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Something that does not nearly get the attention and praise it deserves. What an outstanding accomplishment 👏

Imagine what could be done if that money was somewhere but Boston...

Excuse me, but some idiots online told me that blue states and cities are a mess and don't know how to function, so this must be a lie!

Didn't you hear? Ted Cruz called us communists. Guess we should tell that to our utterly-neoliberal state legislature.

Boston is the economic engine for the entire state.

If that money wasn't in Boston then MA would be a lot poorer

The economic engine of Norway was mineral wealth. But by investing the money wisely in other sectors, they now have far more sources of income.

If a minute amount of that money went to developing Springfield, Pittsfield, and Worcester as independent cities with their own economic engines instead of payong for ever-scarcer land in Boston, imagine the possibilities.

If we're going to be called communists anyway, we may as well get the benefits of being communists. That's just good old fashion neoliberal pragmatism.

Every state is a mess in its own ways. The quicker we stop making everything red vs blue the better off we all are

Heard that my friend!

Yeah, we rock. Always knew we were better than the rest. Just a feeling that comes with being a resident of this fine state.

I would love to see the diagrams without including the farm subsidies and/or Medicare.

Overall very generic not much of a substance article.

This just sounds like trying to make the mess that's in blue states equivalent to the mess that's in red states. I'll take the mess that's in Massachusetts compared to the mess that's in places like Idaho, where they're passing abortion trafficking bills.

Are you trying to equate mineral wealth to an entire CITY? You know Boston does a lot of different things, right?

It does, but it's primary issue is geography. It's too big to continue to be what it is.

Too big? What? For what it is? A city? What does that even mean?

People can't afford housing in Boston but can afford housing in Worcester. What if you relieve the pressure on Boston by developing Worcester. Perhaps even Springfield.

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If we had the housing and transit that people need, we'd be unstoppable

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If people couldn't afford housing the prices would come down.

There’s a lot of bad messes in blue states to. Go drive down mass Ave this afternoon

Not quite how the market works. What it actually does is inflate pay, which ripples along the chain and further inflates pay umtil sole services are priced out. And prices go up everywhere else. I know people who commute from Palmer to Boston daily because housing in Boston is too expensive

I don't know what that has to do with development in Worcester or other cities, however. I also don't know how the state governs development in Boston but not in Worcester.

I don't know what the fuck driving down a road in MA has to do with the argument I'm making.

>I don't know what that has to do with development in Worcester or other cities, however.

You think they want to commute 2-3 hours each way while paying hefty tolls because I-90 is the only viable road every day? If their need for work could be handled by Worcester or Springfield, it would dramatically improve their lives.

>I also don't know how the state governs development in Boston but not in Worcester.

Whenever any policy is up for discussion, they choose to pursue Boston's wants and desires over everyone else's needs, which is how eleven gotten into this pickle to begin with.

This is key and infrastructure

Drive on any road in western mass, or visit any hospital, or visit any city. Springfield, chicopee and Holyoke are embarrassing.

I'll take people shooting dope any day over a Christian theocracy stripping rights from people

I really think progressives/socialists would do better around here if they engaged it from the logical "effective spending" side rather than JUST the moral/inequality side. Good spending is something everyone can get behind, and stuff like socialized medicine and tuition-free public colleges are just a good investment that tons of other countries have already figured out.

I'll take that over my rights as a woman being taken away.

Try leaving the state. Have you ever been down south, or west of New York? Western Mass could be better, it’s certainly got lots of potential, but it’s not even close to equivalent to lots of other parts of the country (largely due to state programs).

This is why a balanced budget is important, no matter your political leanings on what it gets spent on.

Did you know that the most popular communist in American history was born in Taunton? William Foster spent his life trying to build organized labor movements across the country. He was especially known for his advocacy towards fighting against racism both within the labor movement and within society at large. His view was that the labor movement wouldn't be able to build class conciousness and solidarity if all of the workers were too busy being racist to one another.

