Honestly paying for parking is an insult in the first place.
Here in MA to drive a car you have to pay.....
1. Sales tax, whether you bought the car out-of-state or not. This is calculated by the RMV and NOT by your bill of sale. So if MA thinks your $500 car is worth $3,000 you're paying 6.25% of $3k.
2. Registration fees that go up every year. This pays for the 4 hours you have to sit at the RMV watching people who get paid $30/hour help one person every 15 minutes.
3. Private insurance, which is required. Lots of out-of-state policies aren't eligible, so we see ads on TV for competetive policies from Progressive, Geiko, ect yet nobody in MA is eligible to buy them. It's worth it to note that state vehicles don't need insurance as they are "self-insured." So if you crash into a cop you or your insurance will pay 100% but if a cop crashes into you the town and its taxpayers get to pay 100%.
4. We have toll booths all over the fucking place yet we still have some of the worst paved road conditions in the country. Anyone who has visited Cambridge MA can attest to this.
5. We pay yearly excise tax on each vehicle to the town we live in.
6. Exorbiant state fuel tax (27th highest in the nation).
How much more can they charge us for infrastructure without actually having to invest anything on infrastructure? On top of property and income tax and sales tax and excise tax you've gotta pay $3 to park on a public street.....
Do you actually live in MA? There's a lot wrong with what you say.
2) We don't even have to register our cars every year. And you can renew online, so you don't have to sit in the RMV at all. (I did mine a month or two ago.) When you buy a new car the dealer registers it on the spot for you.
3) MA deregulated the the insurance policies a long time ago. Like 10 or more years ago? I can't even remember it was long enough ago. I live in MA and my insurer is.. wait for it. Geico.
4) About the only toll road in the state is the Pike. We have a few bridge tolls. Realistically a bunch of the surrounding states around us have far more tolls. NH has tons of them on roads that many people have to regularly travel. NY has the Thruway. Maine has tolls on the main highways. VT is about the only one around that has less tolls than MA. Anyone complaining about driving in Cambridge is just "doing it wrong". It's super dense and the city is just not set up to support a car-centric lifestyle and they don't want your car there at all.
5) Excise tax reduces to almost nothing unless you constantly flip your car. And that's the town not the state collecting it.
There is a lot of entitlement to think you deserve to park your private car wherever you like.
2) Sure we don't get screwed on registration like people in CA do but we still get screwed. People who buy used really get screwed hard because of the taxes on "value" as described.
3) Not really. Most of the cheap, cheap carriers (e.g. "The General") that keep prices of all the carriers low don't exist in this state
4)NH and Maine toll the tourist highways only. I have no problem with them making money off the people who will be the death of their states. Personally I think they should 10x the toll for out of state plates then refund most of it if you cross the border going the other direction. If you have to compare yourself to NY when it comes to cost of living or individual freedom you've already lost. I will agree that nobody with a brain should be driving in Boston/Cambridge.
5) Unless you own a "luxury" brand. I pay under $40 on my 90s crap. My friend pays ~$200 on his same age Town and Country.
>There is a lot of entitlement to think you deserve to park your private car wherever you like.
I think the GP is saying that for all the taking (taxing) MA does the amount of giving back (in the form of services and social programs) MA does is kind of annoying. All these taxes would be one thing if we had good infrastructure but we don't.
Most places have built way more infrastructure than they can afford to maintain. This isn't an MA only problem. This is a nationwide problem.
Likely if you looked at your state/city/county budgets, they are spending more on road construction and maintenance than they are receiving in vehicle related taxes and fees.
>Likely if you looked at your state/city/county budgets, they are spending more on road construction and maintenance than they are receiving in vehicle related taxes and fees.
I can't just look at the budget. That will tell me what they're telling the public they're spending on X. That will not tell me how much of the budget the people allocating the money expect to actually further X and how much they expect to get sapped by unnecessary overhead along the way. A non trivial amount of that is just monopoly money for the politically well connected. There are administrators and managers who are paid a salary to twiddle their thumbs because they know people. There are projects that exist for no reason other than to be a jobs program. You can't tell what's what from the outside. I have immediate family members in state government in MA so it's not like I'm talking out my ass. I get to hear complaints about this multiple times per week.
>VT is about the only one around that has less tolls than MA.
