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I agree with this. You can allocate a small fraction of the budget to beefing up amenities, but they should always be a distant second to the fundamentals.

Gosh, you sure have made an excellent point there.

I agree with Arlington. Taxes are part of prices. Prices are an inescapable arbiter of supply and demand. Thus all taxes influence behavior. That is so crystal clear to me, I have a hard time even thinking up a scenario where taxes aren’t either deliberately made unavoidable or used to influence...

I thought we were talking about changing how taxes were collected, not how much was collected, but I’ll second the above comments that there is nothing wrong with the occasional surplus. If you never have a surplus it means you always have a deficit. That will probably work fine for the federal...

I think a round number like $0.01 is arbitrary and would be difficult to change. The correct amount may not be a round number of cents, and it might be better psychologically if it isn’t. I suspect the right number is much higher than $0.01. I also think you can do a lot to mitigate the...

I don’t see the ridership potential. There just aren’t very many people living in those places.

What happened to extending the 70 to Kendall?? Grrrr.

I strongly disagree. Building more /denser housing is objectively cheaper and faster than building more transit. I can't even fathom how you could conclude that the opposite is true. That isn't to say we should ignore extending transit, but that only works in conjunction with densifying the...

I’m not familiar with the track configuration at Back Bay. Could you turn/reverse a shuttle there? Could it be a cross-platform transfer? And what kind of frequency can you squeeze out of it? I think this complements GL-Transitway, it’s not redundant.

I agree. I predict these plazas will be underutilized unless the ground floor programing really brings the A-game. This has potential to be a mini city hall plaza redux (with a smaller plaza and a much nicer centerpiece).

The Franklin St. stop seems particularly bizarre. That would make much more sense closer to State, with the shuttles traveling on Atlantic and Pearl (2 turns) instead of the zigzag (4 turn) route.

tmac is right that the world is a shitty place and George is right that we should speak out on the things we want to speak out on. None of us are perfectly consistent, but if anyone is worried about being a hypocrite, they are worried about the wrong thing. Point out injustices when you can...

Granted, a tax deduction mitigates some of the pain of a loss, but it doesn't wipe it all away. In any case, I'm not sure there is a tax deduction for failing to collect rent on your property. If you could explain the deduction you are speaking of, I would be interested to learn. I'm...

I’m not sure you’ve described any market distortions there. It’s an unfortunate outcome, but the landlords aren’t being subsidized for the vacant properties by anyone. They are taking real losses today, betting on the future. I would argue that new tax policies could be effective at CREATING a...

It looks quite good in person, IMO.

Why Congress and not Summer? I believe Routes 4, 7, and several shuttles currently use Summer and none use Congress. I'm not sure either street would need to remove all passenger vehicles to provide an effective bus lane.

Not really. The landlord brought the capital and took the financial risk. You may characterize that as not lifting a finger, but if you had the millions of dollars to invest in something, you'd be looking for ROI too. That IS capitalism. You may not like it, but you don't get to rename it.

I think you are broadening my point, not refuting it. Union and Washington Street both have or could have had room for more bus accomodations, but they didn't bother to utilize them. They should be the terminals for routes that are primarily GL feeders, not Lechmere. They doubled down on...

But that demand is pointed south to Kendall, not up McGrath. I see EZride and shuttles at the North First Street bus stop, not on the loop oriented west/northwest.

I only meant truncate, not eliminate the routes entirely. I think the entirety of Somerville and East Cambridge needs a bus re-plan following GLX. I'll grant that bus service between Union and Twin City Plaza is fairly high-value, but commuters will be switching to GL as soon as possible an not...