Thankfully our country worked hard to address these issues. Most of the labor organizers were arrested or assassinated. William Foster's works were actually brought before congress during the red scare, it was cited as evidence of how pro-labor anti-racism is "Un-American". Taunton even deindustrialized, you can't organize labor when nobody has jobs! As an added bonus that forced local hospital to cut back on services. Morton doesn't even cover deliveries any more, no more commie babies! 🦅🇺🇸 🫡

Massachusetts is easily the most fiscally responsible of all blue states.

It's an enumerated duty in the state Constitution to strive for a balanced budget.

Can you point to some specifics concerning this particular thing? IE, when the state has passed policies that make it so businesses have to develop in Boston instead of those other places?

I've been in 48 of 50. Western mass is decent. But not good compared to most of the northeast and west coast

Then Worcester would become more expensive genius

They contribute nothing to the economy? Holy cringe. I for one enjoy having food to eat, among other agricultural products.

I don't like their politics either but this is some next level tribalism.

Shutting down S&W because people around Boston hate guns is the most obvious recent one. But truly, it goes all the way back to the time they bought greenbacks for pennies on the dollar from farmers because they knew the feds were about to pay them out.

Ah, but peoplencould live and work there. Maybe not miss valuable moments with their kids because they're stuck in traffic at 730PM

OK, so NOW can we spend some money fixing the damn MBTA? Maybe repave roads too?

but for some reason has dogshit transportation networks...

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I love being able to say I’m from MA. It’s like a golden nugget in this sea of shit we call a country, however it’s worth noting that that golden nugget is still submerged in a sea of shit

Not sure we can blame 49 other states for how we don't take care of our own crap.

This is why we should get are SALT back. It’s not fair to be double paying for us and for Tennessee,

Please god pave the dammed roads. It’s fucking embarrassing how bad they are.

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Buddy go try a hospital in rural red states. Oh wait you can't because they are getting shut down at alarming rates

It's funny how every Masshole claims that winter is why the roads are bad, but Canada and upstate NY have better roads.

No joke. The Adirondack area has amazing roads.

Hey, who are going to believe, some townie who has never been outside the 495 loop, or your lying eyes!

It’s because they don’t make enough money to pay for their maintenance, and the repair costs are so high that it gets kicked down the road. So you end up with a bunch of toll free roads slowly falling apart because they can’t afford maintenance, because their toll free nature removes any revenue streams. If you want better roads what we need to do is convert highways to toll roads and invest in the T so less people drive on them, which lessens their use, which makes them last longer, which saves money on maintenance.

And clean them! Why is there always so much trash and leftover sand?

I say this all the time. Imagine how much better this state would be if those issues were addressed.

MA has the second highest cost per mile for road construction in the US. It is literally twice what it costs to build in Hawaii.

HAWAII....

Where literally everything has to be shipped in.

Wonder who is hoovering up all that cash.

California is the number one provider of food. I'm fine never eating anything with corn syrup from the red states again.

Canada has higher gas taxes. You get what you pay for. Anyone who voted against indexing the gas tax to inflation has themselves to thank for potholes.

Because of pig drivers who throw trash out their windows.

Not sure that is it. MA spends twice per mile on building roads than Hawaii.

"Where do you think the food we buy comes from?"

"The grocery store."

Not enough to feed the whole country. And it's mainly fruit, vegetables and nuts. If you think we can all just survive off of Californias food you're delusional.

It's also not great for the environment shipping it all the way across the nation.

But yes the red states only produce corn syrup nothing else.

Insert "taxes are so high, of course we don't need extra from the feds" joke here?

What waste.... punchline of the story..

I thought we were all unemployed protestors... hmmm...

Marlborough finally repaved two roads I use pretty often and it feels like a luxury.

But hey if you want to feel better about our roads take a quick trip over the border to RI, you'll feel much better after that.

