Cambridge residents come together to promote bike safety
Cambridge Bike Safety advocates for safer road infrastructure for the city’s biking community
Photo provided by Alexa Gomberg
On June 21, 2024, MIT PhD student Minh-Thi Nguyen was killed by a truck turning right on Portland St. from Hampshire St. while riding her bike from her home in Cambridge to campus. “That morning, I left the house probably 10 minutes before her to get to work,” said fellow PhD student Alexa Gomberg, Nguyen’s childhood friend and then-flatmate. Gomberg recalled Nguyen’s steadfast attention to safety while biking, even buying her a helmet when the two started biking around Cambridge. “We hit the same route every single day,” Gomberg recalled.
Nguyen’s death caused immense pain to many in the MIT community. “I could not believe it, because she was so full of life,” said Catherine Benedict G, another close friend of Nguyen. They had been texting the morning Nguyen died; the two had planned to attend a concert together the very next day.
Yet Benedict stressed that she doesn’t consider Nguyen’s death an accident, as she believes the existing road infrastructure played a part in the tragic event. “Our government is capable of making safer biking infrastructure,” Benedict said.
Both Benedict and Gomberg joined Cambridge Bike Safety after their friend's death, hoping to prevent similar tragedies from happening. “It’s really meaningful to be in a group of people who didn’t know Minh-Thi, but that care so much about making sure that what happened to her doesn’t happen to anyone else,” Benedict said.
Advocating for bike safety
Cambridge Bike Safety (CBS) is an advocacy group of Cambridge residents interested in promoting safety for cyclists of all ages and abilities. The organization was formed after the death of Amanda Phillips, 27, who was hit by a truck in 2016 while cycling in Inman Square. Although the District Attorney’s report found that Phillips’s fatal crash was “unavoidable,” CBS argued that “protected bike lanes would have saved Amanda’s life.” Since then, the group has worked to promote laws that protect cyclists’ life and create a complete network of separate bike lanes connecting the city of Cambridge.
The deaths of cyclists like Phillips, Nguyen, and others (such as John H. Concoran, 62), have led to improvements in bike safety at the sites of certain fatal crashes. However, Benedict said it seems like the city is “playing ‘whack-a-mole.’” According to her, the city seems to redesign infrastructure only “if someone dies in this area,” rather than preventing crashes by building a complete network of separate bike lanes.
In the past five years, Boston and Cambridge logged 2,287 roadside accidents involving cyclists, and six people have lost their lives while cycling in Cambridge in the last decade. The Cambridge Police Department’s data reports an average of 160 crashes per year between 2000 and 2015. CBS claims the installation of protected bike lanes would prevent 40% of crashes, mainly those that occur away from intersections; these include doorings, sideswipe crashes, rear-end crashes, and head-on crashes.
CBS’s advocacy led to the passing of the Cycling Safety Ordinance (CSO) in 2019, requiring Cambridge to construct separated bike lanes when streets are reconstructed. The CSO was amended in 2020 to include the goal of approximately 25 miles of separated bike lanes by 2026, or five miles per year. The streets selected for this target include all of Massachusetts Avenue, Broadway from Quincy St. to Hampshire St., and Cambridge St. from Oak St. to Second St. According to the City’s Fourth Annual CSO Report, 14.22 miles of bike lanes were installed or under construction by April 2024.
The long road ahead
Shortly before Nguyen’s death, the Cambridge City Council voted to delay the installation of these separated bike lanes by 18 months, citing inadequate planning for disruptions to traffic patterns and small businesses, alongside parking issues. Only after Nguyen and Corcoran’s deaths did the Council reinstate some deadlines: the bike lanes on Cambridge St., Main St., and Broadway were scheduled to be completed by November 2026.
CBS members stressed that the job is not yet finished. “It takes a lot of people to make something happen,” said CBS member and MIT lecturer Christopher Cassa ’03 MEng ’04. Even though the City Council has long sought to make the city’s streets safer for cyclists, Cassa observed that concrete measures would often take too much time to be implemented, or get derailed by opposing interests and priorities.
After the passage of the CSO, CBS’s “number one priority” shifted towards the punctual completion of the bike network, according to Benedict. She and Gomberg helped organize events such as the “Ride for Your Life” bike ride in November 2024 to memorialize Nguyen and other victims while demonstrating public support for cyclist safety policies.
To encourage safer practices among individual cyclists, CBS has promoted the usage of helmets and night lights. Volunteers raise awareness about biking best-practices at schools, give away free bike lights, and host educational panels.
CBS has also supported automated enforcement for speeding and red-light cameras through a petition to the state legislature. The City Council has since agreed to draft a petition requesting the authority to use automatic cameras for enforcement, an achievement Gomberg believes to be “thanks in part to [CBS’s] advocacy.”
The role of trucks in bike accidents
Although Gomberg recognizes that the state of Massachusetts has “some of the best truck safety regulations in the country,” she believes there’s still room for growth.
