Could Boston Be the Next City to Impose Congestion Pricing?
Now that NYC has voted to roll out the pricing measure, BU alum talks traffic control measures here and elsewhere
Boston traffic consistently ranks among the worst in the nation. Photo via Getty/Boston Globe
Could Boston Be the Next City to Impose Congestion Pricing?
Now that NYC has voted to roll out the pricing measure, BU alum talks traffic control measures here and elsewhere
You’re not imagining it: Boston traffic is worse than almost anywhere else.
Our city consistently ranks among the top three most congested US cities, with some reports estimating that Boston drivers lose anywhere from 130 to 150 hours a year to sitting in traffic. When you add the fact that reckless driving is on the rise across the country and that Boston drivers seem to find limitless ways to be aggressive—the word “Masshole” exists for a reason—it’s clear that our roads are in crisis.
The question is, how do we meaningfully reduce traffic?
New York City just took the final step to implement congestion pricing, or the practice of charging drivers extra on busy roads or during peak travel times. Most cars will be charged $15 a day to enter Lower Manhattan and Midtown. The historic tolls—they make New York the first US city to enact a comprehensive congestion pricing program—are the result of a decades-long campaign to push city-bound drivers into using public transit. According to a study commissioned by New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the pricing measures should lower congestion by about 17 percent and raise a projected $1 billion for public transportation.
Salomón Wollenstein-Betech (ENG’22,’22), who studied transportation infrastructure and traffic patterns at the Boston University Center for Information & Systems Engineering, says the initiative could work here.
“I think there would be a little hesitation,” says Wollenstein-Betech, now a postdoc at Stanford University. Boston’s public transportation system isn’t as extensive as New York’s. “Still, I think Boston is one of the best cities to be next in line for this trend.”
Of course, congestion pricing is just one tool in the arsenal of possible traffic-control measures. Dedicated bus and bike lanes, upping the price of on-street parking, or adding charges to rideshares can all help reduce the number of cars on the road, according to Wollenstein-Betech.
“I’m super in favor of trying to incentivize people not to use cars when they can use an alternative option instead,” he says.
Wollenstein-Betech recently spoke to Bostonia about congestion pricing, commuting, and public transportation.
Q&A
with Salomón Wollenstein-Betech
Bostonia: NYC made history with its vote to implement congestion pricing, joining cities such as London, Stockholm, and Singapore in pushing residents toward public transportation. The question is, how feasible is congestion pricing in Boston?
Wollenstein-Betech: That’s a good question. If we think of a newer city, like Indianapolis, with these big roads [designed] for cars, there’s little public transportation there. But I think as we move towards more walkable, European-like cities, where public transportation works better, it’s easier to implement these types of policies. So, I think Boston is a good candidate, and I think it would work well here. I do think there’ll be some challenges associated with how to ensure more access to public transportation, however.
One other thing that concerns me about Boston is that I’m not sure how the city would delineate the congestion zones. Boston’s downtown is a very small area. If you start increasing the perimeter for congestion zones, you start getting into places that are harder to reach [by alternative methods], like the Seaport or even parts of Fenway.
Bostonia: Outside Boston, what are some general challenges with congestion pricing?
Wollenstein-Betech: The basic idea of congestion pricing is based on an idea that’s been around since the 1920s, called Pigouvian taxes, where the amount you have to pay is based on the amount of harm you create to others. In other words, how much you have to pay to use a road is proportional to how much congestion you create. The more you create traffic, [the more] you increase everyone else’s travel times and lower overall travel speed. So, that effect you have on others is what you have to pay. But that is hard to measure and implement.
There are many mechanisms similar to congestion pricing. I think they’re good. But we have to be careful, because there are these large debates about if they’re regressive or not. If you’re charging the same amount to a person traveling from a worse-off area as you are to a person traveling from an affluent area, then the percentage of the affluent person’s income that you’re charging is less than the percentage of the worse-off person’s income, and [is] therefore a regressive tax. That’s an important discussion. The way to make that ultimately not regressive is if that money gets invested in public transportation that connects lower-income areas to the city and improves their residents’ travel times—or makes public transportation cheaper overall. That not only improves quality of life, but also sort of pays people back.
Bostonia: How do we go about making commuting more sustainable?
If we think like economists about commuting, we need to think: what are our utilities for moving from one place to another? I think there are three main reasons we choose [a specific method of transportation]. One is travel time—if it’s going to take longer or shorter to travel somewhere. The second one is, if there are any associated costs, like gasoline or parking, or a subway ticket or an Uber. The third reason is something more specific about your situation: whether you’re injured and cannot walk or if you are disabled in some way that you require a special car to go somewhere. If we want to change the way people commute and travel—which I think is the only sustainable way forward—then we have to affect at least one of these three things.
I have been exposed to transportation all my academic life—logistics, automated vehicles—and for my PhD, my research focused on how to use current infrastructure in a more efficient way. The only way to do that is to have better public transportation. An ideal city is one in which the travel time on mass transit is always lower than in a private vehicle, because that incentivizes people out of cars. Outside of subways, which can be expensive and difficult to improve, you need more buses and dedicated lanes for buses. Bus lanes are great because they reduce public transportation times and reduce the capacity for cars—a double effect for incentivizing public transportation. The other thing is to increase bike lanes, which Boston has been doing for the past five years.
Bostonia: The MBTA is a bit of a mess right now, to put it lightly. We know the T is working on it, but in the meantime, how do you encourage people to use Boston’s public transportation when it’s still so unreliable?
I think reliability is at the core of transportation, and hence it will be very hard to encourage people to take unreliable transportation. Having said that, I think the straightforward way to encourage people to keep using the T would be to lower prices. Alternatively, the MBTA could increase the frequency and coverage of bus routes, along with public-awareness marketing, to offer a reliable alternative for commuters. Similarly, the city could increase reliable transportation via biking by creating 1) safer biking conditions, 2) a bike stipend program like in D.C., and 3) marketing about the benefits of bike commuting. Last, the bigger the practicality gap between commuting by public transportation versus by private vehicle, the harder it is to see the value of public transportation. One other immediate action could be to increase taxes on using rideshare services like Uber and Lyft and invest that money in improving the MBTA.
Bostonia: What else could Boston use?
One thing I think about is not just to ensure good [public transportation] connections from the suburbs to Boston, but also from suburb to suburb. If you pick two random points in suburban Boston, you’ll see that there’s a big gap between what you can do by car versus by public transportation. I also think there is an opportunity to enact congestion pricing on cars crossing through the tunnels of Boston [to get somewhere outside of Boston]; that would incentivize people who are not going downtown to use other roads and improve traffic overall.
Another thing: you can make left turns on a lot of main streets. That is specific to the United States, not just to Boston. On Mass. Ave., for example, there are a lot of places where you can turn left, but you block a full lane. Then you get these three-lane roads with one car on the right looking for parking or with their hazards on to pick up a delivery order, and one car completely stopped to do a left turn. The road that has three lanes of capacity is now reduced to one lane, and you see that constantly. But if there is no left turn allowed and you instead have to turn right, right, right, then that street will have a much faster flow and reduce congestion.
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