The case of the missing T podcast

By adamg on Thu, 10/12/2023 - 3:07pm

GBH ponders the new podcast the MBTA started last week, then pulled after just two hours or so.

Topics:

The T

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Comments

The MBTA can't even do PR right.

By Pete X
Thu, 10/12/2023 - 3:53pm

I'm one of the dummies that actually listened to the whole podcast. Eng was candid and factual about the years of neglect, but by no means unfair or accusatory. He didn't provide any details about how they're going get whole, but he did mention a "100 day plan" to fix the T which I wish someone in the press would ask him about...hint hint GBH.

In any case, the fact that they pulled this innocuous podcast puts the lie to the Healey administration's pledge for transparency. She apparently has no intention of fulfilling that now that she's governor, just like everyone else in leadership positions on Beacon Hill.

Baker

By Ari O
Thu, 10/12/2023 - 3:59pm

might someone in the Healey administration have balked at something Eng said during his interview — a criticism of the Baker years

Can we just admit that the Baker admin's fixing of the T was a complete sham that papered over problems, engaged in publicity stunts which cost tens of millions of dollars, inconvenienced hundreds of thousands of people and got exactly nothing done, and left such a teetering house of cards that it all collapsed on Healey and Eng not long after they took office?

Or are we going to keep pretending that Our Great, White (, Tall) Savior did, indeed, fix the T.

I’m not afraid to say

By Waquiot
Thu, 10/12/2023 - 5:16pm

The Baker administration tried- much harder than the Patrick administration did.

In the end, I’ll also admit they failed.

I’m ready to say the same thing about the Healey administration, but I’ll give her a few years. They did get the newly installed rails on the GLX fixed, for now.

Viaduct

By workingdefinition
Thu, 10/12/2023 - 5:51pm

Any idea why the 10 mph slow zone persists between science park and Lechmere? Hasn't that been fixed multiple times?

Amazingly

By Waquiot
Thu, 10/12/2023 - 6:41pm

I swear I read somewhere that although the did copious amount of work on the structure, the reused the rail.

Penny wise, pound foolish. Once in 2022, I ran from Copley Square to Union Square on a hot summer morning, then took the Green Line back. My slow running pace was somehow quicker than the Green Line that is grade separated.

The Baker administration

By CH
Thu, 10/12/2023 - 5:52pm

The Baker administration absolutely did not try, unless "try" means trying to convince as many people to switch to private cars as possible. They shrank the workforce at a time when the amount of work needing to be done was growing, they left critical positions empty for years, they allowed people to leave the agency and take all their institutional knowledge with them, they wasted a ton of money on projects that didn't work and didn't need to happen, they never held a single person accountable for any of the failures or even acknowledged the failures in any way (beyond insinuating that "unions" were to blame even though current T leadership seems to have no trouble with the unions), they never publicly made a positive case for the value of transit for the state's economy, they consistently put the T in position to miss targets and disappoint and never over-delivered even a single time, and worst of all, they lied to the public about all of it every single day. I honestly don't understand how anybody can look at the facts and come to any other conclusion.

If Baker is your guy, your guy failed massively and intentionally on transit. It's OK. You can still like him.

Healey

By cybah
Thu, 10/12/2023 - 6:33pm

Healey has been a disappointment so far.

Baker "Tried"?

By Pete X
Thu, 10/12/2023 - 6:45pm

What an utter incompetent governor you're painting Charlie to be! If the absolute destruction of the MBTA was Baker "trying", I hate to see what him not trying would mean.

Or wait, maybe we'd have a functioning MBTA if he didn't try?

Compared to Patrick

By Waquiot
Thu, 10/12/2023 - 7:17pm

He did a lot.

On an objective level, he didn’t do enough. The zeal of circa 2018, with constant weekend shutdowns to repair sections of the Red and Orange Lines, quickly faded away. The T of February 2015 was about the same as the T of February 2023. The big difference is the FTA is watching.

Patrick’s version of trying is forcing a company to buil

By robo
Thu, 10/12/2023 - 7:21pm

Rail cars in Springfield that continue to fail and be out of tolerance brand new. The gift that keeps on giving AND they’ve slipped the schedule so far people stopped caring.

I'm glad you will admit that he failed

By Ari O
Thu, 10/12/2023 - 8:21pm

But his trying included:

* Driving out an experienced transit professional who spoke truth to power.
* Bringing in B-school cronies who spent most of their time chasing dead ends trying to privatize. (I heard someone say that Steve Poftak said something along the lines of "it took actually running the T to realize that it shouldn't be privatized." Yeah, no derp, most of us figured that out on our own.)
* Losing such control of the DPU that they literally stopped doing paperwork.
* The completely failed Orange Line stunt which got precisely nothing done but cost $50 million dollars.
* Brought in Secretary No for six years to tell everyone how she was smarter than them and that everything was too hard.
* Spent 8 years doing very little to improve the physical plant while nurturing the most do-nothing do-nothings at the T.

So … yeah, he overhauled GLX, but probably not in the way that it should have been, and some number of contractors fucked some number of things up (and, no, they did not replace old rail, that's just Joe Pesaturo running his mouth). And yes, the Patrick admin did the stupid China deal in Springfield, but would Baker have even replaced the cars? And would he have gone against a low-bidder? (He certainly wouldn't have, you know, gone after federal money because no thank you we shouldn't get money back from the feds.)

The Patrick admin was by no means perfect, but saying that Baker tried harder than them is just revisionist. The only reason Baker even pretended was the winter of 2015; if it hadn't been for that he probably wouldn't have paid any attention.

The region is far worse off for him spending 8 years being white in the governors office.

Revisionism

By Waquiot
Thu, 10/12/2023 - 9:00pm

Again, I will concede that Baker left office with a T that was, at best, as bad as the one he inherited and at worst much worse, but surely you were around during Patrick's 8 years of doing diddly squat. That's why I can give Baker feint praise. The truth is that work was getting done, and for a solid 5 years, the T was on top of things. They did work on the physical plant. Yes, somehow the total shutdown of the Orange Line was a bust, but to lay the blame on the Baker administration for the failure of contractors ignores the fact that they were doing things. Again, for countless weekends crews were on the Orange and Red Lines doing things that should have been getting done for probably for decades before. But let's look at Patrick's "record"

Somehow got rid of Rich Davies. Sorry, but he should have stayed at the MBTA. Not good enough for the T, but fine for NYCT.
Was handed a report on the start of repair of the T and did nothing with it. Nothing. Just stuck it on the shelf. At least Baker paid attention when the feds gave him a similar report. I guess that's the key difference.
Didn't have the DPU provide oversight to the T. Okay, that goes back decades, but since you made the claim of Baker, Patrick get's the claim.

I'm at the point where I accept that things were bad in Baker's time, but let's not pretend the administration did nothing to try to help or that the administration before (or to be fair, the administrations proceeding them) did anything at all.