(The following article by Brian Kladko was posted on the Boston Globe website on January 22.)
BOSTON — This time of year, Brian Welch must wait until the weekend to see his Worcester home in the light of day. Monday through Friday, he tiptoes out before dawn, leaving behind his sleeping wife and 2-year-old daughter. He drives downtown to Worcester’s Union Station, boards the 6:06 train to South Station, and snags his favorite seat for a ride that takes 1 hour and 15 minutes in theory but usually a little longer. It’s what Welch, 36, says he must do to hold a job he loves – helping run a criminal justice program at Harvard University – and also afford a three-bedroom Colonial on a safe, quiet street. Despite sending occasional e-mails of complaint to the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority about broken air conditioning or a lack of timely announcements when trains are running late, Welch remains a loyal customer. His daily round trip costs $6.55 (thanks to a discounted monthly pass he buys through Harvard), whereas driving and parking would cost about $12.70 and save little time. Besides, he doesn’t like the person he becomes behind the wheel at rush hour.
The MBTA will always have riders like Welch, for whom commuter rail is a crucial tether to the opportunities afforded by the big city. But there may be fewer like him. After seven years of increases, the number of people riding MBTA commuter rail dropped by more than 6 percent over the past two years, from 40.6 million riders in 2003’s budget year to 38.1 million riders in 2005’s. What’s more, the decreases happened systemwide, with all but one line carrying fewer riders last year than in 2003. Although high gas prices in the early fall boosted ridership, it’s too early to know whether those gains will persist now that prices have subsided somewhat. What is clear, however, is that some fed-up travelers have left the commuter rail behind for good. Madelaine Thompson, a 33-year-old Haverhill resident, stopped riding the train to her job at the Boston Housing Authority last October, she says, after enduring too many delays, stifling coaches, and rude conductors. “I can’t do it anymore,” Thompson says. “I’d rather sit in my car, undisturbed, not have to share my space, not have to have someone’s elbow in my lap, have my own radio, to be in control of my own destiny.” The cost of her daily commute increased marginally, by about $1.15, but she says that even multiplied over a year, it’s a small price for peace of mind. “I’d rather be stuck in traffic.”
Commuter rail has long had a daunting task: getting people in the suburbs to forsake their cars, if only for two trips a day. It’s a good deal for riders, since fares today pay for less than half of the MBTA’s commuter rail expenses; the rest comes from taxpayers. But attracting riders is getting even harder. The system’s hub-and-spoke design serves people who live in the suburbs and work in the central city. But from 1970 to 2000, within 20 miles of Boston, jobs grew by 30 percent inside Route 128 and by 80 percent outside it – meaning more and more people couldn’t take a train to work even if they wanted to.
Amid these changes, the investments in commuter rail continue – less than in the 1990s, but enough to make a taxpayer sit up and take notice. The South Shore’s Greenbush Line, scheduled to open next year at a cost of $470 million, is expected to serve only 4,600 new commuters – an investment of $102,000 for each rider. Governor Mitt Romney has promised some relatively modest projects designed to attract more riders – new stations on the Fairmount Line, and more parking at stations throughout the system. There are other grand plans, not yet promised but the subject of intense lobbying, including a 47-mile extension of the Stoughton Line to Fall River and New Bedford.
The political rhetoric will have you believe investing in the system is about easing congestion and improving air quality. But prominent economists and transportation analysts say commuter rail, here and elsewhere, doesn’t really take enough cars off the road to make a difference. The morning rush is a bear, and that’s never going to change.
Even Fred Salvucci, a former state transportation secretary, concedes the point. “It would take a very large number of people getting out of their cars to result in free flow,” he says. “And if you had free flow, other people would jump into their cars and get into it. It’s like shoveling the ocean.”
Then why keep expanding? Advocates for continued investment, both in and out of government, give lots of reasons – to secure the economic future of Boston, to revive the state’s smaller struggling cities, to allow more people like Welch to stay in the region even if they have to live more than 40 miles from Boston. And all of this sounds laudable, if not for one important caveat: It’s conjecture, amounting to a high-stakes gamble with public money.
