By adamg on Wed., 10/11/2017 - 9:43 pm
NJ.com reports:
NJ Transit's trains are no longer the worst in the nation for breaking down and delaying commuters.
That mark of embarrassment went to Boston's Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, which had the most commuter train breakdowns in 2016, according to federal statistics released Tuesday.
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Yup
By Stevil
Mon, 10/16/2017 - 3:07pm
It'll be at least 5 years before we see meaningful improvement. Again - you can't blame any of that on him. That's the lead time for a good chunk of all the new cars we're expecting plus other improvements in track and signaling. Could be 8 years - but he'll run for re-election, likely win - and probably make a bid at Prez in 2020 - so the next person will get the credit for fixing the T.
Yup
By Stevil
Mon, 10/16/2017 - 3:07pm
It'll be at least 5 years before we see meaningful improvement. Again - you can't blame any of that on him. That's the lead time for a good chunk of all the new cars we're expecting plus other improvements in track and signaling. Could be 8 years - but he'll run for re-election, likely win - and probably make a bid at Prez in 2020 - so the next person will get the credit for fixing the T.
When You Don't Care Properly For Something, It Dies
By Elmer
Mon, 10/16/2017 - 4:57pm
Pieces of infrastructure are living things, dependent on humans for survival. When people responsible for the care of domestic animals fail to provide proper sustenance, or care for them when they are sick or injured, the creatures will suffer and die.
If you knowingly took over responsibility for a farm with animals that were already suffering neglect, but didn't do very much to feed or heal them, it would now be your fault if the death and suffering continued. If the farm only grew vegetables but you neglected to maintain the crops, they would also wither and die.
Tragic as the failure of the farm is unto itself, an additional tragedy is the loss of food the farm could otherwise provide. It doesn't matter to the people running the farm because they get plenty of food to eat elsewhere, but many people who depend on the farm go hungry.
The Ⓣ provides a necessary source of nutrition to the Massachusetts economy, but the governor doesn't realize how important that is. Charlie needs to visit his farm and taste its offerings first hand. Sometimes riding the Ⓣ can be hard to stomach, and occasionally it can be pleasantly sweet. In any case, it's something that needs to be fed and taken care of on a continuing basis. If you don't take care of the Ⓣ, you break the Ⓣ.
How long should it take?
By Waquiot
Mon, 10/16/2017 - 3:58pm
I mean, if we are talking about the red and orange lines, we have a timeline on new vehicles (5 years from contract to first trains in service.) For the commuter rail, they know the problem (the new locomotives and lack of enough locomotives overall) and are trying to resolve them. The latter will hopefully be resolved by election time, while the new trains will be an issue for the next term (regardless of who is governor.)
As for other infrastructure, you tell us. How long should it take to take care of the maintenance and infrastructure backlog he inherited (and his predecessor inherited?)
Ah, finance class.
By Pete X
Mon, 10/16/2017 - 4:14pm
You said:
But the very first line of the Born Broke executive summary says:
"For the past several years the MBTA has only balanced its budgets by restructuring debt, liquidating cash reserves, selling land, and other one-time actions"
Who needs to take a finance class?
Do you know what restructuring debt means?
By Stevil
Tue, 10/17/2017 - 4:12pm
It's often/usually a good thing, especially in a time of falling interest rates.
Other than liquidating cash reserves, these are pretty mundane operational isdues. And one of the main reasons all this was necessary was due to excess personnel expenditures in the first place.
Again, that white paper was written with the express purpose of justifying the pending $160 million excess payment to the T, not an objective analysis of the true cause of the T's woes.
Forward *ahem* funding?
By anon
Thu, 10/12/2017 - 1:25pm
You are forgetting that nifty trick of "budgeting" years ago when Baker was the primary exponent of dumping all the cost overrun debt onto the MBTA.
This when the contractors had already spent all the transit enhancement money on their expensive lunches and special friends and Martha Coakley too.
You were probably in diapers when that happened. But it happened. It is Baker's fault. It resulted in a debt dump from a highway project on a system that was supposed to receive benefits from that funding. It has killed the MBTA. \
Oh, and ignore Stevil - he's gotten into that wicked denialist koolaid again.
Ignore you
By Stevil
Thu, 10/12/2017 - 2:48pm
I know it's tough when the facts contradict your worldview.
I always wondered what "forward funding" actually was intended to do - apparently in the good 'ole days - the T would spend a bunch of money, collect a bunch of money and then send a bill to Beacon Hill for the difference. Forward funding - which probably references the sales tax component (which was addressed 8 years ago in 2009 per the above - not really anybody's fault unless you expect them to have a crystal ball predicting the dot com bust, 9/11 and the financial crisis and the rise of Amazon/tax free internet sales) was actually intended to tell the T that they had to live on a budget. Unfortunately, as it turns out - their idea of a budget was spend everything we can on salaries, benefits and pensions and screw capital funding - so now we (and they) are paying the price for that neglect. It's not a complicated issue - and is based on any reasoned analysis of the historical income statements.
Which is why the answer was stupid
By Kaz
Fri, 10/13/2017 - 10:24am
So, the answer that Baker and the boys came up with was to give them a fraction of the sales tax and tell them to live within that means (which the politicians predicted at the time would increase forever and ever...and it immediately dropped like a rock with the economy).
Because that makes sense. That's like telling me my salary is based on a fraction of the GDP of Zimbabwe. Why? Because, I was getting paid whatever I asked for at the end of the year. Oh ok, so...why Zimbabwe?
