Mayor Wu's Incredible Shrinking Open Streets
Boston's 2026 Open Streets schedule has fewer neighborhoods, shorter routes, no Open Newbury announcement, and a smaller budget. A long Reddit comment does not put the missing street miles back.
In the third week of May, the city posted its 2026 Open Streets schedule, and anyone who compared it to last year's could see what had happened. Fewer neighborhoods, less car-free street, and no Open Newbury. Word traveled fast, and within a day the mayor had turned up in a Boston subreddit thread titled "No Open Newbury" to explain herself.
Her comment ran several hundred words. Open Newbury and neighborhood Open Streets are run by two different city cabinets, she wrote; they're on different announcement timelines; and this summer is crammed with FIFA, the Tall Ships, and the city's Fourth of July events, all competing for the same police and street-closure resources. Open Newbury is still coming, she promised, and the full program returns to a regular schedule in 2027.
It was patient and well-organized and it answered a question nobody had asked. The people in that thread weren't confused about which department pulls the permits. They'd looked at the schedule and seen there was less of it, and explaining the org chart doesn't put the events back on the calendar.
Here's the less of it. Open Streets ran in six neighborhoods in 2024 and five in 2025. This year it's four. Jamaica Plain gets 0.9 miles of open street, down from 1.4 last year; the new Roslindale event is 0.2 miles. Dorchester is gone. And the program lost $150,000 this year — a number the Reddit comment never mentions. A summer stacked with the World Cup is a real logistical headache, but it isn't what took $150,000 out of the budget. That was decided on paper, before a single barricade went up for FIFA.
The mayor's own comment gives away the priorities. She notes that Open Newbury runs in-house, through the Streets cabinet, while neighborhood Open Streets runs on a contract with an outside vendor that pays for the heavier outreach and programming. So when the money got tight, the program that brings a car-free day to neighborhoods without existing crowds — the one on the cancellable contract — is what shrank, while the recurring closure of one of the wealthiest shopping streets in the city stays on the calendar. Wu lays out that distinction herself and asks us to read it as bookkeeping.
People got upset about a cut, and the mayor wrote a careful, reasonable-sounding post about why the cut made sense. What she didn't do was undo it. We're told the good schedule comes back in 2027, once the World Cup is gone and the books are closed on an expensive summer. Maybe it does. But Dorchester doesn't get a 2026, and neither do the Jamaica Plain blocks that lost half a mile of street. The schedule is smaller, the budget is the reason, and a long comment in a subreddit doesn't change either one.