| Developers who’d invested in downtown Lynn apartment buildings got a rude shock in 2022 when, citing the structure’s decrepitude, the MBTA suddenly shut down the train station and its 20-minute ride to Boston that had been a key part of their formula for success.
But, speaking at an event Tuesday morning touting the reopening of the Lynn commuter rail station nine months ahead of schedule, MBTA General Manager Phil Eng said he wanted to prevent something like this from happening again.
“We’re ramping up our inspection program, but we’re also looking to follow up immediately with the right level of action, building up more in-house capabilities and take care of a situation sooner and not wait until it’s too late,” he said.
Community leaders, real estate developers and transit advocates alike had slammed the T’s surprise decision, under a previous senior leadership team, to close the Lynn station in July 2022, a move later postponed until October 2022 after intense lobbying. The T had said the station itself and the attached parking garage built in 1991 were quickly falling apart and needed to be replaced, along with a series of bridges that take the commuter rail through downtown Lynn, in a $72 million project that could take until 2030 to complete.
The T had initially said a temporary station would not be ready until September of this year. Following public outrage – speakers at Tuesday morning’s press conference also credited a change in gubernatorial administrations that brought sweeping change to the T’s top management ranks – engineers at the MBTA and international train operator Keolis, the contractor that runs the trains on the T’s behalf, found ways to accelerate construction. The new temporary station in downtown Lynn opened in December.
“I want to say thank you for approaching this with a great sense of urgency and establishing standards. When you as a T rider lose service, you should have viable, robust options in place at the time of that loss of service,” said Lynn state Sen. Brendan Crighton, the co-chair of the legislature’s Joint Committee on Transportation. “When you take away a train station from a city of over 100,000, that does a great deal of damage, but this administration stepped up from day 1 when they came in to make sure these options were available”
Speaker after speaker Tuesday compared the speeding up of the Lynn commuter rail station to the work the T is doing this year to fix nearly all its subway tracks and eliminate slow zones that drive unreliable and slow service
“We’re pleased we’ve got partnerships with the legislature….to make sure we’re not starving the T and that we have resources to make investments,” Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll said. “We’re really looking forward to partnering with the mayor and finding ways to make sure that transit-oriented investment in a Gateway City can happen easily, innovatively and in a way that’s designed to impact people’s quality of life and where they live.”
Gov. Maura Healey’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year doubles the state’s operating support for the T as it faces a big budget shortfall as it tries to beef up service levels, hire enough staff to meet federal safety investigators’ directives and fix decades of deferred maintenance.
But that doubling of state aid will still leave the T with a $93 million shortfall for the 2024-2025 fiscal year. A Healey-appointed commission of business leaders, transit advocates and others set to hash out new ways to increase transportation funding to pay for service levels necessary to bust congestion and meet the state’s climate goals isn’t scheduled to deliver a recommendation for some months, putting the budget gap in the state legislature’s lap.
Speaking after Tuesday’s press conference, Crighton told Banker & Tradesman that he didn’t think the $93 million gap in the T’s next budget was insurmountable.
“We have to fill the gap. There’s no alternative,” he said.
