Photo courtesy of John Walkey, Transportation for Massachusetts (T4MA)

State law requires the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) to balance its budget. The transit authority is facing a budget gap of $161 million for FY2013. In an attempt to address this problem, the MBTA is currently proposing huge fare increases (35% or 43%) and draconian service cuts (including the elimination of 101 weekday bus routes and all commuter rail service after 10pm and on the weekends) as we have described in previous blog entries. This would be a devastating blow to transit in the region, which is the most effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emssions from the transporation sector, improve air quality, reduce traffic congestion, and provide mobility to people who may not be able to get around in any other way.

State Representative Carl Sciortino recently wrote an excellent article on WickedLocal Somerville calling for a comprehensive solution to our state’s transportation funding problem rather than putting a band-aid on this crisis and making public transportation users suffer.  In his article he encouraged residents to voice their views and we can only second that. “There will be a number of public hearings around the region in the coming weeks. Attend. Speak up. Encourage friends and co-workers to do the same,” he said.

See below for a full list of public meetings. For the MBTA website, and a for more info, click here.

Public Meetings:

The announcement of a fare increase is never welcome news for transportation users, and Tuesday’s bombshell from the MBTA that it is proposing a hike of between 35% and 43% across the board come July, accompanied by drastic service cuts, made it a very unhappy New Year around the Commonwealth. CLF, along with our fellow members of Transportation for Massachusetts (T4MA) — a diverse coalition of Massachusetts organizations working for an environmentally sustainable, reliable and affordable transportation system — oppose a fare increase that by itself can’t begin to fix the T’s financial problems and is inherently unfair.

T4MA objects to the MBTA’s proposal because it attempts to solve a much larger problem of insufficient funding for public transportation exclusively on the back of transit riders, who are traveling in ways that reduce traffic and benefit the environment. Any fare increase should be part of a comprehensive financial plan that addresses not only the MBTA’s operating deficit for at least the next several years, but also provides the funds needed to address the T’s maintenance and capital needs without further driving up debt service costs.

Moreover, a blanket fare increase affecting the bus, subway, and commuter rail system at the same rate takes into account neither the different needs of different transit users nor the varied costs of providing transit for buses, the subway, and commuter rail. The result would be to disproportionately burden the transit users who can least afford it, particularly bus riders.

And it’s not just public transportation that’s chronically underfunded and nearing collapse. It’s our roads and bridges and the entire transportation system in Massachusetts. Likewise, it is not just public transportation that is supported by state and federal government — the construction and maintenance of roads and bridges is heavily subsidized. As both drivers and public transportation users share the benefits of a working transportation system–from easier access to where we need to go to reduced congestion to cleaner air–so must they share the burden of  financing it. Any fare increases must be paired with other revenue-generating mechanisms with a goal of funding a transportation system that works for everyone.

At a MassDOT Board of Directors meeting Wednesday, board members expressed deep concern about the MBTA’s proposal. T and MassDOT officials said that the public’s input will be key in finalizing a plan.

The public will have an opportunity to comment on the MBTA’s proposals in a series of hearings that will be held  around the state from mid-January through March. CLF and other T4MA members will be filing comments and testifying at the hearings to ensure that the interests of our various memberships are addressed in crafting the final proposal. We encourage you to attend a hearing and join us in calling for a plan that pairs any proposed increase with other revenue-generating mechanisms and fairly shares the burden of maintaining and improving our transportation system.

For more on the fare increase and how people are responding, check out some of the media coverage:

Proposed T Service Cuts, Fare Hikes: ‘Not An Easy Choice’ (WBUR)

MBTA Riders Could Face Steep Fare Hikes (AP)

“T” Faces Service Cuts, Fare Hikes (State House News Service)

MBTA Riders Face Fare Hikes as High as 43% (Fox 25 News)

Groundbreaking for the Wonderland Parking Garage

Less than five years ago, in response to a CLF lawsuit, Massachusetts committed to building one thousand new “park and ride” parking spaces in the Commonwealth. The idea was to put the parking spaces near public transportation, making it easy for people to ride rather than drive to their destinations. The commitment was intended to reduce the number of cars on the roads and their emissions in order to help the Commonwealth come into compliance with the Clean Air Act. Currently, Massachusetts does not meet the national ambient air quality standard for ground-level ozone, a dangerous byproduct of vehicle exhaust that can trigger serious respiratory problems and cause permanent lung damage. Building parking spaces in the right locations, it has been proven, actually helps reduce air pollution.

