MBTA starts to think about fare increases

Fact is, for every single person who starts riding the T, it ends up losing more money.

So you're suggesting that we shut down the T, so that it loses the least money? I don't think that makes a whole lot of sense. A subway car costs about the same to run whether it is empty or full (slightly more electricity would be needed for a full car due to weight, but the cost of building a tunnel, maintaining tracks, trains, and electrical systems, hiring drivers, lighting stations, etc. doesn't vary whether ridership is high or low), so really the best thing to do is to run the system at capacity, and if possible, to increase capacity and then run it at that.

Another thing, lowering the fares won't do anything to increase ridership levels. People choose to drive because it's more convenient. If a doubling in gas prices during the past several years hasn't made a dent, I doubt lowering the cost of a ride would do it, either.

Increased fares have been directly observed to reduce ridership, both in the MBTA system and in other transit systems. Why wouldn't it work in reverse? Frankly, I'd like to see the system become free (or to have no more than a completely nominal charge in the range of 5 to 25 cents). Using the T should be a completely casual and ordinary thing to do, and if there's no monetary impact on people, it would be. I've experimented with this myself: usually I get a monthly pass, and use the system liberally. But sometimes I'll just get stored value (since I know that due to travel, I likely won't get my money's worth out of a pass), and I find myself using the T far less due to cost.

Also, ridership has gone up due to the increase in gas prices. But when service doesn't take people from where they are to where they need to be, and when service is infrequent, or slow, it may not be enough of an alternative. Thus, not only do we need to reduce fares, but we need to increase service availability (more subway, trolley, and commuter rail lines), speed, and frequency, so that the T becomes extremely convenient as well. Both factors: price and convenience matter. If, as you suggest, price were not relevant, then everyone would just take taxis everywhere, since you don't have to bother parking, or driving oneself, etc. But it would cost a fortune, so few people actually do this. Price matters too.

(Plus, as we should have learned very well over the last 40 years, gas price shocks can come on without warning and grow very rapidly, and the price never really goes down as far as it went up. We can safely anticipate gas prices continuing to rise over time, and perhaps shortages as well. Since this has and will keep pushing people to the T, maybe we ought to start preparing now, since we can't really build all the stuff you need for a good mass transit system overnight.)

Oh, and why shouldn't those who use the system have to pay for it?

Because it provides positive externalities. Let us suppose that the T didn't exist; everyone who commutes into or out of the city at rush hour had to drive, many of them individually rather than in car pools. Suppose also that there were no more capacity on the various highways leading to the city than now. This would mean adding some 100,000 or so cars to the major highways every day. (This number is based solely on average commuter rail ridership -- if we add in the subways, etc., the number will grow substantially)

For example, the Southeast Expressway (I-93 from the Braintree Split to Mass. Av.) was designed to handle about 70,000 cars per day, but currently runs at almost 200,000 cars per day, IIRC. Now, assuming that a decent number of commuters come from the South Shore, you want to add, say, another 25 to 30,000 cars a day? Which would only further slow down traffic? And all those cars will need parking, so you'll have to pay more to park in the city (or your employer will, which may be passed along to you in lieu of actual pay raises).

How much extra do you think parking would cost? What about the cost of gas when you're creeping along and not getting good milage? Would you be willing to pay a toll to travel in an ETL lane so that you have a faster drive? Whatever the total works out to be, that's what you're saving by providing mass transit to get cars off of the road. That, along with other factors, e.g. reduced pollution, reduced energy usage, are benefits that even a non-T rider can enjoy, and in all fairness, ought to pay for.

And shared expenses are not unusual in our society anyhow. I don't have kids, but I don't mind being taxed to support schools, because it's more important to have, and I derive more value from having, an educated populace, with a lot of social mobility based on education and ability, than from the rather small amount of money I'd save if we didn't have that tax.

Incidentally, if the T weren't saddled with debt (much of which it was never the origin of anyway), it would have a budget of around $1 billion annually. Since there are about 6.5 million people living in the state, that would mean $150 per person annually to fund it, if the T no longer collected fares, sold advertising space, etc. And this isn't particularly unfair: most people in the state live in the metro Boston area, which is what the T serves. (But if you do think that the people out west would get shafted, well, I'd be happy to pursue mass transit that funneled people into Springfield and Worcester from their surrounding areas, and which also connected those cities more tightly to Boston and each other) If we kept those other forms of revenue around, a smaller contribution from the general fund could be used for significant improvements and a smaller fare reduction.

Reducing the amount of land available for growth in the suburbs is a surefire way to increase the cost of housing even more while forcing middle-class residents to continue to migrate out of state.

Make it up with higher densities. I don't care for skyscrapers, but the old height limit of around 10 stories for Boston worked pretty well with elevators. Some historic neighborhoods might not get much denser (e.g. Back Bay), but the time may have come to start putting up large apartment blocks (varied in style please -- we don't want projects or even just ugly buildings) in place of three deckers. Frankly, if we had the same urban density as Brooklyn and Queens (which are far below the density and building size of Manhattan -- they're more like, though denser than, Back Bay), we could fit the entire population of metro Boston into maybe a third of the area surrounded by 128. Similar densities in the other cities and towns could give us comfortable cities that are better suited for mass transit, walking, and biking, with a state that's mostly agricultural or left to nature. I like living here because it's dense, and I'd like it more were it denser yet well-planned for density, and I bet others would too. I would expect a policy like this to attract people to MA.

I'm assuming your crack about returning housing subdivisions into wood and farmlands was purely for comical effect.

Nope, I'm dead serious. If you want to live in the countryside, I expect you to be a farmer or rich enough to not give a damn. For the rest of us (I'm not rich), the state should pursue efficiency, environmentalism, and livability and that means density.

It's been hard to find information about where the additional 1.25% sales tax goes.

http://www.mbtaadvisoryboard.org/Reports/FY10_Supp... says the MBTA started getting an additional $160 million per year when the sales tax rate increased. But that figure is fixed by law, and doesn't increase with inflation or with increased tax revenues.