Thankfully, the MBTA’s proposed cuts have produced outrage and panic among mayors and city councils throughout the Commonwealth. Menino is now piling on; joining other municipalities from Winchester to Waltham in decrying the cuts.
You’re probably at least somewhat aware, but I’d like to quote the MBTA’s “Scenario #2” for proposed bus cuts that would spare a large fare increase:
Bus Route Reductions: Eliminate Routes (all days): 4, 5, 14, 18, 27, 29, 33, 37, 38, 40, 43, 45, 48, 50, 51, 52, 55, 59, 60, 62, 64, 67, 68, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 85, 90, 92, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 105, 106, 108, 112, 119, 120, 121, 131, 132, 136, 137, 170, 171, 201, 202, 210, 211, 212, 215, 217, 230, 236, 238, 240, 245, 275, 276, 277, 325, 326, 350, 351, 352, 354, 355, 411, 424, 428, 429, 430, 431, 434, 435, 436, 439, 441, 448, 449, 451, 456, 459, 465, 468, 500, 501, 502, 503, 505, 553, 554, 555, 556, 558, CT3
Uh, right. So we have communities all over Greater Boston that have grown up predicated on the availability of public transportation, and now we take those away.
Nutty.
So this won’t work. And if people don’t want big fare increases, then that means the money has to come from someplace else. The Governor and legislature have actually done a good job laying some of the ground work, addressing some issues of accountability in restructuring the transportation bureaucracy and ending some obvious and expensive abuses, like 23-and-out. T
The gas tax plan didn’t fly last time … and predictably, the MBTA’s woes didn’t vanish simply because the legislature ignored them.
So what’s the plan now? For us, now’s a good time to have a talk with our elected reps at the State House: 617-722-2000. They need to know from us, as they’re hearing from the cities n’ towns, that a long-term fix is needed, and that there’s support and political cover for such.
MassDOT has announced that I-90 and I-93 will be closed from 10 pm to 6 am on weekdays and all day on weekends due to financial constraints on roadway maintenance. In addition, 100 secondary roads will be closed indefinitely. People are advised to plan accordingly.
The state must solve the funding problem of the MBTA.
Perhaps if it were steps like this being taken, the voters might find a way to pay more in taxes.
So we’re told we either need huge fare increases that will drive down ridership and increase congestion and pollution or service cuts that will drive down ridership and increase congestion and pollution. Delightful. But that’s a false choice.
Before we consider either fare increases or service cuts, let’s first exhaust EVERY possible avenue of cost reduction or non-fare increases in revenue. What avenues might those be? Let’s start with a public discussion of a few ideas below. I’m certain more can be added to this list:
1. Fold commuter parking into the cost of the monthly pass and eliminate the cost of the parking vendor who makes money just to collect money;
2. Allow host communities to bid on snow removal/sanding of lots and station platforms. They already have most of the necessary equipment and crews and can significantly reduce the costs of lot/station maintenance;
3. Consider replacing the 93 North/South HOV lanes with HOT (High Occupany Toll) lanes to allow drivers the option to travel into Boston on free congested roads or pay a toll to travel express to Boston (not compelling the toll, just giving the option if you think it’s worth your time to pay a few bucks rather than spend an hour in traffic). Other states link such HOT revenues with funding for mass transit, which in turn reduces congestion, which in turn directly benefits motorists;
4. Set up a bonus program for train crews to receive a quarterly cash bonus for system receipts in excess of the previous quarter. Create incentives for 100% fare collection as well as improved customer experience (and I tip my hat to the train crews on the southside commuter rail, who do a great job);
5. I’ve said it before, but why can I buy a beer on the way home on the Long Island commuter rail but not in MA? Limit 2 per customer nets millions of new revenue. Vendors on north and southside (or via line) compete every three years and responsible for litter cleanup;
6. Replace conventional trains sets with Light Rail Vehicles for off-peak use to reduce costs of operations, or at least reduce the number of cars per set to save fuel;
7. Inventory underutilized real estate assets and air rights and then invite competitive bids to maximize return on capital assets via ground/long-term leases;
8. Please, please sell ad space on the back of my blank Charlie Card. Pairing T card ads with consumer discounts to bearers would be especially valuable for businesses adjacent to T routes;
9. Our labor costs for buses and subways are among the hightest in the Nation. Is there an opportunity for savings by better collective bargaining by management? I’ll bet Local 589 will welcome new approaches that result in net savings. See recent work on collaborative bargaining at Northeastern as a model;
10. Encourage more in-state retail spending, since the sales tax already links to DOT, to increase sales tax revenue by encouraging market forces such as http://www.livefreeandbuy.org.
