State goes back to drawing board on Green Line Extension

Never going to happen.

Especially with the new Casey project, that line is never getting extended. They're ripping out all the tracks and putting a road over it.

Honestly, a commuter line to Springfield would be the best thing that's happened for that city in 50+ years. Not that it's going to, but gosh a WMass native can dream...

The mismanagement of this project started a long time ago and was only discovered because the control board convened by Baker starting shifting through the cooked books to find out what was really going on.

" it's the unions, the pensions, and the public services that are dragging us down -"

Overgenerous underfunded liabilities to buy votes with perks and boondoggle make work projects are going to bankrupt the country. Illinois and California will probably go first.
http://www.pensiontsunami.com/

Puerto Rico already is acting as a demonstration project.

Ask yourself: WHERE DID ALL THE COST MORE THAN THE IRAQ WAR STIMULUS CASH GO?

The state got tons of it and pissed it away on pay, temp jobs, and busy work for overpaid paving contractors instead of fixing or expanding what really needed it.

If the T were private, it’d more likely be forced to run a balanced budget and respond to its users needs far more than today. Also, MA has one party rule for the most part, the funding and excess of the T is hard to blame on Republicans, particulary when much of the expense is due to employee over-compensation.

As for the person who said that fares have exploded… Boston’s fares have been artificially low for years relative to other municipalities. Or places where you pay by distance (though that has issues of regressive pricing, not that it can’t be fixed with tax credits perhaps).

In either case, Baker has to fight tooth and nail against the legislature to hold this organization accountable. To blame it on him is simply laughable. Yeah, the unions really have the rider’s back. Keep telling yourself that.

The short history of public transit in the United States:

• Entirely built by private concerns in the 1800s.
• Entirely privately funded. (Often granted government monopolies and eminent domain takings, but entirely funded by users.)
• In the 1920s state and local governments started massively building, standardizing, and upgrading roads and highways for the automobile. This is for example when numbered routes came into being.
• This is a huge subsidy to auto manufacturers: In the case of private transit companies and railroads, they were entirely responsible for the cost of their rolling stock, stations, tracks, all of it. Their real estate was taxed - often heavily - by local governments. The auto manufacturers get their "tracks" entirely for free (paid for by taxpayers).
• Public transit companies - subways, streetcars, and buses - all start going bankrupt.
• Social justice advocates demand the government support public transit for people who can't afford cars; governments create transit authorities basically as a welfare program.
• In the 1950s the Federal Government builds the Interstate highway system.
• What the geniuses did to local transit they now do to the passenger railroads.
• Railroads try to cut service to stay afloat, and government mandates that the railroads continue to provide service even to money-losing locales (among many other horribly counter-productive actions).
• Passenger railroads go bankrupt.
• Government creates Amtrak in the 1970s again as a welfare program.
• Now the taxpayers have to pay for both the roads and the transit system.

This is what Harry Browne referred to when he said: Government is good at one thing: It knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, "See, if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk."

I don't know if privatizing it would fix it at this point, but I know the government can only make it worse. Indeed, Republican-style privatization is often nothing like creating true free-market companies, and is typically just cronyism. But the idea that the government, which spent a century creating this mess we call publicly-funded public transit, is ever going to fix it, especially by just throwing more billions of dollars at it, is even more absurd.

How many billions do you think the taxpayers should spend to fix this mess? The T wants $7B just to get their equipment to work again, not to expand service to meet current needs. And if we commit $7B of other people's money, when do you propose we recognize that once again we've been had? When they spend $8B? When they spend $10B? When they've spent $10B and come back saying they need another $10B just to finish what they started?

Another apropos quote: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.