Yesterday’s MBTA collapse, which shut down our economy, cost us tens of millions of dollars, and created cautionary headlines for anyone trying to draw students, businesses, or Olympic athletes to Boston — let alone get to and from work and school! — is just a dramatic reminder of what T users have known for decades: our public transportation system, once the envy of the world, is inadequate and deterioriating. It will require perhaps $13 billion in investment to pay down its staggering debt and restore it to a world standard.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The essential problem of the T is its current organizational structure, which insulates it from market accountability while simultaneously exposing it to harebrained schemes like Charlie Baker’s 2000 plan to lumber it with $3 billion in debt, $1.7 billion for the unrelated Big Dig road project, and his current proposal to cut its funding further — because current performance is apparently adequate from a financial perspective. (The spectacle of Baker fulminating about “unacceptable” service while having played a large role in creating the disaster, and simultaneously trying to cut the T’s budget, is entertaining in its incoherence, but I digress).
Hong Kong has a much better structure, and a much better mass transit system. The Mass Transit Railway there is controlled by the government, which is its largest shareholder, but is a public company listed on the stock exchange. It has total assets of about $257 billion, annual revenue of about $4 billion, and made about $2 billion in profits last year. The company owns and operates the mass transit system in Hong Kong, and has additional operations in the United Kingdom, Australia, China, and Sweden. It makes most of its profits by developing real estate around the transportation hubs it builds, creating a virtuous circle between transportation and community development. Critically, although it is controlled by the government, which is appropriate for a key infrastructure monopoly, it is organized as a business, which allows it to access global capital markets to raise investment funds, attract and retain skilled staff, and explore new revenue areas in an entrepreneurial manner. It was established in 1975, when Hong Kong started to build its subway system (it is now far larger than the T). That is the kind of venture that can attract the kind of capital the T needs, and provide sustained performance. And it can happen in our lifetimes.
Fundamental changes are required at the T. The chance that the organization as presently constituted can raise anywhere near $13 billion, from the legislature or anywhere else, is slim to zero. But even if it did, the same problems that have reduced the system from a model to a tragedy would still apply. There is a better way. We should embrace it.
Thanks for that one.
If the shoe were on the other foot and that was the response Governor Patrick gave during a storm, I wonder what our friends at RedMassGroup might be saying?
That’s just political games. The T’s problems are structural, and much larger than Patrick, Baker, BMG, RMG or who is talking to who and when. Improving the system requires fundamental change, otherwise it will continue to deteriorate or, at best, stabilize. We’ll continue to suffer in an absolute sense, and fall behind other models in a relative one. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Not much more to say than that.
How would privatizing the T help anything? What exactly do you think a private company can do that a government organization cannot do?
The only thing that a private company can do that a government organization cannot do is issue stock. If the T tried to have an IPO now, nobody would invest, so that isn’t really the issue. The T already has access to the bond markets, and almost certainly has a higher credit rating than it would if it wasn’t implicitly backed by the state. The T can already explore new revenue areas. The T already has a budget for attracting talented staff.
Making the T a private company would mean that it would be controlled by the shareholders, most of whom would not use the T ever. Right now it is controlled by the Massachusetts voters, many of whom use the T or at least benefit from the reduced traffic from other people using the T. Do you really think that outside shareholders would be more interested in spending large amounts of money on the upgrades the T needs? Can you explain why anybody would want to invest in a system that loses money? Do you actually think there is any fare schedule that would allow fares to even come close to covering the costs of running the system? Do you think it is a good idea to cut all the bus/subway routes that don’t make a profit? Do you think a private company would run anything other than rush hour trains?
Also, you said that a large chunk of the revenue for the Hong Kong system comes from real estate developments. That isn’t an option for the T, and it would not become an option if the T was privatized. So unless you can show that the Hong Kong system would work well without the real estate, it’s basically irrelevant as an example.