You’d think that the officials who want to expand the system would have a good explanation, at least, for why it’s losing riders. But no one really does. Maybe the Big Dig, which is almost complete, has made driving to Boston more tolerable. Maybe it’s the economy, although the number of people employed in Boston, Cambridge, and Quincy remained about the same even as ridership declined between 2003 and 2005. Maybe, the MBTA’s general manager admits, it was one too many late or canceled trains. “I’ve got to believe that reliability, which is the number one concern of our customers, has perhaps played a factor,” Daniel Grabauskas says. “We had terrible service last winter. If you’re going to miss your job interview . . . or if you’re going to be late for work too often, and the boss isn’t going to be happy, you’re going to opt to pay the extra money for personal commuting in your automobile.”
The MBTA has historically contracted out the actual running of commuter rail. Amtrak, which held the job from 1986 to 2003, wore out its welcome after too many complaints of poor service. Amtrak’s successor, a consortium called Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad, included several former MBTA officials in its leadership. It also rehired most of the Amtrak employees. But the new contract added penalties for each train that is canceled or more than five minutes late. In 2004, MBCR paid $750,000 in penalties, the maximum allowed under the contract, and through last October, it paid $625,000 – token amounts compared with the company’s five-year, $1 billion contract.
Late trains are no small thing to riders. “It’s hard for me, as a professional who works in the city, to be taken seriously if I can’t even get to work on time,” says Tim Haarmann, a marketing consultant from Andover who still rides the train several times a week.
To riders like Haarmann, it matters little that MBCR officials point to factors beyond their control, including CSX, the freight company that owns the track between Framingham and Worcester. Under its agreement with the state, CSX retains control over the line, meaning it can halt a commuter train to allow for passage of one of its freight trains. The company insists it makes reasonable accommodations, but officials at MBTA and MBCR can’t disguise their frustration with the company, blaming it for the Worcester Line’s poor on-time performance. But according to the chief of the MBTA’s commuter rail, Bob Stoetzel, mechanical breakdowns are more frequently the cause of train delays.
Many of these can be blamed on the neglect of basic upkeep during the expansion of the subway in the 1980s and commuter rail in the 1990s, says Paul Regan, executive director of the MBTA’s advisory board, an independent body representing the 175 cities and towns served by the agency. “Expansion won out over maintenance,” he says, “and those chickens have come home to roost.”
With that in mind, the Romney administration has decided to increase the percentage of transportation dollars it allocates for existing systems – what it’s calling “a state of good repair.” Eighty-eight percent of the MBTA’s $3.3 billion capital budget, the money invested over the next five years in equipment and infrastructure, is devoted to maintaining its bus, subway, and commuter rail service. For commuter rail, that means replacing or fixing locomotives, coaches, and the track and signals that it owns. For commuter rail riders, that should mean fewer days like last October 26, when three sets of equipment died in North Station during the evening rush; some riders had to be ushered out of one train into another, and then ushered into yet another. “It was bad,” says Stoetzel. “One of those nights when you want to say, `OK, everybody, go across the street. Drinks are on the T.’ That’s embarrassing when it happens, and it’s frustrating, and you just hope it doesn’t happen again.”
Commuters can be surprisingly forgiving about delays beyond the MBTA’s control. But what really rankles them is being kept in the dark by train crews and electronic signs on station platforms that flash reassuring messages (“All trains operating on or near schedule…”) when things have clearly gone awry. “By the time there’s any useful info posted on the electronic message board, it’s usually pretty late and not very useful,” Alexandra Woznick, a 43-year-old Beverly resident, wrote in an e-mail. Yet Woznick, who rode the Rockport Line to Fidelity Investments for three years until a job change last month, considered herself a happy customer. “Most of the time, it’s actually pretty good,” she said on a train rolling toward Boston one beautiful autumn morning. “I’m certainly on time to work a lot more than I would be if I were driving.”
That’s the commuter whom the rail system relies on – the one who recognizes its value and embraces it as a part of his or her life. But winning over the car commuter has always been the challenge. Even Grabauskas, the MBTA’s general manager who lives in Ipswich, a town served by commuter rail, usually drives to work. “Where I live in town is right off the highway,” he says, “and my schedule is erratic enough that it tends not to be convenient for me.”
