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No fast lane for congestion pricing for drivers heading into Boston
By adamg on Fri, 07/12/2024 - 10:17am
A proposal to begin charging drivers a fee to come into downtown Boston will remain in committee as its sponsors consider what are turning out to be some possibly complex issues.
The City Council had a chance Wednesday to vote on a measure to advance the idea of congestion pricing - in which drivers coming into a particular area would be charged a fee, via a turnpike-like transponder - but agreed with a request by Councilor Tania Fernandes Anderson (Roxbury) to keep the measure in committee.
Fernandes Anderson said that among the issues that would need more scrutiny are how to keep the measure from harming the city's low-income residents and small businesses. Also, any such measure would likely need cooperation with nearby communities and approval from the state, she said. Unlike Manhattan, which is an island with a relatively small number of bridges and tunnels to be equipped with transponder readers, Boston's roads are linked all over the place with surrounding communities, from which motorists might be tempted to use side streets to evade city tolling.
Fernandes Anderson first proposed the idea in February, back when New York City and state were pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a system to charge motorists $15 to drive into midtown and lower Manhattan. The state's governor then canceled the system last month, 25 days before it was scheduled to be turned on.
In her original proposal, Fernandes Anderson said Boston needed to do something similar in part because Boston is "a popular destination and tourist site, as well as a place where vast numbers of vehicles enter into the City, at times negatively impacting the quality of life of Boston residents." But also, motorists are increasingly getting sucked into gridlock due to the growing numbers of bus and bike lanes, she wrote then.
A set fee placed on drivers of various vehicles could bring money and resources toward other elements of the community, reduce traffic, increase transit use and improve air quality, creating environmentally and eco-friendly solutions, as well as functioning as a tangible solution for those feeling preyed upon and thinking
that the city is not hearing their feedback.
Free tagging:
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
 Complete congestion-pricing proposal | 140.5 KB |
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Comments
And then there's Logan
The other huge challenge for Boston, unlike other metros, is that its principal international airport is very proximate to Boston's densest ganglion of most-used highways and surface arteries. Heathrow is many miles from the core of London. LGA, JFK, & EWR are likewise miles away from the lower half of Manhattan Island. (San Diego is the only other metro in the Lower 48 whose major airport is as close to its downtown as Boston. It's usually a feature, but in the matter of congestion pricing, it becomes a bug.)
This is a reasonably solvable problem
Since you'd just put up readers on the exits from 93 and the Turnpike into whatever would be considered the congestion zone. Ditto for Storrow since the NYC system would exempt travel on the FDR and West Side Highway. The bigger mess is that there are a LOT of surface streets with access into the center of Boston, and there are a LOT of residents in the city center who will SQUAWK if they're expected to cough up a congestion fee every time they want to use their cars.
Is anyone surprised?
A terrible idea that sounds good, but logistically will never work in a city like Boston.
I've said this before …
… will say it again …
Boston is the only major city without a tax on parking.
Chicago 32-40%
San Francisco 25%
Philadelphia 22.5%
NYC 18.375% (10.375% for residential parking)
DC 18%
Seattle 17.5%
Miami 15%
Boston 0%
Boston has 60,000 downtown parking spaces which cost $20-$40 per day, so ~$400 million of annual revenue. Some of this is public (MCCA owns the Common garage, for example) but most owned by private companies, so lets say $300m in private parking revenue.
A 20% tax on this would generate at least $60 million for the city.
And it works as congestion pricing, too! Some of the tax would be absorbed by the parking lot owners, and some would be passed along to drivers. The most expensive pricing is often located with the most congestion (demand = congestion) so driving up prices there encourages people to go elsewhere. It's not perfect (people can still take Uber/Lyft, get dropped off, troll for street parking, etc) but sort of does the same thing congestion pricing does: imposes a cost in coming to the most congested areas at the most congested times and generates revenue.
I think it would take a state law change to allow the City to do this, but it's something worth looking into. (Cambridge and Somerville, and maybe a couple other cities to a very small extent, would also be beneficiaries).
Magoo sez
Magoo consider congestion pricing as the cost of tissues when Magoo has a stuffy nose. Magoo hates having a stuffy nose and thinks that it is just the worst! It makes Magoo’s voice sound super silly. Magoo.
BLAME THOSE BUS & BIKE LANES
LOL then ride a bike, walk, or take the T to avoid traffic.
Then again, cars just use the bike and bus lanes because there's virtually no enforcement so wtf is she talking about.
That comment reads like all the comments under the Globe's instagram post about this. "but bus and bike lanes are causing it".
JFC people wake up and smell the Sanka. Maybe the issue is your big ass SUV is taking up as much space as two compact cars. So many SUV's on the road now.. so much wasted space on CARS.
That struck me as well
Partner and I are currently car people. Partner hates 93 (coming home from a job in the suburbs), prefers surface roads and the major route they take includes Tremont St thru the South End.
Since they put in the separated parking/bike lanes and where it is primarily one lane each way, partner says the ride thru the area is smoother and faster than it was before. No more double parking so other drivers aren't swerving in and out of lanes ... enjoys the drive even more now. And it's safer for all users: foot traffic, 2 wheels and more.
Citing the bus & bike lanes as the reason
Is the usual stupidity we can expect from certain members of the Council. The bus & bike lanes are there because the City chose to build them and reduce the number of traffic lanes. The transit system isn't reliable for getting downtown so what exactly would one expect? The new bike lanes aren't safe, either -- as seen by the number of cyclists dying.