The city is reigniting efforts to improve safety for pedestrians and cyclists once stymied by the pandemic, with Columbus Avenue among the streets next up for consideration.

Several city departments are making pushes to make the heart of Boston safer for residents using alternative transit, with plans in the works for everything from new bus routes to wider sidewalks to more bike lanes.

The Connect Downtown Plan, an initiative from the transportation department to prioritize pedestrians around the busiest streets of Beacon Hill and the Back Bay, may finally set its sights on Columbus Avenue after a lengthy pandemic pause.

The program has been on hold since early 2020. It was in the process of a variety of community engagements, almost all of which unfortunately involved getting large groups of people together in person.

The pandemic put a stop to those activities, but officials now say they’re ready to start things up again. “The city has been improving walking and bicycling experience for the past several years. At this point, no specific changes or designs have been proposed; but we expect to hold public meetings and provide other opportunities for feedback on these corridors in the coming months and look forward to a conversation with community members, advocates, and other stakeholders,” said the mayor’s office. Columbus Avenue will likely be high on their to-do list. It was identified as a problem area on several levels in Connect Downtown’s initial surveys, notably for the high number of pedestrians that cluster around its train stations and the frequency they’re involved in mid-block crashes with cyclists. While the Connect Downtown program is centered on Beacon Hill and the Common, its map goes out of its way to include Columbus Avenue.

Steve Fox, head of the South End Forum, said residents have known about Columbus Avenue’s issues for years.

“We hear about Columbus Avenue all the time. Pedestrian safety there is in particular one of the top issues we hear about on a very consistent basis,” he said. “We asked for a traffic study around a decade ago, which shows that many neighbors had taken notice. Traffic on Massachusetts Avenue would see the green light at Newton Street and literally gun their car.”

What exactly should be done to improve the avenue is still undecided. Connect Downtown was halted in its information-gathering stage, and Columbus Avenue is among the streets it hadn’t yet started gathering information for.

What changes the city needs to make will be decided by officials during consultations with the community. For now, the only definite element the city is looking at is “areas with high demand for bike facilities.”

“We’ve been asking for years for speed deterrent measures to slow traffic down, maybe some blinking signs. Those were all turned down due to ‘federal highway standards.’ We raised money for a pilot program of crossing signs, but the government declined on Tremont.

We still want to pursue that for Columbus Avenue,” said Steve Fox.

“What’s most important for residents to do now is participate in the planning process. I don’t want the planning process to just be an announcement, we don’t want to just be the recipient of decisions made on our behalf.”