableStreets and Jeffrey Ferris, a JP bike activist, in May to discuss the crossing at Route 9, but has yet to fully bring in the Boston Transportation Department (BTD) and the state Department of Conservation and Recreation, which oversees the Riverway.

“We have no knowledge of it,” said Jim Mansfield of BTD’s planning department. “We would be interested, but we’d have to see what the scope of the study is.”

“I’ve talked to folks [at BTD] abstractly about it, but they’re not very focused on it,” said Levine. “It wouldn’t hurt to have Boston supporting it.”

Rosenblum counts Boston’s support as an imperative.

“The way I understand it, the only way that project is going to work is if the City of Boston and the Town of Brookline collaborate on it,” said Rosenblum in a phone interview. “There’s no way you can coordinate traffic control without collaboration.”

Fijalkowski agreed. “One criteria is that we have support from the municipalities,” he said. “The problem is, Boston doesn’t have a bicycle pedestrian coordinator anymore.”

BTD is also receiving a new leader Sept. 12, Dennis Royer, who reportedly worked for the city of Denver as deputy manager for operations of public works. The Boston post will include both BTD and the Department of Public Works for the first time this year, a recent change introduced by Mayor Thomas Menino with Boston’s Fiscal year 2007 budget.

The intersections to be studied by the MPO in 2007 will be chosen in March.

The MPO is accepting public comment until Aug. 15 on its draft Fiscal year 2007-2010 Transportation Improvement Program, of which the study could be a part. To comment on the plan call 973-7100 or e-mail publicinformation@bostonmpo.org. To view it, see bostonmpo.org.

BTD can be contacted at 635-4680 or btd@cityofboston.gov.