MBTA fails urban riders

Many state agencies are to blame. But after 10 years of delays, talks are finally under way to get the T moving. Don't expect instant results.

by Laura A. Siegel

The Big Dig was supposed to make commuting easier for everyone -- not just those who drive along the Central Artery.

In order for the state to get its pet public-works project approved 10 years ago, transportation agencies agreed to make a series of improvements to the city's subway, bus, and commuter-rail systems. Requested by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), these changes were ordered to offset an anticipated rise in pollution from the heavier auto traffic that would accompany the completion of the Central Artery Project. By improving the T, the thinking went, more people would leave their cars at home and use public transit.

But though the state has followed through on its commuter-rail commitments, it has done little for the subway and bus systems. In the fall of 1998, then- attorney general Scott Harshbarger, along with the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF), sued the state's transportation agencies -- the Executive Office of Transportation and Construction (EOTC), the Massachusetts Highway Department, the Turnpike Authority, and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) -- for neglecting their promise to improve urban transportation. According to the lawsuit, "nearly all of the urban transit projects are either inactive, greatly and unreasonably delayed, or slated for nonperformance, despite the passage of deadlines in the regulations."

The transportation agencies don't have the option of backing out on these improvements. The changes are not only written into the environmental permits issued for the Big Dig in 1991, but also included in the state's implementation plan for the Clean Air Act -- which makes them federal law. In January 1999, the agencies responded to the suit by petitioning the DEP to change the requirements. The DEP issued a draft decision on the matter last April.

Since then, in an effort to settle the suit once and for all, the state's transportation and environmental agencies have been negotiating about what exactly the transportation agencies -- mainly the MBTA -- must do to comply with the law, according to Michael Mulhern, chief operating officer for the MBTA, and Doug Pizzi, a spokesperson for the DEP.

Much is at stake: improved service on the Red, Orange, and Blue Lines; expanded bus service; clean-fuel buses to replace some of the city's diesel buses. Officials are discussing whether buses or light rail should replace the rail systems that were removed years ago in

Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. And they are hashing out what the state's transportation agencies must do to make up for their years of delay. The decisions made during these talks will shape Boston's public-transportation system for years to come.

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"Lousy," is how Brighton resident and frequent bus rider Julie Hayward describes Boston's bus system. "You wait too long, and then the buses are crowded because they took too long." Fellow commuter Jimmy Moy nods vigorously. "Lousy, lousy service," he says, jabbing his thumb toward the ground. Everyone who takes the bus has similar complaints -- crowding and late service at peak hours, and greatly reduced schedules on weekends.

Hayward, Moy, and their fellow riders might be less than pleased to find out how the state has handled the changes mandated for the bus system by the DEP. The DEP's Environmental Impact Report (EIR) on the Big Dig called for 400 new buses: 200 to replace old buses, and 200 to provide additional service, expanding the fleet. The environmental permit for the Big Dig, based on the EIR's recommendations, uses more-ambiguous wording than the EIR, but clearly stipulates that the state was to put 400 new buses in service and "expand peak hour capacity to 12,000 additional passengers in each direction" by the end of 1992.

But rather than coming through, in 1992 state transportation agencies petitioned the DEP to delete the obligation from the permit. In 1994, the T finally put 400 new buses into service -- but retired 400 old buses at the same time. Still, the MBTA claims it has fulfilled the permit's requirements by buying the 400 new buses.

But the attorney general's office and CLF say that's not enough -- as commuters who ride the city's cattle-car buses at rush hour can attest. Apparently the DEP is with them: its April draft decision requires the addition of 200 more buses, all of which must meet clean-air requirements, plus additional mitigation by the MBTA to make up for the years of delay. (The draft decision doesn't make clear what form this mitigation might take.)

"Right now, ridership on buses could be increased significantly," says Jodi Sugerman-Brozan, project director for Alternatives for Community and Environment. "Buses are never on time. When you have a bus system that is so inadequate, it's no wonder people aren't willing to take the bus."

Lydia Rivera, a spokesperson for the MBTA, says that the agency has managed to boost ridership by 31,000 passengers a day without adding buses to its fleet, just by making adjustments to existing routes. But critics say that doesn't meet the requirements. "Maybe they're maximizing the capacity they have, but that didn't increase the capacity," says Seth Kaplan, staff attorney for CLF. "By focusing so much on peak-hour ridership, the T has reduced service on Sundays and on routes that are less heavily traveled."