Originally, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) selected Beverly and Salem as the locations to build the bulk of these spaces with new parking garages near their commuter rail stations.  Although both communities welcomed these facilities with open arms, MassDOT decided last year instead to seek to meet their obligation by counting the “park and ride” spaces already being constructed near the Wonderland MBTA station on the Blue Line.  They feared the Beverly and Salem garages would not be completed on time, but now the Wonderland park and ride spaces are also delayed.

Although it had five years to build the parking spaces, MassDOT announced this summer that it will not meet this obligation by the end of 2011.The Clean Air Act requires the Commonwealth to somehow achieve the same air quality benefits during the period of delay, through a so-called interim offset project or measure.  MassDOT, however, has petitioned the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to delay the completion of this requirement without proposing any such interim offset project or measure.  Why, you ask?

MassDOT is arguing that since the parking garage it chose last year to fulfill the bulk of this requirement is near private parking lots that are $2 to $3 lower in price than what the Commonwealth would have charged for parking in the new garage, the new parking facility would have been underutilized and as such would have no measurable air quality benefits.  Are you kidding me?  This tortured analysis is akin to my asking to get paid for a day that I did not show up at work since I would have been on Facebook all day anyway, had I been in the office.  Hopefully, such bootstrapping will motivate DEP to keep its rubber stamp locked up.

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s (“MBTA”) spider-map has been praised and replicated in countries around the world, but it only takes one short look at the transit map to realize one obvious missing link: the Red Line and the Blue Line are the only two of Boston’s rapid transit lines that do not intersect. Six governors, over more than two decades, have legally committed the Commonwealth to fix this obvious problem. Earlier this week, however, the Patrick Administration decided to buck this trend by seeking permission to permanently and completely remove the legal obligation to finish the final design of the Red/Blue Line Connector, without proposing to substitute any other project for it.

The Red/Blue Line Connector was originally supposed to be completed by December 31 of this year. Less than five years ago, the Commonwealth had reaffirmed that it would at least design the connector by the same date. Part way through the design, the Commonwealth is throwing in the towel, stating that it is unrealistic to expect that construction of this project will be funded, although it has never really asked the state legislature or the federal government to fund this critical transit project and has not considered any more affordable options to accomplish the same goal. This is a symptom of the chronic underfunding of our transportation system. Instead of pushing forward and advocating for increased revenue, the State is now entering a dangerous trajectory of just giving up on beneficial projects.

As a result of this missing link, transit riders traveling from points along the Blue Line to the Red Line, or the other way round, must transfer twice by using either the Green or Orange Line, reducing ridership and unnecessarily increasing congestion at downtown Boston stations including Government Center, Park Street, State and Downtown Crossing. The need to transfer twice restricts access to jobs, such as those at the academic and medical institutions along the Red Line, particularly for residents of East Boston, Revere, Winthrop and Lynn, for whom the Blue Line is the only accessible subway route. The Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) projected that the Red/Blue Line Connector would more than double daily boardings, from 10,050 to 22,390, at the Charles/MGH Station alone.

The absence of a direct connection between the Red and Blue Lines makes travel far more difficult than necessary and often discourages the use of public transit. For example, coming home from Cambridge, an East Boston resident has to wait on three different platforms for three trains. This can take particularly long for people who work at night, as many do, since the MBTA Rapid Transit lines’ arrival and departure times at Park Street, Government Center, Downtown Crossing and State Street are not coordinated and the trains are frequently delayed.  Even if on schedule, at 9:00 p.m. on a weekday, a trip from Harvard Square to Maverick Station involves 28 minutes of waiting time alone. By contrast, the route can be driven in only 16 minutes, resulting in a clear disincentive to use public transportation and contravening the State’s policy, articulated in the Global Warming Solutions Act and elsewhere, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector.

