According to the MetroWest Daily News, the House voted yesterday to bring back a tax deduction for commuters who pay for the Pike with FastLane, and for users of the MBTA (including commuter rail). The deduction only applies if you spend at least $150 commuting, and tops out at $750. This was done to bring back the deduction that had been available in past years and expired this year.
“This is a recognition that we are already paying for our commuting costs through Mass. Turnpike tolls and commuter rail passes and we shouldnât have to pay for them twice,” said state Rep. David Linsky, D-Natick, who filed the successful budget amendment.
My take? The MBTA part is a good idea, but I’m not very keen on the FastLane part; we ought to be encouraging public transit (though I suspect rising gasoline prices will do that all by itself), not giving people one more reason to clog the highways. Nobody tries this line with the gasoline tax (or rather, most people don’t take it very seriously), so why is FastLane different?
I used to ride the T a lot. Now, I rarely do. I live in Cambridge, between Central & Kendall, and I tend to go to places like Harvard, Porter, and Davis, several times a week. I should be the ideal T user.
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The problem? My income is way down. When I was a computer sysadmin, I didn’t think about the cost of T tokens. Now that I’m constantly skating the edge of broke, I do. And I need a car, because I go out of the city several times a month. Given that I have a car, well, a round trip to Davis Square costs me maybe 30 cents in gas, but it’s $2.50 by T. If I want to stop in Porter on the way to pick up groceries, which I often do, or stop at Harvard Square for a DFA meeting, that’d push the cost of the T trip up to $3.75. I really just can’t afford it to do that several times a week.
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The T is so expensive that it’s a serious disincentive for low income people. And even for people who can afford it, if they make the same calculation, it might cause them to decide to take their cars too. Tax credits aren’t going to make a difference. A T pass is still too much, and it’s based on a commitment to ride the T twice a day, otherwise you lose money. What we need is free public transportation.
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Portland, OR has free city buses. It’s wonderful. It’s part of the reason why Portland is the only major city in the US I’ve seen that doesn’t have bad traffic or parking problems in the city core. The buses are plentiful and free, they run everywhere and they run often. So people take them, even people who have cars.
How does Portland, OR pay for the city buses? It sounds like a great plan, how could we implement it?
Cos, the MBTA is cheap compared to Chicago, New York, and DC; and those are just the places I know.
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Yes, the marginal cost per mile of your car may be less — but what about the car itself, upkeep, insurance, etc.? It’s gotta be more. The typical reimbursement rate is 35 cents a mile or so, which is supposed to include fuel and depreciation. And I would imagine that in the Boston, your car depreciates faster. 🙁
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Good gravy, and then there’s parking. :(((((
It’s possible that not having a car at all would end up cheaper, overall, for the short trips I mentioned. But like I said, that’s not an option for me: at least several times a month, I go places where public transportation either won’t take me, or where it’s not practical (for example, if I need to go to Northampton for the evening and then come back home). And sometimes I need to carry people, or stuff.
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There are many people like me, who have a car and need to have a car, but would use the T when practical. And I suspect a lot of those people don’t use the T because of the T fare. That’s a shame. If there were no T fare, we’d have fewer cars on the road, smoother traffic, less pollution, use less gas… and the wear and tear on lots of people’s cars would be reduced too.
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When I make the decision to take my car rather than the T to somewhere nearby, several factors play into it, but these days, cost is the biggest one. At the point of decision, the overall cost of owning a car is not much of a factor. Taking the T this time, instead of driving this time, will have a tiny effect on that, perhaps to the tune of a few cents. It’s only the marginal cost of gas that’s significant, and right now in the city I’m paying about 12 cents a mile for gas. At that rate, I’d have to take the T for 21 miles (without stops along the way!) for it to compete.
Even for the trips you describe. What would be cheaper would be Zipcar, coupled with a monthly T pass. If you live in an area serviceable by the T or by taking a bus to the T (just one, I think more than one is a little ridiculous). Of course, it would not be as convenient. When you have a car you can just get up and go wherever, whenever (unless it’s in the shop 🙂 but with Zipcar you have to reserve, and it might not work out too well. But it’s something to consider. I know a few people who’ve sold their cars and just use zipcar.
I recently bought a new car, but seriously considered this option. I ride the commuter rail to and from work every day so do not commute using my car. However I live far enough out and do take some long road trips every month so a car of some kind is needed. Unforutnately I live in an area (Waltham) in which zipcar does not have any cars. I called them and asked if they had any plans to expand in my area and unfortunately they do not. If/when they do I would seriously consider selling my car and joining up. Getting in to cambridge or Boston to get a car just to head back out to suburbia every time I need it takes to much time and really lowers the cost benefit for me. However, several of my friends live downtown and swear by the subway pass/zip car combo. Also note if you travel you can use zip car in several other cities. It all works through your one card.