It would cost $80 million to put 200 more buses on the roads -- a mere six percent of what the state has spent on commuter-rail improvements, and less than one percent of the cost of the Big Dig.

"We do not want to add additional costs just for the sake of adding costs," says Secretary of Transportation Kevin Sullivan. "When we put a new bus route on, we do surveys, check demand, we know our customer base. There's a science to it. But just willy-nilly adding new bus routes means we have to now hire three shifts of drivers and mechanics without maybe much impact in additional riders," at a cost of $24 million each year beyond the $80 million outlay. "That cost," he says, "would cannibalize the [$600 million] project with the South Boston Transitway, where I'm almost guaranteed a tremendous amount of ridership."

The Transitway -- part of the city's planned "Silver Line" system -- is an underground electric-bus route, currently under construction, that will run from South Station to the South Boston Seaport, connecting with bus lines in other areas of the city. It is also part of the changes required by the DEP.

But Robert Terrell of the Washington Street Corridor Coalition, a group of activists working to restore rail service to Washington Street, says the Transitway won't chiefly benefit residents. "They [the state] would like to build things like the South Boston Transitway to really accommodate tourists and people from the hotels and get them over to the convention center and seaport district," he says.

Michael Mulhern says that the MBTA will purchase 106 new, non-diesel buses in the next three months. Most of those will represent additions to the fleet, and most will be extra-long buses. But most will also be allocated to the Transitway or other Silver Line projects. That's certainly progress, but it's still not the 200 buses we were promised: only 25 of these buses will be put to use on regular high-volume, high-frequency routes.

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"The Big Dig should have had a major positive effect on public transit," says Fred Salvucci, who was Massachusetts's secretary of transportation when the Big Dig was approved in 1991. "As you can see, they simply haven't done it." This is as true for the city's subway service as it is for its buses. The environmental permit for the Big Dig demanded that the MBTA add at least 86 cars on the Red Line and 46 on the Orange Line by 1995. The MBTA seems to have interpreted "add" as "replace" -- it bought 86 new Red Line cars, but retired 84. Mulhern claims that the Red Line is at capacity and couldn't put additional cars into use. Though the discrepancy between the permit's demands and the MBTA's actions is part of the lawsuit, the DEP draft agreement dismisses the issue.

As for the Orange Line, says Mulhern, new cars can't be added until a new signal system is put in place. Until then, "simply adding new trains would mean they'd be stored in the yard." The current signal system is so out of date that trains can't safely be spaced closer together. A new system is being designed, and in the next few months the T will send out a procurement for about 24 more cars, to be installed by 2005 -- some 10 years after the Orange Line was supposed to get twice that number of cars. The DEP isn't yet satisfied that this is a valid substitute for its original requirements. Its draft decision asks the MBTA for a quantitative comparison of the clean-air benefits of the original and new proposals, and again asks the agency to make up somehow for the years we've been kept waiting.

By the end of this year, the MBTA was also supposed to have lengthened Blue Line platforms and modernized the line's stations so that six-car trains could run instead of four-car trains. This would have allowed 50 percent more commuters to get to the airport at rush hour.

But Mulhern now says that the longer trains will be up and running by 2004, and that the stations will all be redone by 2005. Former transportation secretary Salvucci calls the delay of the $420 million project "outrageous." For structural reasons, however, the Blue Line construction needs to be coordinated with the Big Dig construction taking place above it, says T spokesperson Rivera -- and the Big Dig construction has been delayed. When the Blue Line project is finally done, the line will have 94 cars, up from 70, increasing capacity 34 percent rather than 50 percent.

Then there is the issue of replacing the rail service removed long ago in Jamaica Plain and Roxbury. If you walk along Centre Street in Jamaica Plain, you see trolley tracks laid incongruously down the middle of the busy street, with not a trolley car in sight. The E branch of the Green Line used to extend down the Arborway from Heath Street to Forest Hills, but the line has stopped at Heath Street since 1985. In 1986, residents voted two to one to restore rail service, and in 1994, the legislature allotted $20 million to do it. But the restoration never happened. Now the T wants to make the route part of the Silver Line instead, putting in long, jointed buses that would run in a dedicated lane. "Restoration of trolley service would have a negative impact with traffic, public safety, and parking," Mulhern explains. The catch: the DEP says the MBTA study that came to this conclusion is not valid -- it didn't compare the new proposal to the original Arborway service, as required.

