The litany of woes is as long, and as old, as the MBTA itself: An $8 billion debt. Aging trains and buses. Maintenance backlogs. Fare increases. And now, the admission from MBTA general manager Daniel Grabauskas that the T has been secretly cutting tripsfrom its published schedules.
The hope, Grabauskas says, was that cutting trips would cut costs.
That hasn’t happened. The MBTA is still saddled with a debt load among the largest in the nation for a public transit system. Riders say service has been declining for years. And this is one of the few issues where everyone on Beacon Hill seems to be in agreement: the T is in trouble.
But what to do about it?
Get on board as we search for the answer to that question. And another, one of Boston’s most famous: "Should we walk, or do we have time to take the T?"
Listen to the full show:
Plus, web specials: From the Kingston Trio to Radio Boston, the T in music - popular and platform…
Radio Boston: Is the T On Track?
Airdate: February 29, 2008
- Guests:
Daniel Grabauskas, General Manager of the MBTA
Stephanie Pollack, Northeastern University Center for Urban and Regional Policy
WEB SPECIALS:
The T may make riders irate, but it’s also iconic. So well known, in fact, that the nation’s oldest public transit systemkicks off our own Radio Boston theme music. Every week, you hear…
… Government Centah, once known as Scollay Square station whereCharlie, the man who never returned,snatched a sandwich from his wife as his train rumbled by. (As envisioned by the Boston Globe in 1948 in the image on right. Click to enlarge.)
The legend, made famous by the Kingston Trio, here with a live performance of Charlie on the MTA:
In 1948, Charlie reached for a sandwich. Today, on the MBTA’s Charlie Cards (click on image at right), he’s got a T-pass in his hand. Interesting that the T adopted Charlie, since the song’s rousing final verseincludes the line, "Fight the fare increase!"
The tune was political from its birth. Written by Jacqueline Steiner and Bess Lomax Hawes, "Charlie on the MTA" was one of 10 campaign songs created for Walter A. O’Brien’s failed 1949 Boston mayoral campaign. As one historian notes, the songs "were broadcast from a sound truck that drove around the streets of Boston. This earned O’Brien a $10 fine for disturbing the peace."
Some T-riders might say it’s the MBTA that disturbs their own peace… give us your two-cents, or nickel’s worth in the comment section below. We promise, no exit fares for riding along with Radio Boston.
Boston Buskers
I will be honest. Some of the musical performers on the T, I love. Some, I can’t stand. In the love category: the guy who shows up sometimes at Park Street station with a very blusey steel string guitar; the skinny folk singer at Government Center; the Spanish guitarist I recorded on the Red Line platform at Park Street.
In the despise category: The long-haired guy with the 70s concert t-shirts who plays 80s mohawk rock, complete with a synth track (Whitesnake? Really?); the Chinese violinist at Harvard Square, because, though I appreciate the culture of it, seems as if he’s in constant musical combat with the Peruvian pan flutists across the street. Not a good mix.
Who are some of your favorites?
And then, there are the just plain amazing. Including the bucket-drummer fellow we feature as a music break on the show. Our techincal director, Tim Skoog, was allowed to record him only after he bought a $10 CD. But, hey, I guess if you’ve got a camera, it’s different, because we found him on YouTube as well:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuWeDNJu8Ho&feature=related[/youtube]
Some Useful Links:
Now that the ground has thawed let’s go on an archaeological dig. What are some of the latest big local discoveries? What do historical artifacts teach us about our past?
I take the Framingham/Worcester line and am not very happy with the new schedule. The MBTA and their cohorts in crime, MBCR, have taken more time out of my personal life by devising a schedule that seems to be self-serving for them and not for their customers. The solution to the problem of not hitting your on-time performance goals is not to alter the schedule and stretch out the commute; it should be to fix the problems that cause the trains to be late in the first place.
I now have to get up 15 minutes earlier to catch the Express Train that gets me in to South Station 50 minutes before I have to be at work. And the end of my day has been extended since the train home now leaves South Station 10 minutes later.
But, hey, as long as they don’t have to pay out more of those On Time Guarantee tickets, and MBCR doesn’t have to pay the contacted late fees for not being on time, then it’s all right for them but not for the riders.
Life on the commuter rail isn’t great, especially if you commute via the two worst performing lines: the Franklin line and the Framingham-Worcester line. Service is unreliable, trains are old, the infrastructure is not built to accommodate the needs of passengers, heat doesn’t work in the winter and air conditioning doesn’t work in the summer, delays are commonplace.