There’s ten to start. Maybe some good, maybe some bad. Maybe all bad for all I know, but what’s your better idea?
We’ve been cutting expenses at the MBTA for decades. The trains are failing because of deferred maintenance. The Red Line has been closed weekends all fall and winter because nothing was done about water flooding the tunnels for decades, and the inevitable rot couldn’t be ignored any longer.
I enthusiastically agree with you that we need to beware of false choices. Here’s the choice that needs to be FRONT AND CENTER:
INCREASE MBTA FUNDING
Raise the gas tax. Take funds from our highways. Shift the Big Dig debt burden back to the highway users who benefit most from the Big Dig. Find a way.
The MBTA, together with its workers and riders, has done enough cost-cutting. Now it’s up to Beacon Hill to do the responsible thing and INCREASE MBTA FUNDING.
NO!
1. What? Into the monthly pass? Maybe I’m missing something, but what about…everyone else who uses these parking lots? Are we talking free parking?
2. Okay.
3. Even assuming you’re still letting HOVs use it for free, there are some serious philosophical objects to letting rich people get better service on our highways.
4. First off, considering MBTA ridership varies seasonally, it would make no sense to do it this way. You’d probably want to compare it to the previous year’s quarter. Even so, I can’t imagine this really gets you that much, considering how much ridership varies just with the economy. Maybe worth a shot.
5. I’d love to see sources for “millions of revenue”, considering whoever’s selling needs to supply cars, related fuel costs, etc. And I don’t see how you can seriously suggest this could happen after this, just last week.
6. Assuming you’re talking about replacing commuter rail trains with DMU sets, the T’s considered that (take a look at the 2003 PMT) and it comes up periodically, but you basically need a whole new set of maintenance equipment. That’s why it hasn’t happened, that’s why the T decided not to go with them on the Fairmount line. You’re not the first one to have thought of this.
7. Has been happening, there’s a big list of stuff the MBTA’s sold off already.
8. T’s been trying like hell to sell off ad space, but there’s a pretty good marketing case for not splashing ads on your main product. Maybe a good idea, maybe not.
9. As anyone who’s followed this for the past few years knows, cuts have happened, benefits were reformed, there’s not a ton management can do, and of course our labor costs are among the highest. This is Massachusetts.
10. Huge tax cut, not particularly relevant, where’s the evidence it would increase sales tax revenues, etc. Basically amounts to a retread of the 5% income tax cut argument, even uses the same BHI study which does not consider the negative economic and human impact of cutting government services. This is just antitax rhetoric dressed up in a computer. Silliness.
In general, this is a set of small ideas, some bad, most already being considered and/or rejected. It’s hard not to see them as a distraction from the fact that the state has saddled the T with massive debt and wants to punish transit users for that. And just to echo somervilletom:
INCREASE MBTA FUNDING
A great deal of the people who use the commuter rail, I can attest, do not park at the lots. Quite possibly, this number is a majority. There is always a line of drop-offs in the AM and a line for pickups in the PM. When I worked in Boston, I walked to the Leominster train station in the morning and walked home in the evening. During periods of inclement weather, I taxi’d to and fro. One of the biggest reasons I commuted rather than drove was to save on the cost of parking in town. Now you’re telling me I have to subsidize other peoples parking? I don’t think so.
An alternate idea, especially if you don’t like “parking vendor who makes money just to collect money” is to purchase adjacent parking lots (not already owned) by eminent domain and set up proper flows: few, if any, of the parking lots on any of the stops on the Fitchburg/South Acton line have reserved spots for local taxis; proper traffic co-ordination for local bus/van lines; co-ordination/licensing for commercial vendors, etc… If you are serious, standardize the parking lots across the lines and charge the local taxis for prime real estate and give space over to food trucks and/or temporary newsstands.
Is this really much of a revenue generator? (especially if some of that revenue gets turned back into the “bonus program”) In nearly 11 years of making daily use of the commuter rail I can think of only a few times where I either didn’t get my pass checked or when without a card, got away with out handing over the fare. The few instances I can remember involved overcrowded trains and, therefore, overworked conductors. I think the receipts here are probably already negligibly close to 100% and that epsilon is often due to crowding and not laxity on the part of the conductors.