Many people, however, do not have the choice between driving and taking public transportation. The Blue Line, more than any other MBTA rapid transit line, serves almost exclusively communities where a large percentage of residents depend on mass transit. At the same time, residents of these communities are also in need of greater access to jobs. Likewise, many Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) patients need to travel from Revere, where MGH has a satellite clinic, to the hospital’s main campus in Boston’s West End. Taking public transportation under the current circumstances is not a simple trek for the infirm.

The Department of Environmental Protection now gets to decide whether the Commonwealth can proceed to request a revision of the State Implementation Plan under the Clean Air Act from the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Let’s hope that someone in the process that lies ahead has the vision to create not only a praiseworthy map but a good underlying public transportation system.

Comedian Will Rogers once joked, “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” He might have been advising the Commonwealth about the cost of inaction on the state’s much-needed public transportation projects. The Commonwealth announced yesterday that the Green Line Extension will be delayed yet again. MassDOT now is projecting that the earliest the Green Line Extension will go into service is in the Fall of 2018, but the moment the residents of Somerville and Medford have been waiting for could be as far away as 2020. That would be six years after the federally mandated deadline and fourteen years since the Big Dig was completed—a long delay considering that the extension of the Green Line was a firm commitment made to counter the air pollution from the Central Artery Project. The year 2020 happens to also be a benchmark year for the Commonwealth’s greenhouse gas reductions goal (25 percent of 1990 levels), which will be hard to reach without the help of transit projects like the Green Line Extension.

Sadly, less than five years after it reaffirmed the promise, MassDOT yesterday also announced that it is seeking permission from the Department of Environmental Protection to abandon its obligation to design another highly beneficial transit project, the connector of the Red Line and Blue Line, citing its increased cost estimate. Part of the reason the costs of the Red/Blue Connector have increased, however, is the Commonwealth’s own repeated delay of this important transit project. Construction projects get more expensive over time.  Likewise, the cost of the Green Line Extension can only be expected to increase as a result of the delay.

Fortunately, the Commonwealth will be required to put in place interim offset projects or measures to achieve the same air quality benefits the Green Line Extension would have during the time period of the delay starting on December 31, 2014. We hope those projects will be located in the areas the Green Line Extension is intended to serve. Although MassDOT has known for more than a year that the Green Line Extension will be delayed, we still do not know what these projects will be. We do know that they will not be free. That points to the fact that it would be a lot cheaper to build the extension than to keep delaying it. And that’s no laughing matter, especially these days.

Yesterday, the Globe published a story covering a legislative hearing about MBTA commuter rail service, specifically, reacting to passengers’ dissatisfaction with the system after a particularly harsh winter and increasing number of service interruptions. Department of Transportation Secretary Jeffrey Mullan reported that the combined on-time performance for all commuter rail lines was 72 percent– which may sound like a decent number until your train is one of the 28 percent that sat on the tracks through dinnertime or left you shivering on a platform for the first hour of your daily commute.

The article reports that much of the discussion focused on the woeful fiscal condition of our transportation system. With transportation officials throwing around numbers concerning operating budget deficits, capital needs, and debt, all in the hundreds of millions of dollars, it is easy to lose hope.  Funding transit, however, is not an intractable problem.  At the hearing, while repeating MassDOT’s focus on “reform before revenue,” Secretary Mullan stated that “we won’t be able to cost-cut our way out of the deficit,” and expressed need for a conversation about revenue.

A report released Tuesday by CLF and Northeastern‘s Dukakis Center suggests a framework around which such a conversation could begin. The framework explains the need for diversified transit financing and suggests putting the broadest possible range of revenue sources on the table at the outset. Such solutions could include lower off-peak fares or universal pass programs for students. There’s also the possibility of granting Massachusetts cities and towns the authority to raise additional local revenue in form of fees or taxes to support services like transit. Other states, including Rhode Island, are already deep into this conversation. It is time for Massachusetts to follow suit.

The framework was developed based on conclusions gleaned from a Blue-Ribbon Summit held by the two groups last November. The Summit brought leading transit finance experts from across the country together to explore potential solutions to better fund Massachusetts’ transit system. To learn more about CLF’s work to modernize transportation, go here.

