Let me tell you a story
About a governor named Charlie
On a tragic and fateful day
He put a card in his pocket
Kissed his wife and family
Went to ride on the MBTA
Charlie stuck in his card
At the Kendall Square Station
With plans to change for Jamaica Plain
When he got on the conductor told him
The line broke down in the snow
Charlie could not get off that train
Now all night long
Charlie was stuck in a tunnel
Saying, “I’m going to fix this mess”
How could he possibly see
The Olympics come to be
With trains idled so chronically
Did he ever return? Of course the State Police who drive Charlie Baker wouldn’t really let the governor risk a ride on the snowbound Red Line.
At this point, it feels a little unfair to pick on the MBTA for its performance during such an awful stretch of winter weather. Even Baker, who has slammed the T’s service twice in just over a week, acknowledged the severity of the conditions.
But my version of the song “Charlie on the MTA,” recorded in 1959 by the Kingston Trio, is really a plea for Baker to use this time of public frustration to embrace the job of fixing — or at least substantially improving — Greater Boston’s transportation system. If the system’s recent failures aren’t a new call to action, I don’t know what one would look like.
Baker certainly sounded frustrated on Monday. “The public transportation system has to work,” he said. “Let’s face it, this can’t happen again.”
Then the T announced it would shut down for the evening and remain mostly out of service Tuesday. At an evening press conference, Baker was peppered with questions about the MBTA. “Obviously there’s work to be done,” he said. “I’m anxious to have that conversation with . . . some of the folks at the T once the snow stops.”
Over many years, there have been lots of plans to study and then fix the MBTA’s chronic money and management troubles. None of them have worked, and the annual makeshift budget solution has usually neglected investments in infrastructure. Ask anyone who has been stuck in the cold waiting for a train over the past two weeks how that’s working out.
“It was all completely predictable,” said David D’Alessandro, who led an independent review of the MBTA for governor Deval Patrick in 2009. “The system was under strain, and many of the capital projects that had been put aside for years were power-related.”
I don’t know how much improvement any one person or plan can make. But I would be hard-pressed to come up with anyone else better suited to the job than Baker and his well-established problem-solving skills.
One of Baker’s biggest achievements is the famed rescue of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. He signed on to run that very troubled organization in 1999, and few people gave him much of a chance. Even the attorney general at the time, Thomas Reilly, presumed the problems were so bad they would end up turning off the lights.
Saving Harvard Pilgrim, now two separate and very successful organizations, took some serious management skills. Baker likes to talk about it as a collaboration with lots of people. He’ll need plenty of that generous spirit to make a dent in the T’s problems.
When it comes to public transportation, Baker wouldn’t be able to lean as heavily on some of the tactics he used at Harvard Pilgrim. As a health insurance executive, he raised rates a lot, closed some operations, and laid people off.
On the other hand, the definition of success would be real change and improvement — not a miracle.
I’m not offering the governor any specific plans to deal with the MBTA. Charlie Chieppo wrote about his plan in The Boston Globe last week. Show it to anyone from Massachusetts who lives at least 50 miles outside Boston and you’re sure to get into a fight. No one out there wants to pay for what is seen as someone else’s problem.
I asked D’Alessandro on Monday what any basic plan should aim to do, and he offered two critical goals. First, stop any political momentum to expand service and focus on maintaining what exists. Second, more money has to come from somewhere.
Eventually, something has to be done about the MBTA’s debts of nearly $5.5 billion. Interest payments this year alone will run about $424 million. Much of that obligation is of the T’s own making, but some of it was unfairly heaped upon the system during the Big Dig. That needs to be addressed.
No one who depends on the MBTA for basic transportation cares much right now, but what does our system’s recent performance tell the people who will decide the host of the 2024 Games?
Long ago, Boston Olympics czar John Fish told me and lots of other people that what seemed like a fanciful quest at the time would at least get people thinking and talking about our infrastructure needs of the future. When it comes to public transportation, the future is now.
Fixing the MBTA is an important job. Baker is an ideal person for it, but he has to be willing to take the political challenge. We need Charlie on the MBTA.
Steven Syre is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at syre@globe.com.