In order: Private businesses aren’t magic, but they can be extremely effective. Issuing stock is huge which is why most large corporations do it. The point is to change the T, not carry on with a dysfunctional system that barely operates. Hong Kong demonstrates that a publicly controlled private company is indeed a far better operating structure than ours. Fares are cheaper there, too, and they use minibuses far more effectively. There’s really no comparison between the service levels: the T loses across the board. Of course real estate development would become an option if it was privatized, along with many other ways for the entity to make money, which is all to the good. The goal is safe, reliable, effective and cheap mass transportation. Hong Kong has built it since 1985 while our system is failing and has a huge debt with no realistic prospect of sustainable improvement. We should move to what works.
They are not funded via appropriation since 2009 – they became bond funded, which is far more expensive.
So – what happens to those bonds? Redeemed by the stock? If so, where is the capital to make needed improvements? What happens to benefit and pension commitments, past and present? THAT is a huge part of the debt. I remember the kvetching when the Pike/T employees learned that they would have to BEGIN to pay premium in their health insurance, which had been 100 percent paid by the state. Not sure if ERISA comes into play on that unless bankruptcy is declared.
CAN bankruptcy be declared? It WOULD be a way out.
The same structure that has been used to rescue bankrupt banks and other large companies: put all of the debt and pension liabilities in a “bad” T and make that the state’s responsibility — perfectly fair, because the state was in charge when the Authority incurred all of those obligations. Let the new venture start with the rest of the system, and operate it like a business rather than a political toy that irresponsible politicians like Charlie Baker can use to pay their credit cards.
When you spin debt into a bad bank (in this case a “bad T”), that is typically via a bankruptcy process and the resulting bad bank typically delivers a steep haircut to the bond holders. Bankruptcy for municipalities is challenging enough, but I don’t think it’s ever happened to a State agency.
I think bond holders of the MBTA would fight very hard in court over this as the T’s inability to operate at a surplus is a political, not a business, problem.
Now if you suggest the state spend $15-20B upgrading the Ts infrastructure & retiring it’s debt, then semi-privatize it, you may be onto something
a new person here who has a grasp of financing public entities.
Jim Stergios was on Greater Boston with some MBTA lawyer/advocate.
When he said he was in favor of the Commonwealth assuming 25% of the T bond debt to go along with funding increases, I tought their heads would explode.
I wonder how often he’s tried to ride the T to work this past month.
The MBTA is not land rich. In fact, it’s a bit land poor. Take Assembly Square as an example. A private develop (Federal Realty) had to give the MBTA the land to build its new station. And I believe each of the new Green Line stations involves land deals or takings. If the MBTA had the physical assets, I’d say you were onto something, but it doesn’t.
… several million people who need to use the system, daily. The main difference between Hong Kong and Boston lies in the respective populations relationship with automobiles: most residents in Hong Kong do not own a car. Hong Kong has one of the lowest rates of per capita car ownership of any city in the world and the Hong Kong transit system was, more or less, built from the ground up with this in mind. For this reason, their infrastructure and operating costs differ greatly: for example, they do not include very much in the way of parking garages or park-and-ride lots or other ancillary resources that the MBTA has to operate because the MBTA has to operate in tandem with a robust auto culture. There are people who live in Boston without cars and they need the MBTA to work for them, so maybe we need to address this interaction between cars and public transit… Personally, I’d love a Boston that is less dependent on the auto and more dependent on public transit. But that’s a bigger problem than just saying some public-private funding/control scheme can be dropped in place.
This is not by way of saying your notion of quasi-private doesn’t make sense. I certainly think it’s worth some intensive study.
The Commuter Rail was previously run by Amtrak which is a publicly funded, for-profit company, so that’s probably the closest we’ve come to ‘quasi-private’… Service was a good deal better then, I can say from personal experience, but it was prior to the implementation of the ‘forward funding” model.
Amtrak certainly did a better job of operating the commuter rail system.
