There’s a lot of discussion here about transit policy.
Let’s cut to the chase. The price of a monthly commuter rail pass from Lowell to North Station is $350.00. THREE-hundred and fifty dollars.
This is an absurdly regressive policy choice, unless you realize that our society is not serious about providing transport to the poor and immigrants who live in our satellite cities. In fact, the system appears perfectly set up to have it make more sense for them to drive a car illegally into the city every day.
And then we wonder why we are where we are. We an incredibly unequal society, a society that continues to rely on fossil fuels, and a society in which largely non-white immigrants live in the shadows while providing labor for the majority white native community. Native-born folks would rather not do those difficult jobs, but are happy to turn a blind eye and take no meaningful action to relieve the suffering of their shadow neighbors.
Never mind that having arrived at North Station, they face at least another 20-30 minutes of travel time before getting to an actual JOB in the various neighborhoods that are growing — the Seaport district, Kendall Square, Cambridge Crossing, etc.
That Lowell train shares the same right-of-way from College Ave in Medford (Tufts University) all the way to North Station. The new stations build for the GLX have had to spend EXTRA money to create barriers between the GLX and the commuter rail.
One of the GLX stops in Medford should have been a transfer station, just like Porter Square is for the Red Line and the Fitchburg line. The same is true, in spades, for the contemplated commuter rail extension to Concord NH.
Commuters on the Lowell line should be able to get off at the College Ave stop in Medford and either walk to Davis Square (and the Red Line), transfer to the GLX, or continue to North Station. The T should run frequent shuttle buses from that stop to the new Assembly Square stop on the Orange Line. Commuter rail trains to Newburyport, Rockport, and Salem should similarly stop at Assembly Square.
The situation is even more dire for those who live in Medford, Somerville, Cambridge, Everett, and similar places who want to work in Lowell, Nashua, Manchester, or Concord.
Massachusetts is still acting to kill public rail transportation, just as it has been for decades.
I’d love it if this were entirely tax-funded, but in fairness this IS still a discount compared to paying for each trip a la carte. If you figure 20 commuting days per month this shakes out to $17.50 per day whereas each day paid for ad hoc is $21.
This ties in with the post I made a few days ago about Essential Workers and society’s treatment of them. This is the sort of thing I think of when I hear that Massachusetts is a “Blue State”, run by Democrats. This explains how Scott Brown won the state and yes, how Donald Trump won in 2016.
There is a divide in the working class that N.S. Lyons refers to as the Physicals and the Virtuals as he looks into the Canadian trucker protest. Democrats may not have turned a blind eye to the Physical workers, but they do seem to look the other way quite often, as this Commuter Rail cost indicates.
While not all those in the physical labor side are poor while some in the virtual side struggle financially, overall there is a stark divide. Essential workers, the Physicals cannot work from home. Their schedules are set in place and a transportation mishap causes them serious financial woes. Most cannot make up the time later with virtual hours. Telling them to “improve their skill set” and “get a college degree” in order to become a Virtual worker and avoid the cost of the Commuter Rail is not a winning platform for the Democratic Party.
The reality is statewide politics is dominated by the suburban moderate voter, the kind of voter profiled in “Don’t Blame Us”, a seminal work in my view on state politics as well as the transition of the Democratic Party as a whole from a working class to a professional class party. They either use the T to virtue signal if they live in a gentrified community off their T or they commute via car and are more worried about gas prices than T fees.
The GLX is an unintentional example of this since it’s a project that was originally designed to mitigate highway pollution for working class communities that now no longer exist. Ironically it will end up as a massive public subsidy for private real estate interests and affluent commuters. Im glad my friends who just closed on an 850k condo near a station will benefit, but I think we should try and avoid future GLX’s if we can.
Projects have to be built more quickly and more cheaply to serve the areas that are transit isolated now rather than having transit continue to be a handmaiden to further gentrification. The Silver Line extension to Chelsea is a much better best practice to build on since it was completed in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost, although residents there are also leery of the gentrification it will bring.
This party transition is largely complete. Immigrants can’t vote, and we continue to see black and Latino support trend rightward since they remain more committed than affluent white liberals to business friendly and police friendly policies. My students, especially the males, are far more excited about Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, or bitcoin than anything coming out of Joe Bidens mouth. Most are North African, Hispanic, Cambodian, Brazilian, or Bosnian/Albanian. There is a potent future center right rainbow coalition for the Republican Party deft enough to put it together, fortunately for now Trump is not the candidate to do it, but I am leery that liberals will continue to miss these warning signs and double down on moral lecturing.
Unless it’s massively expanded, the T will continue to be a niche product for the affluent urbanites to virtue signal their use of like hybrids, or a transit option of last resort for people too poor to own a car. That’s about it for a constituency. Most statewide voters live in suburbs and commute by car, and we should tailor our policies to meet their needs rather than the needs of those who are already in our corner.