Don't forget Connecticut! Connecticut borders Mass and has no tolls in the entire state. There's been some movement since the election to add tolls though.
5) I flip cars all the time, and it's irrelevant. I bought the car with cash, paid to register it, paid the sales tax with cash, pay tax whenever I buy gas, pay tolls whenever I go somwhere... Why does the town need to make money off my car when the state already has 4 times?
You can have metered parking without forcing taxpaying people to pay for it. What if you just made the price for a 2h parking slip $0? You still have meter maids giving out tickets, right? I thought it wasn't about the revenue..... right?
My understanding is that pay for parking (aside from large garages) is generally about space availability rather than making money. Public street parking in Boston is fairly cheap per unit time and my understanding is that the maximum time limits are meant to allow new people to come in and take the spot to do whatever business they need to do in the area. Otherwise people would just squat on spots all day and the businesses would be starved for customers.
Not disagreeing with all the other shenanigans you listed for Ma though.
I've heard that cities also charge for parking because of an interesting social factor: many people will drive in circles for half an hour looking for a free spot rather than pay for parking in a private lot. Everyone driving around in circles creates more traffic. So the city charges for curbside parking, in order to make the cost more comparable to parking in a private lot, with the hope that it will lower the psychological switching cost from "finding a curbside spot" to "giving up and paying for a garage spot".
My annoyance with metered parking in the area isn't so much the cost which, as you say, isn't very expensive. Rather it's that a lot of 2-hour metered parking has been extended from ending at 6pm to ending at 8pm. What that means is that, if you come in for dinner and an evening event, your meter will probably expire before 8pm.
(There is a hack with the online parking app to "feed the meter" although you can potentially get ticketed for that.)
Exactly. If parking time limits weren't enforced, commuters would just park there, hurting local businesses. (I say this having been on both sides of the equation.)
I agree with your assessment, but not entirely. If it weren't at all about making money you could just stand up a kiosk that dispenses parking tickets and not charge money for them. The ticket-to-park method of parking enforcement doesn't require the payment element to enforce parking laws.
> Honestly paying for parking is an insult in the first place.
The alternative in popular areas is to never be able to find parking which arguably sucks more. If there aren’t open spots on the street then the parking fees are too cheap.
> Private insurance, which is required. Lots of out-of-state policies aren't eligible, so we see ads on TV for competetive policies from Progressive, Geiko, ect yet nobody in MA is eligible to buy them. It's worth it to note that state vehicles don't need insurance as they are "self-insured." So if you crash into a cop you or your insurance will pay 100% but if a cop crashes into you the town and its taxpayers get to pay 100%.
The taxpayers would be paying for the insurance premiums if the State bought insurance. The ability to be self insured is an advantage of being any large org. It’s no different then self insuring health insurance.
5th best healthcare out of the fifty states according to [0].
1st best education system [1].
7th by median household income [2].
Wow! 45th on the infrastructure list [3].
37th on inequality [4].
So, seems like you get what you pay for. My guess is that all those plains states have less people and less infrastructure to maintain in general, and with great opportunities also comes great inequality in some instances.
I did not read a word on any of the linked articles besides rank as I’m at work. But it seems interesting, and I didn’t skip over the ones that surprised me.
Education in MA is nothing special. We look good on paper because we have a lot of rich people to drag the various averages and medians up. The kids of all those pharma engineers, college professors and tech workers tend to do pretty well regardless of the school system you put them through.
If you compare outcomes relative to inputs (i.e. compare poor kids to poor kids and rich kids to rich kids) the range of differences between states gets a lot smaller and it's IIRC Texas and a couple other states you'd never have expected that do the best. Edit: can't find the citation but it was an article that was on HN awhile back.
But where does it go? Certainly not back to the taxpayers in the form of public services and social programs. The input to output ratio of MA government is highly inefficient yet most people in this state worship at the alter of government authority so nobody questions why it has to be so inefficient.
Looking at the state budget, or anything published by the state doesn't tell you what is just pork and what positions are jobs programs for the politically well connected. I have immediate family members in state government in MA. It's not like I don't know how this work.
