| In a feisty panel discussion this morning, a bevy of the state’s current and former top transit officials and advocates discussed what needs to be done to fix the T. Experts largely agreed on what the problems were but expressed more skepticism as to Gov. Charlie Baker and Secretary of Transportation Stephanie Pollack’s approach to fixing them.
The event, which was jointly sponsored by Suffolk University and the Greater Boston Real Estate Board, featured not only Pollack but also a former Secretary of Transportation under former Gov. Deval Patrick, James Aloisi, and former MBTA Head James O’Leary, as well as Eileen McAnneny, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, Greg Sullivan of the Pioneer Institute (both longtime MBTA gadflies) and Kristina Egan, director for Transportation for Massachusetts, an environmental and ridership advocacy group. The event was moderated by Peter Howe, business editor of NECN.
Pollack came out swinging at the event, strongly advocating that the legislature follow the recommendations of the governor’s recent panel report on the MBTA and pass a bill that would allow the administration – at least temporarily – to have more direct fiscal and managerial control over the T’s fate.
She said the administration knows many are looking to the governor’s office to come up with a proactive solution to the issue “We want to own the T,” she said, saying that “We will fix it if you give us the tools.”
The T must bring its operating budget under control, Pollack said, adding that the state already heavily subsidizes the system, and there’s no appetite on Beacon Hill to increase its funding. She hinted that could mean taking another look at union and other contracts and potentially allowing for greater privatization of some of the core services the T provides, as well as trying to increase ridership and recover more lost fares.
Aloisi pointed out rather sharply that one option the governor had refused to take off the table was more fare increases and said he was concerned that the governor would attempt to make up the gap in the T’s operating budget by hiking fares and cutting services, which would hit the residents who most depend on the T the hardest. Already there are private bus services that are successfully competing with the T for some types of trips, he said, and further service degradations would only drive more white-collar passengers to seek other forms of transport. He suggested that the governor’s desire to remove the T’s board in favor of a new fiscal oversight panel was a red herring, and that simply replacing the existing board members with the governor’s preferred appointees could accomplish the same goals. What would really help the T is a rethinking of the overall state transport budget so that more resources are devoted to mass transit and away from highway repair, Aloisi suggested, to help overcome decades of under-investment.
All of the panelists agreed that the T needs to increase its transparency – getting hold of a copy of the contract between the T and its unions was tougher than finding the Ark of the Covenant, cracked Sullivan – and do a better job communicating with the ridership. Pollack, whose academic work had often made use of big data to measure and track the performance of the state’s transport network, said she was working on changing the focus within the institution away from tracking mere operational stats about things like engine uptime and speed and focusing more on the metrics that matter to riders.
To a large degree, she said, the extent of the T’s problems remains unknown. In response to a question about fare collection on the Commuter Rail, she said that while the T’s contract with train operator Kelios has incentives and tracking to monitor whether the trains are on time, no such incentives exist for fare collection. Just this week, the department was in the midst of undertaking a study to estimate actual ridership on the Commuter Rail in order to be able to compare it with the current level of fare collection.
