City officials are shopping around three conceptual designs for a planned re-configuration of Mattapan Square – including one with center-running bus lanes and parallel parking – and expect to have decisions made by the fall.

In a series of meetings over the last month, held as part of the Blue Hill Avenue Transportation Action Plan process, officials have been showing off the design options, one of which includes making no changes to Mattapan Square’s existing traffic and parking scheme.

“We’d like to have a good sense by the end of the summer what peoples’ thoughts are and the range of opinions and home in on a concept design by the end of the summer,” said Charlotte Fleetwood, of the Boston Transportation Department (BTD).

“If we can decide about the parking, and if there’s a major change in what we would do with the entire space around that, that would be enough to get us to a concept and then a final design,” she added.

The critical elements in the plan include whether to keep the hallmark angle parking situation, which would retain all the existing street parking and the current sidewalk configuration. Another option would be to move to parallel parking and lose some parking spaces but gain more sidewalk space for street trees and amenities like benches and bicycle lanes. Though some parking would be lost, it has been pointed out that two municipal parking lots are located within the square.

A second decision would be whether to add the center-running bus lane, but only in Mattapan Square at this point. The Blue Hill Avenue process is one large project, and center-lane buses are being considered throughout, but Mattapan Square planning has been moving separately with the BTD and Consult LeLa surveying the community about specific plans that are different from the rest of the Avenue corridor – such as the angled parking.

The square is also separate in that it comes out of a much older process, one that began in 2017 with the city’s Age Strong program and focused on pedestrian safety for senior citizens.

In sum, the three options in play include: (a) No bus lane and keep angled parking (existing conditions); (b) Add a center bus lane and keep angled parking; (c) Add a center bus lane and go to parallel parking.

As far as the rest of the corridor goes with the center-lane bus, BTD officials said they are “committed to a block-by-block strategy.” That means there could be a center bus lane in Mattapan Square, but not one farther up by the railroad bridge. There does not have to be a continuous bus lane from Mattapan Square to Grove Hall, they said.

One thing that’s certain in the design is the providing of a crosswalk at the southern end of the square from River Street to the Mattapan Station Plaza that would eliminate the need to cross over 16 lanes of traffic and several streets. A second certainty is the elimination of the bus loop that requires buses going southbound into Mattapan Station to traverse a “loop” into Milton and then back into the square. The new design will allow a left turn into the station from southbound Blue Hill Avenue for buses only.

Even if there are no major changes to parking or the center bus lane, the city is committed to an infrastructure project on Blue Hill Avenue that will focus on items like sidewalks, underground utilities, signal timing/phasing, and pedestrian crossing improvements.