On the other hand, we have to remind ourselves that Amtrak’s contract ended over a decade ago, a decade during which essentially NO maintenance was performed.
In my view, the premise that public transportation should be profitable or even break-even is absurd. We do not impose that constraint on either automobiles or aircraft.
I think we need a REGIONAL transportation plan, with at least a twenty-year look-ahead, that spells out a coordinated balance of automobile, truck, bus, light rail, heavy rail, and subway operations. Something along the lines of this RFP — you know, the one that Governor Baker railed against yesterday:
Right, Charlie. We don’t know whether we want to go to Montreal or Miami, we don’t know if we need Prius or a moving van, but we’ve got to hit the road NOW. We’ll figure out that vision stuff later.
Bingo.
Same goes for debt. Was talking with another passenger this morning who was railing against Bev Scott and the fact that when she arrived in Atlanta the system was debt free but when she left it was $30 million in debt. The horror!
Do people not understand the idea of a 30-year mortgage on a house? Most people in this country are (significantly) in debt for their entire adult lives via their mortgage, to say nothing of college loans. If that debt involves an INVESTMENT then yes it’s debt but it’s debt with a purpose, and it will be paid off over time.
Why should debt for investment in transit be any different than debt for investment in purchase/maintenance of a home?
There really is a lot of magical thinking that goes on in this debate, where people think that they should have top notch public services for free.
Essentially the plan to inject capitalism would be undone by capitalism. The government doesn’t own enough land around existing or prospective T stations to make money on development. We already let the private have most of the assets.
The MTR in Hong Kong creates value for real estate by building and improving transportation links: a function that only it is allowed to do because mass transit is a monopoly (there and here). I agree this solution requires imagination — any constructive response to the disaster that confronts us does — but it is not impossible.
The MBTA already creates value for nearby real estate by building and improving transportation. However, neither a public nor a private transit entity can turn that into profits because the MBTA doesn’t own the real estate. Imagination will not substitute for actual property in this case.
… involve itself with real-estate speculation and development, that is to say outright, purchase and develop land itself or partner with developers doing exactly that, in a way a strictly government entity cannot. To do this it would have to first be solvent, of course, to be able to purchase the land or attract development partners but that’s a chicken-or-the-egg problem and not, strictly speaking, de facto restraint.
Land acquisition in metro Boston for major and/or public projects tends to be a difficult proposition. Redevelopment authorities and land takings tend to be part of the equation.
As I mentioned above, Federal Realty deeded over the parcel of land for the new Assembly Station. Would a private MBTA have taken the position that it still wouldn’t build the station unless Federal Realty gave it a cut of the development profits too? I suspect that might have killed the whole project and perhaps spawned a lawsuit over the MBTA being a pay-to-play shakedown operation.
Northpoint did a land swap with the MBTA for new Lechmere station. Again, would a private MBTA have taken the position that it would scuttle the entire Green Line extension unless Northpoint made it quasi-partner?
I could see where a well-capitalized transit/development entity might be effective at building lines where none exist. For instance a line through the southern portion of Boston (Boston Med>Dudley Square>Roxbury>Franklin Park>Roslindale>West Roxbury>Dedham) or a north of Boston line (Chelsea>Everett>Malden>Medord>Winchester>Woburn>Burlington). In that case it would have some flexibility about siting and in many cases it would be able to buy low and create commercial expansion. That might even work with an outer loop in that you could develop around new stations while linking existing stops along the Red, Green and Orange lines.
Yet along existing tracks I get a little queasy about “No transit for your section of the city unless you can deliver us some shareholder value [insert evil laugh here].” And where there are existing stops, that land has been gobbled up.
So I suppose I’d consider the idea if the plan were to use development around a significant expansion of the T to fund the operation and maintenance of the existing lines. I suspect that idea is far easier said than done. There would seem to be an underpants gnomes’ ??? in there, but I’m pro expansion and quality of service. What doesn’t seem possible is the notion that a private entity could get anywhere developing around the existing stops and lines. Other entities/people own that land.
