There is an easy answer -- free transit and the gradual reduction of the auto

Coalition wants to study transit hub as way to ease Route 128 traffic - The Boston Globe: "Can Route 128 be saved from slowly choking to death on its own traffic?"

Federal government controlled by oil trolls

Despite suburbs’ swan song, transit money withers - Boston.com: Climate change demands that Americans drive less and use more mass transit, while the specter of ever-rising gas prices provides the economic incentives to follow that environmental imperative. These forces will only grow over time. It’s an easy narrative to follow — except in Washington, where the pitched warfare over budgets and deficits threatens to rob cities and towns of their ability to become future-proof.
...The budget deal cut $2.9 billion from Obama’s ambitious high-speed rail program, leaving the president without a penny to spend on the initiative this year. It also cut New Starts, the program that pays for most new transit construction, to $400 million below last year’s level. Neither cut is paradigm-shifting, but each sets a worrisome precedent. Overall federal spending levels have nowhere to go but down, and this year’s low baseline could become next year’s ceiling.

The transit advocacy group Reconnecting America recently catalogued $233 billion in backlogged transit projects across the country, including $77 billion in the Northeast. The MBTA’s Green Line extension, Blue-Line-and-Red-Line connector, and South Coast rail project are all on the list. At the current spending pace, this backlog would take 73 years to fund.

Attn: Climate delayers - Are you buying beach property?

‘Fighting a losing battle with the sea’ - Boston.com: "The Elsmores’ basement filled with 5 feet of water, and flames billowed into the dark sky from two nearby houses that flooded and caught fire. Their neighbors’ young children had to be evacuated from their house by a bucket loader. In all, some 400 homes were swamped.

The ocean’s fury is an omnipresent threat for the growing number of people who live at its edge. But accumulating scientific evidence suggests that our warming climate could cause sea levels to rise faster than previously thought, making storm surges like the one that pummeled Scituate more dangerous."

GOP = Gas and Oil Party

Good One from Andy Singer - Death by Car

  Good One from Andy Singer - Death by Car: "Studies reveal that the moonshine-for-gas thing is, like the rest of the “alt fuels” ruse, a mega-scam based on exploitation of people’s ignorance of the laws of physics and energy."

Boston - MBTA GM goes #carfree

Boston.com: "Eric Moskowitz, Globe Staff / Apr 3, 2011 04:03 AM
Richard A. Davey has given up his car. Not just for the week, or for the month, but for good.

The MBTA general manager and his wife took the plunge into car-free living last week, donating their sole set of wheels, a sparingly driven Nissan Altima, to the Home for Little Wanderers."