F-Line -- I think you are missing a major aspect of the Transit Planning -- its called the MBTA advisory Board which to a large extent has to represent the interests of the suburbs who:
1) have most of the population in the Greater Boston Area
2) pay most of the taxes and therefore most of the money to run the T
3) Feel that they are getting short-changed on service as it is
Menino really has minimal say on the matter of where the T's $ are spent on expansion -- its the Legislature and the Advisory Board both of which are creatures of the populated and politically connected inner suburbs
That's great but didn't really address my question about the advisory board. Seems like it is all bark and no bite. My guess is the real non-starter behind restoring A service is local Brighton interests (Herb Chambers et. al.) and the absurd power NIMBY neighborhood associations have in the city.
omaja pretty much answers this one. Yes, Menino will occasionally uncork a you're-not-helping level barb a la "Eww...overhead wires is ugly" or his diatribe to the JP Gazette about the Casey Overpass a few weeks ago. But the fate of the entire project never comes down to his actively campaigning against it. Hell, the Casey saga was noteworthy for how eerily silent City Hall was through the whole duration of that very contentious public comment period...and then he musters that response under pressure weeks after the fact. The willful lack of any input from City Hall let that one degenerate into a MassHighway vs. neighborhood pissing match. The vacuum shaped the debate, and the debate got played largely on MassHighway's turf with how it boiled down to options decided solely by highway capacity: enormously complex highway overpass or enormously complex at-grade highway intersection. Well, if "greenspace" is the goal, Youzonnor, how come nobody was stepping up that viewpoint when the argument had taken a turn for the zero-sum?
Maybe he doesn't have a horse in this race. But that's the problem...it's zero-sum all the same because the neighborhood simply becomes flyover country. They're getting the same treatment over the Arborway garage expansion proposals. That's been left to state vs. neighborhood. Arborway was a "temporary" garage opened so they could shuffle operations around while demolishing dilapidated old Bartlett garage and construct its replacement at Southampton. Well...Southampton's been open 8 years now but instead of closing Arborway we're now gonna triple it in size so we can close another dilapidated old garage in Fellsway and load-shift everything around. And the terms of the debate were set again on zero-sum state vs. neighborhood "either make this VASTLY bigger and more invasive, or we'll have to gut your transit options because you must clearly hate transit." Where's City Hall in all of this giving a reminder that they broke their promise to make it temporary??? Why is the debate being allowed to be framed on these lines???
Oh, wait...because the biggest open parcel of T-owned land to build a mega-consolidated bus garage is Readville. In sweet home Hyde Park. Where he's coveted all that unused train yard land for years to bring in "mixed residential/commercial"...and greenspace. (Well...maybe not so much any more because every half-interested developer he brought in there backed out). So, suck it JP...Roxbury didn't get very far with its air quality lawsuits either.
That's how it played out in Brighton Ctr. He wasn't out stumping for "death to transit!" He was AWOL altogether. Except when Herb Chambers had a problem. Then there would be an unambiguous show of support in the papers the next day for Herb Chambers...maybe not directly related to the transit matter at hand, but implicit and unambiguous and in stark contrast to not saying a damn thing to community groups or the A-B Tab for years on end about making the 57 any better. And, ohbytheway...look who's simultaneously looming large at the center of the hype machine during the same era for all the magic bus tunnels to be carving up the Waterfront, Chinatown, and South End.
Like I said, the "flyover" neighborhoods on the commute from Hyde Park to Gov't Ctr. know this drill well. They're relegated to trying to better themselves without an alpha-dog (beyond what limited influence their district counselor can wield) who can shape the terms of the narrative, and vulnerable to the NIMBY's and other very invididual interests who
can get a live voice on a private line from downtown...any day, any reason. Yes, controlling the terms of a debate is very very important indeed. The 3 most recent Mayors of Somerville are testament to that. Menino himself is testament to that on numerous other things. It's hard not to notice the areas where he willfully withholds that attention, but JP, Roxbury, and the not-Harvard/not-BU parts of A-B are quite used to it after 20 years.
And the Advisory Board?...seriously? If it were even structurally up to the task to wag a finger and have its finger wag duly noted by the state, it's a hell of a big leap to picture "the burbs" voting as a bloc for "the burbs'" interests. NIMBY-on-NIMBY they do a pretty fine job tearing their own guts out in hand-to-hand combat. Inside of their own town borders, let alone cross-district. I would love to see an attempt at cramming 100 North Shore suburban commuters and 100 South Shore suburban commuters in a room together and trying to get them to vote in their common interest as a suburban bloc. It would be a fascinating sociological experiment.
No, it's a ranking Legislator here, and a Selectman-with-coattails here, and this-guy-who-has-these-guys'-backs, and a "pillar of the community" businessman here who gets his phone calls answered with a live voice like Herb Chambers-of-the-small-town, and so on. Business as usual.
