Massachusetts Senate Bill 2246 is pure bureaucratic dishonesty. Not the crude kind that lies outright, but the more refined kind that tells the truth in fragments while carefully avoiding the conclusion those fragments inevitably produce.
The bill does not say regulators will cap how many miles residents may drive. It does not mention personal mileage limits, odometer tracking, or fines for “excessive” driving. Supporters will cling to that omission and declare the criticism hysterical.
That stated defense depends on pretending modern regulation still works through blunt commands rather than structural coercion.
Senate Bill 2246 is designed to reduce driving. Not emissions as a side effect. Not congestion. Not inefficiency. Driving itself. The title admits as much: the goal is “reducing emissions and vehicle miles traveled.” Vehicle miles traveled—VMT—is the obsession that runs through the bill like a fault line.
The method is simple and effective. Instead of telling individuals they may not drive, the bill ensures that the system they rely on no longer supports driving in the first place.
Section 80 prohibits metropolitan planning organizations from approving transportation plans unless they provide “a reasonable pathway” to compliance with statewide vehicle miles traveled reduction goals. Read that carefully. Road projects are no longer judged by whether they improve safety, relieve congestion, or accommodate population growth. They are judged by whether they reduce driving. If a project allows people to move more efficiently but increases total miles driven, it fails the test.
The bill then requires “vehicle miles traveled impact assessments” for projects, including estimates of the “net change in vehicle miles traveled” over a 20-year period. These assessments are compliance filters. Once VMT becomes a regulatory metric, it becomes a veto. If the number goes up, the project is in trouble. If it goes down, it passes—regardless of whether it actually serves the public.
To deal with projects that increase driving, the bill lists acceptable “mitigation measures.” The list reads like a greatest-hits album of demand suppression: transit expansion, parking cost adjustments, elimination of parking requirements, land-use densification, transportation demand management.
None of these ban driving. They just make it more expensive, less convenient, and less viable.
This is how control works now. You do not outlaw behavior. You engineer the environment so the behavior becomes impractical.
Section 81 takes the next step by requiring the Secretary of Transportation to set statewide vehicle miles traveled reduction goals for 2030 and every five years thereafter. These are not aspirational targets. They are embedded into greenhouse gas sublimits and binding “roadmap plans.” Once those numbers are written down, failure to meet them becomes a political and bureaucratic crisis. Agencies then scramble to push the numbers down by any means available.
The bill offers no limiting principle on those means.
An intergovernmental council is created to “implement a vehicle miles traveled reduction plan” through “non-personal vehicle transportation options” and “land use policies that reduce the need for personal vehicles.” The council is further instructed to identify “policies, laws and regulatory actions” that may facilitate reductions in vehicle miles traveled.
That language is not cautious. It is deliberately expansive. The legislature sets the goal and hands future regulators a blank check.
Defenders will say this is not about restricting freedom because no one is forced to give up their car. That argument is either naïve or disingenuous. When roads are not expanded, parking is priced out of reach, neighborhoods are redesigned, and alternatives are subsidized while driving infrastructure is starved, the outcome is predetermined. People drive less not because they freely choose to, but because the system has been reconfigured against them.
The bill briefly gestures at public hearings, including in areas with limited transit access. That is simply a formality. Hearings do not change numerical targets. They do not override compliance mandates. They exist to legitimize decisions already made.
What is never addressed is the assumption underlying the entire bill: that reducing vehicle miles traveled is inherently good. Driving is treated as a pathology rather than a reflection of economic reality, geography, family obligations, and work. Rural residents, tradespeople, caregivers, and anyone outside dense urban cores are treated as planning inconveniences to be managed away.
The bill’s defenders focus obsessively on what it does not say. That is the wrong place to look. Modern governance does not announce its most controversial outcomes in plain language. It embeds them in metrics, planning criteria, and conditional approvals.
Senate Bill 2246 does not need to authorize personal mileage caps. It achieves the same result by making driving an increasingly disfavored activity at every level of infrastructure and land-use decision-making. It does not ration miles directly. It rations opportunity.
That distinction is intentional. Explicit mileage limits would provoke backlash. Planning “alignment” sounds technical, boring, and harmless. But once vehicle miles traveled becomes a legally enforced target, personal mobility becomes collateral damage.
The bill avoids saying what it is doing because saying it would expose the reality: a transportation system redesigned not around how people live, but around what planners wish people would stop doing.
“Defenders will say this is not about restricting freedom because no one is forced to give up their car. That argument is either naïve or disingenuous. When roads are not expanded, parking is priced out of reach, neighborhoods are redesigned, and alternatives are subsidized while driving infrastructure is starved, the outcome is predetermined. People drive less not because they freely choose to, but because the system has been reconfigured against them.”
People have been making exactly the same point for decades about walking and cycling. People walk less because cities are designed around cars. People cycle less because the roads and cars make it increasingly dangerous for people to cycle. If the only road between A and B is a highway on which bikes are forbidden then “the outcome is predetermined”.
The evidence is also extremely clear that encouraging people to cycle to work has substantial health benefits. For example “Health benefits of pedestrian and cyclist commuting: evidence from the Scottish Longitudinal Study”shows that:
Compared with non-active commuting, cyclist commuting was associated with lower all-cause mortality risk (HR 0.53, 95% CI 0.38 to 0.73), lower risk of any hospitalisation (HR 0.90, 95% CI 0.84 to 0.97), lower risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) hospitalisation (HR 0.76, 95% CI 0.64 to 0.91) and of having a CVD prescription (HR 0.70, 95% CI 0.63 to 0.78), lower risk of cancer mortality (HR 0.49, 95% CI 0.30 to 0.82) and cancer hospitalisation (HR 0.76, 95% CI 0.59 to 0.98), and lower risk of having a prescription for mental health problems (HR 0.80, 95% CI 0.73 to 0.89). Pedestrian commuting was associated with lower risk of any hospitalisation (HR 0.91, 95% CI 0.88 to 0.93), lower risk of CVD hospitalisation (HR 0.90, 95% CI 0.84 to 0.96) and of having a CVD prescription (HR 0.90, 95% CI 0.87 to 0.93), and lower risk of a mental health prescription (HR 0.93, 95% CI 0.90 to 0.97).
See https://bmjpublichealth.bmj.com/content/2/1/e001295
If you redesign the road network to better support active commuting then everyone benefits. Less cars on the road means less congestion and more cyclists means that health costs come down dramatically. Alternatively you can build more roads which leads to more congestion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox) and worse health outcomes for everyone.
Izaak, what brand of bicycle snow tires do you recommend for use in winter? And should these winter bicycle snow tires be studded? Why or why not?
Planning a trip in Europe I found limited nonstop flights: one example was Malta to Catania. There were nonstop flights only very early or very late, usually with Ryanair; all other flights passed through Rome, Bologna, Istanbul, and even Athens. I cancelled Catania. It’s infuriating to see how they’re trying to sabotage our convenience.