I remain convinced that commuter rail operations and the communities that they serve need to be spun out of the MBTA. The T as it stands is too big for one agency to handle. If you remove Commuter Rail and its associated mega projects and debt: Greenbush, South Coast, Fitchburg Rebuild, Worcester, etc. and you remove all of that infrastructure from the T maintenance rolls, you have a much leaner, adaptable agency. If the MBTA was busses and subways in the existing system from basically Hingham to Salem they would probably be OK. In fact, the only big project they have is GLX.
Then, you combine MassDOT owned freight rails with the statewide rail passenger system (commuter rail) and you have a much, much better idea of how much is REALLY costs to run the system and you build the commuter rail contract around that number. All of the towns that currently pay assessments for Commuter Rail only service would, instead pay that assessment to the rail system and the assessments to offset the number. Towns with MBTA bus and subway pay to MBTA. Then the Statewide Rail Agency would be charged to develop freight service as much as practicable to more fully utilize the state owned rails and use freight revenue to offset infrastructure cost.
This idea of extending the Commuter Rail to Springfield is ridiculous in the existing structure. So Palmer would pay an MBTA assessment into the MBTA pit of despair? No way. Separate out rail and create something better with full cost accounting.
That's been floated elsewhere. Extreme dissatisfaction with the way SEPTA has run its metro-Philly commuter rail and misunderstood RR ops in general has netted proposal after proposal to shear off the commuter rail into a state-level "PA Rail" agency. But it's never gone anywhere because the administrative hurdles are massive. You'd be facing the same problems here. Unfortunately we don't have a setup like CalTrain or MetroLink where the CR agency has always been wholly separate from the metro rapid transit and bus districts.
Clearly, though, this private operator thing has to go...and the fiefdoms that keep rigging the system for politically-connected profiteers like MBCR need to get busted up. We are far and away the largest and highest-ridership system to not be run in-house, and that's an extra layer of waste and non-transparency we don't need here. Once the system achieves a certain scale the only reason to contract out is when the highest-ridership lines run on "foreign" trackage and dispatching...which is why Amtrak and CSX split up ops for MARC in Maryland, and Amtrak runs Metrolink in LA (CalTrain is the only other with >20,000 annual ridership to contract out to a non- track owner, and they're still 4x smaller than our CR).
I also think all of the RR ROW ownership in the state outside of ROW's shared with the rapid transit system needs to revert to the EOT and be taken out of the T's hands so all planning gets centralized and better weighs the freight and intercity stakeholders before making decisions. Let them own the stations and layover yards that directly support the commuter rail, but the ROW's themselves are a statewide resource usable by multiple common carriers. Take it out of their hands. The T has long been freight-ignorant and system preservation-ignorant, only really taking those things into account when it's something like the CSX/Worcester deal (where they'd well exceeded their pain threshold with freight interference on the Worcester Line) and stimulus funding like the Downeaster and Pan Am improvements on the Haverhill and Fitchburg Lines, where the letter of the funding grants and fed oversight kept them on their best behavior. They've been lackadaisical at best elsewhere...chasing most freight off the Eastern Route, Fitchburg Line, and Reading Line by blocking clearance routes, and potentially maiming Pan Am's freight access in Somerville with the GLX carhouse design. They've let every single freight-only line they own go abandoned except for (increasingly busy) Peabody, Medfield-Millis (which may be next), and East Boston (about to be reactivated by Pan Am). And they've had a rocky working relationship with Amtrak over Downeaster and Lake Shore Limited delays, NEC dispatching around slow Providence trains, South Station expansion, and equipment reliability before Amtrak passed on another term as CR operator (with one finger in the air).
They've doled out trail leases on
every single one of their abandoned lines except for Stoughton (precious South Coast FAIL) and Readville-Dedham (no takers yet, but they've been putting out feelers). They've given out easements to build houses on an entire block of the West Roxbury-Dedham ROW formerly reserved for the Orange Line--salting it over forever--and looked the other way while the Blue Line extension ROW got encroached by private developers in Point of Pines. In the last 2-1/2 years alone they've approved $1/99-year trail leases for Newburyport and Salisbury on the Eastern Route (compromises future Portsmouth service to single track), Needham-Newton (Green Line extension ROW), Needham-Medfield (former Millis commuter rail), Peabody-Danvers (1 of the 2 Peabody CR options), Danvers-Wakefield (only extant Eastern Route-Western Route connecting track), Lawrence-Methuen (former Methuen/Route 213 commuter rail proposal), Central Mass (studied CR proposal). And a few of those--Needham-Medfield, Danvers-Wakefield, Lawrence-Methuen--are such shoddy trail designs DCR's going to take a bath bailing out the in-over-their-heads or borderline disreputable volunteer trail lobbies on maintenance.
All of that runs contrary to the state's own finalized Freight and Rail Plan, which codifies the multi-stakeholder interests and emphasizes system preservation and careful planning for best transportation use (rail or bipedal) for every corridor. And then shit like South Coast FAIL that threatens the stability of all stakeholders everywhere with its bottomless resource drain. This outfit isn't competent to manage or maximize its corridors. At least outside of 128...a little focus and they could be making better strides on the bus and rapid transit systems. But they've bollixed things up pouring money down a pit in the 'burbs and being a passive-aggressive accessory to the decline of freight inside of 495 that there's clearly a lot of longstanding dysfunction to correct in the "expansion" towns in the district and places where they overlap with other regional transit agencies and non-Boston MPO's. It's time to put that in the state's hands. Their focus has gotten way too diluted and way too political trying to manage it all.
