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MBTA to legislature: Pay up or the Green Line extension buys it
By adamg on Wed, 04/03/2013 - 4:07pm
The Globe reports T officials are telling legislators that their proposed ciggies and gas taxes won't be enough to convince the feds to give us $500 million towards the cost of extending the Green Line to Somerville, let alone Medford, sometime in this century.
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Comments
Anyone taking bets?
What's the over-under on how long it'll be before someone pipes up with "We can't even afford the system we have now!"?
tripple payout
if it's a Representative from west of 495 that just a few years ago was awarded million in taxpayer MADOT repair funds to fix washed-out roads from the floods.
MWRA?
Why doesn't/can't the MBTA go the Mass. Water Resources Authority route and say: "Hey there. Your city/town with an MBTA/commuter rail station that directly benefits your constituents and increases your city/town property values will now be directly responsible for all MBTA/commuter rail expenses." That would get the pitchfork-and-torches crowd to rush the State House and get the lazy-ass Legislature in gear to actually address this perennial issue rather than slap bandaids on it and keep kicking the MBTA debt can down the road.
Already happens
Every town that has MBTA service pays an assessment to the T.
Three Words
Contempt of Court
Right, but...
I see your point -- the Green Line extension is a court-mandated environmental mitigation measure from Big Dig litigation. But this isn't going to cause funding to magically appear. (Unless we can find a way to hold the legislators in contempt of court -- is that legally feasible?)
...but
Funding magically appeared when the big dig cost went from 2b to 14b...
No it didn't
If it had, the debt wouldn't still be on the books.
I'm all for MBTA expansion but
I'm all for MBTA expansion but first, please, can we take care of what we've got now?
No
I keep hearing this argument, and I keep shaking my head.
Gee, mom, I know you gave me money for groceries and clothes, but I spent it all on clothes and ... WHAT? YOU WON'T GIVE ME MORE MONEY AND YOU WANT ME TO BUY THE GROCERIES OUT OF YOUR ALLOWANCE???
Do the words "court order" and "state is required to do this under court order" go in one eyeball and out the other?
Wishing it were not so does not make it go away. The state HAS to do this.
Sorry, but that's the way the world works when the world outside of Massachusetts is involved. Feds gave money for the big dig based on certain terms and conditions. MA overspent the budget - using all the Fed money for the tunnel and did not complete the other required obligations - and then tried to back out on those terms and conditions ... and got rightfully slapped for it. The underspending on other areas of the MBTA at the behest of legislators whose districts should pay their own way on Irene damage doesn't matter one bit. The longer MA pisses around with the mandate, the less inclined the Feds will be to give us money for any project.
agreed
The "let's maintain what we got first" argument is pretty lame. What we have is a system that is tremendously aged and doesn't need maintenance - it needs a total overhaul. This costs a lot more than maintenance, but that's what happens when you defer maintenance in order to fight the scourge of being called "Taxachusetts" for 30 years. We've stopped paying for things and then have slowly done the kind of painful reforms that GOP-types clamor for (rightly) such as merging all the different transportation agencies, cutting slabs of fat, patronage jobs, etc.
There's probably still some of that that could be done, but certainly not any amount that will make up what is needed to get the system restored (and that amount is something that bipartisan and non-partisan studies, commissions and think-tanks have more or less agreed on.
But fixing Irene damage on Route 2 has little to do with this. Yes, districts far from metro-Boston may be the North Dakotas of the Commonwealth, but maybe with a bit of infrastructure investment their economies might pick up a bit. It's not useful to pit one part of the state against another.
When the Senator from Northhampton ...
1. stops monkeywrenching the T funding and
2. shuts the fuck up about "subsidizing Boston" when his district's car dependence is actually far more subsidized by us ...
I will agree with you. I don't like such divisiveness, but these assholes started it. Until these idiots who are subsidized by the economic machinery in Eastern MA stop whining about "subsidizing Boston" when it comes to funding the system that partially assists that subsidy machine, we need to push our legislators to shit on any and every little scrap of subsidy to their constituents to maintain costly roads in outlying districts.
Not getting the analogy
First, I don't get the how spending the allowance on clothes analogizes the comment you responded in the way you support. The intuitive interpretation of the analogy sounds like equating mismanagement of allowance with MBTA/State mismanagement of its budget. This would mean the right action is to not give the give the kid more money to let the kid learn the consequences - thus this also means we shouldn't give more money to the MBTA.
The second supporting argument makes more sense. However, the counter-argument I read unfortunately make sense too. It is not truly mandated, the state have found multiple ways to wiggle out spending on other mandates. At the least, drag it out until we all old and dead - and I'm only about to complete my second year out of undergrad.
