The MBTA should be dissolved, it's barely even fulfilling service needs at this point.
And replace it with...what? Turn the ROWs into highways?
At this point, honestly, could it get worse to just privatize the entire thing? It's basically already collapsed.
Oh yeah, it can
definitely get worse. If there was actual money to be made in public transit, someone would be doing it. I suppose it's
might be theoretically possible to run a private system in Boston...except it would be far more limited as a service, and likely cost a great deal more. Of course, you could limit the degree to which a private operator is incentivized to run only the most profitable services (shafting the rest) by means of minimum service requirements and other regulations...which would have to be enforced. You'd probably end up with something closer to the Keolis end of the spectrum (mercenary operator taking a cut, with the state on the hook for things like equipment and capital costs) than something like Brightline.
The only meaningfully-plausible justification for privatizing it (assuming that we have any desire to have a public transit system that exists as a public service for the benefit of the city/state/region) would be if that would guarantee it would run better. I know Britain's experiment in rail privatization didn't exactly go swimmingly. (Turns out public goods are inherently hard to privatize. Go too far towards the business end, and you wind up with giant chunks of services getting culled for failure to make money (saw the same thing in aviation with deregulation killing off tons of routes and the introduction of the EAS to subsidize some of them into sticking around). Put in a bunch of restrictions and requirements and if you're very lucky maybe you'll wind up with a competitive market, but you're much more likely to wind up with one or more fat, lazy incumbents skimming as much as they can out of the business and hoping - and lobbying - that they're too important to get kicked out.
I'll reiterate my usual thesis. The T's problem isn't that it's a public entity, or that it doesn't have a profit motive. The T's problem is that it has been run, and continues to run, extremely poorly. And all or virtually all of the ultimate responsibility for that fact falls on a state government and specifically a state legislature that never bothered to fund the thing properly, and never bothered to care if it was actually run properly. Hardly unique in that, I know, but there's essentially been little to no meaningful accountability for multiple decades, something which is only changing (slowly) in recent years, and even that's more band-aid than culture shift. Providing wide-base public transit is effectively incompatible with being a profitable business; full-scale privatization effectively means conceding that we don't want or need it, and will settle for whatever the corporate overlords deem sufficiently profitable. Outsourcing the day-to-day operations a-la Keolis won't do much good, because it wouldn't change the lack of investment (though if it led to a mass cleaning-house and installation of competent - as opposed to merely rent-seeking - management, it wouldn't be the end of the world).
Too bad ATO is probably a decade plus away since the T has little actual vision or planning for the future and modern technology other than magic batteries everywhere.
They already have ATO/ATC/whatever the hell acronym any given agency is using this week to enforce speeds/separation/signals on the Red and Orange lines. I assume it's insufficiently sophisticated to handle operations (though I thought that all that signal work was supposed to be about upgrading that).