Ask Mayor Curley, who just levelled the land for the Expressway by taking the three-deckers. With no compensatoin.
Even now, Kelo would allow for taking to be developed by private parties.
They could keep working for the T from being a viable middle-class job.
They could sandbag any worker, shorn of union protection, who alerts anyone about safety issues.
They could sandbag any worker, shorn of union protection, who refuses to cut corners to keep up the salaries of the managerial class.
They could sandbag any worker, shorn of union protection, who squeals on unofficial policies to ignore people running for the train to keep the schedule.
They could access suspect bond markets with shaky backing, and turn and dump the bill on us when it goes belly-up.
We’re not talking about either a strictly private, or a strictly public, enterprise. We’re talking about a quasi-private enterprise. In theory, such an enterprise may have an IPO in which the government bought every share of the initial offering at a very low price (because you’re right, it’s essentially worthless). The government would then set a plan, using a combination of bonds and public funding, to put its MBTA house in order and use that to entice the sale of stock in the hopes that the purchase of the stocks, and the ever watchful gaze of the stockholders, would propel it past insolvency and, ultimately, into profitability. That’s the theory, in any event.
For such a plan to work the government must remain the largest shareholder (as it is in Hong Kong) and be ready to pay down the existing debt requirements while trying to price the stock appropriately, thus maximizing the number of shares not own by the government yet still leaving the government as majority shareholder. It’s a balancing act and it’s not clear if it can happen.
This is how charter schools were supposed to work and we know how that has turned out.
It’s a common problem, but one we should resist. In any event, the status quo for the T is unacceptable and, equally important, is unlikely to change in any meaningful way absent fundamental reform. Just look at results over the last century for our public transportation system: first to lousy, with every likelihood we’ll continue to decline.
…and no this isn’t a case of throwing good money after bad, but the public needs to own it outright as a public utility.
I need money too, but the subject of the last comment should of course be IT needs money…:)
with your first iteration.
LOL
Chicago has had a terrible multi-decade long experience with privatization that has ended terribly. Morgan Stanley owns our parking meters for the remainder of this century, rates have gone up, service has gone down, and the money doesn’t go back to the city but to one of the worst corporations on Wall Street. Our in house smart card for the CTA worked great, then they outsourced it to Ventra which had a host of well documented problems and works significantly worse.
Historian Rick Pearlstein has written extensively on how privatization has been a public policy disaster under the last Mayor Daley and Mayor Emmanuel.
It also feeds into the narrative that big government can’t be run effectively or efficiently that feeds into the embrace of more privatization and market solutions to public policy problems at the expense of embracing an activist government which we, as liberals and progressives, should be embracing with open arms.
This also obfuscates the fact that the T and it’s mismanagement is the direct result of Republican rule in collusion with a tax averse Democratic legislature that refused to raise the needed revenue. Like the much maligned post office, we starved the beast, we are watching it die, and now we are demanding it goes on a diet during a time when it needs nourishment the most.
I used to agree with you on this, uprate this frequent recommendation which you have made since 2006, and it’s an idea I discussed in person with a favorable Deval Patrick back in the summer of 2006 for a significant length of time. It has worked in other countries and the Hong Kong company not only manages their system-it has begun to manage other systems in other cities and even in other countries quite effectively. Their wiki page is quite instructive on how this could work.
But it won’t work in Massachusetts. The folks over at Pioneer will be the ones writing the authorization, the same man who mismanaged the Big Dig now occupies the Corner Office, and the Wall Street crony capitalists he and Chris Christie are cozy with will be the ones chomping at the bit for a piece of the pie. The same sort of folks that have hoodwinked Chicago will be salivating at the chance to own a piece of Boston as well, and the public will lose.
