AS WE BEGIN a new year filled with policy challenges facing Massachusetts, transportation looms as the big issue that we most desperately need to address and get right. At the state level, 2025 presents a generational opportunity to reverse the failed policies of the past that have left us with the unacceptable status quo of chronic traffic congestion, substandard sustainable access to key regional destinations, degraded air quality, and poor land use.
Three transportation topics ought to be top of mind – and action – in Massachusetts this year: system revenue, system electrification, and transit adaptation.
System Revenue
First and foremost on the 2025 transportation agenda will be the topic of revenue. This is no one’s favorite topic, but none of the values we tell ourselves that we share in the Commonwealth can be met or sustained without a transportation system that functions in a way that is significantly different from the one we experience today.
I distilled my thinking on transportation revenue in a three-part series last year in Commonwealth Beacon that you can here, here, and here.
In brief, Massachusetts faces a short-term funding crisis at the MBTA and a longer-term funding crisis for the entire transportation system. The longer-term crisis is largely a function of a gradually depleting gas tax, the result of the gradual transition to electric vehicles and the gradual loss of purchasing power of a tax that is not adjusted for inflation.
The short-term crisis, which hits in six months, relates to the severe loss of transit fare revenue as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the somewhat slow recovery of ridership since. MBTA ridership has remained around 65 percent of pre-pandemic levels, and those numbers appear to have plateaued, especially on the subway system, a consequence of changed journey needs, poor service quality, and 2024’s long-term shutdowns of subway lines.
Before the pandemic, fares accounted for a third of the T’s operating budget (this was also the national norm). Today, this figure – known as the fare recovery level – is significantly less than that. Thanks to federal Covid relief funding that was provided by a Democratic Congress and that now is being depleted, transit agencies have avoided the fiscal day of reckoning.
That federal support is now gone. As a result, the T’s operating budget, which pays salaries, the costs of the paratransit RIDE, debt service, and the costs of the commuter rail operating contract, is about to be hit hard by a massive shortfall.
What is needed is not a one-time fix but a long-term solution that (1) sets an aspirational fare recovery target at 20 percent (not 30 percent or 40 percent levels); (2) stabilizes and amply funds T operating budgets for the long term, and (3) relieves the T of the costs of paratransit services (freeing up about $140 million every year). Making this happen may require a bridge funding mechanism anchored by Fair Share (millionaires tax) revenues, which gradually transitions to one that is funded in part by new dedicated revenue support from road pricing. Road pricing can mean any approach to charging a fee for use of a road, from conventional tolls to pricing according to time of day or road conditions, or by how many miles someone travels in a given period.
The advocacy group Transit is Essential recently published a thoughtful report on transportation funding that ought to inform the legislative solution.
Funding need not be confined to state sources. Our cities and towns are in the forefront of efforts to improve sustainable mobility. They are introducing dedicated bus lanes, dedicated and protected bike lanes, and supporting important post-pandemic changes to the urban streetscape that make it safer for everyone. These efforts are largely taking place without state or federal financial support.
It is past time that Massachusetts set aside the archaic constitutional restrictions on municipal power, and empower cities and towns to raise revenue at the local level to advance these important initiatives. This could happen via state constitutional amendment, or by a broad statutory exemption to home rule restrictions, including enactment of legislation to allow cities and towns to pursue local-option taxes through regional ballot initiatives.
System Electrification
Massachusetts, like many other states, has placed a large bet on the transition to electrified transport as the primary thrust of its plan to decarbonize the transportation system. While there’s no question that replacing internal combustion engines with electric vehicles will significantly reduce tailpipe carbon emissions, the transition is not happening quickly. For a variety of reasons, most notably the lack of an adequate public charging network and the challenges of deploying urban charging systems at scale, the transition to EVs is taking a lot longer than many had predicted.
At the same time, misguided mandates requiring the T to rapidly transition its bus fleet to battery electric buses (compounded by the T’s abandonment of trolley electric buses) have placed significant fiscal and operational pressures on the system at a time when it needs to focus on service quality and workforce capacity.
Transit agencies across the country are facing the same issue. Because federal funds cannot be used to purchase electric buses that have any components made in China (where many of the world’s least expensive and best electric buses and electric bus components are made), the T has been placed into a monopoly marketplace, which will, by definition, not provide best value or best quality.
If the Legislature does not revisit and amend its electric bus mandate, it will be forcing the T to make a significant investment in an immature technology at the wrong time.
If Massachusetts wants to pursue a transportation policy that is designed to reduce harmful carbon and particulate matter emissions, it should devote more resources to getting more people to travel in fewer vehicles – in other words, getting more drivers to choose a form of public transportation. Forcing the T to move quickly toward an electric bus fleet, under the current circumstances I have just described, does little to nothing to advance emissions reductions at a meaningful scale, and does real harm to the agency as the monopoly marketplace US transit agencies find themselves in right now and for the foreseeable future will not provide value for money.
Transit agencies across the country are trying to navigate this issue. My bottom line: Forcing the T to transition to electric buses on an accelerated basis in the current environment is simply performative, with the costs significantly outweighing the benefits. We need time for the technology to mature and for the marketplace to improve so we are not forced to make unwise and expensive purchasing decisions in a monopoly marketplace.
Transit Adaptation
The pandemic disrupted and then changed many aspects of our lives, notably how and when we work. Those who are privileged to work in jobs that are not tied to shifts or that do not require their physical presence can work remotely for some or all of their working hours.
Remote work, to some significant degree, is probably here to stay, and this has meant changes to journey patterns (spatial and temporal). Those changed journey patterns are made manifest, in part, by new patterns of traffic congestion that are extended through more hours of the day, and by new patterns of transit use with less sharp peaks during traditional morning and evening “rush hours” and that are higher than the pre-pandemic norm on weekends.
Transit agencies like the MBTA need to adapt to these changes by delivering service more frequently and more flexibly. On the subway system, the T should be running much higher frequencies (3-5 minute headways) using shorter train sets. Similarly, the inner core intercity rail network should adopt frequencies that mimic high-quality subway service.
On the bus system, experimenting with more flexible service on certain routes (forms of service with diversions to designated off-route mobility hubs, or on-demand services offered in partnership with third-party providers) would help transform the way people experience bus transit. Taken together, these kinds of changes to service delivery will help the system adapt from its still-operative 20th century model of bringing urban commuters to work in urban settings, into a 21st century system that responds to the journey patterns and needs of our times.
These topics are certainly not the only ones we need to be thinking about as we try to advance a more sustainable, efficient, and reliable transportation system. But they are, for me, among those that are (or ought to be) in the forefront of our transportation conversations and decisions in 2025.
Transforming our approach to transportation funding, and providing the MBTA with a revenue solution that ensures stable, ample funding in the long term, is the most urgent topic, and frankly, there’s not a lot of time to avoid dealing with this under the pressure of a crisis situation.
James Aloisi is a former Massachusetts secretary of transportation.
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