(Photo credit: Stephanie Chappe)

In anticipation of a state Joint Transportation Committee hearing on April 12, today, CLF and the Dukakis Center at Northeastern University released two reports to address the financial woes of public transportation in Massachusetts. The reports were based on conclusions gleaned from a blue-ribbon summit that the two groups co-hosted last November, which brought leading transit finance experts from around the country together to explore and develop solutions that can help build sustainable funding mechanisms for transit currently available in Massachusetts and allow expansion of those services over time. In addition, the reports are supplemented by a background paper describing the financial status of public transportation in Massachusetts and a series of options papers discussing the pros and cons of potential solutions to the problem.

Public transportation in Massachusetts is facing a stark financial crisis. The MBTA alone has a backlog of $3 billion of needed repairs and an increasing gap in its operating budget. The fifteen Regional Transit Authorities around the state, on the other hand, are forced to underserve their current customers because they lack a combined $125 million per year required just to meet present demand on existing bus routes.

Despite the fact that over the years they have received a lion’s share of transportation dollars, the state’s roads and bridges are also in desperate need of repairs. A few years ago, the Transportation Finance Commission projected that Massachusetts will have a $15-$19 billion gap in transportation resources over the next 20 years. While the existence and extent of this financial crisis is well documented, few solutions are currently on the table because so many stakeholders and policymakers mistakenly believe that transit finance in Massachusetts is an intractable and overwhelming problem for which no viable solution exists.

The important lessons learned from the summit include that:

• A financially stable public transportation system requires a healthy and diverse portfolio of revenue sources, rather than the current all-eggs-in-one-basket approach. The current funding system relies heavily on a small number of sometimes volatile funding sources, such as the sales tax.  The experts underscored the importance of  identifying brand new streams of revenue.

• With the chronic under-pricing of automobile travel, raising transit fares is not the answer.  Increased fares, at this time, would send the wrong price signals to transportation users and would create more incentive for people to drive, ultimately reducing the great economic, environmental, and social benefits of public transportation.

• Along with new revenue sources, such as vehicle-miles-traveled fees, universal transit pass programs, and increased registry fees, as well as further cost-efficiencies, a change in fare structures, rather than raising fares, and maximizing ridership are key strategies for generating user revenue equitably and affordably.

Read the full reports, background and option papers:

• Blue-Ribbon Summit Summary
• Blue-Ribbon Summit Framework
• Background Paper
• Option Papers

Boston has been ranked one of the top 15 major cities for transportation by NRDC’s Smarter Cities project.  The study does not rank the cities, but Boston comes out on top alphabetically before Chicago, New York, Portland, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington–which, in our minds, means it’s number one!

While this is probably extremely hard to believe for Boston commuters who experienced too many delays as a result of the cold weather this winter, we will take a win over New York any way we can get it–particularly as the 2011 Red Sox are about to face the Yankee$ for the first time in the Grapefruit League tonight.

What helped put Boston on top? Among the factors on NRDC’s list were our our heavily-trafficked, far-reaching public transit system, including the planned Green Line extension, a project in which CLF is very involved.

See for yourself. Check out why else we made the list, and start thinking about how we can help the ruefully underfunded public transportation system in Massachusetts get better.

See what else CLF is doing to build better ways to get around in your community.

(Photo credit: terriseesthings, flickr)

The delays commuters suffered through during the recent cold weather spell have rudely exposed the MBTA’s decaying infrastructure and serious underlying financial problems.  Many of the MBTA’s vehicles are long beyond their useful life. Because of a lack of funding, the MBTA is forced to spend money to hold these vehicles together rather than to invest in new ones, which in the long run is a great waste of resources.

A February 13 editorial in the Boston Globe points to a source of funding that could be used to help address these problems: Logan Airport’s annual parking-fee revenues.  This is a great idea, considering the airport is one of the biggest beneficiaries of both the transit system and the Big Dig, but has only contributed a limited amount of resources so far. The value of transit system to the airport could easily be monetized through determining how many riders on the Blue and Silver Lines, for example, travel to and from the airport.

Maybe we can get a conversation going before the snow melts—our public transportation system is too important for the economic, environmental and social goals of the Commonwealth to endure further delay.