A simpler, less radical solution is to simply raise taxes to a level where we can actually fund public services for the present and maybe even the future. Elected democrats by and large have failed to wage this fight at the state level for quite some time, particularly our last gubernatorial nominee. And by failing to stand up for these values, we have allowed a liberal state to have a very conservative attitude on taxes. The country may have caught up with us on marriage equality, but we are still fearing Barbara Anderson and Grover Norquist’s shadow when it comes to taxes. This is Grover’s wet dream, not a viable solution for the Commonwealth.
Let me know when that $13 billion tax increase comes through. Or even a $1 billion increase to provide capital improvements for the T. In the meantime, people will continue to suffer. I agree that there is almost nothing worth imitating in Chicago, with the possible exception of the magnificence of the University of Chicago. 😉
If you don’t trust these guys to do the right thing with a public system, how can you trust them to do the right thing with a private one?
The fact that Hong Kong is a borderline command economy with the PRC behind it isn’t something to consider and the persistence of trying to flog the dead horse of real estate franchises tells us the neoliberal ideology is alive if wheezing.
… it’s not at all true. Wrested from the Qing Dynasty during the Opium wars, Hong Kong was a crown colony of the UK until 1997. It is, in fact, one of the most capitalist places on the planet, has it’s own currency, very low taxation and one of the busiest, and freeest, ports in the world. (HSBC, which stands for “Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporations” is one of the oldest and biggest banks in the world.) The PRC has gingerly resisted changing this, for obvious reasons, and has legally defined Hong Kong as a “special administrative region” to avoid contretemps. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a “command economy”, borderline or otherwise…
As for being backed by the PRC, as the years have passed since Great Britain ceded the land back to the PRC, the PRC has come to resemble Hong Kong more than Hong Kong has come to resemble the PRC. This process started well before Hong Kong was ceded back, but it’s accelerated since…
I don’t dispute your description of Hong Kong.
I still don’t want to live there.
has absolutely nothing to do with making the MBTA function.
Step 1: Bob_Neer says “let’s do X”
Step 2: chris-rich says “Can’t to X, because Y”
Step 3: petr says “Y is wrong, goto step 1”
eom
… but I’m pretty confident in the abilities of most readers to suss out my meaning.
How’s about you let somebody else be in charge for a bit? You’re probably tired…
the conversation when you admit to all of the other betises of the recent past, including your Boston commuter comments and the Boston CSA population and the refusal to acknowledge that B2024, despite its stated intentions, intends to use tax dollars to pay for Olympic construction.
I uprated you on a few recent posts because I thought they were mostly on point. Now you are mixing political ragtime talk with your resentment towards me in a way that diminishes your other intellectual skills.
Your “Step 3” is an ridiculous claim based on zero facts or information, simply an instruction that everyone should bow to your opinion. One of the wonderful things about living in a relatively free democracy is that we don’t have to accept claims of authority by people who don’t actually participate in the public political world.
the Uni Chicago Econ Department is a wonder , the home of the worst trend in economics in the past half century with Milton Friedman at it’s front. Their unfettered belief in the market and human rationality in economic decision making explains why you think that privatizing the T might work, ignoring existing property rights or law.
The University of Chicago plus NUS equals bad policy making.
He was being cheeky since that’s where I went to undergrad. Don’t think he was endorsing their economics department-which actually has a diverse lot of people in it. Friedman and to a lesser extent Becker were to the right, but both were strong social liberals, strong critics of the draft and drug war, and Sanderson was an early proponent that the Olympics were a money pit. Still has a neoliberal bent-but we also educated Bernie Sanders!
The department has had both strong libertarian and anti-government tendencies. The privatization impetus he calls upon derives from the latter of the two, plus the NUS.
And hey, I am a Democrat and that does not make me entirely bad!
FWIW I think the U of C’s economics department is a disgrace to the university, the city, the great state of Illinois and, indeed, higher education period.
eom
Right after the Board voted unanimously to back her. Baker’s office said that Baker never intended to make her a scape goat….
