We can remind both Gov. Patrick and both houses that we have multiple crises here. We have aims and mandates that include:
- Reducing petroleum use
- Fewer polluting vehicles onour streets
- Less traffic noise and congestion
- Frequent, clean, safe and efficient mass transit
- T service from where people live to where they work
- Mass transit that is too convenient and economical not to take instead of cars
We subsidize motor vehicle use heavily. Some such gifts are obvious — road construction and maintenance, and highway patrols, for a few. Others are more subtle — tax-free land use for vehicles and the mechanical and human costs of collisions, for example. Still others have become real more recently — consider pollution and its effects on human health and wasted energy (and human time).
Some anti-mass transit folk love to select subsets of data to suggest that car and truck subsidies are more efficient than paying for intracity and intercity transit. Even doing their worst, they can't obscure that the goals of replacing car travel with T and bike and foot traffic are well worth the costs in total. Like other civilized nations and cities, we have to get with the program on this.
We can't get there if we cripple the T and make riding it expensive and unpleasant. We need to pony up, great recession or not.
The big, messy fact is that the legislature blew the T debt. It has to fix the T debt. It corrects legislative errors all the time. This boner is just far worse than average. Hiding from it won't solve anything.
Amusingly, today's Boston Globe lead editorial is yet another gormless commentary around this problem. It does note, “Nearly a third of the T’s operating budget goes to paying debt – a proportion that gives the agency little maneuvering room in bad times.” Yet, it doesn't even propose or apparently address the only underlying issue — that the stupidly constructed debt is exactly the problem.
The legislature created the problem. The legislature must fix it. Surely there is at least one leader on Beacon Hill who can drive this, one who has the wit and guts .
For my part, I have been drawing attention to this at Marry in Massachusetts frequently, Blue Mass Group on occasion, and public transit hearings. I'm not the only one. I pound on forward-funding.
My mid-term vision would be a free-for-all-riders T here to reach our transit and health goals quickly. That even brought qualified support from former Gov. Michael Dukakis. He figured a buck a ride is more workable, but he and I concur on the basic need and process.
The main facts are that our car commute and visit system is terribly broken, as well as that the General Court made a huge blunder with forward funding tied to sales-tax growth. The law part they need to fix right away. The rest will come when the T — under new, clearly seeing management — is reliable, convenient and inexpensive enough to be the default 24-hour-a-day mode of getting into, out of and around.
Gov. Patrick, transit-minded Lt. Gov. Tim Murray and the legislature, get with the program. Get honest. Get responsible
Cross-post: This also appears at Marry in Massachusetts
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p>They don’t even have to fix the whole thing at once. Figure out a way to either (a) shift some of the actual debt back to the state (or for the Big Dig related 1/3, The Pike), or (b) figure out how the state can simply fund some CIP projects for the T over the next few years, allowing the CIP destined MBTA money to instead bang down debt.
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p>They’ve got to get the percent of the operating budget going toward debt services down. It’s the only way to become sustainable.
… that it is one of the best times for the Government to borrow money, given current interest rates. I don’t know what the story is on the debt’s interest rates, but if they are high, they could be refinanced. If they can’t because the debt holding agencies scare potential lenders, it could ‘effectively’ be refinanced by the state buying it out on ‘new’ borrowed money at a lower rate, yes?
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p>Not exactly an expert her… just floating my 2 cents.
that the MBTA’s bond rating was better than the Commonwealth’s, perhaps due to it’s collateral. In any case, MA doesn’t need to hold the bond, just work out a scheme where the Commonwealth pays back specific debt with a cash flow distinct from sales tax & local payments.
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p>How exactly? Ask Tim the Treasurer. He’s the expert.
How do they do that besides refinancing it with a better plan to pay it down. Any lender who was willing to give them a lower rate would demand that they have a realistic scenario for pricing and funding the service.
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p>It’s not realistic to go to a lender and say “we’re going to fund it by guilting people who never take the T into paying higher taxes for it.” The lender will say, what if you get a suburban-based Republican governor.
We’ve had pro-T and pro-car governors, as well as many legislators who think promising never to raise taxes is their only real function. That’s how we ended up with a stealth tax – stealing sales-tax money in high times. In effect, this was raising taxes without seeming to do so and passing T funding along to everyone throughout the commonwealth.
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p>Looking now at the failed funding model should couple frighteningly with the monumental infrastructure debt the same attitudes led the legislature to foist on us. This T issue is one where the problem is inescapable (unless you’re the Globe editorial board or the GM of the T). The legislature and governor either are committed to a workable transportation future or not.
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p>If they are, the big task before them is removing the artificial and onerous debt from the T. They need to toss present management as well as unworkable schemes, but they should be able to frame it so that the future aims to be debt free. Any savvy biz manager can help them avoid the kind of sucker’s gambit they played already.
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p>The T must be able to manage better, but it can’t do that with nearly half its revenue going to debt service. The debt most likely should belong to the state and not the T. That will take smart planning and some real courage in structuring and selling the new ways.
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p>From that point on, the T under new management must first meet the basic obligations of fast, safe, clean subway, bus and train service. To meet the requirements of attracting new and keeping regular customers, it must expand and improve service as it stabilizes.
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p>These are not impossible, just very hard. The first ingredient has been lacking for years — leaders in the T and on Beacon Hill with some honesty and guts. Patrick/Murray are muscling headlong into transportation reform. Now’s the time.
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p>Apparently, there isn’t.
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p>What’s changed in the past 30 years since I’ve moved to Boston? Nothing.
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p>The T has a legacy cost problem, just like the Turnpike, the public school system, Medicare, GM, and Chrysler, and it has accumulated in the form of debt.
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p>Without a change on the cost side, won’t the debt re-accumulate?
The T debt is different — unilaterally imposed by the legislature, with untenable conditions. This is a blunder they made and can fix. The first step, like AA, is admitting the problem.