If you ride the T, you already know this: decades of underfunding are really starting to take a toll on the level of service. The red line is essentially always delayed, and even previously more reliable lines are now delayed on a regular basis.
The T is crucial to Greater Boston’s economy. And it’s dying of neglect.
Rather than subject this critical resource to more of the same, let’s rethink it: make the T free.
It’s reasonable to assume that a free ride on the T will change people’s calculations about how to get somewhere, and that ridership will increase as traffic decreases. The environmental benefits alone make this worth doing, but it has other benefits as well. Without dependable service, the T will stop being seen as a viable option, which will erode public support for funding, which will lead to a downward spiral where only people with no other options take an increasingly unreliable public transportation system. This will kill Downtown Boston as it has killed the downtowns of so many cities without viable public transportation. And if you’re going to locate your company in a suburban office park with no public transportation, why not do it in North Carolina where the rents and utilities are cheaper?
On the other hand, free MBTA service means a significant incentive for more people to choose the T. And the larger the ridership, the larger and more important the pool of public transportation advocates becomes.
Free MBTA service would undoubtedly help tourism (bring your family of 4 to Boston and save over a hundred bucks in T fares on a 3-day weekend!), and, even better, would put money back into the pockets of people who really need it. Right now we’ve got people spending 4 bucks a day to get to and from minimum-wage jobs. This means minimum wage workers are essentially working two days a month just to pay for the privilege of getting to work. That’s crazy, and free MBTA service will redress this injustice.
But how will we pay for it? Where’s the 500+ million dollars a year that currently comes from fares going to come from?
I suggest congestion pricing. Mass Pike and Tobin Bridge commuters have long complained that I-93 commuters are not paying their share. They are right. Let’s put tolls in Somerville and Quincy and jack up the prices between 7 and 9 in the morning and between 3 and 6 at night. Make Storrow and Memorial Drives into toll roads during rush hour. Do the same for Route 9 on the Newton/Brookline line and Route 2 on the Cambridge/Lexington line. I haven’t done the math–indeed, I don’t know how to do the math, but this has to be a really good start on pulling 500 million a year into the budget. It will also have the desirable effect of keeping the traffic reductions that come about as a result of free MBTA service from disappearing.
I’m not an expert on any of this. I’m just a guy who takes the T. I’d love to hear thoughts of anybody who knows more than I do.
That would make a huge difference, including free parking at the stations. I’m not a fan of tolls, since highways are just as much public infrastructure as the T and as such should also be free, but I have long said that if they were used to pay for the Big Dig, then we should toll the Big Dig, ie the Zakim Bridge and O’Neill Tunnel. I would keep tolls inside 128 if possible so that people who don’t need to go through Boston might be incentivised to go around.
Isn’t it supposed to be free by now, having recouped the cost of construction? Boston gets plenty of state largesse already, so why not consider the world outside of 128 and follow through on a promise? Personally, I’m not sure it makes sense to do either, but if we’re going to handpick favored regions of the Commonwealth, let’s have some variety. Those of us in SE Mass will just continue to get screwed.
the Pike spends tons of money and creates lots of debt keeping the excuse that the tolls are still needed. They also claim that the tolls are needed for upkeep of the road, although you can name lots of other highways in the state that have no tolls and are maintained, although not to the cushy standard as the Pike. Also, the Tobin Bridge was supposed to be freed of tolls decades ago, but the excuse that it needed upkeep was used to keep its tolls in place.
…from being turned over to general state maintenance? Now that everything is part of MassDOT it seems that would have cleared the last bureaucratic hurdle.
The organization built up to operate the road and pay off its debt wants to retain that fiefdom and money, and the politicians that have used it as a source of patronage jobs make it so.
Don’t free the whole T. Free the bus (only). Here’s why:
1. Collecting bus fare has a much higher impact on timeliness than rail. Why? Where you pay the fare:
* subway: to get into the station (you’ve already paid when you board)
* commuter rail: seated in the train (the train has already left)
* bus: as you board, meaning the bus can’t depart until every person has paid, one at a time
2. Bus fare is the lowest fare, per ride, so it has the least financial impact on the system
3. The bus is the crappiest of T services. It just is. That’s life. It’s slowest, most unpredictable, least comfortable while riding, least comfortable while waiting for service. It’s also the only service available in lots of poorer neighborhoods.
4. The bus serves the poorest areas.
5. There are places where the bus and the subway are perfectly parallel (57 bus and B Line down Comm Ave). A free bus would encourage price sensitive folks to take the bus instead of the packed Green Line, thereby providing improved service for Green Line (less cramped!) and improved service for 57 bus (less price!).
So, in light of these (sometimes overly general) observations, make the buses free. It would speed up the slowest mode of transit. It would provide an economic break to communities who need it most. It would provide an economic break to communities who haven’t been built a proper subway (or had one ripped out!). Per rider, it would have the smallest financial impact. It would get more people to try the bus, and discover that actually it’s not so bad and should become part of every Boston-metronian’s transit options.
Furthermore, the subways are at rush hour capacity — for both Green and Red. It’s pretty clear that the fare isn’t keeping riders from using the subway during rush hour.
I’ve ridden buses in a lot of other places, and often you can either pay in advance at machines at the bus stop or pay at machines on buses once you board. If a city can put up little payment machines for every single parking space along miles and miles of roadways (aka parking meters), they can put up pay stations at bus stops.
Under this system you don’t have to pay or show your proof of payment when you board the bus, which only slows things down terribly during peak travel times. Instead, periodically inspectors board the bus and check — so you don’t have to prove payment on every ride, just on some rides.
With a large chunk floated on the stock market. This is the model used by the public rapid transit system in Hong Kong, which is arguably the world’s best service (MTR:T :: Red Sox:Little League, tragically). The government keeps control, which ensures that private owners don’t have monopoly authority over a critical public resource, but the system can access the capital markets for investment finance (the starting premise of your post is that the T can’t access capital) and exploit opportunities like real estate development and commercial property management to fund additional investment in the core rail business. If we want a world class transit system (which we had 100 years ago, and have lost), we should use a proven world class model. Take a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTR_Corporation
The T already has access to the capital markets by issuing bonds. Issuing stock would just lead to a bunch of shareholders asking the T to raise fares so that it has profits to distribute. Issuing stock is generally more expensive than issuing bonds, except for when a company has high growth potential. There is no benefit to the people of Massachusetts for the T to issue stock.
If you want a subway system as good as Hong Kong’s (or even New York’s), you need the population density they have. Boston is at an awkward size where we need a good public transit system, but we don’t actually have the density to make it work financially (unless we can get people to stop driving into the city).
Population density isn’t really one of them. Density is important, but at some point it really only boils down to whether it’s dense enough to merit the service or not. We’re clearly in the “dense enough” category.
There are countries that have considerably better public transportation in major cities and out that are less dense than Massachusetts is, including France and the UK.
So I really reject the notion that the T isn’t up to par because of low density. In fact, I think that’s a very silly notion.
We have the population density and then some. We just don’t invest the same kind of resources into it that’s necessary– though plenty of that is the federal government’s fault, too.
Really? Compare to NYC: a good half of the subway service is on Manhattan, which is far more dense than even the densest part of Boston. High density also leads to longer hours of “awake activity” — more people up early, more people out late, that’s more passengers per day for the same amount of infrastructure.
You want high quality subway? You need density AND population. Boston has ~650,000. London has 8.3M. Paris: 2.3M. NYC: 8.3M (also).