As someone who, coming out of North Station on the homeward trip, often sees already drunk Bruins and/or Celtics fans on the trains I can testify that this idea, for this reason alone, is insane. As someone who, often, would stop for a few after work, but before the commute, I can attest that a limit of 2 per customer is meaningless. And as somebody who often ‘held it’ for the entire commute instead of making use of the horrid MBTA in-train restrooms, I can say THAT situation would be exacerbated in the extreme. In fact, I can’t think of a more quicker method of destroying ‘quality of ride’ on the MBTA (which present quality, frankly, isn’t that much more to be desired…)
Non-starter. The present commuter rail trains are barely sufficient for the task: the bench seating alone is agony after the first twenty minutes; anything longer invites deep vein thrombosis. Consider your most recent ride on the Green Line…. Do you think you’d like to extend that ride 40 or 50 minutes? Light rail is just exactly that: light. Asking them to do the job of medium- or even heavy- rail is, again, reducing the quality of ride.
If this is a NEW idea then we are in a much more desperate situation that even I had thought, and I can be pretty jaundiced when it comes to the MBTA…
Advertising costs infrastructure and your infrastructure ought to be about moving people back and forth and not about getting eyeballs on an ad. I’m already bombarded with ads nearly every minute of every day (oh look, there’s a ‘kayak.com’ ad one inch away from the words I’m typing right now….) I can’t imagine that this would generate sufficient revenue to justify its existence.
I already think that the labor force in this instance does more, with less, than comparable systems across the nation. Before looking to costs of labor savings we ought to, as you hint at, seek to do better management.
1. Parking ain’t free. The land has value. Why should some people get it subsidized at the expense of others? If folks get a ride to the commuter rail station, car pool, or bought a house close enough to walk, they shouldn’t pay for the parking of those who didn’t. Let the drivers pay for parking. How much? Just enough so that the lot fills up. Maximize parking revenue — don’t cut it.
2. A great idea, and I’d add trash removal too. Why does the MBTA send a van around to pick up trash from each station each day when local communities could do it? Heck, it wouldn’t be too hard to get individual agencies to take the trash of specific stations. Universities, hospitals, etc. could get the trash at that station, especially if it was set up just outside the station [or for surface stations, right there]
3. I’m a big fan of HOT lanes, and of course expanding HOV/HOT/bus-bike-taxi only lanes to more places means that buses will have an easier time meeting schedules and, if faster than driving, getting paying fares.
4. For commuter rail, I agree that fare collection needs to get better, though I don’t know if that’s the right way. For street car, not so much. Most rush hour riders have a monthly pass, and the infrastructure above ground just isn’t set up for efficient fare collection. Getting a few extra bucks at the cost of another 2 minutes for each stop isn’t worth it.
5. Millions? Pure speculation. Let’s see some numbers please. Added costs due to cleaning up sticky and cans and running the sales vs. revenue. I’m not saying it’s cash negative, but you’ve got to do better than just simply claiming “millions”.
6. What’s the capital cost of owning two different fleets of rail cars? Two different sets of training for operations and repairs? Two different sets of repair bays and repair equipment? My bet is that it doesn’t pay, but of course if you’ve got actual research and numbers please feel free to share.
7. Sure, but be careful — that could well be one-time money, and if so you best not use it to fund operations; use it to pay down debt or fund capital projects which (a) lower operations costs, (b) improve service, or (c) leads to higher revenues.
8. While we’re on the subject, the T is how tens of thousands (100s of thousands?) of kids get to school. We would never put ads for booze on a school bus. Take them *off* the side of the school bus for city kids.
9. Absolutely, and best of luck to ya. My preference would be to work on OPEBs — pensions and the like. My sense is that those are the issues that really piss off the voters, and political willpower is as important as the money itself.
10. While we’re at it, get rid of the the tax-free holiday and you increase the T’s budget by roughly 0.1%. Hell, allocate the entire day’s revenue to the T and you increase the T’s budget by roughly 0.5%. Couldn’t hurt!
==
Some other (better? worse? just different?) ideas…
11. Take “The Ride” off of the T’s hands. The MBTA is for mass transit. Paratransit [handicap transit] is the exact opposite. It’s a point-to-point taxi service for the disabled. It’s important. I think we should fund it as a community. But ratepayers of mass transit shouldn’t pay any more than the rest of us. Move it off-MBTA-budget and let the state pay for it.
12. TSP. Traffic signal prioritization. We have the technology. Why should 50 people in a bus — or 150 people in a streetcar — wait at a red light for 5 people in 3 cars turning left? It doesn’t make sense. I’m not saying that every MBTA vehicle should get all greens all the time, but if we can stretch a green by a few seconds for a bus or train which is just barely on time or running late, it helps big time. Not only do timely buses and trains attract more riders, but they also cost less in overtime for the operators. Smoother operations lower costs.
