Background for the Inevitable MBTA Discussions to follow

[benveniste]

The MBTA shut down all trains at 7pm yesterday.  There were no trains today and only a limited bus schedule.  For tomorrow, here's a rundown of what the MBTA is currently saying:

• 70% of the regularly scheduled trips on the commuter Rail
• Fewer cars and less frequent service on the Blue and Green lines
• "Limited" Service on the Red and Orange lines

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[ckd]

The legislature is far more responsible for the continued starvation of the T than Baker/Scott/Walsh could ever be. Finneran (the felon), DiMasi (the currently incarcerated felon), and DeLeo (the "unindicted co-conspirator") can all take their share of the blame.

And starved it has been since the "Forward Funding" finance plan fell apart (after assuming that costs like health care and energy would either not grow or grow slowly).

See the 2009 review by the D'Allessandro panel, with such choice bits as:Fuel and utility costs at the MBTA grew by a remarkable 122% from FY01 to FY08, far surpassing the 22% growth that the Finance Plan projected.
andFor FY10, over $3B worth of projects were identified by the MBTA as needed to address SGR [State of Good Repair] issues. Only 15 of those 201 projects totaling $203M were funded. In other words, all but 6% of what was requested to address SGR issues went unfunded.
Deferred maintenance. Yeah.

Or this:For the FY10 budget cycle, there were 57 projects, totaling $590M, that scored a “10” on safety

[benveniste]

CKD, over the 2007-2014 the price of diesel fuel rose by about 33%, which is less that the rise in overall operating costs or the rise in "Materials, Supplies and Services."

I don't think there's any doubt that MBTA hasn't spent enough money on infrastructure. But given how fast spending has risen over the last 8 years and that subsidy levels have kept pace with spending, I can't agree that the MBTA has been starved. I want to know who made the decisions on how all that money was spent and why.

[ckd]

Unfortunately, the D'Allessandro report only goes through 2009 (with a look forward into 2010) and therefore doesn't cover the past few years...but the 2000-2009 period certainly laid the groundwork for the current situation.

As that report says:Contrary to not trying, we found evidence that the MBTA did make some hard expense choices. Across-the-board cuts were routinely made to departmental budgets. Periodic layoffs and hiring freezes restrained the headcount. Individual managers took pride in eliminating inefficiencies and redundancies, while embracing a new organizational ethic of customer service. Yet in the end, they could not pare staff below the number needed to move hundreds of thousands of riders across hundreds of routes each workday. Add the complexity and cost of sustaining the system’s aging infrastructure, and it became evident that the cost inflation and savings assumptions in the Finance Plan were never tested against the daily grind.
I would be unsurprised to find that some of the cost growth in 2010-2014 was