10th Annual JP Bikes Spring Roll Ride on May 13th

The 10th Annual JP Bikes Spring Roll Ride is this Sunday -- and it's family friendly! Gather at the South Street Mall (at the corner of South Street and Carolina Avenue, across from Fiore's Bakery) at 10 am on Sunday, May 13 for fun activities, snacks and bike decorating. Then bike parade down Centre Street to the Hyde Square Rotary and back with stereo-bike accompaniment. Children are extremely welcome and helmets are must for kids and adults. Click here for more information on the Facebook event page.

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Jamaica Pond: Meeting on Improving Bike Access, Pedestrian Safety Tuesday

A public meeting to discuss access and safety enhancements to Jamaica Pond will be led by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation and Boston's Parks and Recreation Department Tuesday, April 11. The meeting will specifically discuss how to enhance Perkins Street and Parkman Drive, which are both access points to Jamaica Pond. The DCR presentation will reveal designs for enhancing and improving pedestrian and bicyclist safety. The plan will also include measures for calming traffic, according to a DCR press release. The meeting is open to the public and will be held at the Hunnewell Building in the Arnold Arboretum Tuesday, April 11, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Project designs will be made available on the DCR's website following the meeting.

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Sylvia Lopez Chavez and Elisa Hamilton will have an interactive public art exhibition at The Eliot School for the 2016 JP Open Studios

Your Guide to Jamaica Plain Open Studios 2016

Want to get the most out of your time at this year's Jamaica Plain Open Studios? We've put together this guide to help. During Open Studios, which run Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., 200 artists will showcase their work at 40 sites around the neighborhood. The massive event is free. Open Studios is a fixture on the JP calendar alongside other can't miss events like Wake Up the Earth, the JP Music Festival, the Lantern Parade and JP Porchfest.

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Snake Nest, Er, Tire Sculpture Festoons Brookside Home

Snakes, er, old bike tires festoon the back of a Brookside Avenue apartment, Tuesday, July 28, 2015. At first glance, this collection of old bike tires gave me a heart attack. But it isn't a nightmare collection of snakes. It's art. Each weekday we post a “Photo of the Day” from around the neighborhood.

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Franklin Park Soared at Saturday’s Kite and Bike Festival

A scene from the 2015 Franklin Park Kite and Bike Festival. Credit: Richard Heath
An institution in Franklin Park since 1968 and threatened with extinction not long ago after being evicted form its ancestral home on the golf course, The Franklin Park Kite Festival is making a comeback. The Franklin Park Coalition, collaborating with ArtRox and Bike Boston are making it a Kites and Bikes Day. Hundreds thronged the seven-acre Playstead on Saturday to fly kites, ride bikes, eat food or just chill on a fine spring day. One major improvement was the new sidewalk along Seaver Street for families and strollers and bikes to walk over from Elm Hill or Humboldt avenues and in the park from the Egleston Square entrance at Walnut Avenue.

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Jonathan Kapust, right, head highway engineer for the Casey Arborway, explains a design feature to JP's Jake Hart before a Thursday, May 7, 2015 construction meeting.

Maps: How to Get Through Forest Hills By Foot, Bike or Car

On Thursday, transportation officials broke down exactly how residents would get through Forest Hills during the next phase of the Casey Arborway project. Here are maps and explanations for pedestrians, bicyclists and drivers once lane closures begin on Saturday. The inbound lane of the Casey (going toward the Pond) will be shunted to a temporary surface road on Saturday. Then the following Saturday the outbound lane (toward Morton Street) will get the same treatment. The basic patterns created then will largely stay in place for months as workers dismantle the crumbling overpass.

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Biking 2,000 Miles to Talk Period

On March 31, JP resident Rachel Saudek started biking from Key West, FL back to Boston as part of Sustainable Cycles, a bike ride to promote menstrual health. 7 female bicyclists are riding 3 different routes across the country, all to end up in Boston for The Society for Menstrual Cycle Research's national conference in June, at Suffolk University. Over her lifetime, a woman will spend over $2,000 and create over 260 pounds of trash by using disposable pads and tampons. Sustainable Cycles works to change this commonplace reality and break the cultural taboo that surrounds menstruation by getting women together to talk about their cycles and share information on how to handle them. Along the route, the cyclists will gather community for Period-Positive Workshops: safe spaces to have open and honest period talk.

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JP’s Nicole Freedman, Twice Director of Boston Bikes, Pedals Off to Seattle

Add Nicole Freedman's name to the list of high-level city officials who live in Jamaica Plain decamping for elsewhere. Freedman, director of Boston Bikes, announced her departure for a similar gig in Seattle on a city listserv. "I am proud of how much we have accomplished together for cycling here in Boston. Since launching we have added 92 miles of bike lanes and nearly 2,000 bike racks. We have an award winning Community Biking Program which has donated 4,015 bikes and trained 23,000 youth.

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Proposal: Make Murray Circle Into Two Roundabouts

Proposal for changes to Murray Circle. Credit: Toole Design Group
A historic overhaul of the Arborway could be in the works, with the aim of improving pedestrian and bike safety. This week the Department of Conservation and Recreation held two public meetings at the Arboretum where a design firm put out a "starter idea" that's sure to get Jamaica Plain talking: Take the big rotary where Centre meets the Arborway and turn it into two roundabouts. That's just one of the big ideas floated this week. Resident Clay Harper attended both meetings and published an informative summary at his "Arborway Matters" blog.

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The Hubway bike sharing station at the Monument was moved to Curtis Hall on Friday, Dec. 12, 2014.

Monument Bike Sharing Station Moved to Curtis Hall

Just in time for the end of the holiday rush, merchants in Centre/South regained a few parking spaces on Friday as the Hubway moved its bike-sharing station at the Monument. The new station is across South Street at Curtis Hall Community Center, where it's on the lawn and isn't taking up any car parking spaces. The new Curtis Hall site will shut down by the end of the month, as do most Hubway stations except for nearly all the ones in Cambridge. In addition to the one now at Curtis Hall, several other JP Hubway stations are among the 60 or so Boston ones staying open through the end of December:

Egleston and Columbus

Green Street Station

Jackson Square Station

JP's other Hubway station, the one at the Post Office, has already been closed for the season. Of course, as bike advocates would point out, the former location at the Monument was still parking -- it was just parking for bikes, not cars.

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