In fact, on-time performance was so poor on the Framingham-Worcester line that instead of addressing the issues, the MBTA/MBCR changed the schedule, ostensibly to make it more “realistic” and in effect blaming load times of passengers at the stops. But really, the MBTA hasn’t addressed the concerns of the passengers, they’ve just built in a time cushion at our expense.
The system is broken and in dire financial straits. The MBTA is facing a downward spiral in which the transportation authority cannot generate the revenue necessary to achieve a state of good repair. This means that the T is unable to improve the service and quality needed to retain and attract riders and increase revenue over time.
I think the passengers understand that. What passengers don’t understand is the lack of ownership and accountability for these issues. The MBTA blames MBCR, MBCR blames the MBTA and both blame CSX. Passengers don’t want to hear blame, they want to understand that someone is proactively seeking a solution for these issues.
Public transportation needs to address the areas where population growth is occurring. Due to recent housing prices, that growth is not happening in Boston itself, but in the suburbs and most notably in Central Massachusetts. Commuter rail service needs to expand in order to keep pace with population growth and provide a reliable, economical and ecological friendly way of connecting suburbanites to metropolitan cities.
This is a problem for all levels of state government to address from your local Representative to Senator to Governor Patrick. This cannot go on.
Among the many concerns regarding the MBTA system, I’d like to add another: Alcohol Advertising on the MBTA. Alcohol advertising significantly contributes to both underage drinking and binge drinking, according to a growing body of research.The public transit system serves 25,000 middle schoool, high school, and underage college students in Greater Boston each month. Alcohol ads are displayed throughout the transit system, in stations, as well as on the inside and outside of trains and buses. The MBTA does not allow ads depicting or promoting tobacco, violence, or sexuality, with explicit policies recognizing the negative community impact. MBTA administrators cite alcohol advertising revenue as essential, however alcohol ad revenues comprise a mere .1% of total revenues, compared to the 69% provided by cities and towns. A collaborative group of organization, coalitions, parents and youth have been working to change public opinion and public policy, so as to remove alcohol ads from the MBTA. Please join us to voice your concern about direct alcohol marketing to underage youth and the related public health and safety problems in our communities.
The widely-acknowledged mismanagement of the MBTA may not have improved under current general manager Daniel Grabauskas but it stems far beyond his tenure. The problems are systemic and based on the fact that the T is unaccountable and therefore, arrogant and unresponsive.
A small case in point: throughout its history, the MBTA has a strange policy which prohibited smoking and cigarette advertising yet allowed cigarettes to be sold on its property. I first inquired about the inconsistency of this policy six years ago. Nobody I spoke to in any administrative department was able to justify the policy, nor would they respond to requests to explain it. Even the T’s own Ridership Oversight Committee recommended correcting the problem through the legislature rather than trying to work with the MBTA directly.
My legislator sponsored a bill, H 3594, which would have prohibited tobacco sales on MBTA property. Even as a state representative, she could not get her questions answered by T management.
Without acknowledging any position on the bill publicly, the T sent its lobbyists to quietly defeat the bill through its ties to Transportation Committee Chair Joseph Wagner, who also refused to explain his opposition to the bill.
After orchestrating the bill’s defeat, the MBTA capitulated, agreeing to phase out the leases of vendors who sell cigarettes on its property. Yet the T’s administration remained completely silent about the subject for over six years, a microcosm of its utter arrogance on a wide range of issues and problems both large and small.
Some email from Radio Boston listeners:
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John asks:
“Please ask a question regarding their plans for T radio. It was horrible before they discontinued it but it appears that they are going to try to revise it and try it again at some point. It needs to be ended period. It makes reading impossible.”
Christopher wrote an email saying that dropped MBTA bus trips is old news, but has a new suggestion for improvement:
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“I’m a bit confused about why the Herald reported that the unscheduled
service cuts were previously undisclosed, when the Boston Globe
reported on April 13, 2006 that according to General Manager
Grabauskas, dropped bus trips were down from 340 per day in December
2004 to 34 per day in December 2005. The T has regularly reported on
dropped trips in various public meetings since then, so why is this
all of a sudden new information? Perhaps the General Manager can
clarify.
Grabauskas is definitely pushing the T in the right direction - the
bus and subway passenger experience is noticeably better now than a
few years ago. I hope that the T will be able to increase efficiency
and state lawmakers will provide more funding so that the agency can
continue to make progress fixing its problems.
