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My point is that there's no rhyme or reason for the current system, which funds all Massachusetts highways through the gas tax except for the Turnpike and then gives Turnpike users an income tax break on all their tolls plus a refund on Massachusetts gas tax paid for gas used to drive on it...

Much of the traffic consists of backups from poorly designed pre-Interstate offramps and interchanges. I'm not claiming there's no congestion due to insufficient roadway capacity - just that there's less congestion than there is on other highways in the area, and that much of the congestion...

Getting back to the original topic of the thread... Without minimizing the problems that others have mentioned, I'd bet the reason Boston has such a high proportion of old housing stock is because other cities have a larger geographical footprint that encompasses outlying areas that were...

Yeah, and you add equipment costs to the administrative costs of enforcement and mailing and see what happens when the system makes mistakes, and you get a self-perpetuating, inefficient, Rube Goldberg machine of insanity. Read my post from yesterday and you'll understand why open road tolling...

So you change the inflation formula to account for fuel economy increases. I have never understood that argument, because you generate the same revenue if the tax is high enough. If people were switching to electric vehicles en masse, that would be a different story.

Indeed, this is the mechanism (along with Ch. 90 grants from MassDOT) through which local town roads are paid for by motorists. It's the only driving-related tax that goes to municipalities.

I've been doing a lot of Pike travel lately for work (vs. virtually none before except occasional airport visits) and I've realized that the Boston Extension roadway itself is, in fact, one of the least congested in the Boston area. The reason for that is simple: the toll booths are far, far...

Hire a person for each commuter rail stop, just to sit there and flip a switch once or twice an hour? Seems like the worst kind of make-work government job you can get.

Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos This report from Atlanta gives a lot more context: http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/marta-board-spends-nearly-150k-business-psychologi/nSXws/ The proper term for this is probably more "management consultant" or "leadership consultant" than...

Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos This could be really bad or not a big deal at all. Was the problem managerial incompetence, a lack of communication, or just a personality clash of some kind between her and someone on the board? Or something else entirely? For such a long article...

Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos Clearly they could find some way to ship it if they wanted to, they're saying they don't want to. It'd probably end up costing more in postage, packaging, and handling costs than it's worth

It's not about wideness. It's about actual, real-world ability to get from here to there. The reason we built interstates was because the pre-interstate at-grade highways were inadequate. Just because two roads are equally as bad from your perspective as a pedestrian doesn't mean they're equally...

Those two quotes aren't mutually exclusive. New space is expensive. Developers aren't going to see a profit if they build retail space no store wants to rent (because no customers would come) and condos where no one who could afford them would buy. The only way land like this would get...

You're making my point for me. People would rather park on the street. Therefore it provides more value. Therefore it should be priced higher to avoid scarcity. It's not about what any particular person feels is reasonable. It's about setting a market rate. That rate should be based neither on...

Why not impose price controls saying the price of all parking in Boston shall be $5 per day, then? We can debate the merits of various supply side constraints all day, but given the supply we have, prices should be set to meet demand. That's the best mechanism we have to avoid scarcity. The...

Not much to add... but thought this would be relevant to the discussion: http://www.salon.com/2011/11/15/america_needs_more_powerful_bureaucrats/ Massachusetts in particular used to have much more powerful bureaucrats... Some of the most influential governors in the last century had been DPW...

Blunt. But completely correct, I think.

That's a big part of it, but the Cambridge road/highway connections are also night and day compared to the SW Corridor's, and the wealthy suburbs in Cambridge are a lot denser/closer/more integrated anyway. Try getting from any bedroom community south/southwest of Boston to any of the Boston...

Have you ever been to Quincy? Marina Bay? Crown Colony? Newport Ave? The South Shore Plaza/Braintree Split area office parks? Quincy Center's comeback would not be happening without the expressway connection via Burgin Parkway. That's not to say the Red Line isn't important for that development...

As far as your numbers are concerned, you just aren't facing reality. Transit expansion is expensive, and generally far more expensive than highways. $14B would certainly not get you "far more than five spokes of trains", assuming those trains were grade separated (as they really would need to...