12a. Get the cities and towns to help pay for it. It’s their traffic lights, and at least in the case of buses it’s their citizens who directly benefit. Of course, that means you’d better promise that you won’t remove their bus within the next X years.
13. Lean on communities to allow for more density near bus lines. Another phrase for public transit is “mass transit.” That’s not short for Massachusetts — you need density. Mostly-empty buses most of the time aren’t efficient. Lay it out: if the community doesn’t allow for sufficient density, then they may lose a bus line. Of course, up-zoning doesn’t guarantee more density, but it would at least allow for more ridership. P.S. If there are massive parking space requirements, that doesn’t help either.
14. Know what the fine is for parking/stopping/standing in a bus stop? $100. I don’t know what salary plus overhead is for MBTA police, but it seems to me that they should easily be able to nab 12 a day. Figure $1000/day since some won’t pay and others successfully appealed. That’s roughly $250k/yr/inspector, minus costs of auto, salary, etc. It would generate some revenue and help improve bus service. Same goes for blocking the box on the green line.
—
No one change will save the day. Ultimately, the T has to get out from under the massive debt; the rest is just nibbling around the edges.
P.S. Raise the freakin’ gas tax. Heck, here’s an idea: for every 10 cents under $3.50, collect another $0.01. If gas price is high, the tax is as it is now. If gas price falls a dime, consumers get 9 cents and mass transit (MBTA plus others in MA) get the other penny. Since it’s not reliable revenue due to gas price fluctuations, use it to fund capital projects with cash instead of debt when the opportunity comes about.
1. I don’t quite understand this one. Many folks do not park at the lots at all but rather walk or bike to the stations. In my city of Waltham, the lots are self pay already and are too small to more volume. The lots are city run. Are you suggesting there be a separate monthly parking ticket or that all riders must pay for parking even if they don’t ever use it? I would venture to say the majority of T Riders do not use their cars on a daily basis (or own cars).
5. As long as beer sales close before the Bruins and Celtics games get out I don’t think I would have an issue with that. I have seen plenty of highly intoxicated fans on the late night trains who really do not need another beverage on their way home.
Generally that brings up the safety issue of if the commuter rail is closing at 10 and the games go on much later (which they do), will these changes be putting more drunk drivers on the road and endangering everyone. One idea I overheard someone on the commuter rail suggest was working out some way to have the teams and the garden pay for late night trains on game/concert nights as part of their operating fees. Honestly both plans #1 and #2 are going to cause a pretty significant issue with post game drunk driving.
“Progressive Republican” Dan Winslow is signed onto Grover Norquist’s pledge? 35 members of our legislature have signed on to this cowardly pledge to pander to the policy of not paying for the public good. This includes 3 “Democrats”, Miceli, Nangle, and Majority Leader Rogers. Call your legislator and tell them to quit pandering to the anti-tax Right, approve a gas tax increase for mass transit, and take the Big Dig debt off of the MBTA’s back.
List of signers of ATR pledge in state legislatures
That speaks volumes to the credibility of Dan Winslow when it comes to his willingness to even consider the funding (and therefore tax) increases so desperately needed for transportation in Massachusetts.
n/t
Right now BOTH are in desperate need of increased funding, but please not through a gas tax. These past couple of weeks those prices are once again doing a fine job increasing on their own.
I charted the fifty states on a scatter plot. The blue line is line of best fit:
Source for gas taxes:
http://www.gaspricewatch.com/usgastaxes.asp
Source for gas prices:
http://fuelgaugereport.opisnet.com/sbsavg.html
And as Marcus said below, a state’s gas tax is not a good indicator of the costs of gas in that state.
The bottom line is we need funding for our infrastructure — and the gas tax has been the same, both statewide and federal, for going on 20 years, while costs have skyrocketed.
We’re paying more later — both from deterioration of our transportation system and because paying for things through excessive bonds is suffocating (just ask the MBTA) — because we aren’t adequately funding our infrastructure as it’s needed.
It’s just frustrating when other factors are driving gas prices up that someone comes along and says, “Hey I have an idea – let’s raise the gas tax and increase prices even more!”
Here are some things that are frustrating:
– Not being able to use the Red Line on weekends for the entire fall and winter season, because no maintenance was on it for decades, even though every traveler could see the water pouring through the ceilings every time it rained.