Shocking. It’s like a highly educated bunch of people make money and are highly capable. Go figure.

We also import a lot of our food from Canada too

I can point to one area where money can be saved. Most states control traffic with construction laborers doing flagging duty. We open up the OT chest for the Staties to do the same thing essentially.

This state isn’t perfect but it’s pretty well run compared to the majority of the other states.

We also export a lot of food to Canada. It's roughly a wash. Some years they are the net exporter some years we are the net exporter.

I mean we probably could. Survive != over eating like 5k calories a day. The average American diet would have to shrink and CA would have to stop exporting crops but it could hypothetically be done. CA already provides like 45% of fruit and veg, but also exports like 50% of what it produces. So combine all that with the food we import from other countries and I think we'd be ok.

If, of course, we could actually distribute the food equitably. The fact that we haven't beaten food insecurity in this country is absurd and a disgusting failure of governance generally. But that's a problem in all states

The housing scarcity is intentional. If housing is scarce it keeps poor people away and that's exactly what some rich people want.

ummm, ok. Blue skies here. Everything fairly normal. Certainly the feds have their impact on the country as a whole but as the post states: Mass has the highest GDP per capita in the country. So one could assume that we can make prudent decisions with those dollars and find ways to make said networks reliable and effective. But no blame the feds or the other 49 states or some other deflection.

We control our destiny. The more people understand this the more things will improve. The great federal rescue from 2008 replaced windows in the next town over from me. They spent hundreds of billions on the program and we got windows. I'm sure a few towns over got a short road repaved and somewhere else replaced a water main. We control our path forward. Time to fix the roads, the rails and the utilities.

Rich people need poor people to dust their mansions and mind the little shit offspring they can’t be bothered to raise themselves, as they are too busy driving the middle class even lower.

Massachusetts energy right here

The roads are good in my town. Whereas Fitchburg is basically dirt roads at this point.

Meh, you’re not even aware of it though if you don’t follow the nonsense news.

I’m hoping they do my street this year. I live on one if those unofficial huge cut through streets.

The freeze-thaw cycling of our increasingly mild winters isn’t doing us any favors

He's talking about the homeless people living there.

Bullshit. Rich people bay want exclusive neighborhoods but they do also want neighboring towns to house their workers. Housing scarcity throughout the region is not something they desire

Again, Canada...upstate NY....the mountain west....other places have the same weather and better road maintenance. There really isn't anything amazingly unique about MA weather.

Nah. For one, Mass. is super densely populated already. We can't just build out into open land like they can out west. And when we try to, people get upset about woods being torn down.

Secondly, there's a lot of zoning tyranny. You can only build single family homes in a lot of areas, which provides housing for far fewer people. And a lot of SFH owners wanna keep it that way for "the families" cause they don't want college kids and young professionals making noise in their neighborhoods.

Thirdly, where you can build apartment buildings or triple deckers, they build luxury apartment buildings because apparently there are still enough people to make those profitable.

There's no rich people scheming to keep poor people out of an entire state or city. Stuff like this is almost always caused by bureaucracy or NIMBY shit.

I think my same comment still applies.

VT is also laughing...

(With a 1/10 of the cars)

Sync the god damn traffic lights.

If we spend money fixing roads and the MBTA then we won’t have so much money though

At this point, I just assume MBTA is just supposed to teach us a moral. No way is it supposed to be a dependable transportation.

Probably the idiots in charge? We all know the T is run by incompetent fools, but that doesn’t make mass transit a bad thing to invest in bc once you have some mass firings you’ve got the problem fixed. Either way their always expensive, that’s why the roads are bad EVERYWHERE. Every state complains about the roads because even where it’s cheap it’s still to expensive

MA roads are Alabama bad though.

And yeah, mass transit is great. Sadly, nobody on Beacon Hill wants it.

I think of this when Europeans on Reddit make blanket statements about the US without recognizing places like Massachusetts exist. Heaven forbid any of us live anywhere but Florida and Alabama.

