With the weather warming up, it’s construction season, and Boston is working to limit traffic problems during road projects.
When Boston police officers are assigned to construction sites around the city for extra work details, it is all remarkably still organized by pen and paper. That's all about to change though.
The City of Boston has selected Extra Duty Solutions, a Connecticut-based company, to modernize scheduling these detail shifts for the Boston Police Department and Boston Fire Department.
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"I am honestly just excited about being able to do more of our public works jobs with police detail coverage," said Julia Campbell, Boston's deputy chief of streets. "Without coverage, it's difficult for us to schedule jobs, difficult for us to do work in some of the busiest parts of the city."
For the first time, Boston is also opening up some of these construction details to civilians under a new priority system, which will give Boston police officers the first chance to be selected, followed by other local police officers, then civilians.
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The city is working with former Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis and his company, The Edward Davis Company, to run a civilian flagger program for the city.
"These are very highly paying jobs. Basically, the rate that police were getting paid themselves is now available to everybody," said Christian MilNeil, editor of the popular Streetsblog Massachusetts. "Especially in lower-income neighborhoods, there was a lot of frustration that these flagging detail jobs were going unfilled."
As we first reported last year, Boston has long struggled to fill all the work details that come with a fast-growing city like this. Tens of thousands of details go unfilled every year, leading to delays -- including, famously, a crosswalk in Brighton that took more than a year to paint because of an inability to book a detail.
"We're really hopeful that this is going to allow us to do more work," Campbell said. "It is more than an extra set of eyes, having the details out there means we can close streets, we can have active traffic control."
"Those are the only people trained to do it," Campbell added.
Boston hopes to have both of its programs up and running in the coming months.
