Massachusetts faces a huge question mark about how to fund the future of transportation in the commonwealth. And we need a plan.
A new report from the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation described the challenge as “near insurmountable” given the billions needed every year just to fix the roughly two-thirds of the physical infrastructure previous legislators and governors allowed to rot away at the MBTA, without also thinking about the many expansions necessary to keep our dense state rolling to work and toward a carbon-free future.
Aside from repairing the T, we also need to transform the commuter rail into an all-electric, affordably priced, high-frequency regional train system. Bus service needs to be expanded both within the MBTA’s service area and outside it, so communities from Cape Cod to the Berkshires can stop treating car-lite mobility as something for the poor and get some traffic relief, too. The many minority-heavy neighborhoods this state has starved of quality transportation for generations, like Lynn, Everett or Grove Hall in Dorchester, need to see that historical injustice rectified.
And that’s just a list of the highest-priority projects. It leaves off the very real increases in operations funding the region’s several transit agencies will need to provide this higher level of service and to keep everything in good working order so we don’t get in a hole like this again.
We all know that all Massachusetts risks its tax revenues if Boston-area workers can’t get to their jobs on time, and we all know bulking up mass transit is a core part of hitting our carbon emissions targets.
As we wait for Gov. Maura Healey to file her next budget in January – given legislative custom, likely the first venue for any plans to hit the public eye – it’s clear that everyone is going to be faced with some uncomfortable decisions.
Business groups, by an executive’s natural inclination to put a price on everything, are pushing an expansion of highway tolling – “mobility pricing” in their words, a term broad enough that Gov. Charlie Baker-era calls to hike MBTA fares might conceivably make a comeback. The last time either idea came up, they were panned by liberals who noted both would have outsized impacts on poor and middle-class shift workers, who can’t chose when to drive somewhere and whose budgets are already stretched thin.
Others are doubtless eyeing the larger-than-expected haul from the Millionaire’s Tax as an alternative source of cash. But the wealthy treated their 2022 ballot box loss on the income surtax as a call to arms, and have darkly warned it will drive their peers to move to Miami or Texas.
Even elected officials will have to accept change. Regardless of where the $3 billion or more per year comes from, it’s the height of ignorance to think that much money can be vacuumed up from taxpayers’ pockets without Beacon Hill Democrats becoming permanently more engaged on this topic – and accountable for results.
For 20 years, problems at the agency were left to fester out of sight and out of mind, and the provision of transit generally was allowed to fall far behind where our state’s growth and development needed it to be. We can’t afford to let that happen again.
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