Bus
TransitMatters
TransitMatters Reveals The MBTA's Slowest And ...

[The Pokey/Schleppie Awards] identifies the most unreliable routes and suggests bus priority infrastructure implementations, operations modernization, and policy and planning changes to create a better bus network for riders.

TransitMatters Reveals The MBTA's Slowest And Most Bunched Buses
Public Comment
TransitMatters
TransitMatters Director's Public Comment At ...

“I'm excited to see [the Low Income Fare] program increase access, change lives, and save riders and the Commonwealth money.”

TransitMatters Director's Public Comment At March 2024 MBTA Board Meeting
Public Comment
TransitMatters
TransitMatters Executive Director's Speech At ...

“The lack of sustainable, long-term funding hurts the ability of public transit to operate, plan, or build efficiently. I hope that the recently announced task force will give us some of those options to fully fund public transit.”

TransitMatters Executive Director's Speech At Governor Healey's Press Conference
TransitMatters
Valentines For Transit Workers

Join TransitMatters in showing our appreciation for transit workers by giving Valentine’s Day cards to frontline transit workers on February 14!

Valentines For Transit Workers
Commuter Rail, Advocacy
TransitMatters
2023 Regional Rail Retrospective

As Regional Rail gains momentum, we at TransitMatters are fine-tuning our advocacy strategy to keep pressure on the state and T to invest in the system.

2023 Regional Rail Retrospective

Massachusetts

,

When Does "Operational Efficiency" Mean a Better MBTA?

,
When Does "Operational Efficiency" Mean a Better MBTA?

Recently, a certain lobbying group has been arguing that the MBTA shouldn't be judged by how many people use it to get around, but rather by how many dollars it costs to run a vehicle for an hour or a mile. This cost per mile argument follows on the heels of their recently debunked assertion the that T is overfunded as compared to other transit agencies when looking at cost per trip. Those cost per trip comparisons didn't really make sensebecause they tried to compare the T to transit systems which provide vastly different services, which require different levels of investment to serve different populations (i.e., some agencies run only local bus or rail service, while the T does all of those, plus regional commuter rail, express buses, ferries, etc.).

So let’s address the cost per mile metric...

, , , , , ,

UPDATE: NYC Donates Snow Fighting Equipment; Governor Releases $30 Billion Plan

, , , , , ,
UPDATE: NYC Donates Snow Fighting Equipment; Governor Releases $30 Billion Plan

Spring has sprung today for transit as NYC MTA CEO Thomas Prendergast announced a small donation of snow fighting equipment and the Governor announced a commitment of $30 billion over 15 years to drastically upgrade the MBTA's infrastructure and equipment.

,

Scott’s Resignation a Wake Up Call for Massachusetts

,
Scott’s Resignation a Wake Up Call for Massachusetts

MBTA GM Beverly Scott, PhD, delivered an impassioned speech earlier this week  [Photo via Boston Globe]

We’ve seen it before: the highly qualified leader of a beleaguered transit agency gets fed up with state politics getting in the way of him/her doing his/her job and resigns.

Take Jay Walder, former CEO of Hong Kong MTR, former Managing Director for Finance and Planning of Transport for London, and current CEO of Motivate, the company that manages Hubway. When he resigned as NYC MTA CEO back in 2011, it was not merely to take the job at HK MTR that paid 3 times as much. His resignation followed significant difficulty with indifferent politicians and seemed to be punctuated by his last in-person encounter with Governor Cuomo: getting passed over after travelling to the governor's office. Unlike here where the seat of state government is less than a kilometre away from transit headquarters, Walder had travelled to the capitol 2.5 hours by train upstate to see the governor.