you probably dont live in Boston, because there is no one on the planet that drives into boston rather than taking the T because its too expensive. people drive downtown and pay $40 for parking instead of taking the T.
That's assuming there is nothing else on the ledger.
Suppose you have to choose between a suburban house without any convenient access to mass transit (i.e. you're going to have to drive everywhere) or a more expensive unit which is closer to the city and is near a transit stop. Paying $40 for parking is going to offset the cost advantage of the less expensive housing and leave a lot of people near the breakeven point, and then a $100/mo difference in transit fares could be the deciding factor.
theres plenty of essentially free park and ride stations. theres commuter rail access in basically a 1 hour drive radius of the city. nothing about what you said is relevant.
rich people (of which boston has plenty even in the burbs where average house prices are 800k+) pay to avoid existing near poor people. they think they are going to get stabbed on the subway.
if the subway was faster, safer, cleaner, but more expensive, more people would use it.
> theres plenty of essentially free park and ride stations.
Which is a huge pain, because now you need to have a car, and already be in it to drive to the park and ride. A drive on which there could be traffic. Which means you could miss your train unless you leave early, but then you're standing around the train station doing nothing (and not getting paid) even when there isn't traffic, instead of spending that time either at home or at work. Whereas if you lived near the train stop you wouldn't have to leave early to not miss your train.
Meanwhile if you already need to have a car, and you're already in it and driving it, most people aren't going to drive northeast to the park and ride and then take a train southeast to their destination instead of saving time by just driving directly east all the way to the destination. So the thing that gets them on the train is not having to drive to get to it.
> theres commuter rail access in basically a 1 hour drive radius of the city.
There's commuter rail lines that go an hour from the center of the city. That's not at all the same thing as there being a stop within walking distance of every suburban home.
> they think they are going to get stabbed on the subway.
The people who think they're going to get stabbed on the subway are not going to use the subway. We're talking about the people who might actually use it.
> if the subway was faster, safer, cleaner, but more expensive, more people would use it.
The way you make it faster is to get more people to use it so you can justify more frequent service, which eliminating fares facilitates. The way to make it safer and cleaner is to get more people to use it, so there are more people who care if it's safer and cleaner because they're using it. Which is again facilitated by eliminating fares.
The only thing fares get you is an amount of money that represents less than 1% of the state budget, and then you lose a significant proportion of that to the cost of collecting the fares. It's taking a privacy-invasive deadweight loss to create a deterrent to something you're trying to encourage people to do.
There is nothing convenient about doing park and ride. It's something you do because whatever your other options are suck worse. Commuter rail inevitably dumps you somewhere you don't need to be so then you have to take the T from there. There is no way not to make it a slog of a commute with that many transitions.
