You Don’t Pay Enough To Massachusetts – Time To Pony Up for Picking Someone Up at Logan Airport
By NBP Editorial Board | August 28, 2017, 19:22 EDT
Ever go to Logan Airport for the fun of it?
No?
Why not?
The traffic, your blood pressure, the $3.50 toll to go through the Ted Williams Tunnel?
One of the nicest things anyone can do around here is to pick someone up at Logan or drop someone off at Logan. Everyone knows what a hassle it is, and no one imagines that anyone would want to do it.
Now, our environmental-overlords want to charge you for it.
Technically, it’s a “study” about whether to charge you for it. Or rather, how to charge you for it. The tolls on the Mass. Pike, the Ted Williams Tunnel, the Sumner Tunnel, the Tobin Bridge aren’t enough — we also need a toll for Logan Airport.
Massport has agreed to study tolls at Logan so that the Conservation Law Foundation won’t sue Massport over the planned addition of 5,000 badly needed parking spaces at Logan.
How much?
Pay no attention to whatever tolls they say they’re going to whack you with. Those are irrelevant. Once they establish the toll, they can make it anything they want. Toll increases are just a phony-baloney public hearing away.
But the toll-ers point to England — as if that’s a selling point — where tolls at airports apparently range between $1.30 and $5.
It’s not for the revenue, mind you. The people pushing this say they don’t really care about raising money. (Read: It’s not about hiring more hacks.)
It’s to change your behavior.
Your charity is costing too much air pollution. So now it’s got to cost you (more) money.
Except to actually change behavior some people think the toll might have to be as high as $15.
Fifteen bucks!
Of course, you could avoid this unpleasantness by just pointing your friend or loved one in the direction of the MBTA. And you can do it, too.
Sure, just figure out some route to connect to the Blue Line, hop aboard a squealing subway train with your luggage, screech and lurch along, arrive at the Airport stop, negotiate a skyscraper’s worth of escalator stairs, emerge in the daylight, wait for the shuttle bus, clamber aboard the shuttle bus, hope you get off at the right terminal, head for baggage check-in and then security. Shouldn’t take you more than a hour and a half.
(Here’s a question the “study” can include: How many members of the Conservation Law Foundation have actually taken the T to Logan?)
Back when he was lieutenant governor, Paul Cellucci once talked about the major reason to reduce state fees for getting a driver’s license and registration renewal: “Because we’re inconveniencing you,” he said.
That’s what this toll thing is all about. The toll-ers love central planning and central control, and they don’t care about inconveniencing you to get what they want. You are the pawn, they are the chess players.
It’s time to play Electronic Battleship instead, and sink this toll.