– Watching the state spend $91M on one vendor alone to perform emergency repairs on 14 I-93 bridges in one short summer, while MBTA and commuter rail is dangerous and unreliable and while virtually ALL the underground stops look like trailer-trash back yards in Appalachia.
– Hearing a culture that spends over $100M on one sports team whine that it “can’t afford” basic transportation needs for an entire metropolitan region.
Yes, we should raise the gas tax, or replace it with a consumption tax that reflects the wear and tear on highways imposed even by hybrids or electrics. We need energy prices to stay high, so that alternative energy and public transportation is financially attractive. We need that because global warming isn’t going to go away, and cheap
fossil fuels only add to our already catastrophic CO2 emission problem.
Highways are expensive, far more than public transportation, when all the externalized costs are included. What is the present value of the cost imposed on society when every coastal city is flooded by AGW-driven increases in sea level?
We simply must raise taxes so that we can increase funding for public transportation. We must. The alternatives are many many times more costly.
We simply must not raise taxes on gas. Have you not heard???? The economy sucks for middle America. There are only a few people out there supporting tax hikes for working middle class Americans. I guess you’re one of them.
As compared to the CEOs and merchant bankers who frequent public transportation.
but it is shocking to me how cheap the MBTA is. I love it actually and wish we had it out here because I would use it all the time. I was in Boston a few months ago. Two dollars for a one way trip was like a gift when it costs well over $3. to put a gallon of gas in my car. There just has to be another way than increasing the gas tax.
As part of the Big Dig, the state had to spend big to expand T service. By “had to” I mean they were obligated to do it from a court settlement. Instead of the state paying for it, though, they had the neat idea that the T could pay for it, instead. So the T went from having plenty of money to operate to quickly being under water with no end in sight, because of all the debt it had to take on.
The state needs to be accountable for what it did and take on that debt. Period. If that happens, all the problems the T is facing will practically disappear overnight.
…with the definite exception of gas taxes. Manipulating demand is the wrong way to go about it. I just bought a 1998 Chevy which I have since discovered to my chagrin gets less gas mileage than my previous vehicle, but I have little money and got it for relatively little. We cannot all afford the luxury of more expensive vehicles which are more efficient or spending more at the pump. Frankly, this is a perfect example of an issue that makes liberals look like out-of-touch elites. We need to increase supply of renewable energy and require higher fuel-efficiency standards. We can’t just flip a switch on this and penalizing those of us who need to drive is neither politically, morally, or practically correct.
it likely would have no real effect on gas costs, as gas tax rates and gas costs have little correlation in real life.
But let’s ignore that for a second.
You know what would be worse than looking like out-of-touch elitists? Being the party that tells poor people from around the state who can’t afford cars at all that they can’t get to their jobs on the weekend or visit their kid because the train’s closed.
I have news for you: closing dozens of bus routes everyday and the train on the weekend will be a helluva lot more damaging to families than a 5 cent increase to the state tax. It could actually ruin lives, whereas a 5 or 10 cent increase could — *at worst* — force a few changes in behavior, and more likely have little noticeable difference in a driver’s pocketbook.
I just love how everyone is so eager to raise taxes on me, a regular working middle class person who is finding her household budget stretched to maximum and stretching beyond that every time people like you and government officials who will listen to you decide that the it’s easier to tax the powerless than it is to tax the $1500 a plate kiss ups that really run this state and country. I can’t even begin to tell you how fed up I am. How can you possibly say that $.05 means nothing when the cost of gas already sucks so much out of our household budget every week. And yes, about how high gas prices promotes alternative energy sources. Just look at those alternatives everywhere. Where, where are they? Gas prices have been high for years now and I see nothing in affordable alternatives available. So you raise gas prices and then bask in the glory of how you’re helping to reduce climate change when really that isn’t the case at all. All you’ve succeeded in doing is raising gas prices. That’s it. And on the backs of a select group of people who can’t afford it.
how the prospect of 40%+ fare hikes feel to those of us that ride the bus and train. *50* cents every time to take the bus, 70 cents to take the subway.
5 cents a gallon, huh? I’ll see you and raise.
This requires thinking about large-scale solutions, because it’s a large-scale problem. If the gas tax — which is, after all, paid for by beneficiaries of the existence of a transit system that takes cars off the road — isn’t the right revenue stream, then what is?