If the state wanted more of a say over how much it had to give the MBTA and if it thought the MBTA was making horrible salary decisions and union agreements and squandering capital opportunities...then it should have addressed THOSE issue directly. Instead it just pushed the problem off AND handicapped the MBTA in the process. Well, that all came to roost when it started to JUST HAND THE MBTA MONEY AGAIN TO MAKE ENDS MEET.
Bravo.
And to cap it all off, THEY ARE STILL FUNDING THE MBTA BY THIS METHOD INSTEAD OF FIXING THE ISSUE.
You can make a good argument with made up facts
By Stevil
Fri, 10/13/2017 - 12:23pm
Your argument died in 2009. They changed the formula (guaranteeing asales tax floor) and now supplement the T's budget by 100s of millions annually.
In fact, that "Born Broke" article came out in April 2009, 60 days before this system was implemented. Pretty obvious timing that it was commissioned with the specific goal of political cover for the almost $200 million that the legislature was about to give them. Perhaps needed, separate argument, but the whole Charlie broke the T with forward funding is patently false. Urban myth.
I do agree with this:
If the state wanted more of a say over how much it had to give the MBTA and if it thought the MBTA was making horrible salary decisions and union agreements and squandering capital opportunities...then it should have addressed THOSE issue directly.
Unfortunately, I think it mentioned in Born Broke that under Mass law the T is subject to arbitration - which is why costs went up faster than revenue (which went up 4% - even though they assumed 3% sales tax rise under forward funding). That's on the legislature - not Charlie.
New Jersey Transit had to
By Vicki
Thu, 10/12/2017 - 8:54am
New Jersey Transit had to replace a lot of their train cars in the last few years, having made the monumentally stupid decision of parking them in low-lying outdoor areas for Hurricane Sandy. So, I'm glad they're doing better, but "better" is different from "well."
Obviously, given the choice between the worst transit system in the country with a failure once a month, and the best with three failures a week, we'd be better off with fewer failures, whatever was going on elsewhere. I don't care whether the MBTA or New York's MBTA is having more problems: the problem is that they're both in worse shape than they were ten years ago.
New Jersey Transit had to
By Rob
Thu, 10/12/2017 - 12:05pm
Chris Christie was trying to save money by not running the wash bay that week.
But, yes, besides leaving trains in areas that could flood, they've been having issues the last few years with equipment age, moving maintenance/capital money to plug operations gap, salaries falling behind other transportation agencies so they've been losing some talent, patronage hires, regional/federal politics (helping to slow down any hope of new Hudson River tunnels), Amtrak maintenance issues, and somebody named Sandy parking her boat on the tracks.
Oddly enough
By Ubermonkey
Thu, 10/12/2017 - 10:42am
These clowns think we're the BEST at infrastructure.
Bizarre
By Scratchie
Thu, 10/12/2017 - 11:22am
247wallst.com has never steered me wrong before.
World-class, baby!
By Scratchie
Thu, 10/12/2017 - 11:19am
World-class, baby!
Fake News!
By ChrisInEastie
Thu, 10/12/2017 - 12:53pm
Mayor Marty said the MBTA is mostly reliable, and you crazy media types just like to run with the occasional problem, so this report can't be true.
/sarcasm.
I wouldn't want to go easy on Charlie...
By SamWack
Thu, 10/12/2017 - 1:38pm
But
"oldest subway system in country" = "least reliable subway system in country"
is not that hard an equation to understand.
Technically only about 4 stops on the Green Line qualify as "oldest", but the whole system is pretty old, and was built in (often uncoordinated) parts over more than a century.
Non sequitur
By Kaz
Thu, 10/12/2017 - 1:44pm
Being old doesn't preclude being unreliable. They are easily unrelated.
You could make the equivalent hand-waving argument in the opposite direction by saying that by being the oldest we've run into all the mistakes already and having learned from them we now have the best transit system while all the newer ones are still learning things we learned decades ago.
Our system is unreliable because it's unreliably funded. It's unreliably managed with unreliable public oversight as a quasi-public entity outside of government control in some ways. And it was heavily destabilized as a whipping boy for all the environmental failures of the Big Dig (which should have been an entirely state-owned debacle).
Also
By Waquiot
Thu, 10/12/2017 - 3:14pm
The rankings are based solely on commuter rail systems, so the fact that the Green Line is the oldest means nothing in this discussion.
I stand corrected
By SamWack
Thu, 10/12/2017 - 5:42pm
I hadn’t realized that the report referred only to commuter rail.
The system is definitely underfunded, and Baker shares some of the blame for that. But it’s unferfunded at least in part because it’s so expensive to maintain, which is at least partly due to its age. Experience can’t make up for decrpitude. The human body provides good evidence for that.
The article was about
By Rob
Fri, 10/13/2017 - 11:31am
The article was about commuter rail stats.
Somewhere in it (or the article it linked to), there is a link to an excel file with some stats for all US public transit agencies, with separate lines under each agency for type of service (commuter rail, light rail, rapid transit, bus & whether the agency directly operates the service or uses some sort of licensee/contractor).
It looks like a summary table, not a full report. I could find the numbers the article cited for NJT, LIRR, Metro-North, & MBTA commuter rail - but I couldn't make much sense of the other categories without time to do a lot more reading.
It's even worse than it seems
By anon
Thu, 10/12/2017 - 2:40pm
It's even worse than it seems.
The T commuter rail had the most breakdowns, but those numbers weren't normalized for the smaller number of trains.
We had more than twice as many breakdowns as the LIRR, and more than 3 times as many as Metro North. But each of those railroads ran more than twice as many train-miles. So our failure rate per mile is actually more than 4 times bigger than the LIRR, and more than 6 times bigger than Metro North.
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