Massachusetts Democrats have officially run out of things to regulate, so now they’re coming for your odometer. Senate Bill S.2246 just passed out of committee on a 4-1 vote and is headed to the Senate Ways and Means Committee. The bill would direct MassDOT — that’s the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, for those of you lucky enough not to live there — to set binding statewide goals for reducing the total number of miles residents are allowed to drive.
Because apparently the government deciding what kind of straw you can use, what kind of stove you can cook on, and what kind of car you can buy wasn’t enough. Now they want to decide how OFTEN you can use the car you already own. What a time to be alive.
The bill doesn’t set an individual mileage cap — yet. Instead, it creates a shiny new government council (because Massachusetts definitely doesn’t have enough of those) tasked with figuring out how to get people out of their cars. The proposed mechanisms include “promoting denser development patterns,” “implementing parking restrictions,” and “using technology to track transportation trends.”
Let’s translate that from bureaucrat-speak into English: They want to pack you into apartments, make it impossible to park anywhere, and use surveillance tech to monitor how much you drive. Sounds like a fantastic Tuesday in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts.
Here’s where it gets really fun. The geniuses behind this bill apparently forgot that Massachusetts has an entire rural population. You know — people who live in towns where the nearest grocery store is a 20-minute drive and the “public transit option” is a bus that comes twice a day if the driver feels like it. But sure, tell the guy in the Berkshires that he needs to take the subway to pick up his kids from school. Brilliant plan.
The whole thing is wrapped in the usual climate panic packaging. We have to reduce vehicle miles traveled because — and stop us if you’ve heard this one before — the planet is going to catch fire if you drive to Target one more time this week. Never mind that the United States has been reducing emissions for years while China builds a new coal plant every other Thursday. No, the real threat to Mother Earth is a plumber in Springfield commuting to work in his F-150.
These people would put GPS trackers on your dashboard if they thought they could get away with it. And honestly? That’s probably Phase Two. The bill literally calls for “using technology to track transportation trends.” That’s government-speak for “we want to know where you’re going and how often.” Today it’s aggregate data. Tomorrow it’s a per-mile tax. Next year it’s a text message from the state telling you you’ve exceeded your driving quota for the month.
(Think we’re exaggerating? Oregon already has a voluntary per-mile tax program. “Voluntary” — for now.)
And who do you think gets crushed by this? Not the Beacon Hill politicians who take chauffeured SUVs to their climate summits. Not the Harvard professors who bike to campus from their $2 million brownstones. It’s the single mom working two jobs in Worcester. It’s the electrician driving between job sites in Lowell. It’s every working-class family in Massachusetts who doesn’t have the luxury of “choosing” public transit because public transit doesn’t go where they need to go.
But Democrats don’t think about those people. They never do. They think about Cambridge wine bars and Whole Foods parking lots and TED Talks about “reimagining mobility.” Meanwhile, the rest of the state just wants to drive to work without the government treating it like a crime.
The one lone committee member who voted against this bill deserves a medal. The other four deserve to have their state vehicles repossessed and replaced with bus passes. Let them ride the MBTA for a month and then come back and tell us how great life without a car is. We’ll wait.
Massachusetts has already driven out half its tax base with insane housing costs and sky-high energy prices. Now they want to make it harder to physically leave your house. At some point, you have to wonder if that’s the actual goal — keep everyone trapped in a dense urban pod, dependent on government transit, tracking every mile. That’s not a transportation plan. That’s a control plan.
If you live in Massachusetts and you like driving your own car to wherever you want, whenever you want, without asking permission from a state bureaucrat — you might want to start making some phone calls. Or better yet, start making moving plans. New Hampshire is right next door, and their state motto is literally “Live Free or Die.”
Just saying.
