As Massachusetts gets ready to start reopening its economy on May 18, Boston is actively considering converting car lanes to additional sidewalk space, bicycle lanes and bus lanes to help speed the city’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

In his press conference Monday afternoon, Mayor Marty Walsh said the city is looking to use car lanes to address several key challenges:

• Providing restaurants with outdoor dining areas that, when combined with indoor dining capacity that will likely be limited by the state’s reopening plans, would offer enough seating capacity to let the business restart.
• Reducing crowding on sidewalks to permit more social distancing, particularly in business areas where stores may have lines due to limited internal capacity.
• Offering safer places for residents to bike to work as they try to avoid mass transit.
• Helping MBTA buses move faster and more reliably to prevent crowding.
• Calming traffic as fatal motor vehicle accidents and speeding incidents have risen dramatically despite a significant reduction in the number of cars on the road.

Walsh said the city is working to develop specific proposals it can bring to residents for feedback, but cited other cities around the country and around the world that were following a similar playbook.

“This is an important issue for a safe recovery and we need to have an inclusive conversation to get it right,” Walsh said.

Walsh hinted that, if successful, some of the changes could be retained on a more permanent basis. Advocates have long called for the city to create more bus and bicycle lanes to help tackle traffic – more people can be transported in less space using buses or bicycles, they say – and offer more climate-friendly transportation options. The city’s bus lanes in Roslindale and other bus lanes in Somerville and Arlington have shown the ability to dramatically increase the speed and reliability of buses, which transit experts say helps reduce crowding on individual buses.

Pressed to name specific streets, Walsh acknowledged calls for areas like Hanover and Newbury streets to be closed to pedestrians – both areas with narrow sidewalks and which saw huge volumes of foot traffic before the pandemic – but said the city would need to evaluate the public safety impact of any proposed closure. A fire station is located on Hanover Street, he noted, and the street doesn’t have any other roads that run parallel to it.

South Boston could be a candidate for bus lanes, he said, as a neighborhood with heavy bus usage but significant traffic problems.