The latter doesn't look like many scenarios of anyone learning or being held accountable either. We literally have 1 and 1/4 trains lines shutting down in 2 weeks + another major delay of an expansion + train fires + bus fires + runaway trains + the possibility realization that GLX could be a kneecapped 25 mph ride but somehow the governor and the GM is managing to spin this as an PR event rather than a state-wide defining crisis.
Because it's
not a statewide crisis, or even anything close to it. Not in how it's perceived and covered by the media, not in how it's perceived by (at least a chunk of) the public, and certainly not how it's perceived by the politicians. The portion of the public who rides and depends on the T has become significantly jaded by the agency's long, long period of institutional rot resulting in ever-worse service and ever-greater service disruptions, to the point that something as massive as a whole-line shutdown, while still extreme, is treated as almost expected rather than earth-shattering, because of course it got to this point, things have been so bad and getting worse for so long. Anyone who doesn't depend on the subway system is, at most,
inconvenienced.
The problem is the same as it has been for decades: the people who are responsible for overseeing the system (the politicians) are not particularly exposed when it fails. To this point, at least, there have never been enough state Reps. and Senators actively in danger of losing their seats over shitty MBTA service to make them care, or at least to make them care enough to challenge the insane power of the Speaker, who, as F-Line has vividly illustrated over the years, is basically the most powerful person in the state government, none of whom in recent memory have given a damn about the T.
737900er is correct that a federal takeover (if, indeed, such a thing is even possible from a legal standpoint, I'm not a constitutional lawyer or indeed a lawyer of any kind) would ultimately land us back in this same muck. The FTA forcing the T to not actively be crud isn't a
bad thing, because it's at least accountability of a sort, but it's a substitute for properly fixing the problem. That requires some more direct mechanism than intermittent federal intervention when things go from cruddy-to-outright-dangerous (or, worse, perpetual rule by distant FTA bureaucrats subject to the whims of Congress) to force the state to behave responsibly. Whether that takes the form of a ballot initiative forcing proper funding of the agency, a wholesale scouring of Beacon Hill to get a better, more responsible General Court, or other accountability measures yet to be determined is an open question. But just kicking this hot potato over to Washington's hands isn't a recipe for actually solving the problem, because at some point they're going to kick it back.