(The following article by Mac Daniel was posted on the Boston Globe website on May 2.)
BOSTON — The previous two MBTA fare increases were changed after a series of public hearings, and while T officials said that last week’s proposed across-the-system hikes are fair, they are prepared to reduce them if faced with enough opposition.
And opposition is gathering.
Political leaders said yesterday that the MBTA is proposaing a fare hike at a time of high gas prices and an unstable oil market that the T should be exploiting to attract riders, rather than scaring them away with a fare hike.
”In an ideal situation, this would be a great opportunity for the MBTA,” said Paul Regan, executive director of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Advisory Board, which is made up of the towns and cities served by the transit agency, ”but they just don’t have the cash.”
In Somerville, with some of the highest T ridership numbers in the Commonwealth, Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone said, ”This is a time when the T has a general opportunity to increase ridership, and I hope that opportunity is being closely scrutinized and analyzed.”
”The T will also have to demonstrate these increased fees will result in expanded capacity and service,” he said.
T General Manager Daniel A. Grabauskas said the public hearing process will allow riders to express concern over the fare hike while T officials attempt to explain its necessity. In the end, he said, the public can influence the final numbers.
In 2003, when the last fare increase proposal was made, bus fares were raised from 75 cents to $1 but later dropped to 90 cents after transit advocates said the hike unfairly targeted transit-dependent communities. In September 2000, fares were raised for the first time in nine years, from 60 cents to 75 cents for bus passengers and from 85 cents to $1 for subway riders, though the T bowed to pressure and added free bus-to-bus transfers to sweeten the deal.
”What was originally proposed was not what was finally approved” during the last two fare increases, Regan said. ”The amount could drop. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
The T announced its second fare hike in three years last week, raising subway fares from $1.25 to $1.70 and bus fares from 90 cents to $1.25, depending on whether passengers pay using the new automated fare system expected to be ready by year’s end. Those who don’t use the new CharlieCard automated fare system will be charged more and won’t be allowed free local transfers from bus to rail and bus to bus, as users of the CharlieCard will be. Commuter rail fares are also slated to jump.
This increase, proposed to take effect in January 2007, is intended to help the MBTA with its debt and offset lagging ridership and rising fuel costs.
As the T’s ridership is rising only slightly and as state sales tax revenues that fund the T are stagnant, meeting rising debt payments is critical for the agency, which carries the highest debt burden of any transit authority in the nation.
The T’s debt payment in fiscal 2007 jumps $43 million while the fiscal 2008 payments jump $35 million, Grabauskas said.
Former governor Michael S. Dukakis called the fare hike ”utter madness.”
”Gas prices are now $3 a gallon for regular,” he wrote in an e-mail. ”Yet, here in Massachusetts where we are blessed with what could be the best public transportation system in the country, we seem to be doing everything we can to drive people away from the T.
”It is now clear, as it should have been at the time it happened, that tying the T to one penny on the sales tax as its principal revenue source was a terrible mistake. The T is a public service, just like our highways. It is a critically important piece of our metropolitan and state economy. It needs expansion, not contraction.”
Representative Joseph F. Wagner, Democrat of Chicopee and house chairman of the Joint Committee on Transportation, said the T’s finances and large debt load make this fare increase almost inevitable.
”I just don’t think anyone could look at the numbers and say there’s enough revenue there,” he said. ”Sometimes you have to do the unpopular thing.”