Think whatever you like, but show some evidence that it’s easy to run mass transit in areas full of 3 deckers. The density just isn’t there. Not enough people could possibly live, work, or shop within a 4 block radius of a subway stop, and that’s ignoring that even if you don’t have a driveway the city will let you privatize an 8′ x 18′ piece of real estate for $ZERO/yr.
Now, to be clear, density isn’t enough. We need more funding from the general coffers, we need aggressive enforcement to prevent private autos and taxis from using bus lanes and bus stops, we need transit signal prioritization (TSP) so the Green Line, Silver Line, and Yellow Line (da bus) get green lights to keep moving, we need bus stops placed for optimal performance not in front of the fire hydrant merely to reduce the number of “lost” parking spaces, we need upzoning near subway stations (particularly the Blue Line) so that more people have places to live/work/shop on the subway lines, we need so many things.
The T could be better without more density. It couldn’t possibly replicate the levels of service of London or NYC though, and lack of density is an important component of that.
The rub here is the self-perpetuating spiral. I don’t know about the others, but Manhattan is dense *because* of the subways. The Boston dependence on the automobile has made it essentially impossible to expand anything but our highways.
Both NYC and Boston have transit systems that predate the automobile. I’d love to see how much was invested in subways versus highways in NYC since, say, 1940 — and then see that same comparison for Boston.
My speculation is that Boston chose to invest in highways (and disinvest in rail service). We saw that most recently with the Big Dig — an expensive and necessary project that has starved public transportation since then.
I suggest we consider a requirements-driven approach — it should be possible to travel in either direction between any town within, say, I-495 and the city of Boston at any time of day in about the same time and for about the same cost as a similar trip into or out of NYC. Choose the mix of transportation alternatives (highway, rail, bus, etc) to satisfy the requirements.
Lower density and population should imply fewer people to move, so the transportation requirement should be less challenging. Yet, as anyone who has tried the experiment has learned, Boston utterly fails the test.
I think that if we could truly embrace the *requirements* (I see it as a core aspect of our “business climate”), then a solution will follow.
Look at a Manhattan subway map and it’s roughly a grid, which makes it relatively easy to get from lots of places to lots of other places with at most a single change. Look at a Boston subway map and it’s a bunch of spokes feeding into a small hub. That’s fine if you happen to live along one of the spokes and need to go someplace near the hub but doesn’t really work very well otherwise.
As for suburban rail, it’s a joke for anyone who doesn’t happen to work classic business hours. And gee, why with world-class hospitals being among the city’s major employers might people need to ride a train off business hours? Hmmmm. Let alone people who want to go into Boston during leisure time. I’d love to take the train into town on a weekend, but there are 2, 3 or 4 hours between trains which is kind of ridiculous.
Long Island Railroad in New York, on the other hand, runs trains every half hour or less in Nassau County into Penn Station on Sundays and every 30 to 60 minutes during a lot of the day Sunday even from stations in Suffolk County that are 40+ miles away from Penn Station — the equivalent distance from Worcester to Boston.
There actually is reliable, fast bus service into Boston from several suburban locations including Framingham that runs every half hour. Alas it’ll only take you to Logan Airport. I actually once took the Logan Express and then changed at the airport for the T to head downtown because I didn’t want to drive, but that’s a pretty silly (and expensive) way to take public transit. But why can’t we have that level of service to someplace besides the airport?
That’s what our bus lines (CT and otherwise) do. Check ’em out — you might find just what you’re looking for.
This gets back to the density argument. There just aren’t enough people who want to use the rail off hours to justify running it. Want more commuter rail runs? You need more people overall (density) or a whole lot more people willing to leave the car at home (make driving far more costly). The suburbs will fight both of those things — people moved in the suburbs to get away from the density, and there are so many people who drive in that they’d fight any sort of congestion pricing (as the NYC suburban legislators did when NYC proposed it).
You do realize that more people live on Long Island than in all of Massachusetts and Rhode Island combined, don’t you? And that, because of shape, they’re able to serve all of LI with two main lines (and a few tributaries). Comparing suburban Boston to Long Island is comparing apples and orchards.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m just saying… no, I am saying you’re wrong. If that bus is driving on roads then it’s stuck in the same rush hour traffic. It’s not fast — it couldn’t possibly be. Now, as for frequent bus service on off hours, sure it could be done. Trouble is, again, not enough potential riders in any particular suburban place to support the frequent service.
Take a look at the Long Island Railroad’s Port Washington line. It serves a small and specific sliver of Long Island.
Port Washington has 16,000 residents — nearby towns are fairly similar, including the few others where the line stops (Great Neck – 10K, Manhasset, 8K) before stopping a few places in Queens. I doubt that there are significantly more people living within a couple of miles of the Port Washington line than along the Framingham line. And Port Washington is about the same distance from Penn Station as Framingham is from South Station.
Trains are running every half hour on weekends and holidays from Port Washington to Penn Station. Every half hour. In Framingham, meanwhile, there’s no train between 3:30 and 7:00 pm. In that gap, SEVEN trains run to serve that one small segment of Long Island.
The LIRR was set up primarily to serve Nassau and Suffolk counties, with a combined population of 2.8 million people. Queens is an arguable addition, with 2.3 million. So that’s 5.1M.
Massachusetts has a population of 6.6M, the majority of which is in eastern Mass. Sorry, but the difference in population is not in the same league as the yawning gap in service.
I just spent an hour writing a very detailed response, and Firefox crashed. I’m not going to rewrite the whole thing. The highlights:
1. The Port Washington Line has three times the ridership of the Framingham Line — running the Framingham Line off peak isn’t going to substantially narrow that gap. Also, the Port Washington Line runs every 45 minutes off peak, not every 30.
2. Long Island minus NYC is 3 to 4 times as dense as Greater Boston minus (Boston + Brookline + Cambridge + Somerville).
3. Long Island’s geography makes commuter rail far easier. Long Island is 15 miles wide; there are 2 (in some places 3) parallel E-W lines and as a result it’s almost impossible to live more than 3 miles from a LIRR station.
4. The LIRR should have even higher ridership, but terrible management going on for decades hasn’t helped, nor has the 260+ closed stations. While some live on as subway or had a station open nearby, but many, if reopened, would expand LIRR’s convenience dramatically. The MBTA, on the other hand, could be argued to be “overperforming” given their inherent challenges.
5. I’m not opposed to more ridership on the Purple Line, I just don’t think it’s reasonable for people to ignore the realities of where actual working people live and where they actually want to go. Not anecdotally, but en masse. If we want increased ridership, the way to get there is not to simply build it and hope that they will come. They won’t. Not without increasing housing stock and employment opportunities within 1/4 (even 1/2) mile of the stations. Not without making it harder/more costly to simply drive to work.
6. There’s going to be some improvement. DMUs will reduce the number of commuters who have to take two subway lines after getting off the train in the morning. Expanding South Station will give the station capacity for more total commuter runs within a given hour. Boston and Cambridge are evolving on parking, for example prohibiting a substantial increase in parking spaces in both Kendall Square and Longwood Medical Area. We’ve got a long way to go though — we’ve got a city where the two primary commuter rail stations don’t connect, but we do have a giant park right at the connection of the two most popular subway lines with a giant parking garage underneath. A more modern example: we took down the Central Artery and built a “park” with more paved space for autos than parkland for people, and even allow cars to park on the sidewalk adjacent to Cross Street.
TL; DR LIRR and the Port Washington Line aren’t a helpful comparison to the MBTA and the Framingham Line; density of potential daily riders really does matter despite pleas to the contrary; the MBTA is doing a good job but they don’t have land use and planning support from a Boston Metro area that wants all the benefits of suburbia and expects the mass transit quality of the dense urban areas those very residents fled.
