In which I fix Boston Traffic
One of the frustrating things about getting older is that you start noticing that people are stuck in their ways and unwilling or unable to do the simple things necessary to solve most problems.
“You just don’t understand. It’s complicated,” say people, like, for example, Massachusetts legislators, who know damn well it’s not complicated—they just don’t actually want to do anything.
Let’s take Boston traffic, for example. Right now Boston simply doesn’t work for cars. I’ve recently spent time in Cincinnati and Philadelphia—in both cities you can get around in a car relatively easily. As everyone knows, that’s simply not the case in Boston.
There is only one solution to Boston’s traffic problem: we have to have fewer cars on the road. Duh. Fucking duh.
But because a lot of people inexplicably love to drive, they freak out every time anyone proposes anything to try to get fewer cars on the road.
Sorry if you don’t like it, but there is literally only one solution. You can’t cure traffic congestion by widening roads or building new ones. The only solution is to have fewer cars on the road.
Okay, so how do we get there?
Let people know about the T’s improvements. I get it—when Orange Line trains are catching on fire, it’s newsworthy. When they zip downtown with no slow zones and come at regular intervals, as they’re now doing for the first time in 10+ years, it’s not headline news. But (and credit to the otherwise lackluster Healey administration for getting this done) the T works really well now, and we have an entire generation of Bostonians who have never known fully functional MBTA service. Let ‘em know that we have it! I don’t know how much of Boston traffic is people taking Ubers and Lyfts because they don’t think the T is a reliable way to get anywhere. Even getting those cars off the road will help.
Free public transportation. Free, I say! Just like driving on the roads! Yes, even the commuter rail! Seriously, this is such a freaking no-brainer. All you have to do is look at the evaluations the city has done on the free 23, 28, and 29 buses. Eliminating fares increases ridership. Increased ridership means fewer cars on the road. For buses, it also means faster transit times because they can open all doors and people can board without the slowdown of paying. And faster transit times make buses more efficient. Which helps not only with traffic, but also with the fact that we’re in a freaking climate emergency.
Bus rapid transit wherever possible. For a couple of years I took the 22 bus down Columbus ave from Walnut Street to Prentiss street. The center lane busway from Walnut to Centre made this a viable alternative to taking the train. Even though MBTA train service has improved a lot, there are still large swaths of Boston that are pretty underserved by rail. People who live there deserve decent public transportation too, and center-lane busways are a way to achieve this, especially on big, wide roads like Blue Hill Ave, Columbia Road, Washington Street, and Centre Street. It’s maddening to me that Miniard Culpepper and other Boston City Councilors are advocating against this, like their own constituents don’t deserve decent public transportation.
Separate bike infrastructure. Everybody hates bike lanes. Drivers hate them, and bikers aren’t too crazy about them either, unless they’re significantly separated from traffic. Painting a bike lane on the pavement is a nice reminder to drivers that bikes exist, but these bike lanes still make people feel vulnerable as bigger, heavier cars go past them with no physical barrier, and they’re frequently blocked by delivery vehicles, cop cars, rideshare vehicles, and people double parking “just for a minute.” But let me tell you as someone who bikes on the Southwest Corridor (a paved path completely separated from traffic), it gets used year round. People (not everyone, but a lot of people) like to bike. If you build the infrastructure, they’ll use it.
Now let’s address some common objections:
But what about people with disabilities and mobility challenges! Not everyone can bike or even walk to the bus stop! True! And such people deserve to be able to get around the city in a car. See above—everybody knows Boston currently doesn’t work for cars, and the only solution is fewer cars. But that doesn’t have to mean no cars. The idea is to get people who can bike and use public transportation to favor those options over driving, not to get every single human out of a car.
Think of the emergency vehicles! I am! They currently have a hard time getting through traffic because Boston doesn’t work for car traffic. And the only way to improve this situation is to have fewer cars on the road. Road diets, center lane busways, bike paths and free transit will only help emergency vehicles because they’ll have fewer cars to get around.
Great pie in the sky utopian vision, but how are you gonna pay for it? Just imagine it’s a war, or paying GE to not move their headquarters to Boston. We can find the money. We can always find the money if the will is there. But more specifically, I have two common-sense, transportation-related proposals.
The first is congestion pricing, which has done wonders in New York City. There’s no reason to believe it couldn’t do the same here. Or, failing that, tolls on 93. People who drive into the city on the Pike or Route 1 have long complained that it’s not fair that they have to pay tolls and nobody else does. I completely agree! Tolls for all!
Also, it’s time to close Hanscom field. It’s actually embarrassing that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts operates a whole-ass facility at taxpayer expense so John Fish doesn’t have to fly commercial. We are, as I noted above, in a climate emergency, and it’s nothing short of ridiculous to be subsidizing private aviation at the expense of transportation that 99.99% of people can actually use. Shut this facility down immediately.
These are bold proposals, but they’re not radical. They’re things that have been done elsewhere and proven successful. Here in Boston, we’re in a traffic crisis and a climate crisis, and we desperately need leadership willing to take bold action to actually address these problems. Where is it?