This doesn't mean I don't support Green Line to Medford. I'm sure there are comments I made over the years for its support. Just don't arguments with holes or existing, but unaddressed counter-arguments.
That said, in regard to the anonnie's argument. The best counter-argument I read that I haven't see anyone else counter-argued with a point that actually attacks the statement*** is we are possibly using underfunding the MBTA to justify more underfunding.
***There is a possible counter-argument that the MBTA is not underfunded but just mismanaged and thus not give more money (like the kid who spend all the allowance on clothes). But that's only a real counter-argument if we can find the mismanagement, because we been saying that for years and I can cite stuff that the MBTA have tried to up its management. Thus not a true counter-argument until we can actually identify a real mis-allocated item. Else everything will just for frozen with chronic issues and no expansions.
Clarifying ...
What you missed here:
Parent = Federal Government
Idiot kid = Commonwealth
Yes, the Fed will NOT give more money for this because the state spent it all on clothing (the big dig) and not on clothing and groceries (big dig and required transit projects). Thus the kid (state) is now required to buy groceries (GLX) out of its allowance.
The fed doesn't give a shit if the state forms an agency or what that agency is or does. All they care is that the State do what it promised to do - and that a federal court has ruled that it must do.
The original artery
The original artery mitigation agreement includes a process to substitute projects. That has already been done with Arborway restoration and building Red-Blue connector, both were removed as required projects. Red-Blue was watered down to just a requirement to design it, and the state is right now in the process of having even the reduced design-only requirement removed. If the feds won't pay for GLX, and the legislature won't either, at some point the state will have to begin the process to substitute cheaper projects to replace it, or perhaps cut it back to only two stations (Union Sq. and Washington St.)
Most of the MBTA's annual federal allotment of capital money for transit for the next few years is going to have to be used for new Red and Orange Line cars.
Big Dig says it all!
You really can't blame the Feds for feeling a little put-off by another transportation request from the great Commonwealth. The 2 Billion$, no, excuse me, the 15 Billion $$$$ should have gone to Public Transportation in the first place.
Why would the Feds be put off?
They didn't pay the overage. If they did, then the MBTA wouldn't have Big Dig debt, riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight?
93Fast14
MA has a very poor record of delivering on time, on budget projects. That's why.
Notice how the Feds brought in their own contract management when several overpasses and bridges on I-93 needed to be replaced?
Notice how local mayors whined that they didn't get goodies from the contractors in exchange for having stuff happen in their turf?
I rest my case.
This comes as quite a shock.
This comes as quite a shock. I really thought the Commonwealth was committed to providing convenient, reliable public transportation.
LOL
Well played,sir.
Massachusetts' state motto
The Spirit of (Expletive) You
It rears its head again here.
If the Green Line extension
If the Green Line extension weren't obscenely overpriced, it would be more likely to get built.
And maybe there'd be some money left over for other rail expansions.
uhm..
how much do you think it should cost? have you been comparison shopping?
Let's start with a baseline
Let's start with a baseline of the $375 million estimate from 2003. We can even inflation-adjust that (even though much of the cause of the delays is the spiraling cost).
I do know that the current estimate of $1.3 billion is several times the per-mile and per-station costs for any system outside the U.S.
He might not but there's some truth
He might not but if you do some comparison shopping, there is some truth.
To be honest, I have forgotten the numbers and comparable projects. I am trying to search around, but at the money, the best I find is this article about US transit projects.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-26/u-s-taxpa...
In general, we pay a lot more per mile than other countries. GLX is unfortunately not an exception (and I would like to find the numbers to complete my comments, but I'm having trouble with that right now). The cost for GLX per mile is near (at last check) full-on heavy rail construction. What's really boggling is it is this costly per mile despite already existing Right of Way and little additional land taking. From what I can figure out so far, the reason for this cost (and also why the cost grew so much from original estimation) is at least partly due to our choices for stations and tracks. It seems we are opting to move tracks over while building new tracks and proposing building full-on stations as opposed to strips of asphalt like how the original D-line was built and the original proposal to GLX.
Part of the cost is the
Part of the cost is the full-featured fully-fare-gated stations. I'm always telling people we should move to Proof-of-Payment and stop blowing money on fare-gates, but nobody listens...
But a hefty chunk of the cost is the elevated sections. IIRC, it's about $300 million. The new elevated Lechmere station and the portions flying over the existing tracks. And while it may be possible to roll out service in stages, unfortunately, these elevated portions are a necessary first stage before anything else can be done.