If you rode a nearly empty Wave bus down Milestone Road this summer and found yourself waiting for the fare box to ask for money, the answer is that it won't. The free ride is not a leftover pandemic promotion and not something the town voted on at a spring meeting. It landed on Nantucket because Massachusetts wrote fare-free regional transit into its fiscal year 2026 budget, and the island's public bus system got swept up in a statewide policy change with no local ballot involved at all.
Compare that to what's happening a few miles away on Tom Nevers Road, where residents have been asking for a bike path for decades, voters overwhelmingly approved $6.8 million to build one at the 2025 Annual Town Meeting, and the town still can't say when construction will start. The money showed up faster than the path will.
That gap between how fast a policy can move and how slow a physical project moves is the real story of getting around Nantucket this year. It's worth understanding if you already live here and are trying to figure out whether you can leave the car in the driveway a little more often.
The Fare That Skipped Town Meeting
The Wave, run by the Nantucket Regional Transit Authority, now serves the island for free for all of calendar year 2026, and that's a permanent feature of how the system operates going forward rather than a seasonal offer. Ridership reflects it. Trips jumped roughly 51 percent between fiscal year 2024 and fiscal year 2025, with the system logging more than 425,000 rides in that most recent fiscal year alone.
Routes cover the destinations residents actually need on a normal week: Surfside Beach and Cisco Beach in summer, Madaket, Siasconset, Jetties Beach and the North Shore, the mid-island corridor near Stop & Shop, and the airport. For someone who wants to get to the beach without hunting for parking, or who needs a way to the grocery store without burning gas, that's a genuinely different island than the one where every trip meant driving or biking on a shoulder with no separation from traffic.
None of that required a Nantucket vote. It required a line item in Boston.
The Path That's Taken Longer Than the Money
Tom Nevers Road connects Milestone Road to one of the town's south shore beaches and to the recreation fields at the old Navy base. For years it's had no dedicated place for a cyclist or a pedestrian to be, which means anyone walking to the bus stop, running for exercise, or biking to the beach has been sharing pavement with cars on a road with no shoulder to speak of.
Partial design funding was approved back at the 2019 Annual Town Meeting, but the project didn't gain real urgency until an island attorney, Steven Cohen, was struck and injured by a vehicle while walking along the road. That incident is part of why voters returned to Town Meeting in 2025 and approved the full $6.8 million needed to finish design, acquire easements, and build roughly two miles of path along the east side of the road, from the Milestone Road intersection out to the old Navy base playing fields. Part of the route may even include a raised boardwalk over a low-lying conservation parcel owned by the Land Bank.
That should have been the hard part. It wasn't. The town's own project page for the Tom Nevers Road Sidepath, last updated this past spring, still listed final design, permitting, and easement acquisitions as ongoing through spring 2026, with the construction timeline simply "to be determined." Nearly a decade after the first funding vote, nobody has put a start date on a shovel going into the ground.
Trees, Easements, and the Neighbors Who Disagree
The reason isn't a lack of money. It's that a bike path on a residential road has to cross other people's front yards, and some of those people have very specific, very reasonable objections.
Last fall, Nantucket's Tree Advisory Committee held a hearing on removing town-owned trees along Tom Nevers Road to make room for the path, and it drew enough pushback that the hearing had to be continued to the Select Board. A Department of Public Works representative explained that the design under review keeps the path physically separate from the road with a grass buffer, which is safer for cyclists but requires more land, and more trees, than a simple painted bike lane would.
Not everyone on that stretch agrees the tradeoff is worth it. Mango Jatambruzak, speaking for a family at 98 Tom Nevers Road, argued the cherry trees along their frontage are healthy and among the only town trees left on that section of road. One neighbor a couple doors down offered a more pointed challenge to the whole approach.
"a bike lane is really the right answer for this stretch of Tom Nevers Road."
That's Janet Sherwin, who lives at 120 Tom Nevers Road, and her preference for a simple lane over a separated path is exactly the kind of disagreement that can add years to a project that already has its funding secured. Not every neighbor is opposed. Gregory O'Shea, who owns property at 10 Tom Nevers Road, told the committee he'd likely grant an easement to preserve the trees if the town could tell him precisely how much land it needed. That's the kind of specificity a design still in progress can't always provide, which is part of why the timeline keeps sliding.
If you've watched a renovation or a new build on this island get held up by an abutter's objection or a board that needed one more hearing before it could rule, this will look familiar. The same friction that shapes what gets built on a single lot is shaping what gets built along an entire road.
A Different Kind of Path Taking Shape on Milestone Road
While Tom Nevers works through its easements, a separate and smaller project is moving with less resistance because it isn't fighting over private frontage at all.
The Nantucket Land Bank has spent the past few years developing a bike park on land it already owns, on Milestone Road just past Tetawkimmo Drive. The idea started in 2023 as a way to give island kids a place to build biking skills, and by January 2025 the Land Bank Commission was reviewing three design concepts, including features like a flow trail and pump-track elements. Land Bank executive director Rachael Freeman has said the park is being designed specifically for non-motorized bikes, with e-bikes left out of the plan. The stated goal has been to start construction sometime in 2026.
Because the site sits on land the Land Bank already controls, there's no tree hearing to get through and no private easement to negotiate. It's a smaller project than a two-mile road sidepath, but it's also a preview of how much faster island infrastructure can move when the land question is already settled before the design work even starts.
What This Actually Changes If You're Getting Around This Year
Put the pieces together and the practical picture for residents looks like this. The island already has more than 35 miles of paved sidepaths connecting town to Surfside, Madaket, and Siasconset, and getting to most of those places by bike or on the free Wave has never been more workable than it is right now. Where the system still falls short is Tom Nevers Road, where the lack of a separated path remains the most obvious gap in an otherwise well-connected network, and where anyone walking or biking that stretch today is still doing it on a road shoulder with no buffer from traffic.
A few things worth knowing if you're planning around any of this:
- The Wave's free fare is a calendar-year 2026 policy tied to the state budget, not a Nantucket-specific program, so check nrtawave.com for current route schedules rather than assuming it mirrors past summer service.
- Tom Nevers Road has no dedicated bike or pedestrian path as of this writing, and the town has not published a construction start date for the approved project.
- The Land Bank's Milestone Road bike park is aimed at 2026 construction and will be for pedal bikes only, not e-bikes, once it opens.
None of this changes what a house on Tom Nevers Road is worth today. It does change how a resident on that road, or anyone who runs or bikes it regularly, should plan their next few years of getting around. The fare-free bus is a real and permanent shift in how easy it is to leave the car home. The bike path everyone voted to fund is still, for now, a plan on paper and a few trees still standing in the way.
If you're weighing what daily life looks like on a specific stretch of this island, whether that's how you'd get to the beach without a car or what a road's long-term safety plans actually look like on paper versus in the ground, that kind of detail is exactly where local knowledge earns its keep. The Becker Group has spent years tracking how Nantucket's neighborhoods actually function day to day, not just how they list. Contact us if you'd like a clearer picture of what's changing in the part of the island you call home.
