Maverick Square Transportation Action Plan
Building on visioning in PLAN: East Boston, we're advancing ideas to improve safety, connectivity, and placemaking in Maverick Square.
The City of Boston's Transportation Department (BTD) is leading this transportation action plan. Our goal for this project is to strengthen the area surrounding Maverick Station. We're developing ideas to improve safety, increase connectivity, and support public life and business activity.
- Maintain and uplift the vibrancy that makes Maverick Square a great place
- Increase the comfort, safety, attractiveness, and accessibility of walking, biking, taking transit, and lingering in Maverick Square
- Advance proposals in deep collaborative partnership with local residents, community leaders, stakeholders, and businesses.
SPRING 2025 UPDATE
We're excited to announce the start of our project!
In March, we started our outreach process. We have a partner helping us connect with residents, Openbox, a community-centered design and planning group. They're helping us take a personal approach to community engagement, using targeted outreach to hear from community members who tend to be less able or inclined to participate in traditional engagement events, like town halls and open houses. Specifically, we've been hosting in-depth individual and small group conversations, in particular with transit riders, service workers, students and teachers.
We will also host public meetings over the course of the project to hear from the wider community and keepeveryone informed. For more information, read our timeline and FAQs below.
PROJECT GOALS
Project Goals
UPLIFT THE VIBRANCY OF MAVERICK SQUARE
Maverick Square is a key gateway to East Boston. It's one of the most vibrant commercial squares in the City. This project will use transportation planning to support placemaking and community development.
MAKE IT EASIER TO WALK, BIKE, AND TAKE TRANSIT
This project will increase safety for all users, first and foremost. Importantly, too, will be improvements to transit operations at the busy Maverick Station,
CLOSELY COLLABORATE WITH RESIDENTS AND BUSINESSES
We will ensure that community input is incorporated at every stage of the project. We'll only be successful if we work together to develop visions to improve and invest in the transportation networks and public realm of Maverick Square.
TIMELINE
PLAN: East Boston included an initial look at East Boston. Now, we're ready to advance those ideas:
- Background research: For the first few months of 2025, we're reviewing existing plans and conditions on the ground in Maverick Square. We're working to make sure we understand all that we need to before proposing changes to how the streets work.
- Initial community engagement: Beginning in March, we're hosting in-depth conversations with individual and small groups of residents from specific, harder-to-reach populations to understand their current experiences and perceptions of Maverick Square.
- Interactive update: In April, we'll publish an interactive website where community members can review information and provide input between public meetings.
- Public meeting 1: Around early May, we'll hold a public meeting where we introduce the project more broadly to residents, share learnings from our review of the existing conditions, and share next steps with community members.
- Testing early ideas: During the summer, we'll gather iterative feedback from residents and passersby through early sketches, simulations, and interactive activities to ensure our ideas are headed in the right direction.
- Public meeting 2: Later in the summer, we'll present the first draft of our concept designs to gather community feedback.
No recommendations have been made yet. We will begin the process with in-depth conversations with East Boston community members and assess Maverick Square’s existing conditions before ideas are proposed.
This 9-month-long project will result in a “25% concept design plan,” a set of early proposals for the main interventions we hope to build. Any potential changes will go through further testing and refinement in the future before they’re constructed.
We’ve made no proposals to remove or change parking at this time. Any changes will be made in partnership with the community. There are many ways we can improve traffic, make it safer, more comfortable to linger, and park and do business. For this project, we will explore ways that make sense in Maverick Square.
PLAN: East Boston was adopted in 2024 and led by the Boston Planning Department. The plan outlines recommendations for neighborhood improvements throughout East Boston and a brief proposal on ways to enhance the plaza at the center of Maverick Square. For this project, we plan to assess the Square more deeply and work with the community to understand what should be improved in the Square.
No, this project is focused on road safety and connectivity specifically in Maverick Square.
Please see our timeline above.
Sign up to our email list and come to our public meetings! We'll post here when we have specific dates for our meetings.
GET INVOLVED
We're interested in hearing from you! As soon as we have more information on all the different ways you can get involved, we'll update this section. For now, you can provide your email using the link below, and we'll share information about public meetings and other project-specific details as we have them.
Feel free to send the project team an email at maverickTAP@boston.gov, too!
PROJECT MATERIALS
Project Materials- Project poster (English and Spanish)
- Project flier (English and Spanish)
Read more about the plan at this link.
Read more about the visions for Maverick Square laid out in the plan at these links (English and Español).
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Have questions? Contact:
