General MBTA Topics (Multi Modal, Budget, MassDOT)

The fact that Ramirez doesn't have any transit experience is a problem because he is expected to make decisions in the public interest that are... transit related? When the Rail Vision is being worked on and the higher ups like Pollack say that electrification is bad because it requires spending what are you expecting this doofus who doesn't even know what an EMU is going to do?

He's there to privatize, bust unions, and cut service, not save the MBTA with his brilliant business school skills.
 
Proposition Joe said:
The fact that Ramirez doesn't have any transit experience is a problem because he is expected to make decisions in the public interest that are... transit related? When the Rail Vision is being worked on and the higher ups like Pollack say that electrification is bad because it requires spending what are you expecting this doofus who doesn't even know what an EMU is going to do?

He's there to privatize, bust unions, and cut service, not save the MBTA with his brilliant business school skills.
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AFIAK, he didn't go to business school/doesn't have an MBA. I mean, I agree with you, but you seem to be giving him too much credit.
 
JeffDowntown said:
I think this goes beyond the MBTA to encompass the MassDOT. Since we don't have a regional government around Boston, it falls on the MassDOT to set a transportation vision for the region, including the accommodation of growth without choking the city and the region in private automobiles. Basically setting up the transportation priorities for the region. I also believe that the MBTA needs a big seat at that table, but the priorities need to be multi-modal. (The MBTA transit vision needs to have context.)
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We need a state planning agency to bring it all together.

Having a transportation vision separate from or without an overall regional planning vision seems like a bridge to nowhere approach.

We need to strengthen our state level and regional planning with transportation, water, electricity, public parks, economic development and quality of life all at the table. Right now MAPC seems to be that agency for the Boston area and it isn't.

I agree with the multi-modal approach on the transportation side but unless it relates to a plan for economic development that has political and financial support then it won't happen.
 
tangent said:
We need a state planning agency to bring it all together.

Having a transportation vision separate from or without an overall regional planning vision seems like a bridge to nowhere approach.

We need to strengthen our state level and regional planning with transportation, water, electricity, public parks, economic development and quality of life all at the table. Right now MAPC seems to be that agency for the Boston area and it isn't.

I agree with the multi-modal approach on the transportation side but unless it relates to a plan for economic development that has political and financial support then it won't happen.
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Agreed.
 
datadyne007 said:
You're not as in the minority as you may think.
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Data sorry for not noticing this above earlier. Thanks!

Balerion said:
I agree with you. All the management skill, transit expertise, and political skills in the world aren't as useful as they could be if there isn't a clear goal to which they can be applied.
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Indeed - attempts at financial leadership without a guiding domain-relevant vision is problematic. Financial decision making directly coincides with decision making about relative priorities, about tradeoffs, about risk. It's the vision that guides those choices. Someone who doesn't know or care about the domain is not going to fight/advocate for something to be in this year's budget versus next year's versus the 5-year plan. This isn't only about negotiating the best labor relationship or subcontracts. But indeed it does include those things too.

JeffDowntown said:
I think this goes beyond the MBTA to encompass the MassDOT. Since we don't have a regional government around Boston, it falls on the MassDOT to set a transportation vision for the region, including the accommodation of growth without choking the city and the region in private automobiles. Basically setting up the transportation priorities for the region.
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I can certainly agree with this. You all make compelling points about needing comprehensiveness and cohesiveness of the vision. I'm glad to concede that the transit-oriented vision can be a level higher. But it's got to be somewhere - otherwise one is trying to make financial tradeoffs without guideposts. That's blindness. That's short-term how-can-we-make-the-numbers-look-better thinking.
 
Proposition Joe said:
The fact that Ramirez doesn't have any transit experience is a problem because he is expected to make decisions in the public interest that are... transit related? When the Rail Vision is being worked on and the higher ups like Pollack say that electrification is bad because it requires spending what are you expecting this doofus who doesn't even know what an EMU is going to do?

He's there to privatize, bust unions, and cut service, not save the MBTA with his brilliant business school skills.
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A theory just popped into my head: what if the administration has some goals that aren't going to be universally popular, but that are considered necessary? Ramirez is here tobe the bad cop and do all the dirty work, and then he can get sacked, and replaced with someone to come in and save the day, now that all the hard decisions have been made.
 
DominusNovus said:
A theory just popped into my head: what if the administration has some goals that aren't going to be universally popular, but that are considered necessary? Ramirez is here tobe the bad cop and do all the dirty work, and then he can get sacked, and replaced with someone to come in and save the day, now that all the hard decisions have been made.
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The previous interim GM Brian Shortsleeve*, had no transit experience whatsoever and mostly led privatization efforts. He was not sacked and now sits on the Fiscal Management and Control Board despite community protestation. He is now being replaced by a GM with no transit experience whatsoever and has a right wing worldview.

It takes considerable more effort to believe that Ramirez is going to be a normal GM who makes decisions to improve service and sustainability than to see the writing on the wall that he's there to make politically popular cuts. Because being anti-union is not unpopular in Massachusetts, particularly not with Charlie Baker's base.

The MBTA could have had $23 million or so in savings while cooperating with the Machinist union but chose not to because the goals of this administration are to declare the MBTA fixed and fight unions to hand out contracts to private firms, not to actually fix the MBTA.

*(Poftak was only a stopgap GM for two months)
 
Proposition Joe said:
The fact that Ramirez doesn't have any transit experience is a problem because he is expected to make decisions in the public interest that are... transit related? When the Rail Vision is being worked on and the higher ups like Pollack say that electrification is bad because it requires spending what are you expecting this doofus who doesn't even know what an EMU is going to do?
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How exactly did you learn what a DMU is? I'm guessing less than 100 hours of casually reading internet forums and transit enthusiast articles?

I'm not exactly defending Ramirez here, just reiterating that transit isn't rocket science. There is no barrier to him learning everything he needs to know at a high level about transit per se in a week or two. Whether or not he knows how to manage an organization is what really matters here. I'm not convinced he does, but it really isn't unreasonable to consider that as the primary qualification.
 
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fattony said:
How exactly did you learn what a DMU is? I'm guessing less than 100 hours of casually reading internet forums and transit enthusiast articles?

I'm not exactly defending Ramirez here, just reiterating that transit isn't rocket science. There is no barrier to him learning everything he needs to know at a high level about transit per se in a week or two. Whether or not he knows how to manage an organization is what really matters here. I'm not convinced he does, but it really isn't unreasonable to consider that as the primary qualification.
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That would be fine if we just needed a manager. But we need a leader who is not merely astute at keeping the books in order, but who will passionately advocate for transit causes in alignment with a consensus vision within the MBTA service region.

Make the "professional manager" a chief operating officer or financial officer.

Managers are a commodity. Leaders are in dire short supply.

Where's our leader?

There is no barrier to him learning everything he needs to know at a high level about transit per se in a week or two.
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Really? That is an insult to people who spend their careers trying to become an expert at something. Meanwhile, even if he were committed to spend the aforementioned 100hrs studying within his first month or so...do you actually expect someone as busy as the GM of MBTA will have 100 hrs in that timeframe to be reading up? That is an insult on what it takes to run a complex organization!
 
bigpicture7 said:
That would be fine if we just needed a manager. But we need a leader who is not merely astute at keeping the books in order, but who will passionately advocate for transit causes in alignment with a consensus vision within the MBTA service region.

Make the "professional manager" a chief operating officer or financial officer.

Managers are a commodity. Leaders are in dire short supply.

Where's our leader?



Really? That is an insult to people who spend their careers trying to become an expert at something. Meanwhile, even if he were committed to spend the aforementioned 100hrs studying within his first month or so...do you actually expect someone as busy as the GM of MBTA will have 100 hrs in that timeframe to be reading up? That is an insult on what it takes to run a complex organization!
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Come on now, you are setting an impossible bar and making contradictory arguments to boot. Which field, exactly, should the CEO of a company like Apple be an expert in? Software development? RF transceiver design? Polymer chemistry? Marketing? Is it an insult to the experts in those fields that Tim Cook can't do their jobs? Of course not. The MBTA GM doesn't write the train schedules any more than Tim Cook designs the antenna inside an iPhone.

You don't need to be an expert in everything or anything in particular that your organization does in order to be a good leader. You hire experts to be experts and you hire leaders to be leaders. I agree that the MBTA needs a leader, but I disagree that transit experience is essential to that. It would certainly help if he displayed a track record of public service, but that isn't the same thing as being a transit expert.

I don't know Luis Ramirez from Adam. He might be a good choice or a poor choice to run the T, but whether or not he ever changed the brakes on a bus is irrelevant.
 
fattony, you raise good points to keep the discussion grounded. I admit this discussion is an emotional one for me because I believe there's an adverse societal trend at play, marked by business schools beginning in the 1980s when they realized they could sell the MBA degree as "anyone can manage anything" to people who weren't sure what they wanted to do with their careers (I have an MBA so I am not just throwing rocks) and perpetuated by certain political-economy ideologies along the lines of "everything will be great if we can just keep public spending as low as possible - it's those damn people passionate about causes who are inevitably reckless." Reality is that being a great manager IS an important professional skill, and people passionate about causes CAN be prone to overspending. I deny neither of those things.