Similarly, Roxbury residents have been waiting 13 years for rail service to replace the old elevated Orange Line. But they, too, have been offered the long, jointed buses instead. Most community groups feel that Roxbury is being shortchanged -- that buses just don't offer the community the convenience and stability that light rail would. (See "Last Stand on Washington Street," News and Features, March 3.)

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It's not fair to blame the MBTA alone for the delays, says CLF's Seth Kaplan. If anyone at the EOTC, the highway department, or the Turnpike Authority had decided to push these projects, they would have been completed, he says: "That's part of the tragedy here. There are a number of different sources that the initiative to follow through on these projects could have come from, and none of them stepped up to the plate." In fact, although the MBTA has shouldered most of the practical and financial burdens of complying with the mitigation requirements, the stipulations actually name the EOTC and the Massachusetts Highway Department as responsible for satisfying them.

"The MBTA is just a convenient whipping boy," says Salvucci. He points the finger at Turnpike Authority chairman and former state highway commissioner Jim Kerasiotes, who oversees the Central Artery project and who Salvucci says "misprogrammed the money."

The requirements don't spell out who should pay for the public-transit improvements. With the exception of an approximately $3 million ferry project, not one penny of the Central Artery money has gone to public transit. The money that has been spent on improvements has come out of the T's budget, which in turn comes partly from T revenues and federal money, but mainly from the state. "Funding is always a matter of priorities," says John Rumpler, staff attorney for Alternatives for Community and Environment. "Institutionally, auto-related transportation improvements get the lion's share of transportation money."

Starting in June, according to a new law, the T will no longer be able to use state-backed bonds for new construction and other capital projects -- it will have to issue its own bonds to raise money. The one exception to this new law: the T will still be able to use state-backed bonds for projects that fulfill the Central Artery mitigation commitments. After all, it was the state itself that made the original promises.

The MBTA has met some of the responsibilities spelled out in the environmental permit. Nearly $1.38 billion worth of commuter-rail extensions and improvements, and the addition of thousands of suburban park-and-ride spaces, have been completed or are well under way. A large portion of this sum -- $400 million -- has gone to the Greenbush line, which extends rail service along the South Shore down to Scituate and will be under construction for years to come. Although the commuter-rail improvements mainly benefit suburban dwellers, city residents benefit indirectly because fewer cars will be driven into the city. But the state needs to remember that many of the people now coming into the city on the commuter rail also make use of the Green, Red, and Orange Lines.

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"The regulations are pretty black and white: you have to complete X public-transit improvements by Y date," says Jim Milkey, the head of environmental protection at the attorney general's office. "There's really no question of whether they're currently in violation."

But let's remember the original purpose of the regulations: to improve air quality enough to offset additional pollution caused by increased traffic on the Central Artery. Has the state done this, and might the T's adjustments be good enough -- at least from an environmental point of view?

"The idea wasn't to lock in certain projects so much as it was to ensure a package of public-transit improvements that would maintain a balanced transportation system," explains Anne Fanton, director of the Central Artery Environmental Oversight Committee, who is responsible for monitoring progress on the mitigation requirements. She says that the T has met many of its commitments, but has yet to demonstrate whether its proposed substitutions for the remaining requirements would provide the same air quality and travel benefits as the original commitments.

The idea of improving public transit was to get more people to take the train or the bus instead of driving cars. The T has certainly taken strides toward that goal: according to Mulhern, in the past eight years the T has added more than 38 million passengers. He attributes this growth to system maintenance, new commuter-rail service, and the expansion of Red and Orange Line trains from four cars to six.

One of the ironies of the delays is that the plans came from the T's own capital-improvement scheme. Over time, however, the plans came to look less attractive as things changed -- not least, the timetable of the Central Artery project to which the measures were linked. Once scheduled to be finished in 1997, work on the Big Dig is now slated to end in 2004.

"If the intent is to get transit commitments finished by the time the Central Artery is up and running, well, these now are regulations with an arbitrary date given in 1991," says Kevin Sullivan, the transportation secretary. "We are saying, let's put a realistic date to these."

When that happens, the T says, it will stick to whatever the DEP decides. "I think once the DEP publishes its revised commitments, you will see that the MBTA not only is committed to meeting those commitments, but will be well on its way to meeting its commitments," says Mulhern. "We are going to achieve 100 percent compliance."

What 100 percent compliance means will be determined by the negotiations currently taking place. Let's hope it calls for more buses on heavy-use routes, and faster subway service -- and let's hope it doesn't take another 10 years to implement.

Laura Siegel can be reached at lsiegel@phx.com.