"9 Hurt After Escalator Malfunctioned And Flattened Into 'A Slide' At Back Bay Station"
I'm going to step on to my soapbox here for just a second.
In the last 60 days, the MBTA has been associated with three separate incidents which resulted in injury or death:
- The Green Line collision on Comm Ave
- The death of a BU professor on a staircase adjacent to MBTA property at JFK/UMass
- This recent malfunction at Back Bay
Additionally, this comes at the same time that
Amtrak has suffered a fatal (and visually arresting) derailment in Montana, that saw cars strewn about on their sides, like a 2-year-old's playset.
Obviously the Amtrak derailment isn't the MBTA's fault, and current indications suggest that the (now-demolished) staircase did not fall under MBTA jurisdiction either. But those distinctions are certainly lost on many people, and interact with a much much larger problem.
Fundamentally, American society is grappling with the question of trust in our foundational institutions. The siege occurs on multiple fronts:
According to a UChicago study, some 47 million American adults (about 1 in 5) believe that Joe Biden's presidency is "illegitimate"; of those, some
21 million believe that Donald Trump should be restored by (violent) force.
On the pandemic front,
polling shows that 19% of American adults (again, about 1 in 5) do not intend to get vaccinated, despite overwhelming endorsement from nonpartisan agencies such as the CDC.
Despite controlling the White House, the House of Representatives, and (barely) the Senate, the
Democratic Party is struggling to pass a large infrastructure bill and also somehow is potentially days away from a government shutdown. (To be honest, I haven't quite been able to piece together exactly how the situation devolved to that -- and I follow politics moderately closely, so I have a feeling that many Americans are similarly baffled.)
And then there are longer-running, but equally acute erosions on American institutional confidence. Large swaths of younger generations
do not believe Social Security will be available to them. Even before the pandemic,
increasing distrust in American institutions was well-documented. And of course, all of this occurs against the backdrop of the climate crisis, which becomes more and more visceral with each passing year and each passing superstorm.
So let's bring this back to the T.
Public transit is one of the strongest and most common ways that people interact with a public institution. City councilors, mayors, and governors win and lose elections based on voters' perceptions of how they will handle public transit. Whether operated by the MBTA, Keolis, or MassDOT, voters believe that the ultimate responsibility sits with their elected officials.
The abject failures of public institutions that I laid out at the start of the post do not occur in a vacuum. They are visible and visceral and they hit close to home (literally and figuratively).
(I mean, seriously -- "escalator turns into a slide"? That's the stuff of horror films looking to make the mundane grotesque. The protagonist falls down the esca-slide, and finds that the conductor on the platform has turned into a cannibal zombie. And we the audience enjoy the film because it's so ridiculously absurd.)
When people lose faith in institutions, they turn elsewhere. When those institutions are the very instruments of democracy and public governance, we teeter on the edge of the fascistic abyss.
My point: the T (and Amtrak and MassDOT and the Commonwealth and the country) are playing with fire here, and seem to evince no awareness whatsoever of the calamity which they are now actively contributing to.
EDIT TO ADD: Newsweek has
published an article on the accident at Back Bay, with interviews with bystanders. The details are graphic, but this tweet gives a sense of it: