What would you do to get the T out of its financial mess?

[whighlander]

We are talking about paying for the entire NETWORK, because highways alone are useless roads to nowhere.

YOU are the one talking about highways. Just stop it already.

Jeff -- no one is disputing that we need roads to connect to highways and driveways, etc.

What I'm saying is that the self-serving Brookings study is just a tool for the "fairness argument" which in reality is called Income Transfer

Try as you will you can not credibly argue against the key point that the Net flow of money is from the driver to the benefit of non-drivers

If nothing for the simple fact that a lot of non-drivers themselves are net beneficiaries

The rest is just about trying to jiggle and juggle statistics

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

The rest is just about trying to jiggle and juggle statistics

↑ Best straight man in comedy right there!

Please...do continue digging this hole. It's ever so entertaining.

 

[Arlington]

Try as you will you can not credibly argue against the key point that the Net flow of money is from the driver to the benefit of non-drivers

There is a very large flow of $ from property owners, consumers, and workers to car owners that you can't deny either. You don't like to think of it as asphalt welfare paid for out of income, sales, and property taxes, but that what it is, and you cannot even see how seriously hooked on it you are.

You may own a house, work, and buy a lot of stuff, and so fund much of your car benefits, but when you choose how to commute your choice is distorted by a 1-for-1 subsidy just like the other modes. You aren't some Ayn Rand self-reliant hero when you take a drive, you are a taker just like transit users.

 

[WormtownNative]

↑ Best straight man in comedy right there!

Please...do continue digging this hole. It's ever so entertaining.

Got a shirt for him.

(It was part of a teespring campaign for a YouTube channel I'm subscribed to - LinusTechTips)

 

[whighlander]

There is a very large flow of $ from property owners, consumers, and workers to car owners that you can't deny either. You don't like to think of it as asphalt welfare paid for out of income, sales, and property taxes, but that what it is, and you cannot even see how seriously hooked on it you are.

You may own a house, work, and buy a lot of stuff, and so fund much of your car benefits, but when you choose how to commute your choice is distorted by a 1-for-1 subsidy just like the other modes. You aren't some Ayn Rand self-reliant hero when you take a drive, you are a taker just like transit users.

Arlington -- cut the Sandersonite -- its not a subsidy -- the owner of the car pays for the care and feeding of the car and that includes their contribution to the maintenance of the public roads

Of course the real estate tax is used to pave, plow and fix potholes -- but everyone benefits from these expenses directly or indirectly unless they are living the life of a hermit -- holed up on their 40 acres with their chickens, sheep, wood lot for the stove and vegetable patch using no inputs other than rain and sun -- and paying real estate taxes from their stash

However, there so vanishingly few of such folk in Eastern Massachusetts that we can safely dismiss that category of tax payer

For the rest of us the roads provide access to our needs in one fashion or another even if you do not drive -- the bus, taxi, friend, Uber, ambulance, fire truck, police car, USPS, UPS, Fedex, oil delivery, meter-reader, etc., providing goods and services to you do use the road -- so it is proper that everyone pay for it

However, the same is not true of public transportation which is fed funds from the sales tax and other non-transit-intrinsic sources -- not everyone benefits from the T -- but they all pay for it -- including tourists merely buying a souvenir

 

[Arlington]

For the rest of us the roads provide access to our needs in one fashion or another even if you do not drive -- the bus, taxi, friend, Uber, ambulance, fire truck, police car, USPS, UPS, Fedex, oil delivery, meter-reader, etc., providing goods and services to you do use the road -- so it is proper that everyone pay for it

However, the same is not true of public transportation

Stop. Right. There.

You just conceded that Property Tax Payor's interest is the promotion of general mobility (because it increases the access afforded by their location, location, location)

These Payors want/need the most mobility for their public-street-buck, even when they don't have a particular stake in any particular vehicle or particular trip. They want maximum economic activity per lane-mile-hour, and they want all the activity buzzing around their property to raise its value. Foot traffic for retail, easy commutes for offices, easy movement of freight for commercial/industrial. The property owner has an interest in MOBILITY which is NOT an interest in car-movement. In fact, general mobility is often diametrically opposed to cars. Sure, in Lexington mobility==cars, but elsewhere cars==congestion. Because they so freely "move in" and we don't have congestion pricing, they're really good at converting a public good (road space) for their personal use/enjoyment in a way that other modes don't.

people in cars squat on/privatize a whole lot of square feet of "public" (property-tax funded) asphalt (even when parked), and even more square feet maintaining a 1-SOV-behind-another "safe following distance" and do so for many lane-mile-hours, often at prime times of day, all to facilitate just one fairly-low-value trip.