In my view, here is essence of the issue:
When I write “If we build it, they will come?” (note the “?”), meant the three key bullets implied by the above:
– Increase rail (Amtrak, commuter, and subway) and bus service
– Increase housing stock and employment opportunities within a 10-15 minute walk of each rail stop
– SIGNIFICANTLY increase congestion pricing. I think it should cost something like $25 each way to drive from, say, Andover (I-93/I-495 interchange) to downtown Boston, and another $50/day to park in downtown Boston. That makes the cost of each vehicle trip (during drive times) about $100.
I would add that, in this context, the target should be (in my view) FREE service for bus, subway, commuter rail, and AMTRAK (basic fare). I think the capacity of these systems should be expanded to support the resulting traffic. This target for highways was, after all, how we created our dependence on the automobile.
In that context (particularly the latter), I think we can shift the political dynamics towards aggressive demand for public transportation, and we can simultaneously provide the funding for it.
Finally, in the longer run (I think we should all bear in mind that these changes will take decades to accomplish), we should consider new and emerging vehicle technologies. For example, it may become possible for personal-sized vehicles to be built with rail-compatible wheels and even couplers. Such vehicles could be assembled into trains pulled by high-efficiency (in comparison to each vehicle) engines, and then disburse at their destination. Cars on rails are MUCH easier to control automatically — truly safe self-driving cars on rails are likely to be much more affordable much sooner than the currently contemplated counterparts for highways.
We should design and build our transportation infrastructure TOWARDS the 21st and 22nd centuries.
Now you’re just being vindictive against people who drive. You want it to cost $100 per day for a Boston round trip commute from the Merrimack Valley?! If I understand you correctly I can’t take you seriously anymore. There is no way either the local economy or the MBTA can sustain that. I worked in the Navy Yard this summer for just this side of minimum wage. The commuter rail doesn’t really work for that particular trip. Even if you deduct $50 to park since I had a free space on site that’s still $50 out of th $65-70 I made in a day. Don’t even consider such outrageous pricing until the rest of your vision is realized, but there will always be a need and a place for cars.
may have been true decades ago, but is far from it today.
The only issue holding hundreds of thousands or even millions back from living in or around Boston is housing costs.
We can’t come up with solutions to our public transportation problems if we don’t understand the disease. It’s not suburban flight (ie people not wanting to live in the city), it’s high housing costs.
Building massive amounts of housing closer to Boston and they’ll come, but you’ll only ever get that housing if more public transportation is planned for those areas.
Similarly, we should be building working on an all-of-the-above approach to public transportation in other urban areas across the state, linking urban areas together and drastically improving the service within to meet the needs of those who live there and to spark greater development.
Plenty of us just plain don’t want to live in the big city either.
younger people hate the ‘burbs and want to live in urban locations.
Beyond that, numerous studies have been done looking at why surburbanites and exurbanites bought further and further away from ‘the big city,’ (at least up until recently, when populations have been declining in the exurbs and suburbs and increasing in cities) and price is the number one factor time and time again. Many people out in the burbs would buy closer to the city or in the city if they could afford it.
I’d also note that you live in a fairly big city — one of Massachusetts’s largest 3 or 4. So clearly you don’t mind life in the city that much :p
…especially when you live in an apartment/condo community that straddles the Dracut line. I don’t want to live in the boonies either; I go for light urban/dense suburban, but believe me, I’m not thinking gee, I’d love to live in Boston if only it were cheaper.
The idea of building EVEN MORE lanes and highways to allow minimum-wage workers in Charlestown who live in Lowell to drive themselves to work and back on a daily basis is utterly ludicrous public policy.
Mill towns, like Dracut, Lowell and many of the surrounding towns, built mill housing so that minimum-wage workers could WALK to and from their jobs. The kind of commuting you’re defending is a completely unsustainable artifact of post-WWII US dominance, cheap land, artificially cheap gas, no concern AT ALL for the environment, and a host of other horrific practices of the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
If we can’t change that paradigm, we’re all toast anyway — whether or not we spend three hours a day in our SUV cocoons.
The company I worked for (and may well again another summer) has locations closer to home, where I would have much rather worked, but alas those locations were not hiring. I just don’t think you have thought through the realities (This is still a realty-based blog, right?) that you’re proposals would engender to both the personal economic situation of many (not just me – I really wish you’d stop suggesting my comments are all about or only apply to me.) and the overall economy. We need to improve ALL of our transportation options and start pretending we can wish away independent road-based motoring. So much of our economy relies on road transport and yes, highways DID contribute to the postwar boom. Frankly you seem to be in denial about that.
It’s not wishing it away. It’s implementing public policies over time so that society adapts, changes, reconfigures. You upzone commercial parcels near transit, more folks can take the T. You upzone residential parcels to accelerate lower cost housing near transit. You improve school funding formulas, so more people are willing to live in the urban and not the suburban. You improve parks spaces, so people are willing to live without 0.25 or 0.5 acres of private land. You improve sidewalk and bicycle accommodations, so people are comfortable making short trips for errands. Some of this costs money — you increase the gas tax (to, at the very least, pay 100% of the cost of the roads, which it doesn’t at state or local level now) to help pay for these things. You change zoning to not require minimum amounts of private parking, so that businesses or residents who don’t want that space aren’t compelled to buy it (thereby driving up real estate costs). You facilitate the expansion of high speed Internet infrastructure, to allow more people to work from home some of the time.
We can improve motorways by helping people choose to not drive, thereby freeing up existing roadway capacity. The game is to make changes, one at a time, that make it easier for people to choose to own one car instead of two, or zero instead of one.
The current car-centric and degraded public transit situation is a result of conscious choices. Those choices were not necessarily the best ones; in fact it’s apparent that they were often bad choices. There’s no reason we cannot now choose a different path.
Is the American dream of home ownership passe in your mind? Quarter and half acre lots provide a bit of elbow and breathing room and plenty of places zone for full acres. You have to at least be careful about the sequence of implementation. I’m hearing I think a lot of pay first, but for many that is not sustainable.
You’re right – I meant stop rather that start in the quoted line.
Is “the American dream” home ownership or house ownership? Or is it really “the real estate agent and home builder’s dream” much like DeBeers created the engagement ring out of whole cloth less than 100 years ago?
Home ownership can just as easily and reasonably be a townhome, with a party wall on both sides. It can be a condo on the 18th floor of a high rise. It can be the second floor of a three decker so close to the neighbors that you couldn’t drive a car between the houses.
When you put single family homes on 1/4 acre lots, you guarantee that you can’t have mass transit, because you don’t have the density (do I sound like a broken record on this yet? Yip!). You also guarantee that there’s effectively an infinite amount of parking. You build single family homes on 1/4 acre lots and you will never have mass transit. It will never have sufficient utilization rates. And, of course, our current system requires those who don’t have cars to cross-subsidize those who do, ranging from roadway construction (state and local expenditures on roads are not 100% covered by gas tax) to pollution, noise, and physical risk to those who are walking or cycling instead.
I’m not arguing that people should be required to live cheek to jowl. I am arguing that those who support land use policies that require cars should own up to their chosen reality — and that means be willing to pay the full cost of their choices and not piss and moan that they don’t also have good mass transit options. I’m also arguing that urban land use policies should prioritize more residential and commercial density, more park land, mo’better bike and ped facilities, and mo’better transit.
To be clear I fully support the proposals of this original diary, as well as many of the points you have raised that could make urban living more welcoming and efficient. There are ways to own without land, and while I haven’t polled this, I suspect that is what a lot of families with children want. I’d prefer a little bit if I could (but not too much since I’m no fan of yardwork). I think all systems should be equally part of our infrastructure without fighting over who uses what and who is subsidizing whom. That’s what makes them PUBLIC goods. Quarter acre lots aren’t that big. We’re talking suburbia where there could still be some bus service.
I agree that a quarter acre is not a huge lot and that some public transit could work in such areas. Not the NYC or Paris subway but something to give people another option and alleviate car traffic.
But the issue of who uses what and who is subsidizing whom is an important one, if only because it’s so misrepresented in the typical discussion. As you know, it’s $275 for a monthly pass from Lowell to Boston. At least that includes subway if you need to travel beyond North Station (in NY a monthly commuter rail pass does not include subway). In the meantime, with a couple of much-resented exceptions our roads are free. Let’s make both systems true public goods.
From your last line it appears we are very much in agreement.
Strictly true, but Boston proper isn’t at issue here but rather the area known as “Greater Boston”… which encompasses nearly 5 million people. This fact alone, I would argue, is suasive for the argument against buses and for subway, when in fact, in many ways, we’ve done the exact opposite: you can get many places in the Greater Boston by bus if you’re willing to sit on a bus for an hour or longer… The red line, on the other hand, goes from Alewife to either Mattapan or Braintree in much less than half the time it would take by bus. But this is anomaly: if you measured how many cities, like Braintree, are at the same distance from Boston which are served by bus(es) rather than subway that number is simple… all of them.
The only ‘density’ you really need is density of brain cells: if you’re smart there is a collection of subway, bus, commuter rail and other that is optimal for the city in question, Boston. Nobody thinks that the collection of subway, bus, commuter rail and other we have at present is anywhere near the optimal system…
Not subway + bus + commuter rail + boat.
Now it’s true — the subway includes denser parts of Cambridge, Brookline, Newton, Quincy, a bit of Braintree and Somerville, etc. It’s also true that it excludes a huge portion (area-wise) of lower-density Boston.
The reason we have subway to Braintree is likely nothing special with respect to Braintree. Same with the Green D Line to Brookline and Newton. In the latter case, at least, there just happened to be contiguous rail right-of-way that was no longer being used by the Boston and Maine, so the MBTA created a new line. If there had been a “parallel” line to Woburn (and if the folks in that area hadn’t protested), we could well have had a subway line there too.
Keep in mind though that this is all (roughly) inside 128. There aren’t anywhere near 5 million people living within 128. Christ, all of Massachusetts is 6 million.
Optimal for whom? And who pays? And who loses? I’m not opposed to expanding subway or the T in general… but methinks it’s a bit flippant to just will the addition. Consider the Second Ave Subway in NYC. They’re adding a subway line. In the long run, it’s great! In the mean time, a whole bunch of businesses have gone under due to the construction. And, of course, neighboring residents have suffered as well. Plus, it ain’t free.
To have a subway with capacity of ~500 people visit every 7 minutes, you need to have enough density to justify the cost of building it. Personally, I think the MBTA, MAPC, BRA, DOT, and BTD should work far more closely in upzoning areas near subway stops and major bus lines, and in reworking traffic signals, parking, and lanes to improve bus flow (and Green Line flow). Create more MBTA riders by having more near the transit and by making the transit a more attractive option.
But to suggest that density doesn’t matter is nonsensical. And to ignore that subway is a 50-100 year capital inflexible investment and therefore inappropriate in a district where the urban use even 20 years from now is not obvious ignores very real constraints of resources.
There are many such ‘parallel” lines to the north of Boston. Many of them are now bike paths.
You realize that there is a (sizeable) contingent of people who live in NH and who work in Boston? You keep up like living in, or near, Boston is the only variable at play here. It is not. We are simply talking about moving a lot of people. People are in one spot and they wish, as quickly as possible, to be in another. There are about 3 to 4 million people with domiciles within 128 and another 2 million or so who have domiciles outside of 128 who spend the bulk of their waking hours in the city proper. So the population of people with domiciles is not at issue here. The population of Boston SWELLS every single day by a very large factor.
Optimal for moving the 4.5 million people in the greater Boston area (according to Wikipedia the 10th largest city in the contiguous) plus those of use outside of 128 who work inside of 128 from where they are to where they want to be.
At present Alewife Brook parkway is, well, a parking lot for large stretches of the day because many people come down routes 2 and 128/93 from all over, including NH, wishing to park at the Alewife parking garage, leave their car behind and take the subway into their work. It is also a bus hub for people leaving the city. Many of them don’t want to do this, but drive straight into the city. Yet others, are too late and the lot is full and, therefore, must drive on. A simple extension of the subway of several miles to a lone stop, with parking garage and its own exit on the highway would do more to alleviate traffic north of the city than any other single change. The problem is so severe that reworking traffic signals, parking and improved lanes or any other form of upzoning is simply not possible…
If the population swells daily, and it does, then there should be a cost associated with that. A congestion tax that is used to fund a larger and more far-reaching subway (the aforementioned extension of Alewife being but one example) has my approval.
I made no such suggestion. I said that density is amount per area and pointed out that you were speaking of a smaller area where the problem is over a greater area. You said that there would not be enough people who “could possibly live, work, or shop within a 4 block radius of a subway stop” and I pointed out that this is a perspective valid in one respect and invalid in all others. In fact, I was at pains to point out, a sufficient density of people who “live, work, or shop within a 4 block radius of a subway stop” mitigates against a greater subway system and for a bus system. When I lived in Arlington and worked in Cambridge (a distance of three miles along one of the aforementioned bike paths that was rail right of way previously) I rode my bike to work and resorted to buses only when the weather was inclement. I avoided the subway altogether and never thought much about it. The subway became a bigger factor when my employer moved to larger facilities in Burlington (doubling my commute from 3 miles to 6 miles) and because the subway wasn’t adequate, and the bus schedule too time consuming, I ended up getting a car to go that six miles.
Take a moment to read that again. My entire approach was drastically altered when the distance I had to travel went from 3 miles to 6 miles. This is a clear example of the public transit system not being comprehensive. I had to spend money to purchase a car and all the attendant headaches when I would have been all to happy to take either a bus 6 or 7 miles or a subway the same amount. I, personally, would have been happy to take all that money I spent on a car and spend it on the public transit, either by ticketing or taxation. But because I could not I had to change my entire mode of commuting.
One of the reasons I chose to live in Arlington at that time was the proximity to public transportation. When that proved to be sub-optimal I ended up moving out to Leominster (also because the rents were skyrocketing in Arlington at the time) and commuted, first by car, then by commuter rail, and now (working in Bedford) again by car. I tried my present commute from Leominster to Bedford and it was combination of trains, subway and bus that lasted over 2 hours and 30 minutes. Another clear example of the fractured nature of the MBTA coverage…
You seem to be doing a bit of selective reading. On the first point…
That is true, but a number of them either (a) didn’t connect all the way to the system, (b) included local opposition to an MBTA expansion, or (c) had some other actual barrier. Merely hand waving “bike paths” while ignoring my nod to local opposition is not quite debating on what I actually wrote.
OK, I’ll bite. How many? And How many of them live close enough together that putting in a station nearby makes sense? And how many of them work in a place “in Boston” where they could go from North Station to their work on one change (ie the Green, Orange, or bus)? And how long would it take to drive to the train station, take the train from NH into North Station, and then subway it to the actual work location? You’re hand waving “sizeable” but, methinks when you run the numbers, you’ll see that there isn’t just a very big market opportunity there. Mix in the obvious problem of figuring out how much NH should throw in for the project, and you’ve got yourself a tough sell. Not impossible, and I’m not arguing against the line — I’m merely pointing out that hand-waving “sizeable” and two bucks will get you a medium regular, no more.
No, we’re talking about moving a lot of people who live in a lot of different places, to downtown Boston and then back outward to their actual employment location. The total travel time starts to pile up quickly, and soon enough you discover that there isn’t the density in a number of suburbs to provide sufficient ridership to justify the expense.
What is this factor? Seriously. Boston is ~600,000 people. How many people who don’t live in Boston travel into Boston each day for work? 100k? 200k? How many? And how many of them already live on the T [Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, Newton, Quincy, etc]? Again, where are the numbers?
No it won’t. It will just move that traffic 3 miles north. It will help 3 miles worth, but it will also allow folks to move 3 miles farther north of Boston, so the traffic will start to get bad farther north (when heading south toward Boston in the morning) than it does now.
And besides, the Red Line is already crammed during rush hour. It’s at capacity, and it can’t run trains more frequently. Adding more stations to the Red Line doesn’t get you much absent a number of other changes.
That doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. If the problem is traffic, than upzoning near transit hubs and making mass transit more attractive will reduce private motor vehicle traffic, not increase it.
On this, we agree. Moving from an idea to an implementable policy, however, is far trickier. I wish the powers that be would get to work on this very issue.
But this is exactly where density matters quite a bit. You want to go from Arlington (reasonably directly) to Burlington. You and how many others? And where in Arlington and where in Burlington? Without sufficient demand for that segment, you can’t justify the bus lines. Both the pickups and the dropoffs have to work for enough people that a frequent-enough bus service can work.
Mass transit requires mass.
No, it’s an example that without sufficient density, you simply can’t support direct routes from suburb A to suburb B without extremely expensive subsidies. And to what end? To encourage sprawl?
RIDERSHIP ESTIMATES FOR CAPITAL CORRIDOR PASSENGER RAIL SERVICE BOSTON, MA TO MANCHESTER, NH {PDF}
For example, nearly 100,000 New Hampshire residents work and file income taxes in Massachusetts. [I know, not just Boston, but still…]
Or Maybe: Then there are the 87,000 New Hampshire residents, about 13 percent of New Hampshire’s workforce, who work in Massachusetts.
We know lots of people travel to inside 128 to work — but that’s a big, spread out place, lacking enough density of offices within walking distance (or even short bus loop distance).
Massachusetts, were it its own country, would be one of the most dense countries on earth. We have a higher density than the UK, France, Germany and Japan.
This is doubly or triply true inside the 128 beltway.
To suggest that we can’t even have greatly expanded rail to service inside 128 and even 495, along with linking these areas to other population centers in the state and region, is not only defeatist but would basically be an argument against any rail anywhere in the world with the exception of a pocketful of incredibly dense metro areas.
Yet we see in so many areas that expanded rail (in all varieties) leads to economic development, better neighborhoods and prosperity.
Our ancestors had light rail in Lynn, Lowell and huge swaths of the communities in this state I’m probably not even aware of, which was only ripped up because of idiotic policies and the backing of lobbyists and the sorts of people who thought it was a good idea to turn dense neighborhoods into highways, and who wanted to push suburbs instead of density.
You are simply wrong that we can’t have significantly more rail (of all varieties) in this state. It will take time, no doubt — Rome can’t be built in a day — but this naysayer attitude that flies in the face of the evidence of what other dense countries and areas are able to do doesn’t help.
We’re only ever going to get a tiny fraction of the projects we push for as a community, so if we’re undermining and negotiating with ourselves, as a progressive community, before things even get started… we get nothing.
It was a criminal conspiracy of GM, Firestone, Philips Oil, and Standard Oil to buy up and eliminate streetcar lines across the country.
I have no concrete idea. But if you told me that the number of live bodies actual within Boston proper at any given 12 noon was greater than 4x the number of bodies at any given 12 midnight I would not, in the least, be surprised. Moving that many people in and out of the city is a fundamentally different problem than serving a population of greater density.
… again being accused of A) not making a damn bit of sense or 2) handwaving I’ll merely state that if the point of a transit system is to make distances manageable the difference in a 3 mile commute and 6 mile commute ought to be negligible: absent that manageability we can, comprehensively, say that the transit system has failed and is not doing what it is supposed to be doing. When it is easier and quicker to go from Leominster to Congress street, a distance of approximately 40 miles, than it is to go from Arlington to Burlington, the aforementioned 6 miles, that is a problem. (this is not say that the trip from Leominster to Congress street via public transportation is either easy or quick. It is not. this is to say that a truly arduous, not simply inconvenient, 6 mile trip via public transportation isn’t good public transportation.
It’s not. The point of a transit system is to efficiently move people
(think: plural). It can’t be developed to serve everybody’s A to B whims. It’s efficient for mass demands, and it turns out that there aren’t enough people in any given suburb who want to go directly to any given other suburb to justify the high level of service you’re asking for.
… and as far as I could see, its public transit is lightyears ahead of Boston’s. No underground subway, but they’ve got trolleys, buses and ferries. You can get around anywhere you want easily and conveniently. In my admittedly brief experience visiting a friend there, buses came on schedule (it is Switzerland) even during rush hour, and if you had to switch there always seemed to be another vehicle or ferry that you needed within a few minutes.
What’s Boston’s population density, around 13K people per square mile? Geneva is roughly 4,300 people per square mile (so says Wikipedia) — way less population density. The key is not a population the size of New York, Paris or Hong Kong. The key is a broad-based societal commitment to public transit.
The arguments on this thread are really about suburban transit, not urban transit. I’m not arguing that Boston city MBTA transit is the bees knees, but it’s level of service is quite a bit above suburban service (for good reason).
Did you live in Geneva, or just visit? I’m not claiming Geneva’s system is good or bad, merely observing that when folks visit me they think the MBTA is great — because they’re riding the subway during off-peak hours. They don’t get to “enjoy” all the parts of the T on the day-to-day.
No doubt. But this is America my friend. Where our gas is cheap, our parking is cheap, our roads get bigger by the decade (as do our cars), and so forth. Maybe this is why I’m talking past petr. I’m arguing that the MBTA is going to fund the most efficient routes — maybe petr is arging that the MBTA should keep doing that, but with much more money. Thing is, even if you doubled the MBTA’s budget, funding quality service from Suburb A to Suburb B still wouldn’t make the cut.
My parents, particularly my brother, would be the first to tell you they preferred the quality of life in Cambridge to Wakefield-but were priced out for the kind of space they wanted. They weren’t gunning for a bigger house or yard in fact they both downsized compared to what they had before-but at least they are sharing the same house.
And many are making this call. Some friends of my brother are city workers in Cambridge that had to go as far as Maynard and Tewskbury to find affordable housing. Some of my friends are in Medford, Everett and Malden since even Somerville is pricing them out. The ones in Mattapan actually have it worse in terms of T service in spite of being in the city proper.
It will require higher taxes, more revenue, more efficient tolls and congestion pricing, and fast and free public transit as an alternative. It’s shameful how faster, cleaner and better the trains in Seoul were compared to America’s and the contrast to dirty Manila (a joke of an old elevated rail and no public buses let alone subways) was also stark. Let’s surpass Seoul. Getting surbanites to the table is crucial and may be easier than you think (most people prefer mixed use communities).
is one of the largest, wealthiest cities in the world. It dwarfs Boston in all regards. 1/4 of South Korea’s not inconsiderable population lives in that one city alone.
