Since Bike Bureau launched this summer, the number of blocked bike lanes reported to the city has jumped across the Boston area, in Boston, Cambridge, and Brookline alike. In September, riders around Boston reported more blocked bike lanes than all of New York City.
We pulled a full year of public 311 data for Boston and Cambridge, plus Brookline's parking reports, and matched every case against Bike Bureau's filings. The charts below show what changed.
Boston and Cambridge: several times more reports
From October 2025 through June 2026, Boston 311 received an average of about 170 blocked bike lane reports a month. In September 2026 it received 1,653. That's about four times July's level, and roughly ten times the typical month before the summer. Of those, 1,424 were filed through Bike Bureau.
Cambridge looks the same. It averaged about 40 bike lane obstruction reports a month on SeeClickFix before the summer. Then Bike Bureau started filing there in mid-July. Cambridge got 504 reports in August and 445 in September, and Bike Bureau filed 427 and 389 of them.
How to read the charts: pink is reports filed directly with the city, blue is Bike Bureau, and purple is where they overlap, meaning Bike Bureau reports that landed in the city's 311 system as official cases. Nearly all of the growth is purple. The rest of 311 kept going at its usual pace, and Bike Bureau added a large new wave of reports on top.
Brookline too
Brookline's public data doesn't separate bike lane complaints from other parking issues, so the pink band here counts all parking reports. From March through June, Brookline logged about 65 a month. In August and September, reports filed through Bike Bureau pushed the city's count to 175 and 162. Add the Bike Bureau reports that never made it into the city's system and the totals reach about 200 a month, roughly three times the spring level.
More than New York City
When we combined every Boston-area municipality for September, we counted 2,484 blocked bike lane reports: 2,178 through Bike Bureau and 2,239 in city 311 systems, with 1,933 in both. New York City's 311 system logged 1,991 "Blocked Bike Lane" complaints that month.
New York has about eight million people. Boston, Cambridge, Brookline, and Somerville together have about one million. And our Boston-area 311 count is a floor, since some towns don't publish complete data.
To get a feel for the scale, here are just some of the vehicles reported in Boston-area bike lanes, piled into the Boston City Hall building:
What's blocking the lanes?
Every report comes with a photo, so we can see what's actually parked in the bike lane. Mostly it's private cars, but delivery fleets show up again and again: FedEx, Amazon Prime, USPS, UPS. Each square below is one report, sorted by vehicle type. Click any one to open the original report.
Read the full analysis on Bike Research: What blocks bike lanes?
Why it matters
Every report is a dated, located, photographed record of a car in a bike lane. Before Bike Bureau, most of those moments went undocumented: it took too long to file a report, so people just rode around the car. Now that filing takes seconds, we get a map of where bike lanes actually fail, and cities can enforce there and redesign the curb where the problem keeps coming back. (See our Cambridge hotspot analysis for an example.)
A few caveats. More reports doesn't necessarily mean more blocked lanes; it mostly means more of them are getting written down. Boston's direct 311 reports also rose in July, before Bike Bureau's Boston filing went live. And charts are smoothed over 14 days, so daily peaks aren't raw counts.
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Sources: Boston Open311, Cambridge SeeClickFix, BrookONline, NYC Open Data, Bike Bureau. Boston and Cambridge: October 1, 2025 to September 30, 2026. Brookline: March to September 2026. All dates are local time.