Instead of facilitating economic transactions, cars congest it and bog it down to benefit just a few drivers (compared to how many people's packages can ride on a UPS truck or how many can fit on a bus or trolley).

Property-tax-payers (particularly in MBTA Zone 1A) need/want to be promoting general mobility with their money, not car mobility. Car mobility turns too much of the generally available good of the public street into a big expensive bubble for just one car which then pounds away until the potholes happen.

Property Tax Payors get the most for their streets when mobility per lane-mile-hour and activity-per-ashpalt-wear is maximized something like this:

QED: Subsidizing transit (and complete streets) is the more cost-effective way for property owners to maximize the mobility that serves their property; yielding superior returns compared to encouraging/subsidizing/underpricing/letting cars congest up those streets, scare off the foot traffic, bog down uber/taxi/tourists, and bog down their packages/deliveries/freight.

 

[Arlington]

So you see where this is going? Here's whom I think should pay and how to give them the right incentives.

1) Land Tax (on the value of underlying parcels, not on structures, so as to encourage dense & new construction on such land) on parcels within 1000 feet of Commuter (Zone 1A, 1, & 2), Subway, or Silver Line, and second tier for those between 1000 and 2000 feet of Subway.

2) Congestion Charge, for any trip entering "the core"
North Boundary: Grand Junction (Mass Ave to North Station)
West Boundary: Mass Ave (GJ to SW Linear Park
South Boundary S and SW Linear Park + I-90 as far as the TWT
Northeast Boundary: Water's edge from TWT to North Point

Spend it all on mobility to, around, and through the core.

 

[Coyote137]

Parking spaces are very expensive to build, especially when it comes to garages. Much of this space is unused for large portions of a day - for example, at malls or big box stores.

The prices of the products sold in the commercial establishments using that parking reflect the cost of building and maintaining those parking spaces. However you arrived at a given location, you pay for the parking.

Secondly, the biggest reason roads and highways are used to the degree that they are is that driving has been given the VAST majority of government subsidies with regard to transportation over the last several decades. The auto share of public funding is probably more than 95% of all transportation funding when added up since the 50s.

This has made driving the default. Moreover, government subsidies to home ownership in the suburbs only further underwrote the auto lifestyle. Had those subsidies not existed, the share of people living in dense, urban cores would be much higher, and the demand for transit/ped/bike infrastructure would be much higher.

It's like telling someone to eat vegetables, and then subsidizing candy bars and soda. If driving has been made much more convenient because of tax dollars (and it has), then people will drive.

If the same exact share of money that's been spent on roads/highways over the last several decades had been spent on trains and buses, guess which one more people would be using these days. And I'm not saying it should have been that way necessarily, but just entertain the thought for a second.

And the statement that "everyone" benefits from roads while "not everyone" benefits from transit is absurd. Millions of people get to work via transit, including to the very industries and jobs that power our economy. Kendall Sq.'s stop on the Red Line is enough evidence of this by itself, but you could also visit a few others.

Moreover, anyone on the train is not driving - and therefore is not adding to congestion for motorists commuting to work, as well as all those other vehicles mentioned like ambulances, delivery trucks, etc. Arlington's gif make this point very well.

In short, had apartments/condos in city centers and subways/HSR/BRT/bike lanes been subsidized like suburban homes and highways have, we'd have a very different pattern of living right now. And statements about how auto infrastructure therefore provides "access" to needs would be incorrect.

Your precious roads were built by a marginal tax rate of 90% on the very wealthy during the mid-20th century. Those interstates that Eisenhower dropped out there were the very definition of big government. It was INCOME TRANSFER, which is apparently a bad thing.