Nguyen’s death was caused by a “right hook crash,” a collision in which a driver turns right and hits a cyclist or pedestrian. What makes these crashes more deadly is the likelihood of the victim getting stuck in the space between the truck’s wheels. Two weeks before Nguyen’s crash, Kim Staley, 55, was killed in Cambridge “in the exact same way,” according to Gomberg.
To protect pedestrians and cyclists, countries such as China, Brazil and members of the European Union have mandated the installation of lateral protective devices (LPDs), barriers that cover the open space between the front and rear wheels of a truck. Currently, Cambridge’s Truck Safety Ordinance requires the installation of such devices, but only for “Large Vehicles” used by vendors under city contracts. After the 2024 crashes, the City Council voted unanimously to ask the City Manager to extend truck safety legislation, including these provisions. For Gomberg, this is the “biggest safety issue,” as she believes these devices “could have saved my friend’s life.”
Alongside Harvard and Boston University, MIT now requires that their own trucks have LPDs. However, not all its vendors’ trucks do. In response, Gomberg encouraged the creation of a working group on bike safety with the support of MIT’s Graduate Student Council.
The first step was creating awareness of the severity of the problem. In June 2025, MIT published the results of a survey of its vendors’ truck safety measures, which concluded that “the greatest opportunity for improvement” is the use of LPDs. Moreover, following MIT’s communication to the vendors, “Eight [...] noted they were ordering and would install these devices.”
“I think that our advocacy and bringing this issue forward after Minh-Thi’s crash is really what spurred that action and that survey,” Gomberg said. Now, her goal is to encourage similar efforts from other schools. “I’m hopeful that further action will get more vehicles to be safer.”
In addition to truck safety, Gomberg is working to create a form where MIT students can report the places where they’ve had crashes and near misses. At the same time, she hosts “bike-safety-focused rides” to help students feel safer cycling in Cambridge, conducted in collaboration with the MIT Office of Graduate Education, MIT Police Department, and MIT Transportation.
A city with more cyclists
In 2024, Cambridge was recognized as the second-best US city for biking. The 2023 Biking in Cambridge Data Report showed a 23% increase in Cambridge residents bicycling to work from 2018 to 2022.
“So much progress has been made since I moved here," said Cassa, who has lived in the city since the start of his undergraduate degree and has been able to witness how the city has increasingly accommodated its biking community. Although infrastructure and attitudes regarding biking have “transformed dramatically,” he emphasized that work still needs to be done to ensure the safety of the city’s roads. He was involved in a crash himself a couple of years ago, and admitted that it was hard to get back on a bike after the experience.
According to a 2020 survey, 53% of residents did not bike in 2019, but 85% of residents who biked once wanted to bike more in Cambridge. People cited safety as the main barrier to biking, with 89% of non-biking residents reporting they do not feel safe doing so. Moreover, research published in 2025 in Nature Cities showed that protected bike lanes are associated with nearly double the number of bike ridership, compared to standard bike lanes.
In Cambridge, biking is not only a mode of transportation, but also a way to engage with the community. In Cassa’s case, biking was “a staple” of his life as a student, and is now a “powerful” way in which he can feel much more connected to campus than if he was simply driving to class.
Gomberg, Benedict, and Cassa stressed that the MIT community is crucial in promoting bike safety efforts. MIT sponsors four Bluebike stations, with a total of 207 docks, on campus. According to the 2024 MIT Facts booklet, the MIT community completed more than 633,600 bike-share trips in 2023. In 2019, the most used Bluebikes station in the entire ride-sharing system — recording nearly 120,000 trips — was the one at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Amherst St. on MIT’s campus.
Voting for pro-bike change
“Bike safety is a critical issue for MIT students,” Benedict said. She encouraged students to be safe when biking, get involved in community advocacy, and to register to vote in local elections.
The Cambridge Bicycle Safety Independent Expenditure Political Action Committee, which works to elect pro-bike safety Cambridge City Council candidates, recently published its endorsements for the upcoming elections based on candidates’ responses to their questionnaire and voting track record regarding bike safety issues. The seven “Bike Champions” include former Mayor of Cambridge Sumbul Siddiqui and Burhan Azeem ’19, an MIT alumnus and current city councilor.
“Even if you don’t bike, someone you know [does] and loves bikes,” Benedict said. She emphasized that if a “pro-bike safety” City Council is elected, “we won’t have to fight for every single street.” The Cambridge City Council Election will be held on Nov. 4, 2025, with voting registration due on Oct. 25, the same day early voting will begin. MIT students who are U.S. citizens and will be at least 18 years old on or before Election Day are eligible to vote in the election.
“If you walk or bike in Cambridge, you deserve safer streets,” said Cassa, emphasizing that it is “critical” that students’ and cyclists’ rights are represented. Benedict added, “None of us are safe until all of us are safe.”