I do have one suggestion to increase transparency: post statistics
about the T’s performance on its web site. Not only would it be good
for the public to know how many service-hours are missed due to
dropped runs, but I’d also be interested to see numbers for on-time
performance, ridership, crowding, vehicle failures, absenteeism,
accidents, crimes, and customer complaints.
Christopher Beland
Boston”
I have ridden the T since I was in middle school in the 60s. I live in Cambridge, so I can avail myself of public transportation. I have many fond memories of the T.
However, my overriding experience of being a T commuter is that, if you want to get somewhere on time, you have to leave an extra 30 minutes early. The majority of the time you will arrive 30 minutes early, but a maddeningly high percentage of the time you will just make it. Is it too much for commuters to expect reliability from the T — other than to be reliably unreliable?
As a carless, 30-year-old, 20-year-long resident of the Boston metro area — who took the bus everyday to commute to high school, and regularly since then — I have had some wonderful experiences with the T. As late as the buses can be, I appreciate the bus system immensely. First of all, each bus ride consists of some human interaction — however brief — with the bus driver and/or with fellow riders. And if you think you’re suffering on a crowded bus or stressed about lateness, consider how the bus driver feels! I’ve been on buses during near-blizzards, thunderstorms, unbearable heat, unbearable cold; the buses have saved me! Whenever I’m in Europe I gripe about how the T fails to match up to the efficiency and reliability of, say, German public transport, but there’s character to the T, too. It’s great to hear that there are people working hard to improve the T — because god knows there’s room for improvement — but until then, I am still grateful for the system. And however I can — with a smile, a greeting, a thanks, some human small talk — I try to make it known to the hard-working, necessarily patient men and women who operate these vehicles. -C.D., Cambridge
A whole load of email/comments dropped in our inbox as the show was being broadcasted…. amazing.
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Richard sends this bus rider’s journal:
“Follow this chain of events and dare to deny that something is wrong. I approached the inbound stop for the #1 bus on Massachusetts Ave. in front of the Cambridge Post Office at 12:10am. bus #2211 rolled by and I was not in position to flag him down. So I waited.
No MBTA busses passed in either direction until #2138 passed outbound at 12:50am followed by #2211 at 12:54am.
With my eye on the Cambridge City Hall clock that read 12:55am, #2271 and 2131 zoomed toward Harvard Square.
Bus #2138 arrived headed toward Dudley at 1:02am. I boarded and we proceeded south on Mass.Ave. The bus loaded up at Pearl St.
At 1:07am we picked up some people at Sydney St. At that moment, #2271 passed us heading inbound carrying possibly four people.
At MIT, #2182 passed us inbound, but Out of Service.
My bus (#2138) arrived at my stop (Newbury St.) at 1:13am with #2131 one block behind.
After some sleep and a full day’s activity, I was back at the same bus stop in front of the Cambridge Post office at 10:45pm as indicated by the City Hall clock. At that moment #2288 zoomed toward Harvard with its Out of Service sign lit up.
Bus #2288 returned headed toward Boston at 10:53pm. I got on.
Bus #2258 could be seen on the Mass. Ave. Bridge going toward Harvard at 11:00pm.
Bus #2192 could be seen at Commonwealth Ave. moving toward Harvard at 11:02pm.
We (#2288) reached Newbury St. at 11:04pm where I got off. I decided to spend a little time watching the bus traffic back and forth on Mass. Ave. I took a position in front of the Bank of America at Mass. Ave. and Boylston St. and kept time by the giant sidewalk clock that faces east and west.
11:16pm: #2123 arrived at Newbury St. headed toward Cambridge.
11:27pm: #2288 returned to Newbury St. Cambridge-bound.
11:30pm: #2258 arrived at Newbury St. going toward Dudley.
11:32pm: #2192 was right behind headed toward Dudley.
11:44pm: #2169 arrived inbound at Newbury St., but it was Out of Service as it moved toward Dudley.
11:53pm: #2123 arrived headed toward Dudley.
11:59pm: #2258 Cambridge-bound arrived at Newbury St.
Midnight: #2192 was right on the tail of #2258, rolling toward Cambridge and it was empty.
A casual reading of the above scattershot pattern of busses on the #1 route will show that there were enough vehicles in service to transport the reveling crowds that move up and down Massachusetts Ave. on weekend nights. There is nothing in current bus schedules that show one and two minute intervals between trips after 11pm. And what regulation in T scheduling allows for busses on the #1 route to travel in twos and threes at such a late hour?
