Is there a realistic scenario where decades of under funding gets fixed in 4 years?
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Is there a realistic scenario where decades of under funding gets fixed in 4 years?
Things that are upgrades, major overhauls, replacement for things like signal systems, electrical stations, trains (if it started within the 4 years context), or facilities. No, that's needs more time.
But I like to think it's pretty reasonable to keep the tracks and switches maintained enough to keep trains from derailing. I also think it's pretty reasonable to maintenance where it's about sending crews out to clean or fix in stations (leaks, lights, elevators, etc)
Sure, but what we're experiencing right now isn't "delayed gratification."
As someone else noted, the T is ramping up hiring to get more money out the door faster. But that doesn't mean we have the funds for needed long-term improvements like Red-Blue, NSRL (which the governor doesn't want), etc. Those investments would require additional funding.
I'm with Coyote on this: How does this chart invalidate my point? That money is allocated to the OLT, RLT, and the newly minted GLT (for stop consolidation and beyond), GLX, and SCR. It is not looking at the investments that should be concurrently happening that Jim brings up.
This was the core issue that Monica Tibbits-Nutt has brought before the board for months now: The MBTA can buy a whole new bus fleet or new Orange/Red line trains and add capacity, but if they keep cutting people to hold the budget, it means nothing because because they are unable to run additional or even current service levels and the new trains and buses sit in the yard. This coincides with Steve Poftack celebrating that they are finally hiring above the attrition rate and are now trying to address the spending issue by hiring people to facilitate it.
I am not against Charlie Baker and I even voted for him because he was committed to addressing the underlying issues of the MBTA and I still see his hiring and support of Stephanie Pollack as a sign of that. But I do disagree with him if he believes that backlog and GLX is the silver bullet to fix transportation in MA. We cannot undo 20 years of underfunding with at or just above correct funding. If you are only trying to improve the service that exists without looking at how need is changing, you are essentially only funding the past 20 years of missed opportunity and not funding the current years but instead ignoring them.
The T simply cannot keep up with maintenance. I've been told that it's largely a problem with the operating budget being far too low over a long period of time, even though the capital budget has more than they have been able to spend. So things are left to rot and then have to be completely replaced using capital funds. Just look at the stations. Ever wonder why there are so many different types of light fixtures? Because instead of repairing the old ones when they break, the T just left them there and bought new ones to supplement the broken old ones. What a joke.
I found this article http://http://yelling-at-trains.org/post/buying-in-bulk/
F-Line to Dudley
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[RANT]
Wherein another hack trying to look smart says: "Let's take L.A. Measure M and transport it whole to a state where that's not fucking legal! YAY!!!" I am so sick of these same wholly irrelevant funding comparisons--L.A. and Seattle, Seattle and L.A.--being brought up again and again. We can't do those things without the Legislature's initiating hand. It's part of our state constitution; it's not part of California's or Washington's state constitutions. Constitutions...yeah, they're kind of very important for determining who can fund what en masse. Even the ballot initiative rights we do have as voters doesn't give us access to those pursue strings unless Bob DeLeo gives a shit. Stop pointing at L.A. and Seattle like that matters here, and start learning how to push your Legislaturecritters and their flaccid leadership around. Like TransitMatters et al. are doing. It's Massachusetts government; play 'em on their home field or you're wasting yours and everyone else's time.
Though I do commend this blogger for suggesting the T set up its own equivalent of MTA Construction. Because surely the thing that'll help us keep our construction costs in line are our own homegrown Sandhogs. Congratulations, Blogperson: you are the first person in history to characterize that a good idea. :s
[/RANT]
I get what you're saying here, but the blog's point was that the MBTA got sandbagged just the same when it contracted that work out. The MBTA not knowing what they're doing and contractors exploiting that is not better than having an inside system that has the know-how and is corrupt (per your point). Is your perspective that we not participate in the design-build model?
HelloBostonHi
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fwiw, at the FMCB meeting today they announced they have ruled out operator error, foul play, and infrastructure/track as causes and are focusing on the vehicle itself. They wouldn't say any more about it but I mean its an old aluminium series red line car... Apparently got dragged 1,400ft after derailment too? that seems somewhat concerning.
Jahvon09
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Whoever were in that particular vehicle, they must've had a very horrifying experience once that happened! Too much bad news about that line! But better that it happen now instead of when the new trains come into revenue service.
Hopefully, this with wake up officials to try their best not to let this happen when the new trains come on duty!! It seems that they don't want to admit it, but that equipment is so old now that it's falling apart at the seams!! It's time to put those trains out to pasture & move on to the new bright & shiny trains!! :?
