An eight-lane highway does not a good neighbor make. On a Saturday in January 1969, thousands gathered on Boston Common to emphasize that point with the cry of “People before highways!” They were referring to the Southwest Expressway, which was slated to cut through the Roxbury and Jamaica Plain neighborhoods in Boston and displace more than 7,000 people from their homes.

Today in Jamaica Plain, there is a narrow park that stretches along eight stations of the Orange Line subway, built on land cleared for the expressway, and every May, a festival celebrates the community’s legacy of activism and defeat of the highway.

As it happens, a velodrome does not make for a great neighbor, either. So nearly fifty years later, amid record-breaking snowfall and bone-chilling temperatures, hundreds of Bostonians gathered across the street from the Common for a public meeting at Suffolk University, with an updated message: people before Olympics.