Look at it from the perspective of someone who has to drive a car. Even if you drive a small car like I do, It costs $42 dollars a week to fill the tank (12 gal X 3.50/gl) I have to pay auto insurance every month and excise tax every year. Luckily, I made the last car payment in 2011 so if I can make my car last for a few more years I can be without that expense for a while. On the other hand, at .70 a fare X 2 per day X 7 per week, a commuters expense in an urban area is $9.80 for the week. So, $42.+ vs. $10. ($168/mo +car insurance +$70/mo for drivers vs. $40./mo for MBTA) Sometimes, it feel as if there is an opinion that people who drive cars are reckless and selfish and deserve to pay more.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m certainly not suggesting that “people who drive cars are reckless and selfish and deserve to pay more”.
The T served, on average, 1.349 Million “unlinked passenger trips” per weekday in September of 2011 (see http://transportation.blog.state.ma.us/blog/2011/11/mbta-ridership.html).
That is something on the order of half a million people who don’t have to pay for a car. As you point out, driving a car is much more expensive than riding the MBTA. When we kill the MBTA (which is what we’re doing), you will impose those increased costs on every one of those half a million people.
I get that you live in an area where public transportation is not a viable option for you, and so you are forced to pay the increased costs of using your automobile. I hope you’ll agree that the overwhelming majority of those who use the MBTA every day are even less able to afford those increased costs than you.
Most people who depend on the MBTA have already cut their expenses to the bone — you would add to their burden. A large number of those MBTA riders would own or drive cars if they could afford to — the effect of ruling out a gas tax without offering an alternative is to impose those costs on those who have already done everything in their power to avoid them.
I’m perfectly willing to stipulate that you are neither reckless nor selfish. I hope you agree that nobody “deserves” to pay more.
So if these cuts go into affect, you will destroy the lives of half a million daily riders. They will lose jobs (because they can’t get to them), lose homes (because they can’t afford a car AND rent or a mortgage), and of course lose money. Some of them will lose families — the kind of stress we are discussing destroys even good marriages.
All of this is aside from the enormous negative impact this will have on suburban and exurban residents (presumably this includes you) of Massachusetts, who will face skyrocketing highway construction costs, impossible traffic jams, skyrocketing property tax burdens as local expenses go through the roof while property values plummet, and all the rest. What happens to the value of your suburban home if your 45- or 60- or 90-minute drive to YOUR job is doubled?
So if the gas tax isn’t an option, what is?
I agree that an increase in the gas tax is painful. My point is that the other alternatives are far far worse.
is to figure out way to reverse the inflated costs for health care and fuel.
Maybe this is a good start: Dems propose ‘Reasonable Profits Board’ to regulate oil company profits
In a time frame that allows changes to health care and fuel costs take effect, improving public transportation saves more people more money sooner.
I fear that you underestimate the many ways that improved public transportation effectively lowers the cost of living for suburban and exurban residents like you. Let me add some additional aspects to my earlier comment:
1. Running more commuter trains faster, and providing more and faster MBTA service for them to connect to, greatly expands the areas where public transportation is a viable option.
2. Making public transportation a viable option where it is not viable today lowers the cost of living for those who, today, are forced to use private vehicles.
3. Because area is an “r-squared” quantity, the area served by public transportation increases proportional to the square of the distance expanded.
4. Population density is greatest in the areas that surround urban areas.
Expansion of public transportation therefore lowers the cost of living for a geometrically-expanding number of Massachusetts residents. Reduction of public transportation raises the cost of living for a geometrically-expanding number of residents.
We cannot both reduce public transportation and also reduce or maintain the cost of living for residents when we include all residents in the analysis. Indeed, the best way to reduce the cost of living for the most number of residents is to increase the area where public transportation is a viable option.
Since we have stipulated that you are not selfish or greedy, then the best way to reduce the cost of living for the most number of people is to increase the area served by public transportation. Reducing public transportation instead of raising the gas tax increases the cost of living for a great many people who are already among our least affluent.
If not an increase in the gas tax, then an increase in some other broad-based tax is needed — state income tax, state gift/estate tax, state sales tax. Those are the only options that I know of that are available in time to solve this immediate crisis.
Massachusetts residents face an immediate crisis in public transportation funding. “Immediate” as in “right now”. No matter how marvelous various national initiatives are, they do absolutely NOTHING for the problem at hand.
We must increase funding for the MBTA now, as in before the draconian slashes in service take effect.
I’m just so tired of the cost of inflated health care and fuel being transferred to people who are least able to afford it. There has to be another way and I wish we would fight for that instead of fighting for which middle or low-income person or family is going to have to support this obvious redistribution of wealth upward.