 

[Coyote137]

A little history goes a long way. The suburbs - housing tracts, highways, the auto industry, the whole lot of it - was one big effort to stave off a 2nd Great Depression from settling in after the war was over.

How will we avert a crisis? We'll build houses out in the middle of nowhere, then build roads to get to those houses, then build cars to drive those roads, and then there's the rubber and oil and so on needed to maintain those cars.

All underwritten by massive marginal tax rates on the wealthy, effectively taking money from the upper 1% so that the average person (likely a veteran and his family) could buy a (modest) home on Long Island.

If you're so against income transfer, better hop in a time machine. The landscape in which we live was created by it.

 

[Coyote137]

I would reorganize and restructure the system and bring in analysts to help out.

Donald Trump, is that you?

 

[Coyote137]

So you see where this is going? Here's whom I think should pay and how to give them the right incentives.

1) Land Tax (on the value of underlying parcels, not on structures, so as to encourage dense & new construction on such land) on parcels within 1000 feet of Commuter (Zone 1A, 1, & 2), Subway, or Silver Line, and second tier for those between 1000 and 2000 feet of Subway.

2) Congestion Charge, for any trip entering "the core"
North Boundary: Grand Junction (Mass Ave to North Station)
West Boundary: Mass Ave (GJ to SW Linear Park
South Boundary S and SW Linear Park + I-90 as far as the TWT
Northeast Boundary: Water's edge from TWT to North Point

Spend it all on mobility to, around, and through the core.

Hard to see a congestion charge being implemented in Boston, but another disaster of a winter just might do it. Traditionally, there would be very little constituency to argue forcefully in favor, while there would be a very angry/active constituency to fight against it. Hence why it has so rarely worked out. London is an exception, of course, but also a different context/environment.

 

[Arlington]

Hard to see a congestion charge being implemented in Boston, but another disaster of a winter just might do it. Traditionally, there would be very little constituency to argue forcefully in favor, while there would be a very angry/active constituency to fight against it.

I can't disagree with any of this, except to say that unless something changes, nothing changes.

Hence why it has so rarely worked out.

Congestion charges are kind of a "crisis" thing, it is true, but it is truer to say that they've been rarely implemented, not that they rarely work out.

You need the right mix of "rich city", a population rich-enough for cars, and a history of pro-car development that has choked on traffic, so you end up with a short list like London, Stockholm, Singapore, & Milan. We also have a
"training wheels" version in dynamic pricing of HOT lanes/bypasses in San Diego, LA, Northern Virginia and several in Maryland.

In Paris (and a number of peer cities in Continental Europe) planning is already so freakishly pro-transit (by our standards) and gas is so heavily taxed that they don't really have a core that suffers from cars in quite the same way we do in the USA.

London is an exception, of course, but also a different context/environment.

Except that London is really enough like NYC and BOS and DC, both in its political culture and geography that a congestion charge could be the same success here if only somebody had the courage to try it.

Somewhere between Charlie Baker, Bill Weld, Stephanie Pollack, and Mike Dukakis, they have to know that a congestion charge is, in fact, a "sin tax" a tax on a bad thing (gridlock) that we want to see less of that can be used to fund the mobility that we want to see more of. London's system has basically no losers and I'd expect that to be repeated here. It is like "Romneycare" in that Republicans can claim it as a smart, market-driven and personal-choice driven solution and Democrats can claim it as a progressive win.

 

[TallIsGood]

Arlington, your GIF is a little misleading as you assume the trolly is fully occupied, but the cards are have only one passenger. Cars are frequently occupied by more than one person and trolleys frequently occupied by less than 100% occupancy. So its not as bad as that makes it seem. I understand the main point, though.

 

[George_Apley]

Arlington, your GIF is a little misleading as you assume the trolly is fully occupied, but the cards are have only one passenger. Cars are frequently occupied by more than one person and trolleys frequently occupied by less than 100% occupancy. So its not as bad as that makes it seem. I understand the main point, though.

If we're talking rush hour that trolley is well over-capacity and most cars still have just one occupant.

