My point is that the MBTA never made that promise though it is widely repeated. There’s even a film (
https://m.imdb.com/video/vi633184537) but there is no official document that I have seen that contains this promise or commitment. Repeating this doesn’t change the fact that it’s not an official commitment.
If the document exists it would be great to be proven wrong
Claiming that the MBTA never made the promise, with no evidence whatsoever to support that statement, is somewhat of an odd statement given the rest of the post (and the previous one I replied to).
I am unable to locate an official document laying out an "equal or better" policy; if such exists, it's not easy to find (which makes me wonder how much of the state's archive of transportation-related documents has even been digitized). I did find a reference to the "long-promised replacement" in
this BRA/BPDA document from 2001 (in the middle of the paragraph of item 3 on Page 33). It describes community residents' concerns that the Silver Line will not adequately function as that "long-promised replacement", and though it's not the focus of the document there's nothing there specifically that takes any kind of an issue with the idea that a replacement (and, implicitly, an adequate one) was expected.
There is, in fact,
ample evidence of, at the very least, community, advocacy, and potentially even (municipal) governmental
understanding and expectation that the Elevated was to be suitably replaced. That didn't come from nowhere. It's not conclusive promise that the MBTA (or anyone else) made the promise, but that longstanding expectation coupled with a complete lack of proof that they
didn't somewhere, somehow promise it completely undermines your would-be categorical claim that "the MBTA never made that promise". I'm not saying they necessarily did, merely noting that the 'fact' that they did not
has not been established.
Now, my
personal guess is that it was one or more politicians and not necessarily the MBTA proper that made the replacement promise (whether or not the "equal or better" usage was contemporary or adopted subsequently here and elsewhere as a convenient shorthand). That might tend to explain why it's not in documents. The semantic line between a (nominally political) promise and an official commitment when the promise is made by the politicians who (ultimately) control the MBTA is not really worth arguing about here. Whether or not it ever reached the status of an official, documented, MBTA condition, it's
inarguable that the community expectation was for an adequate (read: equal or better) replacement, and that that expectation has remained unmet since 1987.