Updated December 2, 2008 - Click here to download a PDF version of this strategy.

A healthy, competitive region with a high quality of life demands an efficient and affordable transportation network – one with the flexibility to meet ever-changing needs.  Metro Boston can achieve this vision by coordinating land use with creation of new transportation choices.  This strategy describes the actions that actors across all levels of government must take to create such a network.  

Metro Boston prides itself on “transportation firsts” like the creation in the late 1800’s of what eventually became the MBTA subway system.  The region can also be justly proud of the dramatic improvements in subway service and the restoration of commuter rail toward the end of the 1900’s.  However, the past several years have seen transportation resources disproportionately focused on a single, major project: the Big Dig.  The Big Dig brought tremendous benefits to travel throughout New England, and it re-knit Boston’s financial and government center to the waterfront and North End.  Nonetheless, dozens of other worthwhile projects – both local and regional in scope – were put on hold during its execution, and the paucity of current resources leaves these projects in limbo.

Metro Boston must find a way to re-evaluate these projects and fund the prompt execution of those that are critical to the region’s mobility and economic advantage.  This will require money, generated by reform of the current project delivery system and the raising of new revenues.  Public agencies must find a way to deliver projects more quickly – from concept to design to execution.  Proponents must be mindful of the operating costs of every new roadway and transit line that is built, and must plan for those operating costs before they are built.

Most importantly, the region must make land use and mobility goals the master of transportation improvements, and not the other way around.  New transit lines, extra lanes, and trails should be built only if they support the sustainable land use goals of MetroFuture.  The region must be particularly mindful that some transportation improvements, in the long term, can generate the very traffic and congestion they are intended to overcome.  They can spur patterns of sprawl which the region has rejected in this plan.  Avoiding such outcomes requires state agencies, regional entities, municipalities, and the private sector to coordinate transportation, land use, and environmental protection efforts far better than they do today.