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MBTA to get around to studying rebuild of crumbling JFK/UMass station

The Dorchester Reporter reports the T has added a couple million dollars to its 2024-2028 capital plan to hire a consultant to look at redesigning JFK/UMass, where one entrance had to be shut for four months and where a man fell to his death on a stairway missing stairs that had never been removed despite being marked as unsafe.

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As long as this doesn't cut into the critically needed resources for South Coast rail and the Allston/I-90 project.

Think of the real estate developers that would be inconvenienced.

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Because I still consider the JFK station relatively new. These things just don’t last! Maybe try something besides concrete?

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I thought the same thing. This opened when I was in high school. Our 35th reunion is coming up soon. To put things into perspective, the station originally opened in 1927, about 60 years before it was rebuilt. Then again, doing maintenance would have helped over the years. Same with any piece of infrastructure.

We're old.

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I remember when it added a platform for the Braintree train, which was a few years after they changed the name from "Columbia" to its current "JFK /UMass". Yup, feeling old.

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Maybe try Roman concrete instead of fly-by-night, lowest-bidder concrete? Might make it through a few Boston winters without disintegrating.

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Have they even replaced the staircase yet, or are they just endlessly talking about it?

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That stairwell was a DOT stair. It wasn't part of the station nor owned by the MBTA

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You aren't wrong but the fact that the station is owned by MBTA and the stairway that goes directly up into the station on the same lot is a whole other agency is a direct sign of the problem.

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that the T needs to hire an outside consultant to do what it should be doing in-house. Like everything else, they "study" the problem only once it becomes dire.

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The problem is.. the talent has long since left the MBTA for greener pastures.

Thats half the problem and why this stuff has to be outsourced. There used to be a time when much of this was in house, but the last several years of 'early retirement' and workers leaving the MBTA in droves has caused this.

To be honest, this isn't isolated to the MBTA, this is a known issue with transportation agencies across the nation.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/why-building-ra...

The talent doesn't exist. And what does, all went to consulting agencies because the money was better. I mean once your peers all start to retire, you become a commodity that can nake their price. Joining a private consulting company that contracts to the public sector is far more attractive than just joining the public sector directly. More pay, better benefits, more mobility.

Even if the MBTA (and other transit agencies) could attract the talent, they wouldn't stay long, especially trying to deal with MBTA management and the whole legistrature aspect. As a consultant, you come in, you do your job, you leave. The politics of the job are left to the people who negotiate a contract. Once the contract is over, your job is done, and you move onto another agency. The drama stays behind.

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...our transportation agencies can no longer be educated customers of what they're buying. We're stuck in a hopeless cycle of people in the industry doing a stint in the public sector to gain knowledge and experience, then cashing out by going to the private sector consulting, planning, engineering, and construction firms that pay big bucks. Once there, they can help steer their firms lucrative contracts from the agencies they once worked for, and the next round of agency employees see the pathways opening. Facilitate those contracts and you get your ticket punched.

Until there's an expectation that government can (or even should) pay to attract and keep the best talent, we're just rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking Red Line train.

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Most of the big developers don't have the "in-house expertise" about what it takes to build a major project. What they do after defining the "sketch" or "project scope" is to hire a consultant who represents the owner or project team and assists as required in:

  1. writing the detailed specs for the project [requirements documents],
  2. advertising the project [Request For Proposals and/or Request for Quotation or RFQ] to potential contractors,
  3. defining selection criteria for the contractor,
  4. selecting the winning bidder on the project

and then once the contactor is chosen -- organizing the technical discussions with the general contractor, and with government agencies, property abutters, etc.

These consultants are known as [depending on the business area] manufacturer's, owner's, or developer's representatives [also depending on the nature of the project].

Thus if major developers don't keep senior skilled people hanging around from job to job --- It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever for a government agency doing something every few decades to maintain in-house expertise in the details.

For example why should the T keep on the payroll employees skilled in building a Commuter Rail extension such as the South Coast or the Green Line extension or procurement of more heavy rail vehicles.

No -- what the T needs to keep on its payroll are management personnel who are skilled in selecting and negotiating with the appropriate consultants with the required expertise for the project.

Back at its infancy the T [MBTA] was unofficially dubbed Mr. Bulger's Transit Agency for the mostly geographically biased blatant patronage hiring [with "feather bedding" and "no-show working schedules"]. While Bulger is long since gone geographic patronage has been replaced by check-off the boxes hiring [find me a "-----" who we can hire for this high profile position to "please my electorate"]. Not to say that there are not skilled, dedicated people working in the midst of the rest in the T's personnel.

In other words far from being a meritocracy loaded with talent -- the T has been a great exemplar of the "Peter Principle" of rising withing the bureaucracy to your point of incompetency or beyond -- with an input stream pre-biased toward incompetence and failure.

Here's hoping that Mr. Eng will introduce a new way of doing business for the T.

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JFK as it is should never have been built. They wanted to keep the station close to the 'split', but making people wait in a small lobby to see which train is next was and continues to be a mess. They should have sent everything to Savin Hill and put a flyover in at that point.

So are we just going to put lipstick on the pig?

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