BTW I have a commuter rail pass and my company subsidies my monthy purchase of the pass. Depending on what pass you get it is 25% off the regular price and the majority of it comes out of your pre tax pay. All that figured in it makes the T-pass a bargain, about what it would cost just to park in our area for 3 days. Not a bad deal at all. Our department has 35 people in it (yes I work at a large company). Of those, I do not know anyone who drives to work. Check with your employers’ HR/Benefits office to see if there are similar plans where you work.
ZipCar is for people who don’t generally need to have a car, and would rather not own one at all, but occasionally need one for a short time. It would not meet my needs, I use a car much more than it makes sense to rely on ZipCar for.
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Either way, ZipCar does not really address the tradeoff of T vs. car. It’s still another car on the road, more congestion, more pollution, and more gas used. It’s great for people for whom it can be a replacement for owning a car. It does nothing for people who could use the T more but are discouraged by T fares, or for the general public when it comes to that tradeoff.
Either way, ZipCar does not really address the tradeoff of T vs. car.
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* It’s still another car on the road,
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True, but one car shared among many requires one parking spot, not 10 or 25. In this way, it conserves space.
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more congestion,
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Yip. Except that if you pay for a car every time you use it, you’ll only use it when it makes financial sense… which means less often. Furthermore, since you pay by the hour, you have incentives to combine trips. This means you really do have less congestion than if each zipcar driver had their own car.
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more pollution,
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Nah. This follows the “congestion” argument… people who use zipcar use it less often than if they owned their car, due to the hourly rate. Folks who have zipcar use them rarely. Furthermore, the zipcars are all brand spanking new. That means they emit far fewer pollutants than cars 10 years their senior.
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and more gas used.
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Nah. Same argument as congestion, plus the fact that zipcars tend to have far better MPG than the USA average. This is economics: zipcar pays for the gas, and they’d rather pay less than more. That’s why zipcars tend to be frugile machines.
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I’m not arguing that zipcar is a replacement for everyone — it doesn’t work well for me either. But, zipcars do result in a net reduction of parking space demand, cars on the road, pollution, and gas consumption, because were it not for zipcar, many of its customers would own their own cars and operate them less efficiently than they operate the zipcar.
Zipcar certainly doesn’t work for everyone, but look at this scenario on their webpage. They also have a handy dandy calculator to figure out your own situation.
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So, let’s imagine the situation where you have a car that’s paid for (so no monthly payments or finance charges) and you’re just paying for gas, fees, parking and maintenance.
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If you go by the (I think) conservative estimates zipcar has on their calculator, you’d get (per month):
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Insurance: 75
Gas: 123
License Registration Taxes: 46
Maintenance: 71 ***
Parking: 175
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*** Personally, I would say that the maintenance number is too low for a paid-for car and may average to that amount except for when the time comes to repair some big thing in you car that’s $400. But let’s leave it at that for a minute.
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The above budget would cost you $490 a month and $5880 per year.
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If instead you use Zipcar for an average of 5 trips per month (each trip 5 hours long) that would cost you $212 a month or $2550 per year. Now, even if you if you factor in a Combo T-pass at full price ($71 without any employee discounts, $852 a year) you’d actually be saving $2478 a year and that’s not counting any unexpected $400 charges to your car (or being towed for street cleaning or parking tickets, etc. etc.)
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The numbers certainly don’t work out for everyone (though I encourage you to try it for yourself!) but in this scenario, even if you did an average of 9 5-hour trips per month AND got a Combo T pass, you’d be saving around $400 a year. Not to mention that you can get the aforementioned nifty tax deduction for buying a T-pass 😉
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All of this however, doesn’t answer for the “convenience” factor. If Zipcar is too far from you or inconvenient to get to, it just doesn’t work even in the scenario you described.
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If you live in one of the communities they serve, however, it can be fantastic. For instance, I live in Cambridge and within 1 mile of me there are 24 zipcars that include anything from a Toyota Prius, Honda Hybrid to an Escape, Scion xA and xB, Toyota Matrix, Mazda 3, and various Ford Escape SUVs. Having all those car choices (also Minis and convertible bugs if you are so inclined) can be a convenience in and of itself.
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[FYI – I don’t work or get anything from Zipcar, but I have been a member since they started in 2000 and they did have a picture I took on the front page of their website for a very long time.]
All good points, except for the 3-6 times I year I make combined northeast corridor trips (NYC, Philly, DC), the average of once a year that I make a round the country trip (which usually includes ferrying several people across several states, in parallel and in series, so I’m a form of public transport :), the 6 years my girlfriend lived in New Hampshire then Vermont then Maine, and the group trips to folk festivals where I carry most of the supplies (and several of the people). For me, and for many other people, ZipCar is impractical… but it would sure be nice if the T were a more affordable alternative to driving in the city.
