A city project to revamp transit along roadways in Roxbury near Nubian Square has been canceled.

The Roxbury Resilient Corridors project — which was slated to add bike and bus lanes as well as improved sidewalks and new trees and green infrastructure — hit a speed bump in September after the Trump administration pulled $20 million in federal Department of Transportation funding that had been directed toward the effort.

The project would have made infrastructure changes down the lengths of Malcom X Boulevard, Melnea Cass Boulevard and all but the first couple of blocks of Warren Street.

For transit advocates, if the loss of funding means changes to the scope of the project or its ability to move forward, it would mean potential impacts to local residents as they try to commute to work, take their kids to school or make it to appointments, said Emmanuell De Barros, director of development and community engagement at Alternatives for Community and Environment.

“It’s just another thing that would be a burden to many of these communities,” he said.

Changes proposed under the project could be significant for the area, supporters said. De Barros said much of the corridors that would be renovated under the project haven’t seen comprehensive redesigns in years.

“These corridors haven’t been improved in a while,” he said.

While the project was slated to include changes to the roadway to create dedicated bike and bus lanes, it also included other area improvements like fixing sidewalks, improving lighting, planting trees and installing green infrastructure.

Much like the proposed changes to Blue Hill Avenue, portions of the work discussed for the roadways under the Roxbury Resilient Corridors project were the subject of some disagreement.

Nefertiti Lawrence, a Roxbury resident who participated on a committee that selected a contractor for the project, said elements of the work that would have created dedicated bus lanes were more contentious, but others — like measures to increase pedestrian safety, improve lighting or beautify the corridors — were generally widely supported.

To see those changes potentially cut back with the federal funding cuts was “a little bit of a disappointment,” Lawrence said.

For her, the potential benefits of those changes hit close to home. A teacher at the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science, she said she was thinking about how her students use and interact with the stretch of Malcolm X Boulevard outside of the school, which is part of the project.

“Malcolm X Boulevard is kind of what I focused on, because that’s where my students are,” Lawrence said. “I just kind of felt so happy that at least that they were going to do some things to make sure that the kids weren’t getting hurt.”

Those proposed steps included measures like raised crosswalks in front of the school.

According to city data, there were nearly 500 collisions along the three stretches of road covered by the project between 2020 and May 2025 — the most recent available data. In that same time, those collisions resulted in six fatalities.

Lawrence said she has known of students from the school who have been hit by cars on that stretch of roadway.

Officials have said they intend to fight to get the funding back. In a statement following the announcement of the loss of the federal grants, a city spokesperson said Boston is “reviewing its options” to respond to the cuts that they said ignore the clear intent of Congress, according to reporting by StreetblogsMASS.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley, who advocated for the $20 million in funding to come to Boston called the funds a “critical investment in the Roxbury community” and said she would work with state and local partners to “push back and attempt to undo this utterly ridiculous attempt from the White House to cancel these funds,” in a statement released Sept. 17.

Advocates said they think the project should continue, however necessary. Absent the federal funding, De Barros said he’d still like to see the work move forward and said he’s looking to see how the city and state might leverage investments to fill in the gaps.

The grants were announced in 2022 by the Biden-Harris administration under a program called “Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity” or “RAISE.” The $20 million was intended to “transform a community that has been underserved and overburdened by creating a safer street while promoting active transportation choices,” according to the official Biden-era DOT announcement.

Beyond axing the $20 million directed to the city for the Roxbury Resilient Corridors work, the Trump administration also renamed the program “Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development” or “BUILD.”

In January, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that the department would conduct an audit to “identify and eliminate all Biden-era programs, policies, activities, rules, and orders that promote climate change activism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, racial equity, gender identity policies, environmental justice, and other partisan objectives.”

According to reporting by The Boston Globe, the Department of Transportation grants were pulled because the agency is now focused on “promoting traditional forms of energy and natural resources to the greatest extent possible.”

Regarding a separate $2 million grant for a Mattapan Square infrastructure project that the DOT also cancelled, they said the agency is prioritizing reducing roadway traffic by “preserving or increasing roadway capacity for motor vehicles,” according to the Boston Globe.

Lawrence said she doesn’t think the stretches of roadway shouldn’t be changed in a way that forgets about drivers entirely, but recognizes that bikers and pedestrians use the space and should be protected as well. She said there needs to be a middle ground, where bikers and drivers are safe and “everyone gets what they need.”

“You’ve got to have the happy medium,” Lawrence said. “I feel like if you go too far to the left or too far to the right, then nobody wins, right?”