Please, not the new Green Line extension!
This was supposed to be the harbinger of our bright future, the gorgeous, state-of-the-art addition to our beleaguered transit system. More than 30 painful years in the making, the extension into Somerville and Medford was going to be a happy respite from the rest of our ancient, messed-up MBTA system.
But no. It turns out that, barely a year after it opened, the tracks on our shiny new lines are defective — too narrow in some places to be safe at normal speeds. In some sections, the trolleys must crawl along so slowly that it would be faster to walk. Everybody, including our top transportation officials, is rightly gobsmacked. And so far, nobody, including those transportation officials, seems to know how it happened. How comforting!
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. When the first official trolley finally rolled out of Union Square before sunrise on a windy March morning last year, transit nerds were ecstatic. And tired. The Conservation Law Foundation forced the state decades ago to commit to the project, to offset the environmental impacts of the Big Dig. After the state agreed to do it in 1990, years of legal wrangling ensued to make them follow through. By 2015, the costs of the Green Line project had ballooned so much that the whole thing was imperiled. But the administration of Governor Charlie Baker set about slashing the project to bring it back into line, and it finally got underway.
The cutbacks were disappointing, including stripped-down stations reminding us that there’s never enough funding to build beautiful public amenities anymore. The community path beside the tracks was also threatened, but saved — which is lucky, because right now it is the only efficient part of the new system.
But hey, they got it open. Baker, who famously dismissed calls for him to use the MBTA he oversaw — “I’m not a virtue signaler” — was so proud of the project he even rode a trolley.
That history makes this failure extra painful.
“It took decades for the state to fulfill its obligation,” said Brad Campbell, president of the Conservation Law Foundation. “So it’s especially disappointing that after all that effort, all of the celebrations, that we are now faced with what appears to be a substantial flaw in the construction.”
It’s a flaw that, unlike so many in the system, can’t be blamed on 19th-century engineering, lousy weather, or, apparently, lack of funding. Though this problem seems fixable, and repair costs will ideally be covered by the companies that completed the project, it is a massive blow to the morale of commuters, who have for years been riding a system that seems determined to fail them.
“This would be a far less consequential problem if the rest of the system wasn’t failing at the same time,” Campbell said.
And boy, does it seem to be failing: delays on new trains on the beleaguered Red and Orange lines; slow zones all over the system; dysfunction and understaffing in the track safety department; numerous instances of trolleys coming dangerously close to track workers; a delayed South Coast rail project.
Governor Maura Healey and her new MBTA chief Phillip Eng inherited these problems, but soon they will own them — just as Baker, a governor who twice won over voters by touting his management skills, now owns the travesty he promised to fix when he first took office.
Healey’s administration, the Legislature, and the whole state need to reexamine the assumptions on which so much failed transit policy has been built: that private companies can always do better work than well-run public agencies; that the system can ever reach its potential without serious added investment.
What we have here is an emergency not just for T riders but for everybody who breathes air in the Commonwealth, and everybody who hopes to do business here. We are absolutely sunk if we don’t convince more residents to ditch their cars for public transit in this state. And we do that only if we offer them a better alternative: Not just a safer and more reliable system, but a bigger one too.
The Green Line extension will be fixed. Restoring the faith shaken by this latest debacle is another story.
Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yvonne.abraham@globe.com.