You can't say state transportation chief doesn't feel commuters' pain

It will be most interesting to see whether Mr. Davey actually says what we all know - that the funding mechanism is broken and that it is the politicians' fault, or whether he goes along to get along with the governor and the legislature. We are also going to see if Mr. Davey's new and larger hat has lessened his resolve to fix the T (I think it probably necessarily has).

I hope that he makes a big deal of the fact that he was delayed by the red line, then asks people around the room to think about how much the collective loss of their time waiting for him cost - and then to multiply it by some huge number (reflecting similar losses all over the region, every single day) to begin to get an idea of how much productivity is lost across the regional economy becuase our public transportation system is in such disrepair.

Transit will not get the maintenance, management and money it needs to serve us well until people are made to realize how much it costs all of us when it doesn't. Unfortunately, this involves the calculation of true economic costs, which most people can't easily understand (as opposed to accounting cost, which, well I thought was easier to understand, but millions of households have called that into question over the past few decades and 5 years in particular).

In any case, I'm really bummed that I wasn't able to attend this event. Kudos to MassINC for organizing it.