Greater Boston wants a world-class future, but without a functioning transit system those hopes will go off the rails. The MBTA’s mounting troubles are evident to all of us who ride the system regularly, and individual tales of woe abound. Last week on consecutive afternoons, my normal 20-minute Red Line ride home to Central Square turned into 40-minute and 60-minute odysseys because of disabled or malfunctioning trains ahead of me.
Meanwhile, one colleague reported that one of his subway rides last week was marred by a deafening rattle and a piercing sound coming from the brakes. Earlier this week, the T happened to come up in an interview I had with MIT marine expert Judy Pederson on coastal issues. She launched into invective about how her normal 90-minute train ride from Worcester (for a mere 45 miles!) turned even slower in extreme heat or cold — or just because leaves are on the track.
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good piece derrick but what would help would be for people to start reading and listening to charley chieppo. oh ya, theres no way in hades ya can have a 1st class anything with TENTH-RATE city and state leadership. ma
The T enables mobility of labor resources important to all socio-economic classes. MA would have been better served if we focsed our attention on public transportaion instead of casinos.
Infrastructure is vitally important in the world we live in today. The T is part of that. When you put the state of the T together with the execrable condition of the roadways you have a recipe for failure. Waste all the $$ on a convention center we don't need as starve the infrastucture - good policy.
You neglect to mention how the T announced this week they are throwing away an 872 parking space garage on the Red Line because they failed to maintain it. I suppose there is a bright side to this as it forces people back into their cars it will cut the huge crowds on the platforms during the Red Line's frequent breakdowns.
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Don't forget the fact the MBTA is made up of people, i.e. employees. And these people are spoiled rotten by an overabundance of protections: unions, contracts, retirement promises, etc etc etc. The traveling public is last, the very last, on the their list of priorities. And that is the basic problem.
You nailed the problem...Beacon Hill's myopic vision of mass transit. MBTA riders come from all sections of the Commonwealth...support BY the Commonwealth is vital. Raising fees and reducing service doesn't fix the problem...it exacerbates it. Do we want more people BACK in their cars and adding both to the congestion on the highways and in the cities?? Great article!
Thank you, Derrick. Very well said. In my 20+ years living and working in Greater Boston, I'm always relied on the T to get to and from work. The T has been saddled with debt, which I don't see as a Beacon Hill problem per se, but as a broader national point of view. Public transportation is so, well, "communal," it doesn't play well with the notion of independence and freedom of movement. I remember when the Red line was extended from Harvard to Alewife; now it's like pulling teeth to get the Green Line trolley extended -- above ground, along an existing rail line -- to Route 16 in Medford. How fall we have fallen.
The T continues to ignore its largest problem: not having a fair pension system, but having instead an unsustainable, abuse-ridden pension system. 23 years of service driving a subway car and then out with a full pension with healthcare cannot be sustained on the backs of the transit rider or the tax payer. T management ignores the problem.
Well, in order to shake my apparent image as kind and sensitive, I would have to say that for mikey to complain about anything being tenth-rate is like a D student complaining about a B student not getting A's. -Jim
And how about thinking outide the subway car and bus "box?" How about the T "deputizing" safe drivers so they can pick up commuters in bus shelters? People will take public transportation when they don't have to wait for twenty minutes (or more, often) in the rain for a bus. How about asking people what would enable them to give up their cars? When I was in Mexico City, little mini-vans went up and down the main streets every minute stopping to pick up and drop off passengers for a small fee. How about something like that? Yes, let's get the trains fixed so they can travel on leaves, AND use our smarts and the ideas of the people closest to the problem to find cool new ways to move people from where they are to where they want to go. If we can put a man on the moon, we can find a way to get from Cambridge to Brookline in less than an hour.