Fixing MBTA’s Financial Mess

Boston’s transit agency, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA or T for short), appears to be on the verge of collapse. Eight years ago, it reported a $7.3 billion repair backlog, which has probably grown since then. As I read its 2022 financial statement, it also has $5.4 billion in unfunded pension and health care liabilities.

No one was particularly surprised when an Orange Line train caught fire last year. Photo by Marissa Babin.

State officials have known about the T’s serious maintenance and safety problems at least since 2009, when an outside report commissioned by the governor found that it had a $3 billion maintenance backlog and wasn’t even spending enough on maintenance to keep that backlog from growing further (which is why it grew to $7.3 billion six years later). This was creating serious safety problems, the report charged, finding that the agency’s maintenance program was addressing only about 10 percent of the system’s most serious safety issues.

In 2009, MBTA had at least half the money it needed to close its maintenance backlog, but it chose instead to spend the money building a 4.3-mile extension of its light-rail system that, as of 2012, was expected to cost $1.3 billion. In fact, it ended up costing almost a billion dollars more after its opening was delayed by more than three years.

Today, Boston transit riders suffer the results of neglect and mispriorities. An aging Orange Line train caught fire last year, leading the MBTA to shut down the line, and parts of its light-rail system, for a month for repairs. Also in 2022, a passenger died when his arm was caught in the closing doors of a Red Line train which then took off. Two light-rail trains crashed into one another in 2022, a repeat of a similar incident in 2021. Also in 2021, a commuter train hit an automobile, killing the driver, due to problems with safety signals. This is just a sampling of the many problems the transit system has suffered in the last couple of years.

On top of this, the new, $2.3 billion line that opened last December was so poorly built that trains were required to slow to 3 miles an hour over parts of the route. Meanwhile, replacement subway cars proved defective and had to be withdrawn from service — twice — to correct manufacturing problems.

The political response to these problems has been to fire the general manager in charge of the agency and replace him (or her) with someone else, usually another agency insider. The T has gone through seven general managers in the last seven years. The problems became so serious that they were a major issue in the 2022 gubernatorial election, with the winning candidate, Maura Healey, promising major reforms.

Now that she is in office, we know what those reforms are: she replaced the general manager with someone from New York City’s transit system instead of an agency insider. Ta da! (Meanwhile, in a game of musical transit chairs, New York replaced its subway manager with someone from Massachusetts.) To make sure that his subordinates are as unfamiliar with their jobs as he is, the new manager reassigned 16 of his executives to new positions. Meanwhile, since the new general manager arrived, average speeds on the system’s heavy-rail lines have dramatically declined.

These problems are going to continue until Massachusetts politicians and transit officials finally admit the truth about rail transit: that it is an expensive and obsolete way of moving people, particularly in the decentralized cities that typify post-pandemic America. Before the pandemic, transit carried about 56 percent of commuters to downtown Boston. But downtown held less than 12 percent of the region’s jobs, and only 8 percent of workers in jobs in the rest of the Boston urban area took transit to work. Transit simply wasn’t working for most Boston employees, and a major reason for that was the emphasis on downtown-oriented rail transit lines.

Since the pandemic, only about half of downtown Boston employees have returned to their downtown workplaces. August transit data showed that Boston transit buses had recovered around 80 percent of pre-pandemic riders, but its light-rail system carried only 55 percent and its heavy-rail trains just 58 percent.

The solution to Boston’s maintenance backlog is simple: shut down the worst-performing rail lines and replace them with buses. Keep only the rail lines that move so many people that their operating costs per passenger-mile are substantially lower than bus costs. The first target would be nearly all of the light-rail lines as their average operating costs, either per passenger-mile or per seat-mile, are substantially higher than bus operating costs. Some of the heavy-rail and commuter-rail lines can also be trimmed. The result will be a system with a much more manageable maintenance backlog and the promise of a more flexible route map that can serve the entire region rather than just a downtown that is shrinking in importance.