Probably the idiots in charge? We all know the T is run by incompetent fools, but that doesn’t make mass transit a bad thing to invest in bc once you have some mass firings you’ve got the problem fixed. Either way their always expensive, that’s why the roads are bad EVERYWHERE. Every state complains about the roads because even where it’s cheap it’s still to expensive

It’s because they don’t make enough money to pay for their maintenance, and the repair costs are so high that it gets kicked down the road. So you end up with a bunch of toll free roads slowly falling apart because they can’t afford maintenance, because their toll free nature removes any revenue streams. If you want better roads what we need to do is convert highways to toll roads and invest in the T so less people drive on them, which lessens their use, which makes them last longer, which saves money on maintenance.

I think he’s just trying to be enthusiastic, obviously we all know it’s not the best in the world. With proper funding and management maybe top 10 in the US but we’ve got a loonnnggggg way to go before we crack the top 50 in the world

They probably thought more people riding=more money for the T, while failing to consider that even if 50 million people packed into the T each day their funding would just get cut even more for a new highway and we would be back at square 1. Their thought process isn’t totally stupid, in a perfect world more riders WOULD equal more funding and better service. But we don’t live in a perfect world, we live in Massachusetts, where we canceled a gigantic public transport scheme (the urban ring project) because all the funding got directed towards the worlds most expensive example of induced demand. Who needs a project that’ll have a ridership of 300k per day and remove 50k cars from the road when we can build an highway that doesn’t actually fix the problem, and just puts it underground?

Call the governor, you may have stumbled onto a gold mine here

Yes I’m aware, NJB calls it his strong town series since it’s about the books called the same thing, which is why I called it the strong towns series

It’s because roads are a trap since their cheap to build but expensive to maintain, and they all tend to need maintenance around the same time when you build a bunch at once. When that time comes around, you’ve got a gigantic cost to pay for resurfacing and Pothole fixing and the like, and the budget isn’t enough to pay for it. So some get fixed and the rest get kicked down the line. But the thing is, then other roads need the same thing and the same problem arises, and there’s never enough in the budget to pay for it all. And since roads and streets don’t even make close to enough money to pay for their own maintenance, you need to rely on government funding. But here’s the fun thing, in order to make enough money for those maintenance bills, taxes would have to be raised so high that people would be paying more than their entire yearly income on taxes alone, which obviously you can’t do. So the money never comes, and the roads stay broken. But since we’re all so far deep down the car dependency pit and the initial construction cost is the only number anybody looks at, we keep building roads that we can’t afford since it’s the only transportation option that anybody thinks we can build. And so the cycle continues.

There’s a great series on YouTube that goes into more depth on this, it’s by the creator NotJustBikes and it’s his StrongTowns series. Looks into how car dependant places are being subsidized by walkable/public transit focussed places. Highly recommend watching it

so it’s agreed, we all vote for him?

The 9 serves a dual purpose, as it also represents the number of times an MBTA vehicle has ever arrived at its destination on time

Can’t possibly get any worse than it is now

Are we going to have to start reporting on sumnerings in addition to storrowings? Ffs people, this is getting out of hand. What’s next, zakims? O’neiled?

There was one a decade or 2 ago called the urban ring project, but it got cancled because of a lack of funds. It got partially implemented, the SL3 to Chelsea is the only piece of the plan to ever get built. Shame it got cancled, it woulda made 8 new crosstown bus routes, 2 express commuter routes, 6 BRT routes forming a circle around Boston, and some new rail service from assembly sq to Nubian sq via east Cambridge. But hey, 2.8 billion for a rapid transit scheme that would add 300k new riders each day, 42k of which would be converted from cars, is an insane deal when you can spend 20 billion on the big dig, a highway project that ended up being a great example of induced demand