Eric Bourassa
If you think the new T fare increase will bring improved service, think again.
The most recent hike approved by the MBTA board of directors is the third in six years. Across the system, riders will pay about 30 percent more for the same unreliable service.
While the T has taken promising steps to be more accountable to the public, the sad truth behind the rash of fare hikes is that nothing has been done to stabilize the T's long-term financial problems.
At the board meeting, MBTA general manager Dan Grabauskas noted that the T is "broke," which likely means further fare increases are on the way.
At the heart of the problem is that the T spends more than a quarter of its budget paying off $5 billion of debt, much of which was a result of the Big Dig. A federal requirement was that in order to offset the increased pollution from traffic, the region needed to expand its public transit options - think Silver Line, Greenbush commuter rail and others. Ordinarily, federal money would have paid for those projects, but as the Big Dig went billions over budget, it swallowed up those dollars.
So now we have T riders footing the bill for a project that encourages people to get in their cars and drive.
Until this debt problem is solved, the MBTA will continue to request rate hikes to bridge its operating deficits, and will do nothing to address the backlog of needed service improvements.
But continued fare hikes are not the solution and will jeopardize our public transit system at a time when we ought to be growing it.
Fares have doubled since 2000. As a result, ridership has stagnated or declined. The state has consigned the T to a downward spiral in which fare hikes discourage ridership, which leads to more deficits that get addressed through further fare increases.
The MBTA must encourage ridership through improved reliability, better service, more access, and reasonable fares. At the same time, the T needs to be more efficient by increasing fare recovery ratios, and keeping labor and operating costs down. But don't expect the T's woes to improve until its Big Dig debt is removed.
Eric Bourassa is a consumer advocate with MassPIRG.
