With all the coverage of MBTA financing recently, we wanted to point out excellent material that came out of a summit at Northeastern University in 2010. There are some good ideas in here about T financing. For each of the most commonly discussed options, it includes the current Massachusetts policy, how it is used in other states, its advantages and disadvantages, and a financial analysis. The options are:
- Increasing the gasoline tax
- Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) Tax
- Increasing local funding for transit
- Parking fees and taxes
- Cross-subsidies for transit
- Leveraging private investment
- MBTA debt relief
- MBTA operational efficiencies
- Increasing fare revenue
Read more about the effort or download the summary and framework reports.