I’m a firm advocate of drastic expansion of the MBTA, both in service area and quality of service… but I think we should have more reasonable goals, like being able to match San Fran in levels of service. We need steps that are both forward looking and achievable in our lifetimes.
had a chance to ask an actual resident about the public transit, which she said was quite good. (And while I wasn’t dealing with AM rush hour, I was often taking buses during PM rush hour in the city to get back to my friend’s apartment for dinner.)
I also took trains to places outside Geneva and the service was excellent. In fact, there was only one little town I wanted to visit that wasn’t served by convenient rail so we drove, but in general it was quite easy to do numerous day trips without ever needing a car.
Basically, public transit is considerably superior in most of the developed world in places where it’s not assumed everyone has a private car to take them everywhere they need to go. Population density does matter, but New York-levels of density are certainly not needed for a well-run, useful public transit system.
What matters is putting public transportation at least on an equal footing as private transportation, which is only done in very small portions of this country. Last I looked, New York was the only city in America where more than 50% of people took public transportation to work. By definition that creates a significant political constituency for making sure it works reasonably well.
Perhaps an aspect of the solutions we seek is to recognize that we need to revise the political mythology around transportation in order to make substantive progress:
– Myth 1: Cars are free, rail is not.
– Myth 2: Public transportation should pay for itself.
– Myth 3: The solution to traffic-clogged highways is to widen them
– Myth 4: Cars are more inherently convenient than public transportation
None of these is true, yet it seems that every political discussion of transportation alternatives ends up cooking a noxious stew of all four. People believe what they want to believe, and a simple recital of the facts that demolish each of these myths won’t work — if it did, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
I think we must somehow frame transportation issues through a lens and narrative built on facts and reality, rather than mythology.
…has almost always been true in my experience. You are not slave to timetables when you drive your own car. This is in large part why I balk so much at efforts to marginalize auto usage.
I need to ask how much of your experience is from outside the Boston area, and for how long. The keyword in myth 4 is “inherently”. Those of us who have spent time in other cities and countries know that item 4 is a myth.
In fact, when you live near the NH border (Dunstable, Tyngsboro, Lowell, Billerica, Methuen, Lawrence, etc.), you are more “slave to timetables” than you seem to admit. If you live there and do business in the city, then you do not plan meetings much before 11a (perhaps 10a) unless you are prepared to leave for your morning commute at 5:30a or earlier. You similarly learn not to plan evening meetings near home that start before 8:00p unless you are lucky enough hold a job that tolerates leaving at 2:30p-3:00p.
If you are a parent and you drive, you can kiss off the fantasy of putting your kids on their schoolbus in the morning and sharing supper with them in the evening. Most young gradeschoolers need to be in bed by 7:00p, and those who work in Boston and live in the above areas are challenged to be home for bedtime, never mind supper.
I experience your comments here as balking at ANY effort to erode the massive automobile subsidies that have created our transportation crisis. Your apparently instinctive reaction to the horrific problems that already exist suggests to me that you do not yet appreciate the realities that govern automobiles, traffic, and transportation.
My item 4 is most certainly a myth. Your attempt to assert its truth exemplifies the political and educational work we have to do.
The MBTA only goes to Boston, which is not where I’m going very often and even when I do I have to go on the MBTA’s schedule rather than mine if I use that service. I do sometimes decide to forgo the traffic nightmares when I need to commute during peak hours, but that requires shelling out $20+ per day for both the ride and to park, which is onerous on a minimum wage job. The regional bus service doesn’t go all the places I need to when I need to either. If I were doing a daily Boston commute on a decent salary I’d probably take the T, but in my experience (words I DID use to qualify my last comment) driving myself is in fact almost always more convenient.
Weekends are especially hard in this regard. The trains from Lowell leave every other hour. Depending on when I need to be in Boston I could end up planning to arrive more than an hour ahead of when I really need to be there, which is a huge waist of time. Plus traffic isn’t generally much of an issue on weekends so I can leave on my own time for a quick 45 minute drive or I can plan my whole day around an extra hour of thumb-twiddling (or more if I’m also ready to leave the city more than hour before the next outbound train). Guess which I choose.
Granted you can add runs to the timetable, but as others have noted demand is also a factor. Even the local bus means you don’t get where you’re going nearly as fast due to intervening stops and you can’t decide on a whim you need to run into a store to pick something up. i guess I just prefer to be independent in this regard, which is how I define convenient.
” I do sometimes decide to forgo the traffic nightmares when I need to commute during peak hours, but that requires shelling out $20+ per day for both the ride and to park, which is onerous on a minimum wage job.”
Congestion pricing is the point of the exercise. Increase the cost — significantly ($10-20/trip if I had my way) — of using I-93 during periods of congestion. Use that revenue to (a) reduce fares of commuter rail (my target is “free”), (b) run more trains, (c) add capacity (more cars/trains, additional track on existing routes, new routes).
A combination of significantly expanded commuter rail for medium-distance interurban trips and local bus services to address the “last mile” problem (how people get between their homes and the T) can make life ENORMOUSLY more convenient for those who go straight from home to work and back, and can take enough cars off our roads to ALSO improve the experience of those who make short side trips and shopping stops.
The great majority of the bottlenecks and clogs are caused by HUGE numbers of single drivers going between home and work at the beginning and end of each work day. When we change that behavior, the entire transportation system (including cars) functions more effectively.
You’re comparing using a car to an inadequate public transport system. That’s not the question. Owning a car is not more convenient than using an adequate public-transit system. I know people who live in Boston, and they don’t own a car. For them (especially living in the city), owning a car would be massively less convenient. Consider: with no car, there are no parking hassles, no insurance bills, no fuel costs, no maintenance costs, no regulatory fees, and no traffic headaches. Obviously, owning a car is more convenient in the Lowell area, but that’s because the public-transit system is so bad. Using that inconvenience as a reason to continue favoring autos is circular reasoning.
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…I didn’t own a car either, so yes, for people who live in Boston I can see that getting around via public transit is fine. In DC I managed to not even use the bus very often, but rather almost all subway. Some of us live in suburbia and some of us like it, but we should not be artificially gouged. By all means drop or even eliminate fees, but you are not likely to get critical mass regarding demand for some routes and times, hence the car. I also think we should make cars better rather than practically painting them as the Devil’s work.
There is no transportation system in the world where you can conveniently transport 10 bags of groceries and a toddler via public transportation. It is just plain stupid to claim that cars are not more convenient for many transportation scenarios. People pay a lot of money to acquire and maintain cars for a real reasons.
Your insistence on proving your self right on every point is detracting from your valid points.
How many trips do you take in the car where you don’t carry 10 bags of groceries? The carless friends I referred to above have two little ones, and manage using public transit. Maybe they don’t carry 10 bags of groceries when they shop, but they eat well. The “lot of money” that people pay to use cars is part of the inconvenience, yes?
Your argument is reminiscent of people who buy a giant SUV because they buy lumber or go car-camping once a year. Most of the time, they’re driving alone.
Let’s not forget that things like Zipcar have grown enormously. I know a number of people in urban areas who set aside one or two days a month to do stuff best done with a car (major grocery shopping, day trip) and otherwise go carless. I used to carry 10 bags of groceries home by hand or in an old-lady-style rolling cart in NYC.
Zipcar is great. It allows people to have the convenience of a personal car without having to garage and maintain it. However, that just proves my point. Cars are convenient.
