Pop quiz: Name the only MBTA subway lines that don’t meet. If you said the Red and the Blue, you’re right, and you may be right for decades to come.
Supporters of a “Red-Blue Connector” appeared to gain a boost Thursday when the body controlling distribution of federal transportation aid in Greater Boston programmed $49 million to design the connector. The tunnel would extend the Blue Line a half-mile beneath Cambridge Street from its Government Center/Bowdoin terminus to meet the Red Line at Charles/MGH.
Comments
The Green Line extensions, connecting the Red & Blue line etc are all wonderful ideas but they completely ignore reality.
The state is NOT going to increase funding to support them so when Rafael Mares and his cronies at the Conservation Law Foundation go to court and force these projects the T takes the money out of maintenance.
As someone who has the misfortune of commuting on the Red Line every day I can safely say the T is a mess. The soon to be 44 year old trains fail constantly stopping service on the entire line. I have had to evacuate these decrepit trains twice after the cars, not garbage on the tracks, caught fire. Antiquated signal and switching systems fail at least once a week. The new (only 20 years old) trains are not going to get needed overhauls so they are beginning to fail. The elderly signal/ switching system along with bad management lead to incredibly erratic service. You can routinely stand on a packed platform watching a seemingly endless procession of empty trains going the other direction. The T can’t seem to keeps its escalators running and the 870 parking space Quincy Center garage was condemned due to lack of maintenance.
An independent review done of the T recommended that all expansion stop until the T addressed its maintenance backlog. Despite this Mares and the Conservation Law Foundation continue to force these projects making current T users miserable and endangering their lives. The Conservation Law Foundation is the current T riders worst enemy,
aferr,
We need to do both. The revitalization of the downtown area, especially the wildly successful development of the Kendall Square neighborhood, but also the fact that East Boston is receiving an influx of young professionals hoping to commute by train, means that more people neeed more transit options. Connecting the Blue and Red lines would be a boon for both East Boston (which badly needs it) and Kendall Square (which still has a lot of room to go), and would easily pay for itself in terms of increased property tax revenues and improving the economic vitality of the neighborhoods around both lines. And as if that wasn't enough on its own, it would also do a lot to improve the overall logic of the system, making for a more pleasant experience for tourists and business owners thinking about locating in our city. It's hard to imagine a transit project anywhere in the country that would get you more bang for the buck than this one. This is even more true if we can keep this project in a state where it could potentially be funded by federal stimulus dollars.
And to be clear, this does nothing to diminish the need to find a dedicated funding source that will cover the cost of maintenance and upkeep of the existing system. Personally I would advocate raising the gas tax so that its purchasing power is the same as it was the last time it was raised (in 1993, or 5 subway fare increases ago), and then turning it into a percentage tax so that it doesn't require constant political infighting in order to keep pace with inflation. The state could absolutely afford it, as it would do a lot to attract more business to our already lucrative tech sector (transit is, after all, one of the great things we have that Silicon Valley does not), but the western half of the state must learn to appreciate how attracting business to Boston also help buy things for their half of the state (which, of course, is already a net user of overall state finances).
All of this "we can't do this, we can't afford that, we should aim lower and do less" nonsense strikes me as a really un-American way of looking at things, and I really can't imagine an attitude like that is going to help us build the leading economy of the 21st century. It's a battle of ambition and right now we are losing.