Steven Senne/AP Photo
Passengers board a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority subway train at an underground station, April 14, 2020, in Boston.
Boston and New York’s transit systems have faced budget shortfalls, system-wide service nightmares, and revolving-door general managers since well before the pandemic. But in response to the latest disaster, caused in part by diminished ridership as central business districts struggled, New York state and city officials finally put their collective shoulders to the fiscal boulder crushing the system. Boston, however, continues to flub the basics of moving people safely from one destination to another in a reasonable space of time. How is it that New York has cleaned up its act, while Boston doubles down on disastrous transportation decision-making?
In mid-November, the Federal Transit Administration proposed strengthening the role of state safety oversight authorities over rail transit system projects in the engineering or construction phases. Last year, a barrage of safety failures involving the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) that serves metro Boston inspired the feds to come to that decision. During weeks of safety management inspections, federal officials uncovered far more safety incidents across the MBTA compared to its peer systems nationwide. The agency, which had already threatened a system takeover, instead issued a blistering report and ordered fixes.
But then revelations about two newly opened light-rail lines shocked even the most hardened veterans of been-there, seen-that MBTA clusterfudges. At the end of 2022, departing Gov. Charlie Baker cut the ribbon on the $2.3 billion Green Line Extension to the inner suburbs of Somerville and Medford. The new trains came with service speed restrictions, the bane of MBTA riders’ existence in the older sections of the line, where the saying is “Should we walk or do we have time to take the T?”
Why speed restrictions on new rail lines? In September, MBTA General Manager Phillip Eng (who has been in the job less than a year) announced that the prefabricated tracks were built too narrow, and the train operators had to slow down. Not only that, but MBTA officials had known about the problem for two years and laid the tracks down anyway. One line must be almost entirely rebuilt; half of the second line needs reconstruction. The MBTA fired two senior officials.
For decades, the MBTA has been plagued by budget woes, deferred maintenance, internal mismanagement, and problematic oversight from almost every entity that should provide it. Massachusetts governors have tried reorganizations and revenue-generating proposals, but have largely failed to wring epic dysfunction out of the system. Baker installed a fiscal control board in 2015 after a series of snowstorms battered the region, paralyzed the system, and laid bare atrocious maintenance problems.
The control board’s 2019 annual report was prescient. “Safety, operations, and workplace culture are questionable and require immediate attention.” Two years later, the board closed up shop. Federal pandemic funding kept the doors open. Yet the Baker administration went on to prioritize capital projects over basic transit system maintenance.
Massachusetts governors have tried reorganizations and revenue-generating proposals, but have largely failed to wring epic dysfunction out of the system.
The ensuing spate of light-rail crashes, injuries, and deaths brought the feds to town. FTA officials got to see the crisis unfold in real time over seven serious incidents: collisions, derailments, rollaway trains, and more. After the inspectors left, there were three more major accidents, including one involving a subway train catching fire on a rail bridge over a river. All of the passengers escaped onto the bridge, except one person who jumped into the water and swam to safety.
The FTA’s report indicated a lack of follow-through on key repairs, which meant that the MBTA’s “aging assets and infrastructure continue to deteriorate and fail.” Worse still, “the combination of overworked staff and aging assets has resulted in the organization being overwhelmed, chronic fatigue for key positions in the agency, lack of resources for training and supervision, and leadership priorities that emphasize meeting capital project demands above passenger operations, preventive maintenance, and even safety.”
But the safety incidents and FTA rebukes have continued into the fall, with rail maintenance workers nearly getting run over by trains and others suffering electrical burns during work near the third rail. If that wasn’t enough, last week Eng, a veteran of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Long Island Rail Road, announced that the MBTA needs $24.5 billion to get the system up to a state of good repair.
Brian Kane, a former MBTA official who heads up the independent MBTA Advisory Board representing cities and towns in the service area, told Axios, “With Phil Eng, it’s like the adults are finally in charge.”
New Massachusetts governors usually underestimate how much of their energy gets consumed by Boston’s transit issues. After one year in office, residents are already holding Gov. Maura Healey accountable in a way that Baker wasn’t. (He managed mostly to maintain high approval ratings in spite of the MBTA.) A recent poll by MassINC Polling Group found deep dissatisfaction with the MBTA. Residents surveyed gave both the governor and state lawmakers Cs for their handling of transportation assets and the transit agency. “Nearly as many people gave [Healey] a D or an F as gave her an A or a B,” says Rich Parr, senior research director for the MassINC Polling Group. “These grades suggest that people want her to fix it now, so it’s up to her, regardless of who was in charge when it happened.”
State lawmakers probably figured that a voter-approved Fair Share Amendment, which levies a surtax on millionaires and sends the $1 billion to education and transportation sectors (including the MBTA), would absolve them of having to come up with new transportation revenues. But that optimism has waned with the latest developments. “We’re asking states to manage and control transit that only really serves part of the state as opposed to having the mayors or some sort of regional government structure that just pertains to the particular region that’s served by the transit agency,” says Parr.
NEW YORK’S METROPOLITAN TRANSPORTATION AUTHORITY is not immune from delivering new assets that don’t work (brand-new but defective subway cars have already been pulled from service). But for once in the Empire State, the governor, the mayor, and state lawmakers have devised real mass transit fixes. For the first time in two decades, the largest transit system in North America will see balanced budgets for the next five years, through combinations of tolls, fare increases, and operational efficiencies. Gov. Kathy Hochul wanted the city to contribute more ($500 million); Mayor Eric Adams, much less. They met at $165 million, not exactly in the middle but close enough.
It helped that the two architects of much of MTA’s dysfunction, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, have departed the scene. They clashed about everything there was to feud about, including how much to allocate to public transportation, what projects should take priority, and who should control it. Cuomo ran off his fair share of top agency officials, too, among them the popular MTA head Andy Byford (who got love from transit riders and the “Train Daddy” moniker after confronting signal issues that slowed trains down). Cuomo also finally won a congestion pricing plan that had been sloshing around for nearly 20 years. (The Federal Highway Administration approved the plan this past summer, though the state of New Jersey and city of Fort Lee have challenged it.)
However, what sets New York apart from Boston is an intrinsic understanding that public transportation, the subway in particular, is indispensable and is what makes New York work. When the subway reached a breaking point with service snafus in the summer of 2017, Cuomo declared a state of emergency, which helped him get the congestion plan moving. Boston has a similar relationship with its transit system, but its officials and political leaders don’t seem to be able to devise reforms that dent the agency’s unresponsive culture.
Furthermore, the MBTA does not have the pull on Boston’s Beacon Hill that the MTA does in Albany. Nor do Boston mayors have the clout with state lawmakers or governors that Gotham’s mayors have. Yet world-class status doesn’t come easy to a city yoked to exorbitantly priced housing and bad transit.
“It’s still a tough political issue because you are trying to solve this housing crisis by leaning on the T, and the T is not exactly showing itself to be capable of dealing with the issue,” says Parr. A multifaceted plan of revenue-raisers and bold executive actions like New York undertook is possible. But Boston leaders have never mustered the will or the political alliances to force the agency to come up with a program of relentless accountability that it can actually deliver.
