We applaud Boston Mayor Michelle Wu for using $8 million in COVID-19 recovery money allocated to the city to subsidize three popular bus routes for two years.
By making good on a 2021 campaign pledge to make bus routes free, Wu struck a hard blow in favor of economic development and environmental protection.
“Expanding fare-free transit to Routes 23, 28, 29 will better connect our communities, increase ridership, and ease congestion for all our residents,” Wu said in a statement. The three routes have among the highest riderships in the city, with Route 23 alone serving more than 100,000 passengers per month.
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) routes will be free starting March 1.
Even before Wu was elected last November, this newspaper editorialized in favor of free transit and equated the ease with which people can move around with economic development.
It is more than readily apparent to anyone who commutes anywhere in Massachusetts that its aging roads and highways are clogged with traffic polluting the air at a time when climate-change threats are simmering on the front burner.
The way to pull people out of their vehicles and off roads is to give them the ultimate inducement to change their transportation lifestyle. A free ride pays for itself by reducing environmental damage and reducing long-term costs associated with road repair.
Already burdened by budgetary and maintenance problems, the MBTA reeled under a staggering blow in March 2020 when COVID-19 business shutdowns emptied buses and trains.
Vaccination has helped get people back to work. But employees who endured pandemic-driven unemployment and struggled to pay their rent continue to need every financial advantage they can grasp to get to their jobs and make ends meet.
Free buses and, by extension, free public transit, is a big financial advantage and one that Massachusetts’ major cities, including Lawrence, Worcester and Boston, started embracing in 2021.
The City of Boston distributed 1,000 free MBTA and Bluebike passes last spring to provide transit-expense relief to small-business employees, including people living in the city’s low-income neighborhoods.
The City of Lawrence spent $225,000 over the last two years subsidizing fares on three bus routes running through the city’s most densely-populated neighborhoods.
Free buses — and, by extension, free transit — can bring riders back to the MBTA,
Boston Transportation Director Vineet Gupta said during a 2021 transportation forum.
If free buses can prime the ridership pump and open the spigot for riders to pour back onto buses and trains, then the MBTA will be better positioned to achieve financial stability.
One of the points Gupta and other forum participants underscored is that if business owners know their employees have a free and reliable form of transportation, they will have one less worry as they recover from the pandemic and, even more importantly, stitch together the connecting bonds to underpin a revived and growing economy.
