The value of reliable public transit is evident at least to real estate agents. While the looming extension of the MBTA’s Green Line through Somerville won’t be completed for years, home values have already soared in neighborhoods along the planned route. “Steps to T,” property ads across Greater Boston declare, even in cases when those steps number in the thousands.
Yet rising property values don’t translate into more revenue to keep the system functioning. Instead, the contributions that the T receives from the cities and towns it serves are shrinking as a percentage of the agency’s operating budget, according to the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, from 14 percent in 2001 to 8 percent in 2015. The seeming impossibility of seeking more from the 175 Eastern Massachusetts municipalities that qualify helps explain why the T’s financial woes persist year after year.
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Most public transit systems run at a loss. If riders had to pay full freight, they’d drive instead, creating crippling gridlock, or not be able to work at all. Since Greater Boston is the state’s main economic engine, and the MBTA is vital to its proper operation, the state should pay a part. But a state lawmaker from, say, Western Massachusetts might reasonably wonder whether, in the T’s time of crisis, the cities and towns that benefit most from the agency’s service might also do more to help.
State Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack raised that possibility in a recent Globe news article. Boosting those towns’ contributions, she indicated, could make the MBTA more accountable to them.
Few towns, it seems, would take that deal. Geoff Beckwith, head of the Massachusetts Municipal Association, argues that Proposition 2½ limits towns’ ability to capture the benefits of rising property values. A larger assessment for the T, he said in an interview, is therefore “not affordable for the communities because they don’t have a way to pay for it.” He also predicted that, even if towns were to be promised more oversight, other stakeholders, such as transit riders and the T’s employee unions, would lobby the Legislature to thwart meaningful controls.
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Dante Ramos can be reached at dante.ramos@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @danteramos.