It is not always possible to update, ammend or append stories as they evolve or new information becomes available. We’ve got so many that it isn’t always possible to recall what we wrote or find it. But they often evolve and change as new information becomes available. We’ve had to deal with two recently. The first one is the piece on redistricting in Concord. It wasn’t as screwed up as it appeared, and I added an update in comments. The second is the Massachusetts bill to lower vehicle miles travelled.
The premise is correct. It’s still not about the environment. It is leveraging the so-called green agenda to manipulate behavior, but in a way more idiotic than I’d imagined.
Senate Bill 2246 is designed to reduce driving. Not emissions as a side effect. Not congestion. Not inefficiency. Driving itself. The title admits as much: the goal is “reducing emissions and vehicle miles traveled.” Vehicle miles traveled—VMT—is the obsession that runs through the bill like a fault line.
The method is simple and effective. Instead of telling individuals they may not drive, the bill ensures that the system they rely on no longer supports driving in the first place.
You have to think, globalist, movement-constraining, fifteen-minute city, kind of stupid.
Section 80 prohibits metropolitan planning organizations from approving transportation plans unless they provide “a reasonable pathway” to compliance with statewide vehicle miles traveled reduction goals. Read that carefully. Road projects are no longer judged by whether they improve safety, relieve congestion, or accommodate population growth. They are judged by whether they reduce driving. If a project allows people to move more efficiently but increases total miles driven, it fails the test.
The bill then requires “vehicle miles traveled impact assessments” for projects, including estimates of the “net change in vehicle miles traveled” over a 20-year period. These assessments are compliance filters. Once VMT becomes a regulatory metric, it becomes a veto. If the number goes up, the project is in trouble. If it goes down, it passes—regardless of whether it actually serves the public.
If the goal appears to be to make everything less accessible to motorized transport, can they use taxdollars to install a place to hitch up your horse if they have business inside any increasingly inaccessible “urban” area? Probably not. The scourge of VMT is rural dwellers. Commuters. Which got me thinking.
If your transportation plan centers on making your state less accessible to job creators, that’s a great way to reduce the impact of vehicle miles traveled. If they can’t get there from here, they will eventually have to get somewhere else outside Massachusetts.
As with my previous piece, there are tons of variables for which there may be no remedy, which will mean that mileage reporting and fees or fines will be required (at some point) to impress upon the SUV-driving peasants that you mean business. But I don’t think they do.
Massachusetts Bill S 2246 looks like it might have been written by Vermont Democrats. It appears impossible to implement, measure, and lacks the details necessary beyond the “can we pat ourselves on the back” about it. It sounds great when you are rubbing elbows with like-minded idiots at Democrat events from sea to rising sea. You can add it to your resume.
Nice to meet you. You know, I co-sponsored (meaningless, Potemkin-village) legislation to reduce transportation emissions (without actually reducing them).
My name is attached to a bill that emphasizes community density to reduce private transportation use, but it won’t do either.
They may pass it, and that idiot Maura Healey could sign it, but in the end, all it will do is create more government emissions exacerbated by the transportation emissions needed to get the expanded bureaucracy to their new offices to accomplish nothing at great expense.
Note: I fixed a few typos after this was published.