Providing the parking spaces, and the car lanes to drive on, are both massive investments in real estate, given over for your use to store and use your vehicle. The fees and taxes you mention aren't nearly enough to pay for those investments themselves - they are supplemented with funds from property and income taxes. It might not seem like it, but you are getting a very good bargain, especially compared to someone that doesn't own a car.
You pay so as to not abuse the privilege of using a limited resource. I think that's completely reasonable. You could argue that the other costs of car ownership are too high - that's certainly true in MA.
Well, if paying for parking (an additional tax in your implication) is unreasonable, then so must be each of those other taxes too? Where do we draw the line?
> Private insurance, which is required. Lots of out-of-state policies aren't eligible, so we see ads on TV for competetive policies from Progressive, Geiko, ect yet nobody in MA is eligible to buy them.
I grew up in MA and was very angry about this, so even when I moved out of state [and am still out of state] I paid attention to this.
It is my understanding that [frmr] Gov. Deval Patrick changed this specific policy somewhere around 2006/7. I distinctly remember writing in a letter [for whatever little that was worth] encouraging him to do so.
Has time in MA been rewound? Is one of us not paying attention?
This is why if I ever move back to New England I'd move to New Hampshire. Massachusetts is hopelessly addicted to taxes, it could really use some of New Hampshire's libertarian bent.
> Maybe we should stick to facts over divisive exaggerations.
Or we could avoid mischaracterizing lazy math as fact. New Hampshire has no income or sales tax compared to Massachusett's 5% and 6% respectively. New Hampshire has higher property tax, sure, but coupled with the COL disparity you can't honestly say the two are the same.
Furthermore, it's missing GPs point which is that for all the vehicle-related taxes Massachusetts roads are notoriously terrible. New Hampshire's infrastructure ranks much better.
EDIT: I'm also having a lot of trouble finding a source for that 7% figure they have for property tax. Best I can figure is it's around 1-1.5% in MA, 2-2.5% in NH. Also, looks like they based it on a $200,000 house without accounting for the fact that buys a lot more house in NH than MA.
I really thing we need interstate migration controls. The idea that within the span of a few decades a bunch of people sharing a set of beliefs can run a state into the ground then move somewhere else and start doing it again before society can react is an end run around the purpose of having separate states.
I'd be perfectly fine having to be a resident somewhere for say 2yr before having voting rights there. If I'm moving somewhere then it's clearly a good enough place as is and I shouldn't be missing much by not being able to change things.
> There's a fire-hose of Massholes who move there with no regard for the local culture
As a Mainer, living in Mass I find this hilarious. New Hampshire is the New Jersey/Texas/Florida of New England - to blame it on "massholes" is ridiculous.
Texas because NH has that libertarian/don't tread of my mentality.
New Jersey because of the commercial development / build up (you're never more than 20 min from a Lowes unless you're in the mountains)
Florida because crazy shit happens in NH, and people go to HN to do crazy shit (source: I have family members and friends who did crazy shit there)
As I said, it's a joke and shouldn't be taken seriously, NH is a lovely place - I skied there this winter, and visit regularly but I'll always be a Mainer, and now that I'm a "flatlander" Masshole I have a whole new set of jokes!
Here in MA to drive a car you have to pay.....
1. Sales tax, whether you bought the car out-of-state or not. This is calculated by the RMV and NOT by your bill of sale. So if MA thinks your $500 car is worth $3,000 you're paying 6.25% of $3k.
2. Registration fees that go up every year. This pays for the 4 hours you have to sit at the RMV watching people who get paid $30/hour help one person every 15 minutes.
3. Private insurance, which is required. Lots of out-of-state policies aren't eligible, so we see ads on TV for competetive policies from Progressive, Geiko, ect yet nobody in MA is eligible to buy them. It's worth it to note that state vehicles don't need insurance as they are "self-insured." So if you crash into a cop you or your insurance will pay 100% but if a cop crashes into you the town and its taxpayers get to pay 100%.
4. We have toll booths all over the fucking place yet we still have some of the worst paved road conditions in the country. Anyone who has visited Cambridge MA can attest to this.
5. We pay yearly excise tax on each vehicle to the town we live in.
6. Exorbiant state fuel tax (27th highest in the nation).
How much more can they charge us for infrastructure without actually having to invest anything on infrastructure? On top of property and income tax and sales tax and excise tax you've gotta pay $3 to park on a public street.....