Green Line passengers at the Newton Highlands stop headed for shuttle buses after a train on the D branch derailed on the morning of Aug. 7, 2019. State House News Service photo | Chris Lisinski

Restrictive procurement requirements and a lack of high-level staffing for capital projects hamstring the MBTA’s ability to deliver much-needed improvements, according to a new report.

Researchers with the conservative Pioneer Institute examined the T’s spending practices over the past decade-plus and ongoing work to upgrade the Red and Orange lines. They concluded in a report released Tuesday that without additional hiring and changes to make awarding contracts easier, the T will struggle to reach its modernization and ridership goals.

“The MBTA will need to change the way it does business and the Legislature will have to remove unnecessary restrictions if the T is to modernize and consistently provide riders with high-quality service over time,” Pioneer Institute Research Director Greg Sullivan, one of the report’s two authors, said in a statement.

While Sullivan and co-author Ian Ollis said the MBTA has made progress in recent years by doubling its annual spending on modernization, reliability and expansion, they warned that spending level must increase by another 60 percent to meet every goal outlined in the T’s five-year plan.

Researchers also said reforms should be made to how contracts are awarded, saying the requirements the MBTA faces are unnecessarily complex and slow down projects. Gov. Charlie Baker proposed some changes in a long-term transportation bond bill he filed last month.

In the short term, the report suggested the MBTA offer more detailed updates of crucial Red and Orange line modernization projects to boost transparency and increase spending on maintaining power systems and trains until new hardware arrives.

The morning following the report’s release, an inbound MBTA train derailed on the Green Line’s D branch, adding to the troubles facing users of the service-challenged transit authority.

The T reported no injuries – there was only one passenger on the train at 6 a.m. – and said 35 shuttle buses were being deployed after the derailment east of Riverside Station to move move would-be train users between Riverside and Newton Highlands.

MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo said the first car of the two-car set did not derail and T personnel have begun to re-rail the second car. He said the cause of the derailment is under investigation. Pesaturo said there will be an inspection of the right-of-way infrastructure once the train is back on the rails and has been returned to the Riverside rail yard.

A Red Line train set derailed on June 11 in Dorchester, wiping out signal infrastructure as it careened off the track and spurring the T to form a review panel to review the agency’s safety practices and derailments.

T officials have not announced the cause of the Red Line derailment, but this week said that delays stemming from the crash will extend until sometime in October. The T initially hoped to end those delays by Labor Day.