Anyone else finding the whole brouhaha over Dan Grabauskas a little bit bewildering? Three T board members express … well, outrage is not too strong a term … over Grabauskas' handling, or lack thereof, of the two crash incidents and the NTSB report. The Patrick administration follows up (provokes? orchestrates? who knows?) with stinging words. Basically the rest of anyone who matters in government – the other four MBTA board members, Senate Prez, Speaker of the House, House Transport chair, and Senate Joint Committee on Transportation chair — all throw in with Grabauskas. CWUnbound's Gabrielle Gurley calls the administration's actions “amateurish” and a “debacle.”
Well OK then. I hear that. So here are my questions.
- I'm a relatively recent immigrant to Massachusetts. I wasn't around for the Great RMV Miracle that Grabauskas is apparently responsible for. Does it necessarily follow that if he did a good job at a different agency, then he must be doing a good job at the MBTA? How long does that halo last? Is it even a relevant question?
- How does one evaluate Grabauskas' tenure at the MBTA? We have on one hand:
- Reasonably successful Charlie Card rollout
- Website improvement
and on the other hand …
- Safety negligence, lack of a “culture of safety”
- Inability to implement technical safety fixes, a la NTSB recommendations
- continuous maintenance problems
- projects wayyyy over time/over budget
- increasing fares
- Wow, a lot of people making pretty good scratch …
- Of the problems the MBTA now faces, how many are due directly to the debt service, which is brought up every time something goes wrong?
- I keep hearing about the hidebound culture at the MBTA, and what a challenge Grabauskas has in changing it. But how much power does Graubauskas have to fix that? If very little, why? Don't legislators have the power to give him power? If they do, but haven't, why not?
- Of those legislative leaders who might refer to the debt service as a major problem that Grabauskas must heroically deal with, how many are actually doing anything to permanently fix it?
Essentially, what we're seeing is a classic example of the Big Dig Culture — no one really knows whom to blame when things go wrong. The three board members who criticized Grabauskas seemed to start a circular firing squad. Transport reform's reorganization of the T under the executive branch can't come soon enough. We need to know whom to hold accountable. Currently, if it's not the MBTA chief … who is?
And if he is doing a great job under difficult conditions, a.) where's the evidence, and b.) Why are we allowing such conditions to persist?
from the Disability Community represented by Legal Services (only in State House News Service)
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p>and from Tom Menino also to State House News Service
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That settlement also entailed the commitment of money the T didn’t necessarily have to make these upgrades — http://www.mbta.com/about_the_…
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p>State Street ($75m)
Savin Hill ($17m)
Orient Heights ($30m)
Arlington ($28m)
Copley ($21m)
Kenmore ($31m)
Green Line: New No. 8 Low-Floor Cars ($224m)
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p>I’m not saying ADA accessibility was responsible for 100% of the costs above (although I picked projects from the list that were predominently about accessibility). But when the system’s finances are going off a cliff, these projects — worthy though they might well be — should be seen as part of the problem as well.
Some of the MBTA improvements listed on that page (note: delete the last character in the link, a colon I think) are in fact used to improve efficiency (extended platforms to allow for 6 car blue line trains and 3 car D-Line trains mean 20%/50% increases in capacity with little additional expense).
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p>But, lots of that is pure ADA. Now, I’m not opposed to ensuring accessibility for the disabled; in fact, I work for it locally. But, so long as The Ride is such a growing part of the MBTA budget, and so long as paratransit is still required by law even if the entire trip (embark station, debark station, intermediate stations, and all vehicles) are ADA accessible, the MBTA still has to provide The Ride to anyone with a doctor’s note.
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p>From a business standpoint, ADA is a losing issue. It’s an incredible amount of money in CIP to add fewer than 1% more riders. It doesn’t even decrease the liability of The Ride. Now, I’m not arguing against it, because society demands that we serve as many as we can, especially those who are less well off.
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p>Still, the T is absolutely bleeding. Any CIP projects which don’t pay back in safety and/or savings are sucking money at a time when there just isn’t enough to go around. Maybe the state should directly fund some ADA improvements, and leave the MBTA to fund those which relate to maintaining/improving current operations.
Especially the part where legislators say, “he’s a good guy doing a difficult job.”
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p>The way the legislature works, decisions seems to be made with very little open debate to hash out pros and cons. Some idea like “let’s clear the T’s debt” come up, and the response is a shrug from one or two influential chairmen or “not this year.”
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p>Grabauskas clearly has a good relationship with the legislature–but is he serving the cause of improving transit by never asking the legislature for more money to clear the T’s debt? If that failsafe for the Green Line costs $300 million that he doesn’t have, why doesn’t he push for that money, for the sake of his passengers and drivers?
They should just fix the parts of the current safety system that are broken. If they just fixed those red lights, instead of letting the drivers get used to them and blow through them because they never turn green, it would cost a lot less.
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p>They can get a new handy dandy safety system, but if they let stuff break and never fix it, the new system will be as bad as the old one.
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p>This is the basic problem with Boston, the expectation is the place is fucked, and at the pace repairs take place, it would take 100 years to fix it, so we’ll just get by somehow. How many years have trucks been hitting the bridges on Storrow Drive? Well we’ll just get by somehow.
The MBTA has no ability to fund the capital improvements needed to address the safety issues raised by the NTSB. It has no ability to address its fiscal issues so long as it is burdened by Big Dig debt and required to fund itself from a portion of the sales tax.
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p>The transportation secretary, James Aloisi, was a key player in creating the Big Dig debt and then foisting it on the MBTA. Governor Patrick chose Mr. Aloisi to be transportation secretary.
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p>How does an administration hold its own Transportation Secretary accountable for his decisions (taken in 2001) that created today’s predictable and predicted consequences? How does an administration hold itself accountable for choosing that Transportation Secretary while having full knowledge of his role in creating the problem?
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p>Mr. Grabouskas is taking the fall for a problem that he did not create and cannot solve. Replacing Mr. Grabouskas with some other prospective fall guy won’t solve the problems.
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p>The performance of the General Manager of the MBTA — whether good or bad — is not the problem. The problem is the structural failure created by Governor Celluci and Tom Finneran in 2001. If that structural problem isn’t solved, the MBTA will collapse — no matter who is foolish enough to agree to run it.
It’s an impossible task because the people who are defending him for doing an impossible task are persisting in making it impossible!
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p>Say what?
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p>And in any event, I’m just not even sure I buy that line of argument. Need more info, though these seem to be essentially untestable questions.
The person throwing Grabouskas under the MBTA Bus is the person (Aloisi) that made Grabouskas’ job impossible because of the poor decisions Aloisi amde years ago.
Mr. Aloisi was a terrible, embarrassingly inept choice for Transportation Secretary. No executive with any insight into the problem or the organization suffering from the problem would choose Mr. Aloisi. Any executive with any genuine sensitivity to organizational dynamics would have demanded his resignation half an hour after reading his self-serving back-stabbing public comments about Mr. Grabouskas. Not that Mr. Grabouskas is displaying any courage himself — he should have already resigned.
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p>The choice of James Aloisi as Transportation Secretary was a bonehead decision, Charley, as is the apparent decision to keep him on. It may be that Governor Patrick is the only electable progressive in the cards.
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p>That doesn’t change the reality of his mishandling of his, and the state’s, most important priority.
…the state GOP (Baker) has a convenient foil in fending off accusations about his Big Dig involvement. The Governor should’ve left Aloisi in the shadows. What a dreadful appointment.