tax the cars! ride for free! i LOVE it.

You’re right, I guess I totally missed your point and to be honest I like the idea. My 1% number is probably way off, but I was thinking more in terms of mass transit’s convenience to where people need to go, versus population access. Another thing we must consider here is that during the work week a large part of the traffic in Boston (and other large cities) is non-residents who commute long distances to get to Boston. Most of them are not conveniently served by Mass Transit.
My belief is that for any transit system (I include automobiles here) to be a success it must be convenient and affordable. By convenient I mean easy access from home, quick and reliable and within a reasonable distance of where you wish to go. While present mass transit systems meet these requirements for some people, the car overwhelmingly beats mass transit for most other people.
Being the free market capitalist that I am, I think when someone or some company develops a Jetson style system things will change. The system would have a “pod” that can be summoned to your home, you enter the pod, tell it your destination, it automatically transports you to a super high speed pathway which delivers the pod close to your destination, the pod exits the pathway and continues to the door of your destination where you exit. All this would be done without human control. When something like this is developed and implemented the car will be destined to the same fate as the horse and buggy, until then I think we’re stuck.

Dollar vans don’t sound like a good idea. If I wanted to ride a vehicle on surface streets with other people, I’d take the bus. I don’t understand why we have to accept that government run enterprises will be horrible. Privatization sure didn’t help the tube (http://www.commondreams.org/scriptfiles/views03/1105-12.htm).

Of course, a doubling of B-line trains would have no double solved this problem, as would careful expressing of trains. However, since the B-line catered to students and young 20-somethings that hadn’t established themselves as voters, it was basically abandoned. The Orange line was similarly treated poorly.

The only reason you think that “free T” would solve problems in Boston is if the only times you take the T are the Red-line and the Green line between Government Center and Copley (or maybe Kenmore if being generous). The MBTA does a wonderful job of getting wealthy people to cambridge, in from the suburbs to downtown (Alewife -> red-line), and those same people to Red Sox games, but for everyone else, it’s sweaty barely AC’d cars, standing room only, etc.

So, has it sent droves of people to transit? Well, for a medium-sized Western city we have quite high transit ridership. But the problem is that the transit system consists exclusively of buses operating on city streets (with the exception of the express service to Denver, which uses an HOV lane much of the way), so the bus is guaranteed to be slower than driving. On the university campus, where parking is scarce and incompentently managed, the transit system has a high share of commuter traffic (probably in the 25% range, maybe more), as does bicycling and walking. Downtown workers probably arrive by bus in similar numbers, once again mostly because of managed parking.

But all other employment and shopping centers (especially those in the growing sprawl belt beyond Boulder’s greenbelt) have abundant free parking, and hence buildings are far apart and nearly everyone drives. The Catch-22 is that if most people rode transit, everyone could get where they’re going faster — but a free bus alone isn’t a big incentive for a middle-class individual to switch since the bus is going to get stuck in the same traffic as a car, and then get delayed further by stopping for other passengers: the extra time is worth more than the two bucks for most people anyway.

I don’t see a large-scale solution without the following three improvements: 1) Get most riders onto passes (as here) or just make the ride free so people don’t have the inconvenience and annoyance of paying per ride, 2) give transit its own right-of-way (like a rail system, which is supposed to be built here in the next few years), and 3) get rid of “free” parking almost everywhere, make parking lots smaller, and cluster buildings better so pedestrian access to and from the transit station is more attractive. Fat chance on number 3: highway interchange developments separated by oceans of free parking are going up all over the place.

Patrick: I don’t think Alex would like riding in a dollar van compared to spreading out on the Red Line (Boston has one of the only dog-friendly public transit systems in the U.S.). We’re a rich enough city that we don’t have to do everything at minimum cost. And I don’t want a dollar van blocking my path any more than a private car. We’ve got the tunnels and the rails. I want to see more cars added to those rails until the streets are cleared out.

Paul: Your 1% estimate doesn’t seem accurate. New York City has more than 2% of the nation’s population, for example, and every neighborhood is served by public transit. No New Yorker ever needs to go anywhere not served by public transit. Here in Boston the T carries more than 1 million riders per day, which is 0.3% of the American population. Chicago’s core transit system delivers about 2.5 million rides every weekday. When you talk about “free rides” and people “paying their way”, you’ve missed my point. This isn’t a scheme to benefit the poor by saving them $2. This is a scheme to benefit the rich, whose time is precious to them, by unclogging the roads. It would be sort of nice to have a $400,000 Maybach car and a driver, for example, but I would rather have a Honda Accord and a guarantee that it will never take more than 15 minutes to get anywhere within Route 128 (our ring highway) and never more than 5 minutes to get from point to point within central Boston.

When I visited in ‘98, there was a chunk of the downtown core of Portland where MAX was fare-free, and I gather this is still the case. This policy can’t be displacing much commuter traffic, because it’d be easy to walk from one end of the fare-free zone to the other. It’s more likely that vehicular commuters are diverted to light rail by the lack of parking and the cramped streets in downtown Portland.