My son’s third grade class is looking for “juicy” adjectives, and I found one.  Again and again, journalists are describing the Massachusetts Governor’s 21st Century Transportation Plan, which proposes to raise revenue for our chronically underfunded transportation system, as “ambitious.” Not the kind of “ambitious” your mother admired in you when you were a college student, but the “ambitious” that implies hubris. As in asking for a lot. Maybe even too much. Insisting that the Governor’s plan is “ambitious” immediately gets people thinking about how they can cut it down to size. So before the knives come out, having carefully reviewed the plan and understanding the real needs of our transportation system well, let’s take a look at what’s really in there:

• The plan proposes to increase Chapter 90 funding for local street maintenance and associated projects from $200 to $300 million per year.  The Massachusetts Municipal Association, however, just recently estimated the actual need to be $562 million per year.
• Likewise, the Governor’s plan only dedicates 23% of the capital to strategic expansion projects, the rest is all maintenance of roads, bridges and transit infrastructure, replacement of old trains and buses, capacity upgrades, and other costs of the current system.
• More importantly, only 4% of the money set aside in the Governor’s plan for operations is related to strategic expansion projects.
• The plan also assumes that good and necessary transportation projects which have long been recommended by transportation planners and economists, such as the Red-Blue Connector and the Urban Ring, would be left unfunded over the next ten years.

I don’t know whether “reasonable” or perhaps “conservative” would be juicy enough adjectives for my son and his friends, but they would surely be a more accurate description of the Governor’s transportation plan.

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.