I enthusiastically join you in fighting against the skyrocketing cost of health care.
I think fighting to reduce the cost of fuel is a losing battle. I think a better approach is to fight to reduce the cost of energy. If anything, I think we should be increasing the cost of fossil fuel so that we can wean ourselves of our fossil fuel addiction and shift our energy supplies to renewable resources.
The only way to persuade ourselves that fossil fuel is “affordable” is by denying the cost of global climate change — not to mention the astronomical costs of providing the military and diplomatic resources needed to acquire and distribute it. The replacement cost of fossil fuel by anything except renewables is essentially infinite. Like a cocaine or heroin addict who lives in denial of the ultimate cost of their habit, we live in utter denial of the ultimate cost of our fossil fuel habit.
In any case, I fear you posit a false dilemma between these two hugely important issues and the immediate cost of public transportation. We will have to fight these two whatever we do with public transportation, and the immediate impact of destroying our public transportation system makes these large issues far more difficult to address.
MBTA subway+bus fare is $59, and expected to increase substantially. That’s not commuter rail, nor does it include things like riding a taxi late at night or in other situations when the T just won’t get it done [big purchases, trips outside of area, etc]. I don’t know the percent of MBTA passengers who also own a car, but I suspect it’s far higher than the 0% you implicitly assume.
12 gallons of gas a week? At 20 mpg, that’s 240 miles each week — about 35 miles each day. That’s a lot of driving my friend, and that’s at a meager 20 mpg. I suspect that the average person in MA who drives to/from work puts in way less than 12 gallons a week. You’ve also ignored car payments and the cost of parking, so you’ve got both positive and negative errors…
Methinks that you’ve substantially underestimated the complete financial cost of MBTA commuting and your auto estimate is incomplete.
As for my opinion, those who drive cars *are* selfish. I don’t mean that in a completely negative way, but let’s be clear: driving has detrimental externalities. Every time you drive, you pollute our air with NOx and SO2 and particulates. You emit CO2 which drives climate change. You make noise, you require foreign oil and the wars which provide it, you contribute to the demand to remove more green space in favor of roads and parking, and you put pedestrians and bicyclists at increased risk. These are facts. I’m not arguing that you shouldn’t be allowed to drive, but at the very least I’d like motorists to pay for the freaking roads [drivers don’t — they pay most of the federal roads, some of the state roads, and *none* of the local roads, which are covered with property tax]. Note that drivers also benefit substantially when other people ride mass transit, so there’s no reason for them to not contribute to that outcome.
but right now we are busily and painfully paying for billion dollar profits for oil companies. If you want to keeping squeezing blood from stones, by all means do it then. You will be hurting families who really mean no harm to anyone, yet continually pay the price for all the harm caused by issues that those families have little control over. As far as the gas mileage thing goes, it varies greatly. I can fill my tank, drive the 100 miles or so to the beach and be left with more than a 1/4 tank. I can fill my tank, drive to work, the grocery store, my son’s bus stop and other various errands and use up the whole tank in a week. Apparently I get far less than 20mpg, even on long trips. I don’t know if a 2005 Dodge Neon is small enough for you, but try fitting 3 teenagers and various activity supplies into it and you really don’t want to go much smaller. It’s a small car, and I do the best that I can with it. As soon as used electric cars are sold for $8,000 or less, I will buy one. Do you have any idea when that might happen?
Depending on how the electricity to power the electric car is generated and distributed, the electric car might be worse than your Neon. It takes the same energy to move a vehicle of a given weight, and the climate change and environmental impact of that energy depends on how it is generated.
It is very difficult to efficiently move electricity (transmission line losses and all that). Generating electricity from conventional sources and then moving that electricity across a transmission network to a vehicle may well be worse than using the same conventional fuel in the vehicle. It’s complicated and hard to model.
It isn’t roads we need to pay for, we have far too many of them already. We need to instead build public transportation systems capable of reducing the traffic load on the roads we already have. If more people used public transportation, the roads we already have could be better maintained, carry less traffic, and be safer. If more freight was moved by rail or light rail, we’d have far better highways.
We have, sadly, built an economy and culture premised on unsustainably cheap energy. Now the piper must be paid. Since the 99% accounts for the lion’s share of transportation system use, it seems to me that it follows that the 99% will end up bearing the lion’s share of the cost of moving it to a sustainable basis.
