Gov. Charlie Baker publicly rode the Red Line for the first time over the weekend. For months, the governor has been under pressure to address the growing traffic congestion in Boston and improve the MBTA. Chris Dempsey, the president of the advocacy group Transportation for Massachusetts, praised Baker for the publicity stunt and said he was happy to see transportation given a spotlight by the governor.
“Look, it’s great,” Dempsey said during an interview with Boston Public Radio on Tuesday. “The T is a critical and essential public service for ... 1.2 million of his constituents every single day, and it makes all the sense in the world for a public leader that cares about the state of that system to actually experience that system himself.”
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In response to the transportation crisis, Baker recently released a proposal on "managed lanes," which would create a new lane on some major highways that individuals can pay to use, avoiding a general toll on all drivers.
Dempsey said that he is not an advocate of building new managed lanes, but rather managing the ones that already exist. Dempsey’s preferred policy to combat traffic congestion is to impose congestion pricing, which would impose a surcharge on all drivers during hours of peak usage to discourage drivers from being on the road at the time.
Baker is opposed to congestion pricing because it leaves no room for drivers to choose whether they want to pay a toll or not.
“We agree with the concept of trying to use pricing to get our roads working better,” Dempsey said. “The place where we disagree with the governor is he is saying he wants to physically add lanes to highways.”