The MBTA chief thinks that the key to getting new commuters onto the trains – or luring them back – is better reliability, more attention to customer service, and nicer amenities. Among the last would be clear windows; many are so clouded and scratched they make all the scenery look like English moors. Grabauskas came to the job last May after serving as the state’s transportation secretary and the registrar of motor vehicles, where he won praise for reducing wait times, opening satellite offices in shopping malls, revamping the computer system, and moving 500,000 transactions online. With his “I’m on your side, folks” attitude, he touts the improvements promised in the MBTA’s five-year plan: 38 new locomotives, 75 new coaches, and refurbishment of the seats, air conditioning, and windows in 75 older coaches. He also points to global positioning system technology that will allow electronic signs to say with accuracy when the next train will arrive. All of those improvements, however, may have little effect on how many people take the train, says David Luberoff, executive director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and coauthor of Mega-Projects, a book about transportation initiatives. Commuter rail, he says, must be so convenient and enjoyable as to overcome the hassles associated with it – the need to use two, maybe three modes of transportation (car, train, and subway) for one journey, or having one’s routine dictated by the train schedule. And even if rail service manages to coax a significant number of drivers off the road, Luberoff says, other riders will take advantage of the improved traffic flow and jump on the road, replacing those who left.
“Investing in transit is not going to reduce congestion,” he says. “It’s just not going to happen.”
Luberoff aired his skepticism last spring in CommonWealth, a policy journal published by the nonpartisan think tank MassINC, decrying projects like the Greenbush Line as wrongheaded. “You’re going out to really, really low density places,” he says later. “Even if all those people work downtown, which they don’t, there’s still so few of them living near the rail lines, the ability to get a significant number of people on commuter rail is really minimal.”
Such thinking amounts to heresy, at least here in Massachusetts, where environmental activists wield considerable clout. “It was pretty clear that David was out to slaughter a sacred cow,” says Robert Keough, editor of CommonWealth. “People have very strong feelings about public transportation in these parts, and they were not at all happy to see the conventional wisdom challenged.” A sampling of those strong feelings emerged one night last fall in Andover, where the MBTA held one in a series of hearings on its five-year plan. After officials described its rundown of useful but not terribly inspiring projects, commuters asked for more. Peter Griffin, a former Brighton resident now living in New Hampshire, asked about extending lines to the Granite State. Martin Klein, a retired Andover engineer who uses the train occasionally, said, “I believe what we really need is a plan to cut, say, 20 percent of the traffic in the Boston area . . . rather than just putting Band-Aids on a system that isn’t even close to adequate.”
Doug Foy wasn’t at that meeting, but as secretary of the Executive Office for Commonwealth Development, he probably would have sympathized with, even encouraged, such pro-expansion views. When he was president of the Conservation Law Foundation, he persuaded the state – using the threat of litigation – to undertake several major transit projects to counterbalance the effects of extra automobile traffic on the Central Artery. When Romney tapped him to oversee state policy on transportation, the environment, housing, and energy, Foy brought with him his commitment to mass transit. Although he says commuter rail will ease highway congestion, he makes a broader economic argument: If more people can take the train to Boston from depressed towns like Fall River or New Bedford, more people will be likely to settle in those towns, which would lead to more home building, more shops, more local jobs. Call it a trickle-down theory of transportation.
Take Worcester. Since getting commuter rail service in 1994, the state’s second-biggest city has been slowly rebounding. The state’s largest development project outside of Boston is CitySquare, a mixed-use “urban village” of homes, shops, offices, and entertainment next to Worcester’s beautifully restored train station. Foy also points to Lowell, the fourth-biggest city and another served by the commuter rail, where closed-down mills have been reincarnated as offices and shops. “I’m not particularly enamored of the notion that we should be subsidizing the rich stockbroker to take the train from New Bedford,” Foy says. “But I am very interested in helping New Bedford rebuild itself. And if a transportation investment can do that for New Bedford … well then, that’s what the public should do.”
