Transportation Reform in Massachusetts

Dear Green Streets supporters: The state Senate has sent to the House of Representatives draft legislation to restructure the state’s transportation system.  As Director of Green Streets Initiative, I am writing to urge each of you to get in touch with your Representative and with the leadership of the House Transportation Committee (see details below) to urge support for a couple of particular components of the proposed bill. Please contact them as soon as possible, as the vote could be as early as next Monday, April 6. 1) Increasing the Gas Tax:  While the governor’s proposal to raise the gas tax by 19 cents has generated lots of controversy, it is an absolute necessity.  First, it is needed to cover previous Administration’s decades of neglected repairs and upgrading.  Second, it is needed to prevent the total collapse of our state’s public transit system which, whatever criticisms of its performance we may have, was hobbled with totally inadequate funding even to maintain its current service levels.  Third, it is needed to pay for finally pushing our transportation system to give walking and bicycling more emphasis.  (For more details about why it will be cheaper to raise the gas tax than let all these problems – and others – fester, see http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/02/26/gas_tax_paying_cents_to_save_big_bucks/ . 2) Institutionalizing a connection between transportation and health: The Healthy Transportation Compact (section 13 in the Governor’s original proposal and included in the Senate’s version) creates a way for the public health and medical world to provide on-going feedback to top-level transportation decision-makers, and requires Health Impact Analyses for all major transportation projects.  This is absolutely unprecedented in the United States and will be a major step forward. Transportation is not only about how we move people and things, it is also one of the major ways that we impact both the environment and our health.  In the past, our state and nation have given so much priority to designing our roads, residential areas, commercial centers, and even our recreation areas around the needs of automobiles that we’ve made getting it difficult to get anywhere in any other way.   The inevitable result of our car-centric transportation system has been pollution, noise, personal immobility, and reduced safety – leading to diseases (such as asthma, heart disease, several types of cancer, stress, skin irritations, and more) as well as sedentary lifestyles and accidents. It is time that our transportation system be restructured, from its design to its operation, to prioritize public transit, bicycling, and walking.  This will do as much as almost any other public action to reduce our carbon emissions, lower pollution, make our neighborhoods safer, and protect our health.  We believe, based on national research and our own experiences, that such a restructuring of our transportation system will also foster economic growth, create jobs, and facilitate social connections within our communities. However, there are a couple ways that the transportation-health connection could be made even stronger in the House version of the bill. 1)      A “Walking and Cycling” division should be established at the same level as Highways, Transit, and Airports/Waterways in order to institutionalize those modes as having equal importance. 2)      The Bike Advisory Group inserted in the Senate deals solely with recreational cycling on paths.  Its purview should be expanded to include on-road use of bikes by commuters, kids going to and from school and after-school activity, and people using bikes for short-trips doing every-day errands and visits – as well as those who use the roads for recreational riding where no off-road paths exist.  (An expanded and strengthened Bike Advisory Group should be included in the bill even if the unwise attempt to transfer DCR parkways and bridges to Mass Highway is dropped by the House.) So, please – write your own letter and send it (as soon as possible) to your own Representative, or make a quick call to her/his office.  (To find out who is your Representative, and his or her contact information, see http://www.mass.gov/legis/) If you have time, it would be very useful if you also sent copies of your letter to the House Leadership: Speaker of the House Robert A. DeLeo State House, Room 356 Boston, MA 02133 Telephone: 617-722-2500 Facsimile: 617-722-2008   E-Mail: Robert.DeLeo@state.ma.us Rep. Joseph Wagner  House Co-Chair, Joint Committee on Transportation State House, Room 134 Boston, MA 02133 Telephone: 617-722-2400 E-Mail: Rep.JosephWagner@hou.state.ma.us   Rep. Jeffrey Sánchez House Co-Chair, Joint Committee on Public Health State House, Room 42 Boston, MA 02133 Telephone: 617-722-2370 Email: Rep.JeffreySanchez@hou.state.ma.us Rep. Harriett L. Stanley House Co-Chair, Joint Committee on Health Care Financing State House, Room 236 Boston, MA 02133 Telephone: 617- 722-2430 E-Mail: Rep.HarriettStanley@hou.state.ma.us Thanks for your help on this important effort. (I apologize if you are getting this from another part of the world. Our Green Streets email list is not differentiated. In any case, I think these issues are more than just local.) All my best, Janie Janie Katz-Christy Founder & Director Green Streets Initiative

Comments

[Alan]

The problem” is that all the Camb. & S’ville reps & senators support this. So it doesn’t help a lot for all of us to contact them again and again (tho’ they might need reassuring). Will the leaders listed below listen to us in metro Boston?
What “we” really need to do is write to our friends in the suburbs, central MA and western MA where there is no/little support to increase the gas tax. They see metro Boston as sucking up all “their” tax $ for the Big Dig and the MBTA which they never use. I am emailing my friends “out there” but I don’t have many.

[ELizabeth Bolton]

The resistance to raising the gas tax makes me want to bang my head against the wall. I've been praying for higher gas prices for years - clearly I should have been more specific because I wanted the price to be raised via taxation not by the oil companies. I tend to write letters to the editor, public officials etc. in my head - where they stay. Thanks for the nudge.

Liz