I recently read somewhere that, factoring in most of the things you mentioned Charley, it costs about $0.58 a mile. However that is a national average so it doesn’t reflect the super high insurance rates here and it doesn’t reflect parking. That means the few miles around Davis, Porter, and Harvard has to be less than 5.8 miles in driving for it to be cheaper than taking the T.
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Cos, I think free buses are a phenominal idea. Any idea how Portland pays for it? I have heard nothing but great things about that city from it being super eco-friendly to incredibly beautiful and laid back. I also tend to agree that something more than tax credits are needed to make it affordable.
The tax deduction for MBTA commuters doesn’t make sense to me. Why not use the money to better subsidize the MBTA do they can lower their token/ticket prices? That seems like a simpler and more effective way to increase T ridership. Am I wrong?
Best of all would be to lower token prices to 0, and save all the money that goes into selling tokens, collecting money, and enforcing compliance through maintaining card readers and turnstiles and so on. Make the buses free too, at least in dense urban areas where we have a strong public interest in increasing ridership and decreasing traffic.
The MBTA write-off is only on monthly passes, not for all riders. The reason it makes sense to give an extra deduction to monthly passes is to encourage folks to buy them. Then
(a) the MBTA has the money on the first, not spread out all month, averaging to the 15th. That extra money collects interest, and it does add up.
(b) one transaction per month is fewer than many, which keeps lines short and reduces the need for multiple attendants at T terminals.
(c) the $44 is in the bank — even if the commuter goes on vacation, drives some of the time, or drops dead.
(d) once the person has already bought the T pass, he’s more likely to use it. Consider the poster above who pointed out that it costs him $2.50 to take the T 8 blocks down the street and back, but $0.35 in gas. If he had a T pass, it would cost him $0.00 to take those extra 2 rides on the T, making him more likely to ride the T instead of drive. The same holds true for commuters who could waver between T and car.
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So, the T writeoff does make sense, [i]in addition[/i] to increased subsidies for all riders.
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I can’t stand the writeoff for fastlane though.
Ok, so I understand why it makes more sense to give a deduction only to monthly riders. You’ve sold me on that one. But why do it through a tax write-off? Why not directly subsidize the T so they can reduce the price of the montly passes? Wouldn’t a lower up front price be more attractive than a tax write-off?
It would be more attractive and more efficient.
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But, it would also be more costly. After all, not everyone pays taxes (think: college students, the very poor, etc).
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It may be a simple matter of control. The MA Leg may find it far easier for them to impose a tax credit for monthly passes than to get the MBTA to change their price. The former requires a single piece of legislation, so to speak. The latter requires changing the MBTA budget, getting the T to lower the price by that amount, yadda yadda. I expect that it might be harder to pull off.
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But, in principle, you’re absolutely right. Just lower the freaking price up front, instead of on the back side. As an added bonus, it makes filing your MA taxes slightly easier. If the legislature did that 10 times, you might start to consider filing your own taxes easy again.
that “tax credit” sounds really good to voters in an election year.
Should the lege be doing this, and Travaglini’s new family tax credit; or should we be trying to get the income tax level down to 5.0%?
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Hey, free lunch everybody!
From my perspective, free MBTA across the board in exchange for a slightly higher income tax: great deal! But to make it a statewide deal, you need something for those parts of the state the MBTA doesn’t serve. For example, start funding a project to extend the Worcester commuter rail line to Holyoke and Pittsfield, and free PVTA (with a connection to the Holyoke stop).
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For people who work in Boston, free MBTA could cut down on commuting costs not only if they use the T. Fewer drivers means less demand for parking means parking garage prices are less likely to increase.
I’m sure all those people in the suburbs and central & western MA won’t mind the income tax increase to subsidize the cost of transportation for people in the city . . . Think realistically – public opinion is a huge factor.
Worcester gets the discount, as do South and North Shore folks, as do local suburbs of Brookline, Quincy, Cambridge, Newton, Somerville, etc., as do residents of Boston.
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Newsflash: that’s most of the population of Massachusetts.
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Furthermore, anybody who is driving to the metro area during rush hour suffers from traffic problems. If a tax break gets some of those other cars off of the road, the traffic problem is reduced, which is good for those who still drive to work.
I’m confused. You’re repeating the same point, but sarcastically?
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I said that, as a city dweller, I think it’s a great deal. Then I added that people outside the metro Boston T zone wouldn’t think it’s such a great deal unless we added something for them. I even included a suggestion for adding something that would serve one part of the state outside the T zone.
take a look at the [Boston Indicators http://www.bostonindicators.org] transportation page. I think you’ll see some interesting numbers on the MBTA.
