Ride for Your Life participants biked from Cambridge Common to the Massachusetts State house on Beacon Hill to call on state lawmakers to make streets safer across the Bay State.
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More than 200 bicyclists with similar stories of loss took a memorial ride to the Massachusetts State House Sunday for the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims Ride For Your Life event, which honors the loved ones they've lost and calls for increased safety on the roads.
It was an emotional day for a lot of people who are living with enormous grief while fighting to keep others from going through a similar tragedy.
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Alexa Gomberg's best friend was killed in a Cambridge intersection 150 days ago.
“A truck hit her when she was just trying to bike to work – like we all do every day,” Gomberg shared.
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Eric Olson lost his 5-year-old daughter in Andover 18 months ago.
“I would so much rather be anywhere else than here because it would mean my daughter was alive,” said Olson, who is the president of the Sidney Mae Olson Rainbow Fund.
“A semi tractor-trailer killed my daughter less than a block from our house. We pushed the pedestrian signal, we had a walk sign, I watched only steps away as my sweet Sidney was here and gone in the blink of an eye,” said Mary Beth Ellis, who is vice president of the Sidney Mae Olson Rainbow Fund.
Emily Stein's father was hit by a distracted driver in Acton 13 years ago.
“Right when he was about to become a grandfather and my kids never got to meet him,” shared Stein, the executive director of Safe Roads Alliance.
Those that gathered Sunday for the bike ride to a rally are advocating for change to make streets safer, like a bill that would install automated sensors on public roads to catch traffic violations on camera.
“It was a really emotional day but voices matter and we’re just hoping that all these voices show that we can do better,” Olson said. “We have simple, sensible things that can change and could have prevented a death like Sid’s.”
Gomberg, a Ride for Your Life organizer, said, "We shouldn’t be looking retroactively after an accident has happened. We should be thinking proactively about what we can do to fix our streets now.”
“Hopefully everybody will come away from here and talk with their legislator and say that they want red light cameras, that they want speed limits to be lowered, that they want speed bumps in their city because that’s what will slow cars down,” Stein said.
Organizers say these types of changes could have saved more than 700 people who died on Massachusetts roads this year.
