The MBTA Poses a Problem for Mass Competitiveness: Single Occupancy Vehicle Traffic in Kendall Up 25% Since Pre-Pandemic
bostonglobe.com/2023/11/10/business/mbta-kend...
bostonglobe.comPosted Nov 10, 2023, 8:52 PM UTC
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bostonglobe.comThe T, though always obviously inadequate for a metro area this size, was none the less one of the best things about living here compared to other US cities.
The emphasis being on the "was"; its now so decrepit that that even for trips with short walks on the end, its is some how even slower than driving in our horrific traffic. And yes, of course this has a strangling effect on our economy.
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We all know the T has gotten worse, but we also all know it's because of years of neglect. The question is, are we going to do anything to fix it? I think it's easy to stand here and complain, whereas the people who are working there now (and inherited a broken system) are doing constant damage control and have no money or freedom to do anything else. The real answer is to change laws so they don't have to give every contract to the lowest bidder who never delivers on their promises (like CRRC)
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Closing some of the wage fraud loopholes would probably help, too. Not that that's the primary reason the MBTA is broken, but it is certainly one of them. And, most importantly, it is a loophole that helps lay the foundation for a fundamental culture of corruption within the organization. This culture is the primary reason why the MBTA is so broken.
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This article uses 2022 as a reference point, but the T (and the Red Line in particular) has been spiraling since 2015. I grew up in Boston/Cambridge and went 40 years without a car — got to school, work, etc, just fine on the train. Everything fell apart after the big snowstorms, and every disruption just got bigger and bigger since then.
Of course people are driving more. You can’t reliably support yourself, much less a family, if you count on the T. Traffic sucks, but the train sucks much harder.
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People still don't want to talk about covid but I think people are still making choices to reduce their exposure even if they don't admit it or even really realize it.
The ride is really slow and makes it competitive with circling around for parking.
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lol, no. Not everything is about Covid in 2023.
Yeesh.
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This is a fundamentally false headline. According to the actual report, single occupancy trips are DOWN from pre-pandemic. The share of car trips that are solo has gone up a bit (9 percentage points since 2018), but the total number of car trips is down 23%. This means the total number of single occupant vehicle trips is DOWN 7.5%.
As usual, I apologize to the readers of this subreddit for bringing facts to the table even though they don't align with our very sensitive feelings.
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People rather use their cars than public transit. That will never change. And there is nothing wrong with that.
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There is absolutely something wrong with that... There isn't enough room for everyone to have a car on the roads. We don't charge tolls for local roads... the traffic will become so bad that it will reach parity with the T travel times. It is called the Downs-Thompson Paradox
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There's also nowhere near enough room to accommodate parking of all these vehicles. We're only lucky a lot of this is likely ride share and gig economy stuff. If residents, visitors and office workers all actually tried to park a car in the City, we'd need multiple parking garages to accommodate that. Which would cripple efforts to add new housing density to try and address the housing crisis.
Parking also limits the ability to add new transit infrastructure like bike & bus lanes.
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If new development were required to provide suitable off-street parking for the building residents and occupants, we could convert the street spaces into bike lanes.
At the same time, requiring new development to provide suitable safe & secure bike parking would encourage more cyclists.
When Our Heavenly Cyclists make vague mentions to their Cyclist Utopia du Jour, they nearly always point to areas where those considerations are in place.
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If new development were required to provide suitable off-street parking for the building residents and occupants, we could convert the street spaces into bike lanes.
This is known as "parking minimums" which are overall known to be bad for affordable housing. Cambridge recently eliminated this for a reason:
Parking minimums are a type of urban regulation that require developers to provide a predetermined number of parking spaces for a certain number of residential units or a given developed square footage. These mandates centralize decision making and impose uniformity, rather than leaving parking decisions to developers or property owners who are likely to understand the needs of residents and appreciate how these needs vary across geography and over time.
As such, parking mandates are a great example of an urban regulation that reduces efficiency and unnecessarily increases costs. Parking mandates also compel vehicle‐centric transit in what is—or would otherwise be—urban areas. Because land is expensive, especially in urban and development constrained areas, the costs of parking mandates can be substantial.
At the same time, requiring new development to provide suitable safe & secure bike parking would encourage more cyclists.
This is true. And this is something we should do. We don't need to encourage more drivers though. And bicycle parking is significantly cheaper. It can be as cheap as some basic bike racks stuck in the ground. It can be fancier with covered and/or locked parking (think the T's bike & ride station locks). It can be even fancier with basement/garage style bike rooms. This could be next to a small underground covered parking lot (but not so large as to make everyone think they can own a car, and separately charged from the cost of the unit in the case of apartments).
When Our Heavenly Cyclists make vague mentions to their Cyclist Utopia du Jour, they nearly always point to areas where those considerations are in place.
No, parking minimums are mainly a US thing. Notice the Wiki page I linked to actually talks about parking maximums which are a thing in Europe, where most "Saint Cyclists" actually point to for examples of good infrastructure and urban policies:
In Europe, parking maximums are more common. As a condition of planning permission for a new development, the development must be designed so that a minimum percentage of visitors arrive by public transport. The number of parking places in the development is limited to a number less than the expected number of visitors.[20]
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Just worry about yourself and let others worry about themselves. If "traffic will become so bad that it will reach parity with the T travel times", just take transit and you have nothing to worry about.
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Tell me you’ve never traveled to Europe or Asia without telling me you’ve never traveled to Europe or Asia
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I absolutely prefer taking (good) public transit over driving through a city, especially Boston with its shitty traffic
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People will use whatever is most convenient.
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Not what Reddit demographic wants to hear, even if it is true that cars are faster and more comfortable.
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The red line has like 15 minutes headways and moves at 3mph between harvard and kendall. A trip from Porter to Kendall that used to be like 10 minutes is now 20. This is incredibly unsurprising