By MARK SARDELLA
Like most of you, I had never heard of “transportation equity” until a week or so ago. It’s one of those terms that members of the Woke Community toss around in casual conversation believing everybody knows what it means, because everybody they know does.
You probably thought “equity” was the value of your home minus what you still owe on the mortgage.
How quaint. Turn off Fox Business and put down the Wall Street Journal, insurrectionist.
Regardless of whether you support “transportation equity” or even know what it is, you may soon find yourself paying for it if Town Councilors Jonathan Chines and Mehreen Butt have any say in the matter.
I recently learned that one definition of “transportation equity” is free bus service. I learned that from a letter to the MBTA signed by Councilors Butt and Chines along with elected officials from 14 other Massachusetts communities promising local funds to support “fare-free” bus service.
“We believe this effort will help improve the efficiency of public transit, improve transportation equity, reduce emissions, and create safer streets that will save lives,” the letter asserts.
The missive requests the MBTA’s “collaboration with us as the elected and appointed representatives of our respective communities in an effort to ensure that there is a fair, equitable and standardized process for implementing fare free bus pilots, and potentially permanent fare-free service on specific MBTA bus routes.”
But don’t worry, the letter reassures the already heavily subsidized T, we won’t be asking your agency to bear a penny of the cost of providing bus service that we demand you offer for free. We know some “stakeholders” who will foot the bill before they know what hit them.
“While the implementation of fare-free buses requires a partnership between our municipalities and the MBTA, we are not asking the MBTA to simply forgo fare revenue to make this happen,” the letter states. “Our communities are willing to fund fare-free buses because of the benefits we know they would bring.”
The letter to the MBTA was written on the letterhead of Cambridge Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui and signed by elected officials representing Cambridge, Amesbury, Boston, Everett, Malden, Medford, Melrose, Newburyport, Newton, Rowley, Somerville, Watertown, Winchester, Worcester and of course, Wakefield. Both Chines and Butt signed with their official “Wakefield Town Councilor” titles.
I couldn’t recall when Wakefield Town Meeting had appropriated the funds to subsidize free bus service, so I emailed Councilors Chines and Butt inquiring under what authority this pledge of local funds was made.
“I signed the letter to MBTA General Manager Poftak as an individual town councilor, and not on behalf of the Town Council as a whole,” Councilor Chines responded.
Councilor Butt echoed that sentiment, word-for-word.
“I signed the letter to the MBTA General Manager Poftak as an individual Town Councilor and not on behalf of the Town Council as a whole,” Butt replied.
That will likely come as a surprise to the Mayor of Cambridge, who seems to be under the impression that her co-signers on the letter were in fact speaking for their communities.
“The success of the fare-free bus pilots in Boston and Worcester has made Cambridge and other communities excited about putting local funds toward pilots as well,” Mayor Siddiqui said in a press release accompanying the letter signed by Chines, Butt and the other municipal officials.
Are Chines’ and Butt’s denials an admission that Wakefield taxpayers are not especially “excited” about having their tax dollars used to fund free bus service?
Americans love their automobiles and the individual freedom and independence they foster. Electric vehicles have not caught on to the degree that some had hoped, so now other efforts are underway to get you out of your gas-burning car and on to more communal forms of transportation in the name of transportation “equity.” The hope is that if they make public transit “free,” you’ll drive less and ultimately give up your car altogether. Then we can all be equally miserable on the same bus.
Of course, “free” public transportation isn’t free any more than “free” health care is free or “free” college is free. Somebody always pays.
If you’d like to see who that is, seek out the nearest mirror.