TRANSPORTATION SECRETARY STEPHANIE POLLACK said on Tuesday that the mindset of the state bureaucracy needs to change and change fast if Massachusetts is going to have any chance of responding in a meaningful way to climate change.
“We don’t have a lot of time and it takes us a long time to change,” she said. “We’re not moving fast enough.”
Speaking at a Boston Mobility Summit sponsored by the Barr Foundation, Pollack prefaced her remarks by saying she wanted to be “deliberately provocative.” She indicated the state’s transportation agencies are not focused on the goal of reducing carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050 even though the transportation sector is the largest source of greenhouse gases. Based on vehicle miles traveled, automobiles overwhelmingly dwarf all other transportation options, including public transit, bicycling, and walking.
To begin a shift away from cars, Pollack said the state’s transportation agencies need to view their job not as getting people from point A to point B but getting them what they need. She said riding public transit often takes longer than driving a vehicle, but public transit can be attractive because it gives the user productive time for reading and other pursuits.
Pollack said the state’s transportation agencies tend to focus on operations and building and fixing stuff, but cited a number of statistics indicating they don’t do either that well.
For example, she said, the MBTA operates 164 bus routes, of which 131, or 80 percent, are clearly failing the agency’s reliability standards, meaning they are on time less than 73 percent of the time.
She said MBTA capital spending has improved dramatically, but is still way behind where it needs to be. Five years ago, the T was spending $400 million a year on capital projects. This year the agency will spend between $600 million and $700 million. She said the T needs to be spending between $1 billion and $1.2 billion a year.
Pollack also said the agency is struggling to prepare for the future. “We can’t plan for yesterday, which is what we usually do,” Pollack said.
The transportation secretary said the T knows it needs 50 new commuter rail locomotives to improve service reliability, but the agency is just starting a planning process to determine what kind of commuter rail system it wants in the future. That planning process will dictate what kind of locomotive is needed. Until that planning process is completed, Pollack said, the agency will try to make do by spending about $50 million to keep old locomotives running. The T’s Fiscal and Management Control Board approved a $27 million contract on Monday for the overhaul of 10 locomotives that are already 30 years old.
Karl Iagnemma, another speaker at the summit, talked about the role autonomous vehicles may play in the future. Iagnemma is the CEO of nuTonomy, a Cambridge-based developer of autonomous vehicles, and the principal research scientist at MIT.
He said he believes autonomous vehicles have tremendous potential to reduce the number of vehicles on the road. He cited one estimate for Singapore that indicated 300,000 taxi-like autonomous vehicles could take 850,000 vehicles off the road. He estimated the maximum wait time for an autonomous vehicle would be 20 minutes at peak travel times.
He also explained why nuTonomy is currently testing its vehicles in Singapore and Boston’s Seaport District. He described Singapore as a good initial test site because of the favorable regulatory environment, the mild climate, the well-behaved drivers, and the tech-savvy population.
Boston, by contrast, offers a favorable regulatory climate and a tech-savvy population, but the weather is far more challenging and the driving more difficult, he said. “The driving behavior is unique,” Iagnemma said. “We are able to break things fairly easily in Boston.”
The nuTonomy executive also said Boston presents other challenges. He noted Silver Line buses in Boston bend in the middle, which makes it difficult for an autonomous car’s software to recognize the bus as a bus. He also said seagulls in Boston sometimes look like children to an autonomous vehicle, prompting the vehicle to stop.
Transportation Secretary Pollack is right, we don’t have a lot of time to change the bureaucracy mindset so why not start with how missed tolls are paid in Massachusetts? Right now it’s set up to waste paper, slow the cash flow process and increase costs on vehicle owners who do not have an E-ZPass. It takes 10 business days or in my case 16 total days to receive an invoice and an envelope in the mail with options to pay online, pay at a few inconvenient locations, pay by phone or pay by mail. For the privilege of receiving those options, I was charged $.60. When I missed a toll in New Hampshire a few months ago all I had to do was go online within seven days and pay the toll. There were no extra costs, no wasted envelopes, no billing and no hassle. So how is it both states have E-ZPass by only one state…New Hampshire…the land of the $100 a year state legislators…has a quick and easy way to collect the missed tolls? By the way, the payment due date was 7/17/2017 while the date I received the invoice was 7/17/2017. The state spent 16 days to get the bill to me and I had less than 7 hours to pay it.
Here’s my proposal: Newton approves over two hundred units of transit-oriented development, and the T increases frequency of cross-town bus service that ties our transit system together. We’ve already done our half. And 900 more units are proposed at a site on the same bus route (59).
So heartening to hear a government official, in a Republican administration, acknowledge that we do not have a lot of time. The fastest way to get people out of their cars and into public transportation (including supporting spending more money on it) or bicycling (electric bikes are set to transform commuting) is to institute a revenue neutral fee on carbon emissions from sources like gasoline and diesel. Senator Mike Barrett is sponsoring just such a bill. Let’s get going Massachusetts. We have led the way on so many fronts – public education, ending slavery, marriage equality – we can do it with ending the use of fossil fuels.