Hopefully, this with wake up officials to try their best not to let this happen when the new trains come on duty!! It seems that they don't want to admit it, but that equipment is so old now that it's falling apart at the seams!! It's time to put those trains out to pasture & move on to the new bright & shiny trains!! :?
F-Line to Dudley
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Not at all. It needs oversight, and that's where critical staffing shortages let them get repeatedly snookered because there simply weren't enough bodies available to watch the process. Or enough bodies to watch the public and political input process, which is where mission creep chews them up on things like station design. The MBTA has reams of design standards for rail structure and station construction, so it's not at all that they don't know how to do this. But when they are staffing 1/4 of the management minimums for a project as huge as GLX there's more blind spots than eyes, and that's when the contractors looking to bilk and the politicos looking for eye candy get to contort the process freely.
The answer isn't going to be some massive overcorrection of reinventing the design wheel in-house with new specs (we don't need to be over-designing signal heads because reasons like Caltrain). Or to create a 'machine politic' of self-perpetuating project churn for self-perpetuatingness' sake (the Sandhogs or--blog author's preference--"Design Sandhogs" problem). It's just to staff the internal project management staff up to the requirements of what they know it is they're building and what method it is they're pursuing to design-build it. Nothing else more radical is going to work if they can't even make the internal hires they damn well know they need, because all other "better" methods require you to staff your advertised headcount too. The blogger skirts around this coulda-been useful point, but then goes back to ineffectually hammering at his target fixation with the Boston-transplant "Measure M" we constitutionally can't have. It's a mess of a piece, taking close passes at some practical issues/solutions but then wadding them up for that imaginary ballot measure cannon.
Alon Levy has written a book's worth of blog posts on transit construction costs, and why they are so high in the U.S. Unlike some of his other opinioneering biases occasionally liable to turn to shitshow, construction costs are far and way his analytical gold standard. In fact, his latest post name-checks GLX as a worst-of/best-of case in the power of basic oversight described above in a bigger piece about project mgt. hiring. I highly recommend searching his blog archives for a deep-dive on construction costs. Though, caveat: globally each country has transit design-build things they're uniquely "bad" at...so there's no magic-bullet solution other than adopting best practices where they're available, minding the local quirks of public-private culture, and taking an educated guess on best available balance between those forces.
https://www.masslive.com/boston/201...s-wanted-for-assaulting-a-police-officer.html
If they actually made an effort to stop the thousands of turnstyle hoppers every day, the fare hike wouldn't even be necessary.
If they actually made an effort to stop the thousands of turnstyle hoppers every day, the fare hike wouldn't even be necessary.
Source please?
https://www.wbur.org/bostonomix/2019/03/08/state-senators-mbta-fare-hikes-pushback
In 2016, estimates from the MBTA and Keolis, which operates the commuter rail system, put the total cost of evaded fares on both commuter rail and on the T's subway as high as $42 million per year.
Not an exact science, but $42m per year equates to $115k per day, or 23,000 unpaid $5 fares.
Thanks for following through with the source -- much appreciated.
That is an interesting figure they provide -- I wish we knew their methodology. If these numbers only referred to subway fare evasion (including surface Green Line, and thus not literally turnstyle jumpers), it would suggest something like an average of 10 evaders per hour at each station (again including each Green Line surface stop), including into the late hours of the night. That seems hard to believe to me, so I imagine a large chunk of the fare evasion occurs on the commuter rail, where the prices are higher anyway (making it easier to reach high evasion costs while keeping number of evaders low) and where fares regularly go unchecked, particularly during the afternoon peak.
The flipside to that is a fair number of commuters use a monthly pass, and so the fair is collected regardless of whether a conductor looks at it or not. (Heck, it's collected even if the passenger never boards the train.)
I wish I knew the distribution of passholders versus ticket users.
bigeman312
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Purely anecdotal, but I've seen many fare evaders trick the gates in plain sight of a transit ambassador. It would be great if part of their job was to prevent and/or punish this type of behavior.
Sam Staiti
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same here, happens all the time
Any "punishment" for breaking MBTA rules is probably the purview of the transit police. The cost of paying a cop to sit around and watch for people fooling with the gates is probably higher than the cost of the subway fares you'd recover.
Also, as demonstrated by NYC Transit's experiments with "broken windows" policing, a crackdown on fare evasion just gives cops another method to racially profile, which is never a good thing.