It may prove that, for some things, cars offer convenience. It also proves that people don’t always need to own a car to get those things done. Most people, though, do have to go to work 5 days a week or so. If there were more or better transit available for commuting more people might choose to forego car ownership. The “real reasons” for many people to own a car come down to the woeful inadequacy of our public transit system.
Plus don’t you have to reserve in advance and get to the car lot thus adding steps to your trip?
What I’m thinking of is an expanded commuter rail service (more runs and more stations), with significant residential and commercial development in proximity to the stations. If each station has a zipcar location right near it, those who live and/or work there could avail themselves.
I’m not looking to eliminate cars but rather to reduce, or at least not add to, the need for them. This is a goal that will take some time to implement but I think our land use policies should head in that direction. I recall in the Romney era Doug Foy was chosen to do work along those lines but I don’t recall the details of what happened.
I drive my dogs to go for walks in the park or woods once or twice a day. That would not be even remotely practical using any public transportation system in the world.
BTW, I didn’t say that “convenient” is inherently good. There are a lot of things that suck about owning/driving a car and there are great reasons to promote public transportation, but lying to yourself that cars are not a convenience is silly.
Yes, for some people who live in a dense enough neighborhood with adequate shopping within easy walk/T/bike distance they can easily live without a car, especially if there is a Zipcar site nearby. Of course, the utility of Zipcar just underscores the convenience of cars. Everyone I know who doesn’t own a car, uses Zipcar for some errands.
…I’d want to handle a couple of toddlers on public transit regularly. I suppose there is quite the range of how well that works based on behavoir, etc. of the toddlers.
I thought I was clear enough when I wrote:
Of course I didn’t claim that public transportation is more convenient than cars for every situation.
Here’s my statement of the myth (again): “Cars are more inherently convenient than public transportation”.
That statement doesn’t preclude using a car for the occasional shopping trip. At the same time, I-93 is not jammed with grocery shoppers every morning (southbound) and every evening (northbound).
If you qualify for The Ride, you can do it with the MBTA. But you’ve presented a false choice. First of all, one doesn’t need to buy 10 bags of groceries at at time. In an area with better transit (and with it, more walkers), local grocers are far more plentiful, allowing the customer to buy a bag or two at a time. On top of that, you’ve got Stop&Shop and Roche Brothers delivering groceries, and Boston Organics and Crescent Ridge delivering specialty groceries. So — 10 grocery bags and a toddler is an entirely unnecessary event and, if it really is necessary once a year, you call a taxi.
1) no one is arguing for cars to go away, not even Tom, so there’s nothing stopping Mom and Dad from driving out to buy groceries with the kids.
2) It would be great, though, if we had the public transportation infrastructure so that we could move more families from being two car families to one — and expand service so that there are at least some affordable locations to live where some people could get by without a car at all or through occasional use of a zip car.
2) Speaking of zip cars, they can easily fill in a gap for people who completely eschew owning a car altogether, enabling them to get their 10 bags of groceries if they need it, so long as there’s an adequate public transit system to begin with. Expanding service to more and more areas would organically result in fewer and fewer cars in those areas, as families move away from owning two cars and a few people who don’t need them to get to work shift to zip cars or taxis for the rare situations where they would need a car, etc.
3) There may be no transportation system in the world where people can conveniently transport 10 bags of groceries and a kid on public transportation, but there are plenty of them where people don’t feel the to buy 10 bags of groceries at once.
In many parts of this state that are well serviced by public transportation already, it isn’t a struggle to find local grocers and food markets in walking distance of one’s house, ones that often have better quality food than many supermarkets. An expansion and emphasis on public transportation (and the housing density that would increase around them) would certainly result in more local shops.
4) In this day and age, if you want 10 bags of groceries, you don’t even have to go out and get it. You can get it right at your door with services like Peabod, etc., for fairly modest fees. This is actually a greatly expanding market, with lots of companies looking at getting in on that action.
Tom may not be right about everything and there are parts of his arguments on this issue I disagree with, but on the whole he’s right and your reply doesn’t even really succeed in addressing it.
It’s an interesting topic. I guess one has to figure out why charging for its use is justified to begin with. Some reasons to charge for a public resource is:
1) It is a scarce resource. Parks are free, but once the baseball diamonds start filling up, it may make sense to charge a rental fee to use them. Of course, ideally this money should be used to build more diamonds, but it never is.
2) You need to fairly allocate costs. Would it be fair for someone in Williamstown to pay higher taxes so that trains can run in Boston? I’m not so sure that is right since Williamstown might as well be in New York State. Of course, Williamstown may benefit from a more robust state economy if the state uses general funds to help projects which Williamstown could not fund on its own. Still, that would probably be a hard sell, particularly if Williamstown is feeling left out of the state’s economy.
Commuter rail is mentioned in passing above. Here’s a voice from Worcester pointing out that our additional trains just got postponed again, and that no one is working on pushing any trains out past us. And to the above points: in most areas of the country, Worcester, at 50 minutes out, would very much be considered part of metro Boston.
for free buses by employing congestion pricing and it was definitely interesting. Mathematically, it works and it’s net effect would be good.
I don’t think tolls are a good idea, though. They’re expensive to collect and cause traffic. It becomes a more interesting and far more feasible idea once we move over to only using transponders and snapping license plate pics of those who don’t have them.
Playing Devil’s Advocate, though, how do we factor in people who have to drive through Boston, but don’t drive in Boston. If someone stays on 93, do they get hit with the same fees as someone who goes into the city? Even though they’re not the ones causing the ‘congestion’ in the city to merit congestion pricing? It’s pretty damn hard to go from the North Shore to the South without driving through 93 or 90… and any implementation of congestion pricing has inevitably become pretty damn expensive, more so than just a normal toll.
IL and NYS do this, pretty sure we are one the last holdouts for physical collection and it’s high time we switched.
I was just visiting there. Cashless tolls all over the place – no toll booths, no traffic, no problem. Embarrassing that Texas has a more sophisticated toll collection system than we do.
what’s to keep the state from putting them anywhere they feel they can generate a nice revenue stream? Let’s see, Route 1 has a ton of traffic daily. Why not place a toll system on it and capture a ton of revenue from the captive commuters? How about Route 3 coming up from the South Shore? And, why not Route 24? The possibilities boggle the mind, and once the state makes the leap, it will be a torrent of tolls.
Has a sudden burst of toll roads been created in other states where open tolling exists (IL, NY, TX)? If that’s not the case, than what makes you think it would happen in MA?
It’s just my feeling that with an easy way to generate revenue, what will prevent it from happening once the technology has been implemented here. Referring back to David’s post, upstream, he says that he saw cashless tolls “all over the place” in Texas. Does he mean on roads previously tolled via booths, or in different roads that they have since decided to apply tolls to?
If the point is to encourage development of the T 🙂
Last Summer, we drove to northern NJ. I wanted to avoid NYC, so took 84 to the NY Thruway. Took a ticket at the toll booth and drove South. When we exited the Thruway, there was no toll booth, or anywhere to pay. Shrug. We don’t have one of them transponder doohickies, because we don’t drive on toll roads more than once or twice a year.
Three weeks later, the mail brought a bill from NY, for an amount equal to driving the entire length of the Thruway, from NYC to the other end. Plus a service fee. With a threat of a fat penalty if they didn’t get payment within a week.
I hate New York.
They can’t expect to collect if they don’t give you the opportunity. If you were given a ticket at the beginning there has to be a way to pay for it at the end. That’s just bad enforcement.
I spent several years just trying to get out of the place.
There is indeed a toll plaza in Harriman shortly before you hit NJ. You probably drove through the ez pass lanes by accident and didn’t notice.
For future reference, that route is *much* longer than taking 684/Saw Mill down to Tappan Zee, which still avoids most of the worse city traffic.
There was no toll plaza, with or without EZ-pass lanes. I can’t remember exactly where I got off the Thruway, but I do remember that.
I have experienced the Saw Mill Parkway, and have seen it become a frustrating snarl for no apparent reason.
It was there a year ago, and still shows up on Google satellite view, so it must have been removed fairly recently. Bummer.
I have never gotten stuck on the Saw Mill itself (north of 287, that is), but I have gotten stuck on the bridge itself in heavy holiday traffic. Of course, the real secret is to avoid rush hour, but you already knew that. 😉
They plan to remove them and go cashless tolls but it’s not supposed to happen for a year or more. Don’t know what happened to kirth. NYC once sent me a notice on a parking ticket for a day neither I nor my car was anywhere near the city. I had to go down there for something else anyway, so I went to my hearing and (miracle) got it dismissed.
I generally take 684 to the Hutch since I’m headed for the boros anyway. If I’m going past NYC I take the Saw Mill and check traffic. If it’s OK (which is pretty rare) I do GWB, otherwise Tappan Zee. Never had much problem on the Saw Mill though I don’t like all the curves at night with little lighting.
From a technical perspective, this is easy. You put sensors on 93 going both in and out of the city. Want to charge people going through less (or nothing)? They trip both sensors, they don’t get charged. And you’re right, it would be foolish to ask someone driving from 1 (north of Boston) to 3 (south of Boston) and make them go all the way around Boston.
It’s a tight enough radius that it doesn’t add that much distance vis-a-vis 93, and of course no toll.
Route 128 has been overcongested for virtually its entire history. It is already bottlenecked, pretty much end-to-end, during drive time. Surely we don’t need to add yet another lane or lanes to 128.
The direct route through the city is intended to reduce through-traffic pressure on 128, not vice-versa — a significant exception being for hazardous materials, which are routed around either 495 or 128.
First you point out, correctly, that 128 is bottlenecked during drive time, but then you say we don’t need to add lanes. I hadn’t brought it up, but it seems that if a road is bottlenecked it DOES need additional lanes. Of course if 95 and 3 had been built through as originally planned that might have saved headaches now.
More lanes only causes more cars. The Big Dig has more lanes through Boston, and there are now MORE, not less, cars on I-93 between Boston and New Hampshire. Route 3 between NH and Burlington was widened, and the result is MORE congestion at the local interchanges and on local roads (just as was predicted when the expansion was debated). It remains clogged at drive time. We are already far too dependent on automobiles. We need more people using public transportation and fewer people driving.
Congestion pricing on 128 and I-93, in addition to the Mass Pike, is an excellent approach when used to provide more funding for public transportation. More commuter rail (both capacity and routes), more subway capacity, extensions for the green, orange, and blue lines, and … yes … free buses.
We’ve tried building more lanes many times. I think the results are pretty clear that more lanes just draw more cars. We need to think of something different.
Inceasing roadway capacity often actually increases congestion
Tom’s assessment of the effect of widening Rte3 is accurate. I have had to use the road to get to work for about 25 years. Congestion on Rte3 is as bad now as it was before the widening. Some alternates are still better, but that won’t last.
I’d be in favor of anyone driving through the city at rush hour getting hit with congestion pricing. They are, after all, contributing to the congestion on the highway whether they’re getting off in the city or not.
through the city at rush hour because they feel like it and are on a lark. These people are primarily beholden to their work schedules in their choice of when they drive the roads.
Including where we work, where we live, and how we travel between the two. Sure, they’re not perfectly flexible — big decisions like employment and housing take time, and life throws curveballs. But plenty of people choose to make the tradeoff of less rush hour driving by giving up a bigger home, a grassy lawn, late nights or early mornings, etc.
My parents wanted to downsize to a one floor unit since they are how empty nesters and dads not as mobile as he uses to be. Wanted my brother and his wife on a second floor while they got the first floor . My brother, like me, loved living in Cambridge and was a big transit fan and loved not driving to work. They couldn’t find a house in Cambridge, Arlington, or even Medford and Melrose and ended up in Wakefield. If my brother worked in Boston that’s still easy since they are down the street from the Greenwood station but he works in Lexington (used to shuttle it from Alewife) and has to drive.
It’s not a city v suburb dichotomy anymore. Rents and housing costs are skyrocketing in cities which are actually getting richer in their urban core while suburbs are getting poorer. Anthony Guardia has made fixing and investing the T a key component of his campaign and this will require getting suburbanites on board with paying for the T and making linking lines so that Petr and my brother can have easier commutes.
We are both CRLS graduates and both of our classmates are moving further and further into the burbs. We want Cambridge but it’s increasingly clear Cambridge doesn’t want us. All of these issues are tied together and it’s not as simple as people “choosing” the burbs. For some, like my ma’s cousin in Chelmsford who has a ‘pave the rainforest’ bumper sticker on her Audi A8 the low taxes, lack of minorities, big house, big yard, and in ground pool are more important to her than a sustainable quality of life. But my brother walked the walk for years and is downright angry he has to wake up early and drive in.
and in our country, that means folks make choices they don’t love because they don’t have the wealth/income to do otherwise.
I argue for upzoning along mass transit — both in the city (incl. Cambridge) and in the suburbs. More housing units brings rents (and home prices) down. It’s not that Cambridge doesn’t want us. The problem is that lots of people want to live in Cambridge, and the housing supply hasn’t grown quickly enough. Yet Central Square still has one story buildings right on Mass Ave. Hell, the population in Cambridge is the same it was 100 years ago.
I hope your brother is able to move closer to downtown. I just think the way to help make that happen isn’t to provide high quality mass transit to every suburb inside 495. Instead, I think the way to do it is to have more residential and commercial development on our already-existing mass transit lines. That helps bring housing prices down and provides more fare for the MBTA without adding substantial costs.
forcing people driving on the Mass Pike between Westboro or Framingham and Newton to pay higher tolls in order to fund the Big Dig in Boston. And yes, Pike tolls were raised for those traveling within the western suburbs in order to pay back Big Dig bonds — even though many people who use the actual Big Dig road get to drive it for free.
I give jamaicaplainiac a lot of credit for saying how much revenue would be lost and proposing a way to make it up. What’s really “free?” There’s discussion about making the T “free,” making the MassPIKE “free,” public parks are “free.” None of this stuff is free. Sure, in this context the posters are referring to whether or not you have to pay per/ride (T) or per/use (MassPIKE; Parks). I get it. But, I think it leads to a stilted dialogue. Whether you pay per use, or not, we have to pay for it now, or defer it. The problem is that so much money has been sucked out of government that we’re deferring the cost of maintenance and repairs on so much of our transit and infrastructure. How long can we afford to underfund these things in the way that we are without a massive hit to our economy? To use a stupidly simple example, does it cost more to maintain a bridge on an annual basis and pay for it by collecting taxes, or wait for the bridge to fall down, and then tax to fix it? We are in the process of doing the latter with the T, with highways, etc. Oh well… just keep income taxes down and everything will be fine, right?
…that free means as you suggest, not paying per use but funded through taxation, as almost all roads in MA are. You are right to make sure we don’t lose sight of the fact that we have to pay for it somehow, and I for one have always been a fan of fixing the roof while the sun is shining.