Good-Bye, Ms Scott

Under fire from Massachusetts Governor Charles Baker for “unacceptable” interruptions in transit service, Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s general manager, Beverly Scott, has resigned from her post. The immediate cause of those service interruptions, of course, was Boston’s record fall of more than six feet of snow in the past two weeks alone.

The underlying cause of those interruptions, however, is the aging and decrepit nature of the transit system. Burdened by $5 billion in debt that demands $422 million in mortgage payments a year–a full 22 percent of the agency’s budget that ought to be going to maintain and rehabilitate the system–the T was simply ready to fail.

This failure can’t truly be blamed on general manager Scott, who has worked in Boston for little more than two years and before that was working for Atlanta’s transit system. Indeed, the blame belongs to politicians who agreed to borrow money to build rail transit extensions. Indeed, some of the blame could be put on Governor Baker himself, who helped develop the finance plan for Boston’s Big Dig.

Many people think of the Big Dig as a highway project, but it really was more of a city beautification project. Yet when it was planned, the Conservation Law Foundation sued, saying more money should be spent on transit improvements. The state agreed to borrow $1.7 billion to make such improvements, something that is often called “Big Dig debt” even though it didn’t fund any of the Big Dig itself. The state also borrowed another $3.5 billion to spend on a variety of other transit projects.

While Baker himself isn’t responsible for MBTA’s Big Dig debt, his role in the Big Dig plan shows that, despite libertarian leanings, he is just as susceptible as other politicians to urban-monument-type projects. Though construction of the $2 billion Green Line extension began a month before Baker took office, he probably could have killed it if he wanted to; instead, he let it be known that he “has no plans to change course on this important project.”

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The snowstorm is yet another reason why cities like Boston should consider replacing their aging rail systems with buses. Boston has 490 active snowplows that together have plowed enough snow this year to fill the New England Patriot’s football stadium 90 times. Why should Boston have to fund a completely separate snow removal system for the rail lines, especially when switches, power facilities, and electric motors are more vulnerable to snow and ice than pavement and internal combustion engines?

Though general manager Scott shut down the subway lines on Monday evening and all day Tuesday, MBTA buses continued to run. And if the weather is so bad that the streets can’t be cleared enough for the buses to run, then there probably isn’t much point in running the subways anyway. If priorities must be set, it is far more important to keep the streets clear for emergency vehicles, not to mention the more-than-80-percent of Boston-area commuters to drive or take the bus to work, than to keep the tracks clear for the less-than-10-percent of commuters who take rail transit to work.

Boston has more than 240,000 downtown workers and more than half of them take transit to work. Yet, as the Antiplanner has shown, buses could easily handle this many commuters. Only New York and, possibly, Chicago have so many downtown workers that rail transit is needed to support commuting.

Scott’s departure is just one more in a long series of transit agency CEOs who have been fired or resigned in disgrace (or, in one sad case, committed suicide) over rail scandals. Between optimism bias over both costs and ridership, the insider-deals that accompany all big-budget projects, and politicians’ unwillingness to fund rail’s growing maintenance backlog and the accidents that ensue, rail transit systems are truly unmanageable. Indeed, it may be that one of the reasons why CEOs of rail transit agencies are typically paid two to three times as much as those of bus-only agencies is that the risk of failure is so great.

So long as the feds are willing to help fund new construction such as the Green Line extension, the MBTA isn’t going to bring its system up to a state of good repair, much less replace its trains with buses. The federal carrot makes state and local politicians eager to spend local money on matching funds when they should dedicate that money to rehabilitating existing lines. Then, when the system fails, they can blame it on the general manager who didn’t make those decisions yet must somehow run the system anyway.