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Both can happen simultaneously.

Well, it can in a functional government.

It can be 10 degrees (F) colder up there, does that not make a difference? Anyway, not trying to defend road construction in MA, I like to joke that the reason the roads are so terrible is because some politician’s brother owns a road construction company

You're right. I'll put my pitchfork away.

Ummm....have you ever seen a map of North America?

Canada literally includes parts of the Arctic. Their roads are sometimes built on permafrost.

well maybe they should eliminate the tolls on the pike and repair some roads...

Much less traffic on them than the roads around Boston. Out in western ma, there was much more snow this year, but nowhere near the number of potholes.

Toronto doesn't have traffic? Buffalo doesn't have traffic?

Man, why do people defend shitty things?

That’s why I was confused when you said that Canada has the same weather as Massachusetts

Hey guys both sides! Both sides!

Fuck that shit. They tried to stage a coup, red is a bunch of fuckbags trying to tear everything we work for down.

I meant cold, wintery weather with snow.

My bad.

I agree. I'm a weeb for Mass and I was born and raised here.

It is strange though all in all I FEEL like were a B and that makes me terrified for what the rest of the country looks like..

Did you forget your /s ?

Never mind the impracticality of transferring enough of the entire state’s driving to MBTA stops to offset our road damage.

Unless the system was expanded and made frequent and affordable. Oh, and made to go above 7 mph.

Why would I need a /s?

Freeze-thaw cycles create conditions that accelerate the formation of potholes

https://www.summitengineer.net/faqs/How-do-potholes-form.html

I’m clearly missing something here. Not sure why I’m getting downvoted since I’m not disagreeing with u/Thiccaca, I’m just saying that because we keep getting freezes that then warm up the conditions seem to be getting even worse than they used to be when we had longer periods of deep freeze

I apologize for whatever I’m misinterpreting because I’m apparently clueless

Also the nice rumble strips as well so you can tell where the lines are when they are snow covered. Highly underrated.

Have you seen the bike lanes in FINLAND, the winter is not the problem at all, it’s an excuse to not invest in infrastructure and Americans buy it because most of them never leave their cars anyways and have no idea that they will indeed not freeze to death the vast majority of the time.

Two-thirds of Massachusetts lives in the Greater Boston metro. Boston needs a denser and better-connected inner-core to support the sparse and sprawling suburbs... And that's impossible with car infrastructure.

Don't you see, there's one area addicts take drugs. Thats just as bad as stripping an entire state of reproductive rights, the same!!!

That’s great. We have so much money. We should fix our failing bridges.

The winters do cause the road issues. Those other places have less traffic and pay more to fix them.

Our public transportation is somehow 1 or 2 in the country so I feel bad for everyone.

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Good thing nobody else has large population centers where it gets cold and snowy!

Nope....MA is super special that way.

The secret is that winter weather isn’t the main cause of road damage. It’s mostly wear from vehicles, particularly large freight trucks but the big SUVs and oversized pickups that so many people drive are not helping either. A lot of this traffic could be offset if freight railroads weren’t shit and if the MBTA was functional but I guess that’s too much to ask

Why make it functional when you can keep using it as a way to funnel money to your friends in the form of consultancies?

If passenger rail wasn’t shit either small cities of students move around the state multiple times throughout the year every year. Putting trains from out west to Boston (preferably near Logan) could relieve tons of student and holiday traffic.

Sorry I forgot about the megacity of Buffalo in upstate NY. And the famous population density in Canada.

Toronto has 6.3 million people.

There are many departments of our state that are incredibly well managed.

And then there’s the T…

https://www.reddit.com/r/toronto/comments/v5156c/honest_question_why_are_our_roads_in_such_awful/

I remember reading that every wealthy town needs three not wealthy towns to support it.

That was fifteen years ago.

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NY state has a toll system for most of its highways. MA DOES NOT. This is HOW THEY KEEP UP THEIR ROADS and MA does not. It's not rocket science.

