I believe the T should have one goal: be the best at getting you where you need to go.
For decades, the T was underfunded and deprioritized by legislators whose constituents didn't live anywhere near a train station. And the work that has been done has been slow, inefficient, and sometimes outright disastrous.
The Green Line Extension took 32 years to arrive. Even when it did, an issue was identified that was never fixed during construction. The tracks had to be ripped up again, delaying it even further.
I'm an engineer. I built companies where mistakes like these were emergencies. I'm trained to look at our processes and figure out the best way to achieve success.
It's time to get the T back on track.
In 1947, the Coolidge Commission published a map. It showed a sprawling MBTA ecosystem, where the Red Line went all the way to Lexington and the Blue Line went all the way to Lynn.
It was a blueprint for a new way of living: an interconnected set of trains that went all across the state. You could wake up in Woburn and get to Boston without ever setting foot in a car.
These days, expanding the Red Line to Arlington or the Green Line to West Medford sounds impossible. I want to challenge why that's so unfathomable. Cities around the world have working transit that is safe, reliable and efficient. We can do the same here.
Then we fell in love with the suburb. The Federal Highway Act built highways across Massachusetts. After Brown v. Board of Education desegregated schools across the country, white Americans fled to the suburbs and wrote zoning codes to ensure that lower-income families of color would be kept out.
With more and more people choosing to get a car, plans for the T fell by the wayside. Promised expansions were delayed. And cities that were originally slated to have a train station passed laws prohibiting them from getting built.
When the T needed repairs, they didn't get funded. Diagnosis of the problems were outsourced to expensive consultants.
Los Angeles had a similar problem. Their solution was to pass Measure R, a sales tax, that exclusively funded public transportation with a sunset provision. That measure was so successful, they passed Measure M, another sales tax funding public transportation that had no sunset provision.
Funding transit works.
We don't have to do the same thing as Los Angeles. We could fund the T with revenue from the millionaire's tax. We could institute a hotel tax or fine absentee landlords who don't maintain their properties. But we need to prioritize funding the T. If the T works, people will take it.
Right now, a lot of the decisionmaking around the T rests in the hands of people whose constituents don't use it. So its funding gets cut in favor of other priorities. We should create a governmental body made up solely of people from places with T stops and let those municipalities have greater say over how they want to fund the T.
We need to clone Phil Eng. Unfortunately, the technology isn't quite there yet, so we need to hire in-house, dedicated people who will work for the T and develop institutional expertise. Not expensive consultants.
We need to expand. Build a Green Line station in West Medford. Connect the Red Line to Arlington. And we should do it according to smart engineering principles: design one station designed to fit everywhere. Figure out what needs fixing and do it quickly. Then do it again, faster, smarter and cheaper this time around.
In Cambridge, I've been pushing the MBTA to redevelop the land around Alewife Station. Gilman Square is another station that would be great for social housing.
Not just able-bodied people use the T. Accessible options open up transit for everyone, from wheelchair users to families carrying strollers. We shouldn't have elevators that are broken for months or escalators that haven't worked for years.
Buses are one of the most effective investments from a transit perspective: they're cheaper to build than trains, they can go anywhere a car goes, and you can design routes that people will actually use. We need more reliable buses that come faster and dedicated bus lanes that make them the better, frictionless option.
I've been endorsed by Jim Aloisi, former Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation, and Jarred Johnson, former Executive Director of TransitMatters. These are people who know what they're talking about. I'm proud to have their support and I'm passionate about making this work.
Jim Aloisi
Former Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation
Jarred Johnson
Former Executive Director, TransitMatters