The MBTA: How We Broke America's First Subway (And How to Fix It)

0:00 This was what commuting in Boston looked like in the 1900s. Boston had just built the first subway station in North America. By its first year, it had 50 million passengers. That was almost 130 years ago. But today, "Ladies and gentlemen, we are momentarily held. Signals cut, snow interferes with the rails, and for a transit system that serves millions of passengers, there's a whole lot of frustration. I'm Burhan Azeez. I'm vice mayor of Cambridge, and I'm running for state Senate to represent Cambridge, Somerville, Medford, and Winchester because I believe that we can have a radically better T. In 1947, the government published a vision for an expanded T stretching from Lexington to Lynn to Dedham. It would be fast and reliable. So much so that you could get across the state without ever setting foot in a car. The commission didn't mince words. "Rapid transit must be extended," they wrote. "Otherwise, it would add to the already intolerable traffic conditions in downtown Boston."

0:58 So, what happened? In 1956, Eisenhower passed the Highway Act, pouring money into road construction. People bought cars and moved to the suburbs. Train ridership fell, and the T shrank. Demolitions to build these roads disproportionately affected lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color, increasing pollution while tearing down public trust. In response, communities organized, passing laws making it nearly impossible to build anything at all from transit to housing and utilities. That was an understandable instinct at the time, but many of those same laws are still on the books today, yes, stopping bad things from happening, but also stopping the good things. The Red Line, for example, was supposed to extend into Arlington in the 1970s. But after massive community opposition, Arlington had the state pass a bill prohibiting the building of any transit facility. It was only repealed in 2024. Everything that is happening now, the affordability crisis, the housing crisis, the transportation crisis, the utility crisis is because building good things has become too hard. Those laws, once passed to protect our communities, have impeded our ability to grow and build infrastructure to account for what our people need today.

2:13 Before we can talk about the solutions, we need to dig into the problems. First, the MBTA is $5.2 billion in debt. How? Prior to 2000, the T was funded by the state. It used its revenues to pay for what was needed. But if the T's funding fell short, the state picked up the rest of the bill. In 2000, the governor changed how he funded the T, so it would instead get a lump sum every year. 1 cent on every 6.25 cents collected by the sales tax. And it had to figure out what to do with the rest.

2:44 Any additional funding had to be approved by the state legislature on a case-by-case basis. But not everyone in the state legislature represented constituents who live near a T station. At the same time, the state had debts that it shifted to the T, leaving it financially impaired from the get-go. It was set up for failure. Let's look at the current debts for the T. $1.85 billion in operating shortfall since 2000, $1.65 billion from prior transit projects. And most importantly, $1.7 billion from the Big Dig, the most expensive highway project in American history. The T got stuck with the bill. Today, a quarter of every dollar the MBTA collects goes straight to paying its debt. It's basically far enough for public transit. In 2022, when the Federal Transit Administration audited the MBTA, what they found was bad enough that officials didn't know where to begin. The prevailing view was to distrust government bureaucrats. And to outsource the work to consultants. So that's what the T did, spending millions of dollars, which we already know the T didn't have. The consultants found that workers weren't being properly trained, and there weren't enough of them. Then almost nothing from a 2019 safety audit had been fixed. I mean, I'm not a consultant, but duh. The MBTA had paid to diagnose the same problems twice.

4:04 Then there were the trains themselves. Some were so old the original manufacturers no longer existed. The MBTA was fabricating its own replacement parts. The MBTA launched a bidding process for new trains. The lowest bid came from CRRC, China Railroad Rolling Stock Corporation, at 200 million under the MBTA's estimate. At this time, transit funding was not popular. It was hard to convince politicians need to pay for these trains. CRRC promised to build the shells in China and build an assembly factory in Springfield. It became a climate program, and a jobs program, and an anti-poverty program.

4:40 The idea was that Massachusetts would become a manufacturing hub for trains. These are all laudable goals, but we're not known for building trains, and adding these additional goals on the T when it was already struggling meant that it was set up for failure. The new trains arrived late and defective. There were door malfunctions, battery explosions, and derailments. By the time the problems were clear, the MBTA was locked in. The total cost ballooned to another 500 million dollars. After these disasters, there was finally some political momentum to fix the T. It got emergency funding and bigger budget packages than we've seen in years. It brought in new leadership. Thank you, Feline. For the first time in decades, the MBTA has eliminated all slow zones.

5:26 New trains are running, and sometimes they're even on time. That's a start, but what comes next? The MBTA's 24 and a half billion-dollar repair backlog won't fix itself, and it's actually getting worse every year, not better. It won't be fixed by consultants or unfocused mandates. I have a plan for how we, you and I, can get the T back on track. First, we focus on making the MBTA the best way to get around. The single biggest measure of success should be, is this the best at getting you where you need to go? The T will become a climate program if it works and more people take it. It will become a good jobs program if the T expands and needs to hire. But we have to set up the T for success by achieving its primary goal, getting you from point A to point B, no questions asked. Second, we have to hire people in-house. We build the right team with people committed to solving the problem, like Phil Eng. No more expensive outsourcing just to be told what we already know. Montreal built a world-class metro by hiring the right people with deep expertise. They had the same team with a singular goal, build the next station faster than the last one. After that, it all gets easier. We standardize the station design, have the same team building the next station every 6 months. With each build, we'll get better. We'll get the parts for cheaper. We'll get better at digging.

6:45 We'll have a more robust supply chain. It will become easier over time. We also have to align incentives. We need a government that wants the T to work. Right now, the T is funded by a state sales tax, but it always falls short, always needs more funding. That funding requires convincing legislators whose constituents don't live near a T stop to keep the lights on in Metro Boston. LA solved a version of this. In 2008, voters passed measure R, a half-cent sales tax dedicated entirely to transportation for 30 years. That measure was so successful, they passed measure M, another half-cent sales tax that removed the 30-year restriction altogether. They raised $2 billion a year. That funds new lines and new buses built by the people who use them, funded by the people who benefit. We need to shift the power to the people who will benefit. We could give governance to the metro area rather than the state, #megaboston.

7:39 We need a government that wants the T to work. Eliminating funding fights, then we can enact a 2 cent metro sales tax for everyone in the MBTA service region that will raise billions for projects every year that can fund the Red-Blue Connector, the Grand Junction, or finally build the North and South Connector. We can increase efficiency on construction by passing laws designed to streamline the process. People are getting pushed out of the metro and into surrounding suburbs because of housing costs. But, the metro area is where the jobs are, so people still need to get to work. They commute to work because we do not have an expanding metro system. This results in people having to drive longer and worse traffic. Housing, transit, cost of living, they're actually all the same issues. We need someone who understands how these policies relate and how to implement real solutions.

8:32 That's why I'm running for State Senate. I believe in a better T, and most importantly, I have a plan to get us there. And I hope after this video, you do too.