State legislators’ vote last week to send nearly $300 million from the Fair Share Amendment tax to public transit agencies is a step in the right direction, but two vital, additional steps must be taken in the coming years.
For all the lumps we’ve given the Massachusetts legislature in this space over their role in starving public transit systems of sufficient money to operate safely and effectively, we must give credit where credit’s due: Their decision to stick to a nearly 50-50 split in divvying up Fair Share money between transportation and education needs deserves to be commended.
The $90 million allocation to regional transit agencies, in particular, will be transformative and help these frugal services both add night and weekend service – pause, momentarily, to consider what use a transit system is that doesn’t work on nights and weekends – and set up more fare-free pilots to boost ridership.
But the $206 million headed for the MBTA will unfortunately largely be a drop in the bucket of what’s needed to both repair and expand the system to meet the demands of the 21st century.
Because the agency was neglected for so long on Beacon Hill – whether attacked, as when a sensible law indexing the gas tax to inflation was scuppered a decade ago, or its future needs and past management failures merely ignored and left to fester – the bill to bring it up to date is massive.
A project underway to turn just four Newton commuter rail stations from crummy, crumbling asphalt strips sandwiched next to the Mass. Pike into wheelchair-accessible train stations will cost north of $170 million – and dozens of stations still need similar upgrades. A recent MBTA presentation about designs for a new, all-electric bus garage in Jamaica Plain estimated $4.5 billion alone is needed to upgrade or rebuild the T’s ancient bus facilities.
The Fair Share Amendment is a far cry from Los Angeles’ fabled Measure M sales tax, which is pumping $120 billion over 40 years into expanding that region’s transit system. But it can get a lot closer if Gov. Maura Healey and the legislature work together to bond against future Fair Share dollars to hand the T a much bigger and more stable pot of money at once, that can more effectively be deployed to specific upgrades instead of being drip-fed into the system.
We’ve done similar things before. The $3 billion Accelerated Bridge Program, launched by former Gov. Deval Patrick in 2008, took a 20 percent bite out of the hundreds of “structurally deficient” bridges across the commonwealth.
In a year or two, once the bond markets understand that Fair Share money is a stable revenue source, the state can borrow against it to pay for parts of big, hairy projects like electrifying and boosting frequency on the commuter rail network to transform it into true regional rail.
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