I actually wholeheartedly agree with you that managerial skill is key here - BUT, I worry that the current administration would choose people specifically because they are ANTI-cause. That they will strip service features, increase service intervals, reduce skilled staff, etc, to make the numbers look good.

We err if we choose someone who is blinded by their cause....and we err if we choose someone who doesn't give a shit about a cause. There's no such thing as politically neutral cost-cutting - I'm sorry, it just doesn't exist. So I would rather err toward taking care of the cause.

As for what type of background makes the best leader of an organization?
You are spot on - an RF designer or a software developer or a materials engineer would all be constituent disciplinary practitioners at Apple, and on those merits alone none would make a well-rounded CEO. But what I am suggesting is that there is a critical middle-ground of background relevance - Tim Cook being a great example: he was a promote-from-within candidate who spent YEARs as Jobs' understudy, running key operations at the company. So to generalize: someone who has expertise in getting products of Apples' nature through design, into production, and out to customers - that's a great background for an Apple CEO!

Same goes for transit: no one expects an expert in trains, or busses, or light rail specifically. But someone who knows the risks, the politics, the vendor base, and the requisite resources cold - and is passionate about the cause of transit? Why - because again, there's no such thing as neutral cost cutting. Cost control needs to be aligned with a purpose. Of course Ramirez won't be making bus schedules himself...but when it comes to shoehorning something into the budget so an underserved area gets taken care of, is he up for that? Without support from the leader, good initiatives die.

I am not against the general concept of prioritizing managerial competence.
I am against the deliberate devaluation of cause-passion specifically so that cost-cutting can be the priority rather than GREAT TRANSIT.

And no, I do not think that someone who really cares about transit and who is also a capable manager is so much of a unicorn that we couldn't try to find him/her. I think what we ended up with was a deliberate attempt to avoid him/her.
 
Thanks for the thoughtful response.

With Ramirez presumably being transit agnostic (I don't think we really know if he is pro-transit or not) I suppose the marching orders he receives from up the chain will determine his incentives and goals. Does Baker tell him: "cut spending" or "increase ridership" or "move more people with fewer dollars" or "expand transit coverage" or ...

I don't think Baker is stupid or overly ideological. At least he's no Sam Brownback.
 
bigpicture7 said:
Tim Cook being a great example: he was a promote-from-within candidate who spent YEARs as Jobs' understudy, running key operations at the company. So to generalize: someone who has expertise in getting products of Apples' nature through design, into production, and out to customers - that's a great background for an Apple CEO!
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Very much correct. I don't need an Apple CEO to be an expert in the jobs of his/her underlings, but I do need them to be an expert in the job of Apple CEO, to know the technology industry backwards and forwards - product cycles, marketing, supply chains, competitors... I don't think someone straight out of an MBA program could go to Apple and learn all they needed to know in a couple of weeks.

Running a transit agency does require knowledge of asset management, transportation finance, labor relations, service planning, the Boston Area... this is some businessman from Texas (were they don't have transit like the MBTA - has he ever been on a subway train in his life?) who has never even considered these issues before and who lied on his resume about his success in prior positions. I'm sure he's a nice man, and probably a smart man, and maybe he'll succeed (and I hope he does). He's still a terrible hire.
 
What is going on with the Orange Line tracks between Sullivan and Community College southbound? Last 2 weeks or so the train comes to a complete halt after Sullivan and goes at a painfully slow roll the entire way to Community. Its been brutal.
 
falcon42 said:
What is going on with the Orange Line tracks between Sullivan and Community College southbound? Last 2 weeks or so the train comes to a complete halt after Sullivan and goes at a painfully slow roll the entire way to Community. Its been brutal.
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I was on it Saturday and noticed the same exact thing! I think it took 25 minutes to get from Assembly Row to North Station (it's normally something like 7 minutes).
 
Its brutal. At rush hour its adding more people waiting for each train. Never seen the train that crowded north of Boston before. Shouldn't take 2-3 weeks to fix whatever is wrong.
 
There are numerous slow zones all over the Orange Line right now that the T refuses to disclose the reasons for (arbitrary "track work" is all we can get out of them) and refuses to say how long they are expected to last. The communication/transparency right now from the MBTA Public Information Officers (PIOs) is despicable.

Peer cities like Chicago openly disclose slow zones including maps, why they are slow and how long they will last. If you're fixing something to make the ride better, the public wants to know! It's simply good PR!!
 
Not sure if it's related but they are working on the disused eastern NB OL tracks at Wellington; looks like they were ripping up old rails maybe in anticipation of laying down new ones?

Also does anyone know what this would do for the Orange Line? I'm glad to see any repair work being done but it seems like we were getting along okay with just the one platform and two tracks. This makes me hype for a future expansion to Reading; imagine being able to take a train from Reading with stops at just Oak Grove and Wellington before North Station.
 
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