By Monday, Massachusetts transportation officials must come up with a plan to put the state’s roads, bridges and rails on the right track.
Official estimates show the state could need up to $1 billion a year in new revenue to meet highway and mass transit needs.
Former Transportation Secretary James Aloisi said the state needs to make dramatic changes to invest in transportation, such as increasing the state gas tax or implementing a vehicle miles traveled tax. He recently outlined these and several other funding recommendations for CommonWealth Magazine.
“People need to come to grips with a few realities,” Aloisi said about accepting an increased state gas tax, which has not been raised since 1991.
“There’s no commodity that anyone buys in Massachusetts that hasn’t gone up in price since 1991 or gone up with inflation,” Aloisi said. “Number two, we’ve created an entirely inequitable approach to transportation financing by forcing fare increases on transit riders and keeping vehicular motorists free from sharing the burden.”
Aloisi knows it’s a tough sell. It’s one he tried, and ultimately failed, to make when he was the transportation secretary in 2009 and Gov. Deval Patrick proposed raising the state gas tax 19 cents per gallon.
“We need to understand that our future in terms of energy security, in terms of environmental protection, in terms of mobility depends upon a more realistic and honest appraisal of the cost of vehicular mobility and the way it is dragging us down in many ways.”
The fairest approach, according to Aloisi, is taxing vehicle miles traveled. Under this proposal, vehicles would be outfitted with GPS equipment that tracks the number of miles traveled on state roads. Car owners would then be assessed a fee based on that mileage and the location. As Aloisi explained, it could be a broad-based fee for rural areas that increases for more urban or congested areas.
Aloisi said the state needs to improve mass transit between suburban and urban areas to help people who live in the suburbs but have to commute into the Boston area. Part of that may include some incentives to take mass transit into cities such as Boston, which could help lower the costs.
In 2009, Patrick and lawmakers overhauled the state’s transportation agencies, combining them into one agency, and closed pension loopholes.
“So I don’t think that the solution here is to go back to the same, frankly tired old arguments about cutting and reforming, because it only nibbles at the margin,” Aloisi said.
The reality, he said, is the mass transit system is old, expanding and in need of repairs because it has been “chronically underfunded” for years.
“The way to solve that is to do something big and bold and fair and structural,” Aloisi said. “It’s not to nibble away at the edges and it’s not to create the sort of red herrings of the past.”
In the end, it depends on what lawmakers decide to do to create stable funding for the state’s transportation needs. House Speaker Robert DeLeo and Senate President Therese Murray have signaled that transportation is a top agenda item for them this legislative session. That conversation will play out in the months ahead.
Through a free mobile application (app) SafeTrac, Latha can track Preethi’s movement on a real-time basis, either from home, on the Internet, or on a hand-held device that has Google Maps and an Internet connection.
In case of an emergency, or when Preethi feels unsafe or threatened, she can click the ‘Emergency’ button in the app. This will immediately send out an SMS and e-mail alerts to the emergency contacts registered by the user. Since the location of Preethi is readily known, help can be rushed to her immediately.
The Chennai-based KritiLabs has developed the app as a social initiative following last month’s rape incident in Delhi. It was developed based on the company’s Transport Operation Mobile Management software platform, which is largely intended for the logistics industry, said Srikrishna Varadharajan, Consulting and Business Development, KritiLabs.
The moment a SafeTrac alert is initiated by Preethi, her mother will know the route she is taking, in real time. Any deviation from the usual route, and she can call her daughter immediately.
The app works through the global positioning system. At present, Google Maps has an app called My Location, which shows the precise location only to the mobile owner. The same concept has been used in the app but with both mobile and Internet integrated through a central server.
Currently, SafeTrac works on Google’s Android-based phone but there are plans to extend it to other platforms, including iPhone and BlackBerry, says Varadharajan. SafeTrac can be accessed at www.safetrac.in. Users need to first register by providing the requisite information. On successful registration, an email is sent with instructions on downloading and installing the app on one’s mobile phone, he said.
Going forward, the company plans to provide SafeTrac with features such as alerting the nearest police patrol / station when the ‘Emergency’ button is clicked.
Over the past two years, FotoBridge has built a strong following among people interested in preserving photos, including educators and archivists, and its corporate clients include NBC Universal, the Smithsonian, the Indianapolis Colts and USA Hockey. The company shares photos, photography news and tips, and discount offers with its 14,000 likes on Facebook and 18,000 followers on Twitter. It also uses social media to answer questions and share blog posts, testimonials, and behind-the-scenes details of selected high-profile digitizing projects. “We answer questions and support customers primarily in real-time via Facebook,” said Ms. Morris. “For us, it’s a quick, effective and efficient way to communicate with those customers adept at using Facebook, which is becoming a larger part of our customer base.”
The company uses a mix of pay-per-click and Facebook ads to build followers and drive traffic to the Web site. On a typical campaign, it spends more than $10,000 a month on Google ads that Ms. Morris believes end up more than paying for themselves. “For every dollar we spend on Google AdWords,” she said, “we earn six dollars back.”
They have found that it helps to change keywords frequently. “We review our keywords every six to eight weeks,” she said. “We look for ones that are relevant to our service and that are not highly competitive yet but have a decent amount of monthly traffic and have proven to convert well in the past.” So far, the company’s search audience has been largely baby boomers, but FotoBridge has been finding different keywords to attract younger customers. “Our younger audience use words like ‘photo scanning’ verses our older customers who will type in ‘slide conversion,’” she said.
In addition, Ms. Morris uses Twitter to focus on sharing content and hashtags that promote their crucial terms in search results. Social media, she said, is “our primary means of building our brand and engaging a broader audience in a conversation.”
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