 

[CantabAmager]

Arlington, your GIF is a little misleading as you assume the trolly is fully occupied, but the cards are have only one passenger. Cars are frequently occupied by more than one person and trolleys frequently occupied by less than 100% occupancy. So its not as bad as that makes it seem. I understand the main point, though.

According to AASHTO's CTPP profiles: 84% of drivers who drove to their workplace in Boston, did so alone. 13% did so in a 2-person carpool, 3% in a three person.

I think the GIF definitely leans heavily towards to "as bad as it seems" end of things.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

I think I read something somewhere claiming that congestion charges only help to reduce congestion if commuters believe they have a reasonable alternative to the SOV. We might need a significant increase in bus service to go along with any congestion charges. (Conversely, the right increases in bus service might reduce congestion even without congestion charges.)

Collecting any sort of user fees for transportation at all can also be pretty inefficient. Look at all the surface Green Line POP vs front door only boarding vs installing CharlieCard readers at all doors debate, or the concerns about whether commuter rail fares are getting collected; if we could move MBTA funding from fares to income taxes, we could avoid a lot of these problems and save a bunch of fare collection labor costs, while making transit more attractive relative to driving in both cost, and on the Green Line in speed. Is the push to keep income taxes low coming from people who are so rich that they never spend time stuck in traffic because they go everywhere by helicopter or something?

 

[Arlington]

According to AASHTO's CTPP profiles: 84% of drivers who drove to their workplace in Boston, did so alone. 13% did so in a 2-person carpool, 3% in a three person.

I think the GIF definitely leans heavily towards to "as bad as it seems" end of things.

The GIF has something like 50 cars. If you let the cars reduce their footprint by carpooling, you'd add an intermediate frame with
42 SOVs
3 2OVs (6 people, a savings of 3 cars)
1 3OVs (3 people, a savings of 2 cars)
======
45 Cars (with rounding)...at most a 10% savings. So at its most inaccurate, the picture is ~90% correct, which is as good as six sigma as far as this forum goes. ;-)

Or keep the number of cars and simply turn the ~10 non-drivers in all the putative carpools into standees on the streetcar, and the picture is restored to 100% correct (and is a fair depiction of many rush-hour vehicles).

For the record, the image is from Toronto.

 

[Arlington]

I think I read something somewhere claiming that congestion charges only help to reduce congestion if commuters believe they have a reasonable alternative to the SOV.

Given that Boston already has a very high walk/transit/bike share, and unusually pervasive CR coverage, we're about as ready as any city can be (along with DC and NYC). People know the T is there, and the collateral idea is that 100% of congestion-charge revenues get poured into making the alternatives even more reasonable.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

congestion charges and improving transit

During rush hour, there are still plenty of bus routes that don't have 15 minute or better headways, or that do have better than 15 minute headways but tend to have overcrowding. I think if we were really ready to get people out of SOVs we'd have been adding bus service to keep up with increasing demand (and the disconnect between the GreenDOT mode shift goals and the non-change in quantity of buses in the MBTA fleet is crazy), but I do agree that spending 100% of congestion charge revenue (minus any overhead) on improving transit service would be the right way to make a congestion charge work.

(Also, improving commuter rail service frequency and getting north side commuters further into Boston somehow would be useful.)

 

[Matthew]

I feel that Boston has less bus service density roaming the streets compared to places like Chicago or NY. Part of it is the BERy-designed hub-and-spoke structure of the network. But still -- despite the extensive subway infrastructure in NY and Chicago, there is still a thick network of buses laid on top of that, and they run frequently. Also both remnants of disassembled streetcar networks.

I can't really say if Boston of 1940 had a similar density of service provided by streetcars, and lost it, or if this is something more fundamental. The street network seems to make things difficult because only the main roads are really usable by buses and they follow the old intercity / square-to-square routes.

And if Boston did get serious about surface transit (which I think they should, since it's probably the only thing we can reasonably do in the near future), they'd still need more space to store and maintain buses.

Right now we have a perverse situation where a bus rider pays more (and rising) for a single bus ride than a driver pays in tolls to use the highway (free or cheap). Express bus fares are $3.65 and $5.25 for inner and outer zones. That ought to be flipped around, to start.