The New York Times reports today that NYC is one step closer to sharing a $1.1 billion pot of federal money to implement road pricing schemes:
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg?s congestion pricing plan got a boost today from the governor and the United States secretary of transportation, who announced that New York City was one of nine finalists for a share of $1.1 billion in federal money intended to fight traffic in major urban areas.
Why can’t we get some of that tasty $1.1 billion.
More generally, road pricing is an excellent idea and should be implemented as soon as possible as widely as possible. We’ve got the technology to bill drivers without slowing them down with tolls. The federal government will pay to implement it. What’s not to like? Personally, I’m sick and tired of spending billions and billions of tax dollars to subsidize the automobile industry by paying for all the roads. If people want to drive, great: let them pay for it. Market prices should reflect the true cost of driving.
Love the idea, as well as deregulating Mass buses and taxi’s as a means to encourge masstransport.
with using fees to discourage driving is that the people who are most likely to be hurt are the ones who really do need to drive, because they can’t afford to live in areas with good public transportation and they have to get to work in the city. It runs the risk of becoming yet another poor tax. Unless there were some sort of sliding scale, the result is less annoying traffic for people who are wealthy enough to not care about the fees anyway.
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This needs to be packaged with a plan to reduce gas prices for low-income families, waive fees below a certain income level, or dramatically improve the access and affordability of non-driving options. I don’t just mean dump more money into the bottomless pit that is the MBTA. Less obvious offsets would be nice too – like, more affordable housing in the city.
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That said, I think it is a great idea. Drivers SHOULD pay part of the cost that they burden the city with. Beyond road repairs, there is smog, noise pollution, and stress. No more free ride.
I haven’t any kids in public sghools and never have. I’m sick and tired of paying exhorbitant taxes for schools I’ve never used. let the people who have kids pay for their education.
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Bout time someone came up with these user fee ideas!
Now give me back all my Social Security that is being used up by the old folks.
Glad to hear that you’re against free public education.
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If only most Republicans could be as honest as you are.
Someone pays for it. You, me, and whomever.
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But really, that’s not a bad idea. You drive a lot, you pay a lot. You want a new fancy car, then you pay the new fancy car fee. We should offer pay as you go education. I don’t recall the US Constitution guaranteeing K-12 education. As it stands now even after semi attending 13 years of taxpayer funded babysitting, our yoots have difficulty with simple reading comprehension and arithmatic, they have no understanding of accounting/maintaining a solvent bank account,geography and a host of mundane cognitive skills.
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Get rid of the MCAS, it irritates teacher unions and was an exercise and futility, and lets start making education cost effective.
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Economics controls everything else in most Americans lives. Let’s finish the job.
You mean we could have been paid 500 million instead of paying 14 trillion to reduce congestion in Boston?
Especially since drivers don’t have to pay a tax on gasoline, oh, wait, never mind.
we could spend some money on expanding & improving services by the MBTA. Maybe we could have spent some of that nineteen jillion Big Dig dollars on that.
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But we didn’t. NYC is building a new subway line in Manhattan as we blog. Boston? Meh. The MBTA is fighting to avoid expanding the green line northward.
Thank Mike Dukakis and Fred Salvucci. A whole lotta folks attempted to torpedo this abomination, however Tip O’Neill, Ted Kennedy, Joe Moakely, and the “War Hero” jammed it down the throats of Massachusetts taxpayers and US taxpayers collectively.
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Lay it at the feet of those who deserve the credit. Weld, Cellucci, Bulger, and Jane Swift aided and abetted the snouts in the trough AKA the rape of the taxpayers.
that’s fur sore. However, I’d suspect [based on no evidence in hand] that Dukakis’ vision included some mass transit work too. Somehow, that part got left behind.
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NYC metro [tri state area + inside the 5 boroughs] is responsible for 80% of all passenger miles traveled by rail in the United States. I’d love to see Boston eat into those numbers a bit. How much nicer would it be for everyone if more folks took the commuter rail into the city, and used the subways to get around town? There’d be higher service for those rail systems [more passengers –> more trains –> trains coming more frequently], and less traffic on the roads [more folks in trains –> fewer folks in cars]. Everybody wins.
…it is unlikely that the Boston mass transit system will not be substantially improved in the near future unless Boston were to be destroyed in war and, twenty years later, be awarded the Olympic games. The latter was what spurred the construction of Munich’s mass transit systems, and the former was what made it possible. The underground system through the central city, especially the Marienplatz is amazing–the tunnels must go down at least a hundred feet below the surface.
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On the subject of the main post, I’ll merely point out that, in the absence of convenient mass transit, cheap road travel benefits not only those who are traveling, but also employers who might employ those who travel, the owners of the buildings in which the employers are located and merchants who might sell to those who travel. Which benefits Boston directly due to the property tax that they can charge. Put everything out onto Rt. 128 or even I495, and see what happens to the central city of Boston. We haven’t been to Boston in years (mass transit is too erratic and parking is too expensive). We’ve been through Boston, on our way to and from Logan Airport.
or the MFA, or ICA, or Harbor Islands, or the diversity of JP and the South End, or a concert at the BOA Pavilion?
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Poor guy ….
As I’ve mentioned, we spend a lot of time in Munich, Germany. That is home to the largest science museum in the world, the Deutsches Museum, a number of major art museums, including the Alte Pinakothek, the Neue Pinakothek, the Pinakothek der Moderne (modern art museum), the Glypthothek (a set of sculpture museums), several ethnology museums, the Old and New Botanical Gardens, numerous theaters, and so forth.
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All readily accessible by public transportation.
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So, no, we don’t feel deprived by not going into Boston, given its exhorbitant parking costs.
Germany had the back handed opportunity to rebuild their western sector cities post 1945 since they were virtually destroyed. Kinda made city planning simpler and there wasn’t a disruption of essential services since there were none.
…Munich waited until 1965 to rebuild the central square (the Marienplatz) are you? I you are, your Behauptung would be idiotisch.
NO
Even a dyed-in-the-wool fiscal conservative like me is in favor of road pricing. I like user fees a lot more than broad-based taxes and this is the fairest of user fees. It also gives us the ability to manage demand by using congestion pricing. Hey, it might even help us break the habit of building things, then never maintaining them. Joe Giglio, who was on the Transportation Finance Commission until last fall, has a new book out called “Driving Questions,” in which he proposes a lot of this stuff, including the use of road pricing revenue to pay for transit.
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Now slipping back into a stance that would be more expected of me, transit got lost in the Big Dig? Come on! The mother of all mitigation agreements resulted in one of the slowest growing metro areas in America having the fastest growing transit system over the last 20 years. It also reulted in the T paying more in debt service than it collected in fares last year! Perhaps which should figure out how we’re going to pay for stuff before we build it (Hello New Bedford/Fall River commuter rail).