The near-omnipresent congestion on Massachusetts roadways has now reached a "tipping point" where access to employment is strained and meeting statewide greenhouse gas emissions targets is growing more challenging, according to a new report from the Department of Transportation.
Data collected and reviewed by MassDOT over the past year underline a trend that many drivers have experienced: traffic has worsened over the past five years, and predictability has all but vanished, forcing commuters to experience well-above-average travel times as often as every other week.
Addressing the problem, officials said, will require a multi-pronged approach combining improvements to public transit, construction of new housing, and better planning to avoid disruptions from individual accidents or construction. The Baker administration also called for further study of so-called "managed lanes," which add lanes of travel where drivers can opt to pay a toll to travel faster.
"Congestion is a complicated problem with a complicated and interconnected set of causes," said Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack at a press conference unveiling the report. "There is no silver bullet. There is no one thing the commonwealth can do that will make congestion better here. But there are a lot of things that we have to do if we take congestion seriously."
The report's findings are in many ways a reflection of what drivers experience every day. Pollack herself noted in an introductory letter that residents "don't need this study to confirm" that congestion "has gone from bad to worse" in the past five years.
Over the course of 157 pages, however, the study did quantify just how deep the problem goes.
Roadways within the Route 128 belt, for example, now see a 14-hour "peak period" stretching across the day. By 6 a.m. on a typical weekday, one in four miles of road inside Route 128 are either congested, which means travel times are 50 percent higher than a full-speed trip, or highly congested, where cars move at least twice as slow. The afternoon rush in that region starts as early as 3 p.m. and lasts until well after 6 p.m.
The conditions are felt across the state, but they are the worst in the greater Boston region, researchers said. All five of the worst instances of congestion — which includes two different hours on both Interstate 93 Southbound and Route 2 eastbound — are just outside or in the city.
"Rush hour starts earlier and ends later than it did four or five years ago," Gov. Charlie Baker said at Wednesday's press conference.
While congestion continues to grow, officials highlighted variability as a particular concern.
The commute from Burlington into Cambridge's Kendall Square, for example, takes about 40 minutes on an average day. But the extremes at either end range from as fast as 25 minutes to as long as 75 minutes, and 10 percent of all commutes along that route took close to an hour.
As a result, Pollack and Baker said, employees either adjust their schedules to leave enough time for a worst-case trip every day, burning precious minutes they could use for any of a range of other purposes, or find themselves frequently late.
"When people can't plan for their commute to take the same amount of time each day, it affects work schedules, child care arrangements, school drop-offs and pickups and a whole variety of other issues," Baker said.
Pollack and Baker warned that the worsening congestion may make it difficult for Massachusetts to achieve sufficient reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. As of 2016, the most recent year for which full data is available, Massachusetts had reduced emissions by 21.4 percent from 1990 levels. A ten-year progress report projects reaching a 25.4 percent reduction by 2020 - state law requires a 25 percent reduction by that year.
"In Massachusetts, the transportation sector is both the largest and the fastest growing emitter of greenhouse gases," the report stated. "The Commonwealth cannot meet its goal of reducing overall GHG emissions 80 percent by 2050 without substantially reducing transportation sector carbon emissions."
And while the traffic is likely a result of a strong local economy — more job openings bring more people to the state, who then put more cars on the roads — congestion is now bad enough that it is reducing access to employment.
The governor pointed to several pieces of legislation he has filed as important first steps to address congestion. His $18 billion transportation bond bill, he said, will help take cars off the roadway by improving public transit capacity and granting businesses a tax credit for allowing employees to work from home.
Baker also argued his push to lower zoning-change requirements will lead to more housing production, which would in turn give more workers shorter commutes.
The study built on those proposals, further calling for addressing bottlenecks on both state and local roads, which were not examined in depth but likely experience similar traffic concerns. One option, it said, would be for MassDOT to prioritize "managing" its roadways by deploying tow trucks along highly trafficked routes to help clear accidents more quickly or take a more active role in redeveloping signals.
Those changes could take effect in the next three to four years, Baker said.
However, although Baker ordered the study last year when he vetoed legislation that would have piloted a congestion-pricing program, the governor said Thursday he still does not support such a system, where tolls vary to incentivize off-peak travel.
The most congested roads in the state, he said, do not have tolling gantries that would be needed to implement congestion pricing, and even if they did, he reiterated concerns about the "equity" of such a practice and how it would affect lower-income commuters who do not have the option to travel at less popular times.
"Penalizing drivers without providing alternatives who have no choice because of work shifts or school or childcare is not a proposal I would support," Baker said.
Instead, he suggested investigating managed lanes, which are in place in parts of Virginia and Utah. Under such a setup, the state would effectively offer drivers two options: to remain on the free multi-lane highway or pay a toll to use a new, separate lane with a 45 miles-per-hour minimum speed.
Some drivers would switch over and immediately enjoy better commutes, the thinking goes, and those who do not would see some improvement because fewer cars would be in the free lanes.
The state would have to add a lane for that to work, either by constructing a new one or converting a shoulder, because federal regulations prohibit taking away an existing lane of travel.
Such a change would require significant adaptations on existing roadways, though, and the congestion study calls for a follow-up study over the next year of how feasible managed lanes are in Massachusetts.
The report also highlighted fees on ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft as a possible target to reduce congestion. Legislators are debating bills to increase the surcharge on those companies, currently a flat 20 cents per ride, both to increase revenue and push more users into shared rides or public transit.
Baker last month unveiled separate legislation to track more specific data about how the services, often called transportation network companies or TNCs, are used and to implement new safety regulations. The study stopped short of endorsing a specific new fee structure.
"As a percentage of total traffic, you cannot say that transportation network companies are the reason for congestion," Pollack said. "They are in single digits (of total vehicle miles traveled). But depending on where they are and at what time of day, if people are tripled-parked and can't get to the curb at rush hour, that's going to be a problem."
"We support Governor Baker’s goal of reducing congestion in the Commonwealth and look forward to working with him and doing our part," Uber spokesman Alix Anfang said in a statement. "As the report notes, rideshare vehicles represent a small fraction of cars in Boston and across the state. Any additional fee should target the most congested areas and times so that Bostonians who have limited access to mass transit aren't punished."
Lyft spokeswoman Campbell Matthews said the vast majority of vehicle mileage in Boston comes from private and commercial cars and trucks. The only solution, she said, is "a holistic approach, applying any proposal equitably to all vehicles on the road."
The study, published Thursday after several delays, drew mixed reactions from transportation advocates who have long called for action to address the problem.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology system dynamics professor David Keith called the administration's doubts about congestion pricing "a bit of a head-scratcher."
Chris Dempsey, executive director of Transportation for Massachusetts, praised the suggestions that were included but criticized the emphasis on managed lanes over using tolls to reduce traffic.
"The Governor must more aggressively confront congestion by piloting and testing smarter tolling approaches that have worked in other regions and can work here," Dempsey said in a statement. "In the absence of implementing this essential tool, it will be challenging for the Commonwealth to adequately tackle this growing crisis. The Governor's proposal to build new highway lanes won't fix our congestion problem and it runs counter to the Commonwealth's environmental and transportation goals."