The state hasn’t committed to that $670 million project yet, though the MBTA has already spent about $39 million on design work and fixing bridges in anticipation of its approval. But Foy is already thinking beyond New Bedford, to a project that doesn’t even get a mention in the state’s wish list of transportation projects: extending the Worcester Line all the way to Springfield. If people like Brian Welch are contributing to Worcester’s revival by turning it into an affordable bedroom community of Boston, Foy wonders why the same thing can’t happen in Springfield. “It’s essentially in bankruptcy,” Foy says. “And it has a really amazing potential and a really amazing housing capacity to start to solve some of the affordability issues that the state faces right now.”
Sixteen years ago, when Foy was an environmental watchdog pressuring the state to undertake more transit projects, “the state” was transportation secretary Salvucci. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he wanted to appease the environmental lobby to avoid years of costly litigation over the impact of the Central Artery project on air quality. But he was also sympathetic to Foy’s agenda, and he committed the state to several transit projects – including the Greenbush Line – just before he and his boss, Michael Dukakis, left office.
To understand why, Salvucci invokes the Boston skyline as seen from MIT, where he now teaches transportation policy. When Governor Frank Sargent began shifting transportation dollars from highways to public transit in 1970, the business community predicted that downtown would be rendered a ghost town. Instead, today’s jagged profile is marked by buildings that sprang up in the ensuing years, and Salvucci believes that spending on transit, including commuter rail, fostered that growth by giving companies a reason to locate there.
That rationale persists today, he says. Better that a company move to an empty space in the city than knock down some trees along Route 128 or Interstate 495, build an office complex in an area accessible only by car, and add to the traffic jams on suburban roads. Commuter rail won’t cure or even ease congestion, he says, but it will allow Boston to grow without making congestion worse. “You can’t expect a business to locate in the South Boston waterfront district or in Kendall Square unless there are reasonable gateways to get there,” he says.
Salvucci isn’t as bullish as Foy is about extending the commuter rail system. A branch to Fall River and New Bedford is, he says, “a nice line on a map,” but he notes that the tracks would have to traverse a lot of wetlands, requiring elaborate efforts to limit environmental damage. He is more interested in adding more frequent service and stations to the existing spokes – for example, doubling the number of trains on the Worcester Line from 10 to 20 a day.
Still, both men share the same conviction that investing in public transportation pays huge dividends that have little to do with making the roads to Boston more passable. For Salvucci, the payoff would be a more vibrant and accessible Boston. For Foy, it would be a revival of the state’s smaller cities that have languished over the past half-century. But both men concede that their beliefs are just that – beliefs, based on circumstantial evidence and gut instincts. Salvucci concedes that he can’t prove the Boston skyline owes its shape to transit investments, and Foy makes the same admission about commuter rail’s impact on Worcester.
“Well, in order to prove it, you’d have to take the train service away,” Foy says. “But it’s very interesting to look at . . . these cities and juxtapose the ones that have transit with the ones that don’t. And when you do that, you’d be hard-pressed to find second-tier cities that are doing really, really well that lack train service.”
Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time that significant sums of public money were spent on faith. But now that the “Massachusetts miracle” of the 1980s and the boom economy of the 1990s are receding into memory, it’s worth asking whether more big transit projects are such a good thing, considering how many dollars they divert from other worthwhile programs or even from existing public transit. (Debt payments on big capital projects now consume more than a quarter of the MBTA’s annual budget.) Romney signaled his own doubts three years ago, when he temporarily halted design work on the Greenbush Line – one of the projects Salvucci promised Foy in 1990. Seven months later, Romney let the work proceed, though his decision may have had less to do with the project’s merits than with the consequences of breaking the 1990 legal agreement. (The Conservation Law Foundation sued anyway last year over other transit projects.) “The advocates will say, ‘If you build it, they will come,’ ” says Regan of the MBTA advisory board. “And the history of the last 15 years has been that they built it and people came. But they built it and people came and the T now has a very old fleet, and the age of the fleet shows up in service reliability. . . . People won’t ride something they don’t think they can depend on. We’ve got to focus first on making it dependable, making it exactly as advertised.”
But political campaigns run on big promises, not small fixes that keep a system running or make it just a little better. It’s hard to have a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new track signal.
The two-year decline in ridership could be temporary. But it also might be the start of a reckoning for a 368-mile system that has stretched itself too thin and let itself deteriorate. Think of it as a yellow light on the tracks ahead, warning the politicians, the planners, and especially the taxpayers to take it slow.