These problems with the MBTA’s #1 bus operations surface regularly on Friday and Saturday nights after 11pm. This June 2 scenario is not the worst. It is not my intent to get a bunch of drivers in trouble because the regularity of the scheduling snafu indicates a systemic disorder that has to lay with the dispatchers and supervisors.
A headline in the December 8, 2006 Boston Globe read: “T will add new Roxbury bus line enhancements”. This would include inspectors in the middle of a route and not just at the terminal points. This is a good move, Roxbury needs more transit service. However, route #1, which runs busses into very different neighborhoods, carrying low- wage workers, university professors, bio-technicians, students, medical personnel, musicians and party animals must not be neglected. It is one of the top five heaviest traveled bus routes.”
Robert says, safety first:
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“What is the MBTA doing to control the driving habits of its bus drivers. I regularly see bus drivers going through red lights, cutting cars off, stopping in the middle of the street instead of pulling over and permitting traffic to pass.
Robert”
Dann sent us an email saying he can park in Boston for $10. MBTA general manager Dan Grabauskas said, “Where? Let me know.” Dan sent us this email response:
“Thanks for taking my email - I park underneath Boston Common during week for $10. I guess it’s their evening rates; but it’s regularly that cost.”
Maria writes with this idea:
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“I live in Winthrop, and I’m wondering whether there is any kind of plan to create another line that does a loop to connect all of the other stops. It seems that would solve a lot of the problems–like connecting the Blue and Red line.
Thanks,
Maria”
M Forbes wonders about the “herd” of buses problem:
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“why do you have to wait 20 to 30 minutes for the 28 and when it does come there are 2 buses. Why do the buses not run more often instead of togather.”
Alvin emails as a champion of eminent domain:
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“Why not use domain power to expand the T while at the same time
restrict vehicle traffic. Also why not outsource new lines and
highspeed rail commuter lines to european companies that can offer
plug and play solutions like spain did with its german built rails.
Alvin
Boston”
We received this email from Shelley, supporter of the T:
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“Hi there,
I wanted to write and in say that the T is one of the reasons I can to
Boston and have the job I do.
I am an itinerate teacher and teach in Lynn, Chelsea, Revere, and Everett.
I use the buses, the Subway and the commuter rail to do my job.
I do have one question, o.k. two.
What is the statis on the Orange Line repairs, we have had months of the top
of the orange line being out of service and having shuttle service. I take
the orange line to church on Sundays, and when the orange line is being
worked on my trip can take more than two hours to go from Revere to
Somerville.
I also am wondering, who is responsible for cleaning the snow from bus stops
and shelters? Is it the land owners, the T, or who, if if I can’t get into
a bus, or off a bus at those stops, who can I contact to fix this. This
winter I have been doing a lot of walking in the street. Which is not safe
for myself, my guide dog, or the drivers in cars.
This is one of the best transit companies in the country, I have lived in
Michigan, Kalamazoo, Erie, Pennsylvania, Cleveland Ohio, and Redding
Pennsylvania.
Shelley”
Frank writes with this simple reason he chooses the Mass Pike:
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“I work in Framingham, and am moving to a town on the Fitchburg line. I would need to take a train all the way to Boston from say Ayer, then take a train back west to Framingham, which is why I choose to sit in the Mass Pike traffic.
Frank”
Hello…I moved to Boston 2 years ago and have had to rely on public transportation, which I find pretty weak, considering Boston is an international city. I´m glad to at least see new trains go in service on the Blue line (which I take everyday.)
I have 2 questions: Why does the T stop running so early in the evening and start relatively late in the morning, giving taxis a complete monopoly during these off times????
Given that all Blue line trains HAVE to turn around at Bowdoin anyway, Why does that station close at 6pm and remain closed on the weekends????
One thing I keep wondering about the T system, is why there’s not a ring connecting the outer points. Moscow has a great, fast, train system with one. Intsead of having to go into the center and transfering, maybe once or twice, a ring connecting the outer points would make it SO much easier to get to the outerlaying neighborhoods in boston. Possibility of that?
I´m an Airline employee and used to rely on the 441 and 442 to get to the Airport. Besides the infrequent schedules on weekends and holidays, buses very often skipped runs at certain hours. When the buses actually showed up they´d be jammed with people. Frequent answers from the drivers were “someone didn´t show up to work today!”
This made me take my car to the Airport instead. Pretty hard to wait up to 2 hours at a stop in the cold…with no other Public Transportation options.
I´m curious why the Blue line closes it´s Bowdoin station at 6 pm and does not open it on the weekends, when all Blue line trains have to turn around there anyway??