This is actually the lie of the “balanced budget/lower deficit” mantra we hear from the right wing and media. The 99% have always paid for our transportation system through taxes and fees. What we’ve done in the past ten years (since the Iraq fiasco) is ENORMOUSLY increase the REST of our spending (in ways that directly benefit the 1%) while slashing the share of taxes paid by the 1% (and bloated the deficit while so doing). Now comes the “balanced budget” cry, and rather than take back the wealth from the 1%, we instead destroy and dismantle vital services like public transportation that the 99% require.
We need to raise taxes. We need to raise the share of overall tax revenue paid by the very wealthy. And we need those who consume our transportation system to pay a greater share of building and maintaining it.
One alternative that we haven’t talked about is a weight-based odometer tax. This reflects the reality that an electric car burdens the highway with the same wear and tear that imposed by a conventional car of similar weight. Trucks are far worse than passenger vehicles.
One way or another, we MUST do better than what we are doing now.
from http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/noframes/20694.shtml
22 city 29 highway I’m sure I’m not doing that well, but I’ve heard those stats are not a true reflection of reality.
I think it’s great that it’s a very low cost alternative and I’m happy to see that it’s available for some people. The large-scale solutions are that we have to lower the cost of doing business in general. The high cost of fuel and the high cost of health care is crushing everyone, and by lowering the cost I don’t mean transferring the cost to consumers, I mean lowering the cost of the products.
First of all, yes, when you live paycheck to paycheck any increase in gas prices is going to be noticiable. Second of all I too want to keep or preferably expand public transit service. The gas tax is regressive and I would prefer an increase in income or other general tax to pay for it rather than feeling nickeled and dimed by ad hoc taxes like gasoline. Plus, again I’m not arguing some grand correlation between taxes and other factors that affect gas prices; I’m just arguing basic math. The station down the street I most frequently patronize jumped from 3.27 to 3.47 in just the last couple weeks. Add another 10 cents and you get (drum roll please) 3.57. Ok, so it’s another $1.50 per tank, but like I say every bit counts. It’s not like I go joy riding and waste gas for the heck of it. So I’m not going to tell poor people they can’t take the train; I’m going to advocate for ALL forms of transit to be safe, affordable, and accessable for everyone.
I really do hear the objection of liveandletlive. I really do.
If an increase in the gas tax is not the answer, then we must find another source. Public transportation is dying, if not already dead. If we kill off the MBTA and commuter rail, the economic impact will be on all of us will be even worse than raising gas taxes.
You must know that I far prefer raising taxes on the truly wealthy. I don’t know how to do that in a timeframe that will save public transportation, and if there is another source for funding, I’m all ears.
Once we let public transportation infrastructure fail, the replacement cost is staggeringly higher. If we can’t afford to maintain it today, we surely can’t afford to build it new tomorrow. Yet if we don’t build it, we can’t possibly build enough highways, buy enough cars, and buy enough gas to sustain even today’s economy (never mind our carbon footprint and our increased dependence on fossil fuels, with all that implies).
We must have a sustainable transportation system in Massachusetts to maintain the quality of life we all want. No sustainable twenty-first century first-world region can exist without public transportation. None.
We must find a way to pay for it. Please — offer a viable alternative to increasing the gas tax instead of simply ruling it out.
of us are. The high cost of fuel and health care. It just seems ridiculous to me not to address those issues but instead turn around and increase prices on consumers who are also dealing with the high cost of fuel and health care. Will it ever end? If fuel prices were lower instead of artificially inflated to the benefit of the few, then I would imagine that people would not be panicking over the thought of a gas tax and that the MBTA would not be in such a difficult place.
…if you’ll forgive the slight tangent, this is apparently happening on the T. Personally I find it a bit unsettling, but maybe I’m not attractive enough to be a target:)
Yeah I saw that too. I really think it is not a good idea and could lead to a lot of legal issues. The T says it is outside of their jurisdiction to control, but I wonder who’s it is in? Would it be worth having the AG’s or Suffolk County DA’s office at least take a cursory look in to it?
Pity that there hasn’t been this level of discourse among the actual decision makers. I shared my views with the DOT Secretary today, as well as the idea of updating our pavement specifications to allow our roads to last longer between paving jobs (and hence save DOT money that could be redirected to mass transit which I strongly support). And really, were you surprised that I oppose net new taxes in this recession? There are so many ways we can improve services at the same or less cost that I can unabashedly say that I will oppose tax increases in Massachusetts until I am convinced there is no responsible alternative. I’m a long way from being convinced on that point. But this discussion has yielded some really good ideas and I will endeavor to have them included in the rare debate on Beacon Hill.