The Senate revived its push to increase fees on ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft in its fiscal year 2022 budget bill, and with roadway congestion starting to return in force, transportation reform activists are hopeful the House will join their colleagues from across the hall.
The growth of rideshare trips taken in Massachusetts decelerated in 2019, but the roughly 91.1 million trips taken with services like Lyft and Uber generated more than $18.2 million in assessment fees for the state and local governments.
Gov. Charlie Baker won praise from Democratic lawmakers for targeting ride-hailing companies as a source for new MBTA funding, but the idea riled the services themselves.
A day after blaming ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft for clogging roads and operating with “little oversight,” Gov. Charlie Baker is proposing to hike the per-ride fees on such services by 80 cents and to use much of the new funding to help the MBTA.
Boston is expanding a program that forces drivers for ride-hailing apps to pick up and drop off fares in specific spots instead of double-parking and clogging traffic after initial results showed success.
The city of Boston used money it received from assessments on the roughly 35 million ride-for-hire trips that originated in the city in 2017 to rebuild miles of sidewalk, restore lane markings, redesign key intersections and add bike share stations.
While TNCs are now an established part of our transportation ecosystem, we need to focus on influencing their role in being ultimately a contributor to enhanced shared mobility, congestion relief and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The MBTA went without $23 million last year in potential fare revenue from riders who decamped from the ailing public transit network for ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft, according to a new report that also put a big estimate on the net carbon footprint of the companies.