Bob DeLeo controls the purse. Mr. DeLeo made it clear that will oppose any tax increase. I think she quit when she realized that the MBTA will get NO funding.
She did the right thing.
I’ve ridden on the MTR and it is amazing. It is fast, cheap, clean, and while crowded I’ve found people much more accommodating than here in Boston (They do things like take off their backpacks!).
The problem with this argument is that the MTR was already operating a HK$300M+ surplus when it was privatized. You generally have to be making money, or have the future opportunity to make money, to gain stock investors. Today no one would buy stock in the MBTA if you privatized it as is.
I will say I’m not opposed to the idea of running transit on a concession model (Like how the Commuter Rail is run). London does this and while it also is not perfect, it does seem to work. The tracks, rollings stock & other infrastructure is owned by Transport for London (A quasi-government agency). Operations are run by London Underground, and they have to rebid the contract every few years. TfL sets very strict performance standards for service. However, TfL still operates a net deficit with most of its financing coming from London or the British Government, who view investment in infrastructure as being a net positive investment for the city, region & country. The concession mostly keeps the operational expenses of the system at market rates.
As someone above mentioned, MTR makes much of its money from real-estate development. This is the same for Japan Rail in Japan (Which runs the train & subway systems). 3 of the JR companies are privatized, 3 are still state owned. But the ones that are privatized make most of their money from real-estate, not rail.
Think of it like the printer business – you don’t sell printers to make money on printers. You sell printers to make money on the ink, which only you can make. If you own the rail system and develop the malls and office complexes near the rail stations, then you make money on that, and the rail is just the method to move people between all of your money making assets.
As noted, Hong Kong built a system that is much larger than Boston’s, works much better, and makes $2 billion a year, largely from scratch in less than 30 years. Boston, by contrast, has been reduced from wonder to ridicule over about a century. Conclusion: they are doing something right, we are doing something wrong, and we should try to be more like them insofar as our mass transit systems are concerned.
I live in Boston. I don’t want to live in Hong Kong. I don’t want the government that controls Hong Kong, I don’t want the culture of Hong Cong, I don’t want the economy of Hong Kong.
In my view, a better model of how to run a public transit system is Vienna, Zurich, Innsbruck, Munich, Berlin, even London. Or, more instructively, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, or the UK.
acquire all of the development rights around both existing T stations and (what I think you are suggesting) new stations. Most T stations are already surrounded by fairly robust commercial districts. Most T land was sold off during the past decade to pay for operating expenses. A privatized T will not have the capacity to take land from private landowners. Please tell us how you think it can acquire development rights in the real world, not fantasy-land theory.
Privatization simply feeds the narrative that government is by nature hapless and can’t do anything properly. That is false – government is only as hapless as our elected officials let it be, and in past decades, we have not governed well in most places in this country, choosing to turn any issues into purely ideological issues.
A private entity would do a few things:
* Bust the unions.
* Pay workers much less.
* Increase fares whenever it made sense.
* Defer maintenance as much as possible. Deferred maintenance usually isn’t detected for decades, long enough to skip town with the profits.
* Externalize costs as much as possible. That means that the benefit of the state would take second fiddle to the benefit of the shareholders. That means looking at a train run that takes 3,000 cars off the highways (thus preventing gridlock) and saying “gee, this particular run isn’t as profitable as it should, so shut it down”.
* View the MBTA as a private revenue generating engine rather than a system to move people around as quickly and efficiently as possible.
* Become completely opaque when it comes to finances. Remember the reports by the Herald describing how many $100k workers there were? Try and find the executive salaries of the private contracting firms that do our road construction work – you can’t. The best you can do is to find out how much real estate they own across the country or look at what kind of cars they drive.
