Editorial: Bike washing machine won’t clean up Mass and Cass

Mayor Michelle Wu is determined to make Boston a gleaming, green utopia. That calls for innovation, such as the new CycleWash bike cleaning station in the Seaport. Do you know what else could use some innovation? The moveable feast of horrors that engulfs Mass and Cass and surrounding neighborhoods. Despite tent encampment sweeps, addicts are back, as are the drug traffickers plying their trade. Now we can add a surge of rats to the list. Councilor Ed Flynn joined the Boston Police Department and the Wu administration’s coordinated response team late last week for a walkthrough of South Boston’s Andrew Square neighborhood — where residents shared that rats are quite literally being fed by the city’s open-air drug market, due, in part, to homeless people and addicts rooting through and scattering trash. Homeless and drug-addicted people who used to frequent the long-standing Mass and Cass encampment but have spread out into surrounding neighborhoods since the city ordered the removal of Atkinson Street tents in late 2023, are also worsening the city’s rat infestation with their homemade grills, Flynn said. It doesn’t help that the City allows for trash to be put out in plastic bags, not containers, making garbage easy pickings for scavenging. Kevin Conroy, who lives in South Boston with his wife, said rats have “pretty much destroyed our quality of life.” The quality of life is getting a boost over on Drydock Avenue, a little under two miles from Andrew Square. There the city installed a free-to-use bike washing station. In a snazzy video on the Boston Planning Dept.’s Facebook page, Sachin Kumar, managing director at CW Cleaning Solutions, gave a run-through and said it takes only about 6 minutes for a bike to be cleaned. His company created the CYCLE wash robotic bicycle washing system, which, according to a spokesperson for the mayor, “was temporarily installed by the company at zero cost to taxpayers and is free to use.” It’s impressive, and no doubt appreciated by the users of Boston’s burgeoning bike lanes. Green transportation is getting a leg up under Wu’s administration. But that doesn’t offer much help to the parts of the city burdened with entrenched problems. A clean bike loses some luster when you have to dodge a rat to get to your backyard. “They’re fearless,” Conroy, told the Herald. “I walked right up to them and they were just kind of ignoring me until I hit them with a shovel. … They’re everywhere. It’s just crazy.” What would be crazier is if city leaders focused more on a green future for Boston and less on the nuts and bolts problems of neighborhoods dealing with drug addicts, drug traffickers and the homeless. And rats, definitely a group that shouldn’t find our neighborhoods hospitable. Innovation isn’t only for supporting zero-carbon forms of transportation. It’s for coming up with solutions to problems that never seem to go away in the city: rampant drug use, drug dealers, and the inevitable fallout on neighborhoods, families and businesses. It takes 6 minutes for a bike to be cleaned by the CYCLE Wash, how long will it take for people living in the neighborhoods affected by Mass and Cass to get relief? Editorial cartoon by Al Goodwyn (Creators Syndicate)