A letter to Gov. Baker
Your new proposal on transportation to alleviate traffic in the Boston area is absurd. Charging people to use an express lane has a 0% chance of easing traffic and a 100% chance of creating revenue for the state. The idea that you would charge people to use an express lane does nothing to solve the root cause of the problem — there isn’t enough roadway to accommodate the number of cars in the Boston area. Simply charging people to use the roads that are already there without reducing the number of vehicles on the roads does not solve the fundamental problem. You are not creating any ways to reduce traffic with this proposal, yet you are increasing the burden on the taxpayer. That seems to be the fundamental mission of Massachusetts. Raising the cost of living in Boston is not the answer.
If you want to look to a great example of how your proposal is going to fail, simply look at TSA PreCheck. Originally, the idea was to charge a certain number of passengers to get advanced screening and expedite their way through security lines. If you’ve flown in the past few years, you can see that the only thing that’s happened is that people with means have bought their way into TSA PreCheck and now TSA PreCheck is just as crowded as the other lanes. What happens is you’re distributing traffic over the same number of lanes, only to funnel back into the same amount of space. That doesn’t do anything to ease traffic, especially when traffic is so bad in the Greater Boston area. The difference between air travel and road travel is that people can back off on the amount of air travel they take, whereas driving into the city for work is not an option. Not to mention, once people pass through airport security, they disperse to a greater number of gates than security checkpoints. That’s not how driving in the city works: same number of streets, same number of exits, too many cars = congested traffic for miles regardless of whether the elite have paid extra for a “fast lane” that isn’t actually fast.
You’ve failed to provide good public transportation for most people in most suburbs of Boston. I live in Medford and my options for getting into the city are terrible, costing a lot of money and taking two to three times the amount of time it would if I were to drive on a non-work day, and taking the exact same amount of time it would to drive into the city at rush hour. In other words, I have no good choices to get from Medford, which is a mere six miles from the city, into Boston.
Please explain to me how charging more to get into the city reduces the amount of time it takes me to get into the city. Please explain to me how charging people to get into the city reduces the number of cars on the road. The answer is public transportation. The answer is expanding our highways. You have failed to do any of those things and it’s hurting the Boston area. Do not think that charging people more is going to be a Band-Aid for a big problem that you’re refusing to address at the core. But congrats on increasing the amount of money you generate for Massachusetts.
Katherine Teitler
Medford