Infrastructure to Nowhere (The Vestigial Infrastructure Thread)

[Brattle Loop]

And that's just the House (the most powerful branch here). The Senate historically follows the House tide. The Governor is the weather vane of public mood at best, and the scapegoat when things go wrong.... because people don't understand how things actually work.
Want infrastructure to get fixed? Tell your rep to raise your taxes. Maybe they'll grow a pair.

I'd add "tell your rep to fix the House's warped power structure", it's not as though there's any legal reason the House Speaker is so absurdly powerful.

 

[Teban54]

I have on numerous occasions provided data and analysis on the matter. That doesn't seem to matter to the true believers who "know" that NS will be permanently necessary. The T has spent or proposed to spend upwards of $6B on outdated diesel related infrastructure. When will this madness end? How long will we ignore the examples of the many other systems where they have embraced the 21st century?
And if SSU is designed properly, the two tunnels could be used interchangeably.

I know this is comparing apples to oranges, but the fact that a single Type 9 breaking down was able to fuck up the entire Green Line for 90 minutes on Boston Marathon day, not to mention leaving passengers stranded in trains the whole time, shows how much value redundancy has.

Kind of ironic how this conversation happened just before the incident took place, tbh.

To be fair, very few subway systems worldwide have more than 2 tracks solely for such scenarios, but the benefits of a 4-track NSRL is still well justified otherwise. When we have the option to add redundancy - by building 4 tracks, and/or keeping North Station to some capacity - I don't see how we should forgo these considerations just because "if everything runs perfectly, you don't need them".

 

[BeyondRevenue]

I'd add "tell your rep to fix the House's warped power structure", it's not as though there's any legal reason the House Speaker is so absurdly powerful.

Fear of reprisal.
If the speaker is challenged, upon losing the challenger is punished, relegated with bad committee assignments, has legislation shelved and is generally ostracized. More important, that means the challenger's district will get much less state aid if any at all.
They didn't teach that in Schoolhouse Rock, but that's how it goes. Oh yeah!

 

[Brattle Loop]

Fear of reprisal.
If the speaker is challenged, upon losing the challenger is punished, relegated with bad committee assignments, has legislation shelved and is generally ostracized. More important, that means the challenger's district will get much less state aid if any at all.
They didn't teach that in Schoolhouse Rock, but that's how it goes. Oh yeah!

But, again, that's not baked into the state constitution. There's like eighty million Democrats in the state house, if they (well, a majority of them, at any rate) decided that they didn't like living under the Speaker's petty dictatorship, they can change the rules. You're not wrong about the individual disincentives, but the total lack of collective action is emblematic of atrociously-atrophied standards of good governance. (Hardly a phenomenon unique to Massachusetts, though.)