Both I-90 and I-87 in NYS are Toll Roads. Except I-87 North of Albany. Tolls in NYS are not cheap, the ONLY Tolls you pay in MA are on I-90 or the Ted Williams, Sumner or Callahan Tunnels.

Yet we are in desperate need for federal receivership of the MBTA, please!

It's killing people and causing literally all of our traffic problems.

No one can rely on it to get to work on time so everyone drives.

You're saying the bluest state has the least dependence on government dollars?

Huh, isn't that neat.

Then why does everyone claim the weather is the problem and then shrugs?

I feel like this just means we are getting more fucked on taxes than most other states...

Done all 3.

MA is the worst. Especially for what it costs to repave. But hey, cops need a new ski boat so....

We could even use some old unused railway that was installed ages ago... Oh wait they just made that into a bike trail....

Tradition.

It's gotten worse since COVID. I've watched all manner of life just toss everything from the average McDonald's to vape charges and even a phone once (could've been for other reasons but still thrown).

Came to the conclusion that people just dont give a damn about their cities anymore. Or your city if they are visiting. Look at Walmart parking lots in general, cesspools.

But what are you going to do? Yell at them? No enforcement causes this, no repercussion means it's no crime right?

Now it's up to 6! Progress!

Fewer people means fewer drivers and less wear and tear on the roads.

I forgot nobody lives in Canada. /S

Some states have programs where under-employed people can be trained to work as flaggers.

1/10th the cars is part of it. The level of traffic affects how quickly a road deteriorates.

A country, a culture, people are evaluated by its lowest point. U.S. is particularly bad at this as it has no intention to improve the worst people

Unemployed yet paid protesters lol

Or try getting addiction treatment in those states. They want addicts to die, full stop.

Because we take care of our own here. We blue as f.

Exactly. They've tried to build affordable housing in many expensive Boston suburbs and the townspeople protest it every time.

Seriously??? My god.

You clearly don’t have kids if you think people sending their kids to daycare “can’t be bothered to raise” them themselves lol. Both parents NEED to work in MA since everything is so fucking expensive. I wish we didn’t need daycare, but we do.

USA is also bigger than all (most?) countries in Europe…that would be like us judging Paris for what happens in Moldova.

Europe isn’t some magical utopia either lol. Lots of places have shit infrastructure and shit politicians and huge income inequality too but for some reason American redditors see one picture of a bike lane in Amsterdam and a train in Germany and think that’s how all of Europe is 😂

Not joking either it’s crazy

I thought we were just talking outside cities. If you want to talk about cities, it's not like buffalo is known for their pothole-free streets: /r/Buffalo/comments/sxy10m/allen_street_potholes_this_is_getting_ridiculous

To be fair, (Greater) Boston, with its huge student population, is part of the Northeast Corridor, which connects cities from Boston to DC and has the best intra- and intercity passenger rail in the US-- not that that's a very high bar, but still.

I imagine a visitor from any major western European city would be dumbfounded at the state of infrastructure and public transportation in Boston these days.

We just keep collecting dubs

Because no one actually thinks it through. They don’t know NYS. Most people east of 495 know east of 495 and that’s it. They travel North to NH, ME for both summer and skiing. Maybe also VT for skiing. Then there’s also the Cape in the summer. If they do go to NYS it’s typically not often and it’s downstate. You don’t hit Tolls on I-95 until you hit the Bridges. If you take I-84 it’s the same, you hit a toll at the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge. If you drive on the parkways in NYS, which aren’t toll roads, they aren’t nearly as good.

Cops standing around, texting in their cars...

I do have kids, and your reading comprehension is terrible. Hopefully your kids will be better at it.

? Reread what you wrote lol. Wtf are you on about with your statement that I already quoted?

I follow this subreddit and also /r/Florida that stark contrast and positive news I see on here compared to there makes me sad