What is stopping the government from doing those things? A responsibility to the people who elect them. A toxic political environment that is governed by sound bites more than anything. (No tax increase!) A lack of true leadership and vision of what the MBTA is, what it does, and what it should be.
nt
While largely agreeing with your assessment and prediction of the parade of horribles to be aware of when treating with private firms, I’m compelled to note that the terms of the debate, as Bob_Neer laid them down, do not specify a wholesale delivery of the MBTA into private hands, nor a Pontius Pilate moment where the government hands are cleansed of the responsibility of it.
Or to paraphrase Miracle Max, QUASI- private is also mostly public.
We’re in a discussion of a public-private entity mostly controlled by the public. At least, that’s how it works in Hong Kong, the model Bob_Neer cited. I have no earthly idea if it could work in America. My first reaction is to say no, it can’t. But I think it’s worth some thought and study…
But, for sure, if anybody would think to present just such a wholesale privatization of the MBTA, I will join you in full throated opposition.
To argue that public/private partnerships tend to be more expensive in the long run and deliver poorer quality services as they are currently practiced in the United States. We could reinvent the wheel and create a pilot system that is closer to the Hong Kong model-but it seems so much simpler just to force the political punting to end and actually fund the T.
As a question of policy, like single payer-this may be the ideal. I was recognizing the reality that the status quo includes a variety of stakeholders who would fail to implement Bob’s vision or implement it in a crony capitalist sort of way. It’s why I said this wouldn’t work in modern America. We really need to change the entire way we view the relationship between government and business on a host of fronts before solutions like this can be feasible.
Our American examples include the Chicago Skyway, Parking Meters, Illinois Lottery and Midway Airport-all run by quasi public private agencies owned by bigger companies. It also includes Fannie and Freddie. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is largely an outlier where this partnership has worked, but it’s underwriters like the Koch brothers and other donors have been known to quash stories just as badly as advertisers on the commercial networks.
The Metro West Bus system serves a bunch of towns clustering around Framingham.
It is a privatized subcontract to some huge Canadian bus service company.
It is hilariously crappy. The schedules are nebulous, the web site is junk.
http://www.mwrta.com/
And the drivers are a mixed bag with blaring radios. To be fair they probably aren’t paid anything like T scale.
But if you are patient and figure it out it’ll get you from Woodland T station in Newton to Sudbury or the Ashland/Sherborn border for $1.10.
It is a better value than commuter rail and the schedule is more flexible if something of a hope rather than a fixed time table.
The Lowell and Merrimack Valley systems are better. I can’t wait to try the one covering Attleboro as I can use it to get to Raynham for hiking the Hockomock.
.. but I was replying directly to nopolitician who didn’t include the analysis you did. So I’m confused what you’re trying to say here and am compelled to ask if you mistakenly replied to the wrong comment?
its main assertion:
How does the current organizational structure insulate the T from market accountability, and what exactly is market accountability? Privatizing the T will lessen accountability by further insulating the T from things like the Public Records law.
It seems to me that the essential problem with the T is underfunding. The post notes that the Hong Kong system’s revenues total about $4 billion a year. The MBTA”s revenues are half that.
So for the T the price of the ticket does not equal the cost, right?
It’s ticket + government subsidy = cost, and that cost does not appear to include setting aside money for capital expenditures, and maybe even some maintenance.
The second part is that the benefit gained by the cost is something other than the transportation provided to the rider, reduced traffic, allows people without cars to get to jobs etc.
I would postulate that in order to get support for additional subsidy, that taxpayers/voters will want to know:
Is the current cost structure appropriate?
What exactly (or actually approximately) are the benefits?
Right now many people have the impression that the cost are too high (I would say personally I don’t know), and if you live within the MBTA service area and don’t use it, you couldn’t currently even guess on how it benefits you.
Non-users of the MBTA are benefited enormously by all the cars not on the roads. If we shut down the T tomorrow forever, T riders still have to get to work — so say hello to unholy gridlock as people jump in cars. Even if there was a lot of car pooling it would still be a huge increase in traffic. Say hello to reduced air quality too, which also affects MBTA non-users.