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Your token pays about 33 percent of the cost of riding the T. The fare is one of the lowest in the nation, and I think about 18 percent of people living within the Boston metro area use the T as a primary form of transit. (In New York the number is somewhere around 47 percent, but that includes the commuter operation, the MTA serves closer to 70 percent of the population.)
Subway stops are 5 blocks or closer to nearly all of the NYC population (Queens and Staten Island excluded). Boston has huge regions with no subway access.
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Make the silver line a rail line. Expand the Green line’s Kenmore-Park tracks to 4 lines to allow express (like many NYC lines) and reduce congestion. Extend the Green Line north. Bury more of the B, C, D, and E lines so that the cars aren’t so damned slow because they have to stop at red lights. Connect Gov’t Center to Park Street or Charles MGH by Blue Line to make the airport and other Blue Line stops far more accessible to folks on the Red Line (esp North). Once you make the Silver Line rail, extend it South from Dudley.
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You want more folks to ride the T? Provide them with rail options. Incidentally, you’ll also spur development in the Boston area, resulting in more housing choices (and lower prices?) since more folks would be willing to live in areas that are quieter now due to no train access.
I grew originally in Haifa, Israel – my family moved to Boston when I was 7. Growing up in Haifa, you took the bus everywhere. In fact, at the time, a majority of Israeli households didn’t even own a car (boy has that changed!).
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Years later, thinking back on how accessible the busses were, I pored over a bus map of Haifa, trying to find how far you could be from the nearest bus stop. I searched all of the city core and all of the main residential neighborhoods. Eventually, I found one spot that was four blocks away from the nearest bus stop. One spot.
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Haifa’s layout is weirder, twistier, and windier than even Boston. It’s where a small mountain range meets the sea and forms a natural harbor, and it started as a fishing village circa 5000 BC. It was not designed for motor vehicles. You don’t need a grid layout to make dense bus coverage possible.
Oh, puh-leeze.
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There is a world of people who live west of 128 who have NO MEANINGFUL ACCESS to public transit! Don’t patronize us by saying we should use public transit–you can’t use what you don’t have and what Beacon Hill refuse to provide. The tax break is not going “clog the highways” because the Fast Lane users are already on them, whether they want to be or not. It is about receiving some equitable treatment in exchange for all the subsidies which we’re providing you.
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What all the Dems in Boston and Cambridge fail to realize or acknowledge is that the Massachusetts Democratic Party needs the money and the votes of the world past 128. MetroWest districts are swing districts, and the voters out here want to feel like someone cares about them. How do we persuade swing voters that Democrats care about their needs when all the tax moneys flow into town and little flows back out? Rep. Linsky and the other MetroWest reps and senators struggle mightily to be sure that their constitutants’ voices get heard. However, we are getting hammered by the lack of local aid and public services as compared to what the folks in the Boston/Cambridge/Somerville axis get.
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Nearly every community west of Boston between 128 and 495 pays subsidies to the T, and gets minimal jitney service in return along a very limited series of routes. Every time our reps have gone to the T seeking additional service, they get shut down. You can’t hold your breath forever waiting for bus service to arrive when the people with the money don’t give a rat’s ass.
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Even if you work near a commuter rail station in Newton or Boston, the parking stations on the Worcester line are usually full by 7AM–and if you rely on train service, you better hope that there’s not an emergency which requires your returning home from Boston before the afternoon commuting service or to stay in town after 7PM. The alternative is to take the Green Line out to Riverside and pay for a very expensive cab ride west.
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The MassPike tolls have been long diverted to pay for the Big Dig in a manner wayyyyy disproportionate to the benefit we receive out here from that project. Persons forced to use roadways controlled by the MassPike have no choice but to pay tolls, whether they are going into town or not. Yet the folks driving north-south on I-93 use the tunnel daily, while paying nothing over and above gas taxes for the privilege. Is this fair?
I live in MetroWest, so I’m not sure who you mean by “you”.
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And you’re absolutely right that public transport ought to be more prevalent out here. That’s not exactly a compelling argument for tax breaks for the Pike. Rather, it’s a compelling reason for towns to gather together and start their own regional transportation. Expand Framingham’s LIFT, for example, into neighboring towns.
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I’d also like to point out that I didn’t say that the tax break would clog the highways. I said it would give people “one more reason” to clog the highways. Don’t you think the roads are bad enough already?
I’m sure all those people in the suburbs and central & western MA won’t mind the income tax increase to subsidize the cost of transportation for people in the city . . . Think realistically – public opinion is a huge factor.