Massachusetts residents are more willing to embrace higher gas taxes to repair the state's crumbling transportation system than any other proposed solution, including higher tolls or more booths at the state's borders, a Boston Globe poll shows.In fact, higher tolls - as recently proposed by the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority with Governor Deval Patrick's support - are by far the least popular among an array of suggestions that have been floated to fix the state's transportation woes.
Patrick has called it a bad time, with the economy sagging, to raise the gas tax. House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi has said he would prefer a tax hike, which affects motorists generally, to toll hikes that burden only some.
When those polled were asked to choose between raising tolls on the turnpike or raising the gas tax, the tax won out 48 percent to 42 percent. The feelings about taxes or tolls varied considerably depending on where respondents live - toll hikes were the clear preference of those from the state's west and southeast sections, who are least likely to pay them.
But even some who do not regularly drive on toll roads object to the hikes.
"It's outrageous," said Steve Edelheit, a 62-year-old college teacher from Brookline who seldom pays tolls and responded to the poll. "Why should it fall on the backs of those folks to pay for the Big Dig?" The lingering costs of the $15 billion tunnel project and the resulting financial crisis for state roads and public transit have vaulted transportation funding to the top of the state's political agenda.
But residents - by a more than 2 to 1 ratio - say the final product was not worth the time and money invested in it. Sixty-five percent said the Big Dig has had no impact on their travel time, and some said it has even made trips longer. Fifty-four percent said they were at least somewhat nervous driving through the tunnels, which claimed a life in 2006 when a ceiling panel collapsed.
"You've got two-thirds of the people who say it wasn't worth it, but they're going to have to pay for it," said Andrew E. Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, which conducted the Globe's poll. "That makes a political problem."