There would also be many streetcar suburbs whose economies would crater as the folks who live there now and are T dependent for work either move closer in to the center of Boston so they could walk to work — or move out of the region entirely. Real estate prices in places like Malden would tank, I would bet; a lot of the value of residential real estate in places like Malden or Somerville is transit based. Without viable transit, not so much. Might as well live further out in Saugus or Woburn with cheaper rent/mortgage and just buy a car and suck up the heinous commute. So non-users of MBTA who live in places like Malden and Somerville might want to spare a thought of what happens to their sky-high home values when the MBTA tanks.
Communities would fight to get rail lines and the losers would sometimes wither. The green line extension is already layering in another enhanced value zone.
There is a sizeable number of people who ‘park and ride,’ sometimes from a distance. That is to say they drive their cars to any of the line terminus points and park: They may eschew the Commuter Rail, for an number of reasons, but drive to Alewife (to the north) or Braintree (to the south) for the Red Line or Riverside for the Green, Wonderland for the Blue or Oak Grove for the Orange and thus are dedicated users of the subway. The mitigation here is lesser auto population in the heart of the city and resulting ease on prices for parking (already sky high).
Growing up in Scituate when we wanted to go ‘in town’ that meant driving to Braintree and hopping on the Red Line.
Do you also include your personal share of public highway subsidies when you calculate the price of your car? Do you include your share of the enormous investments made in airports, regulation, air traffic control, and so on when you consider the price of an airline ticket?
How much do you add on to the pump price of gasoline to reflect the TRILLIONS of defense dollars (not to mention blood) this nation spends to keep that gasoline available?
I suspect that if you had to work in Boston this week, even if you don’t use the T, you’d have a pretty good handle on what the T does for you. The commute from Andover was pretty abysmal (which is hard, because it’s already awful even with the T operating normally).
It goes through the hallways of my life memory.
I often take it to Ballardvale. It goes through extensive wetlands in Wilmington, past parts of Reading I’ve known for 50 years and down through that funny run of old bedroom towns.
The Newburyport run is probably the best to look at. http://youtu.be/3Zllo5dq554
But I pretty much enjoy them all.
After all Bob is a serious guy and no market fundamentalist. And we are all pragmatists, right? We have to take seriously anything that works.
But I’m having problems with this idea.
First of all, the bar is low. Almost anything is better than what we have.
It’s entirely credible to me that there is so much dysfunction that you could carve out a nice meaty slice for the shareholders of this quasi thing and still leave some meaningful pan drippings for the rest of us, in the form of better service.
But so what? Here’s one example of this arrangement working in one city, with its own unique circumstances. Are we looking at any other cities where things aren’t as bad? Which could be all of them, btw, but how about DC, London, Paris, New York?
How do they do better than us? Why not follow their example?
Probably the greatest genuine public-sector advantage in general is the distributive efficiency of markets. See, for instance, cap-and-trade regulations.
Other than perhaps introducing externalities into the price signals that consumers get from their McCar (and fat chance of that), it’s hard to see how markets fix the T. Bob’s proposal isn’t about using market mechanisms at all.
Here’s what I can say in favor of his idea. It’s absolutely clear that the T needs a complete shakeup in everything from structure to culture to rolling stock. Sometimes a new broom sweeps clean, and that’s what you need. The details do matter, but not as much as revolution.
Bob’s proposal would be that.
He always cites Hong Kong. I don’t think he’s every compared the HK model to the model in any other city, nor compared what makes HK and Boston similar or different.
His logic boils down to: look! Here’s a single anecdote about the HK system. That’s proof it’s the best, let’s copy it.
Maybe it would be better, or best. Maybe not. But Bob’s posts don’t do the work to help with that kind of assessment.
It seems to come with the territory of boosting.
Let others sort out the specifics.