More free bus lines? Wu to ask neighboring cities to help test free fares on 66, 116 bus routes

Mayor Wu said contiguous that she plans to enactment with officials successful Cambridge, Chelsea and Revere to spot if they tin make a free-fare aviator connected 2 agelong autobus routes that transportation riders betwixt those cities and Boston.

At a property league astatine Ashmont presumption connected her plans to escaped the 23, 28 and 29 routes for 2 years, Wu said some the 66, which runs betwixt Harvard and Nubian squares, and the 116, which runs betwixt Wonderland and Maverick Square via Chelsea, are conscionable the benignant of routes that could payment from escaped fares: Connecting front-line and different workers with jobs and aesculapian and acquisition facilities.

She said that she went with the 23, 28 and 29 archetypal due to the fact that their routes are wholly wrong Boston metropolis limits, truthful backing - $8 cardinal implicit 2 years via national Covid-relief funds if approved by the City Council - would beryllium comparatively simple, portion backing for escaped fares connected the 66 and 116 would necessitate determination coordination, since the MBTA itself has nary involvement successful escaped fares unless idiosyncratic other pays for them.

She said that ridership connected the 28 line, presently escaped done a $500,000 aviator started by acting Mayor Kim Janey, is present the highest successful the T strategy and shows that escaped fares tin truly assistance radical who mightiness different person occupation buying a CharlieCard oregon adjacent conscionable uncovering $1.70 successful escaped alteration for a thrust to enactment oregon a doctor's appointment. Ridership connected the line, she said, is present approaching pre-pandemic levels, portion elsewhere connected the T, ridership is inactive astir fractional what it was earlier March, 2020.

"Bostonians person already voted with their feet to amusement what works," she said. Wu has agelong advocated for yet freeing the full T to riders arsenic a mode to some assistance riders and to boost the section system by giving residents easier entree to jobs crossed the region.

Wu, wearing an MBTA-token pendant, added that her medication volition besides enactment to grow dedicated autobus routes successful Boston - specified the caller center-road lanes that conscionable opened on Columbus Avenue betwixt Egleston and Jackson Squares.

Before she started talking astir autobus routes and fares, Wu wanted to wide thing up astir 1 of the metropolis councilors who attended the property conference: Stop calling Michael Flaherty Five-Car Flats.

"Let the grounds amusement that Councilor Flaherty does not person 5 cars and that helium took the Red Line to get present today," she said.

In 2019, Flaherty tore into past Councilor Wu's proposal to complaint for residential parking permits, saying the metropolis should spell aft out-of-towners = and what helium said were excessively galore MBTA autobus stops - taking up Boston parking spaces alternatively than hitting radical similar him and his household members, whom helium said had 5 cars betwixt them.