Coming Soon to Boston’s Massive Parking Crater: More Subsidized Parking

Quick -- what should a city do to improve access to a rapidly developing area near a bus rapid transit station? In Boston, officials have settled on an expensive plan to subsidize driving and traffic.

The Boston Globe's Jon Chesto reports that the city of Boston and the Massachusetts Port Authority are planning to spend more than $100 million to add 2,100 parking spaces in Boston's Seaport District. As you can see above, this area -- a competitor in Streetsblog's 2015 Parking Madness tournament -- is already an ocean of surface parking. But recent development has caused the market for parking to tighten up, so the government is stepping in to rescue "suburban commuters who [don't] want to pay downtown Boston prices or use public transit."

The city will pay $22 million to add 550 parking spaces to an existing parking deck, Chesto reports, while the Port Authority is paying $85 million to build a 1,550-space garage nearby to bring parking prices down:

More recommended reading today: David Levinson at The Transportist spoke to NPR about the shaky economics of Trump's $1 trillion infrastructure plan. And Modern Cities looks at Target's new strategy of entering urban markets with smaller stores.