Boston subway system shut down for 36 hours

by philg

Boston’s MBTA bus, subway, and rail system shut down due to the snow for about 36 hours. The New York Times article on the system characterized it as “underfunded.” This is a system that is paying pensions for a lot of folks who retired at age 41 under the recently abandoned “23-and-out” rule (Boston Globe) and pays bus drivers about $100 per hour to work at night (boston.com). When Jesse on Breaking Bad ran out of money buying strippers and drugs for all of his friends, was he “underfunded”?

Let’s suppose that the New York Times is right and the MBTA actually does have less funding per passenger than other systems. What to do about it? I vote for congestion pricing for cars and give the money to the MBTA so that it can pay all of those retired bus drivers and also push the snow off the tracks.

What do readers think? Is the impending insolvency of the MBTA due to its pension commitments and debt service enough to motivate Bostonians to go where no other U.S. city has gone?

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4 thoughts on “Boston subway system shut down for 36 hours”

  1. Modern mass transit is a difficult issue. At one time, subways were profit making businesses so they were run like any other business – salaries and pensions were limited by the amount of revenue you could raise thru fares. But at some point, mass transit was no longer a viable business, and yet you can’t have a big city (esp. one like Boston with tiny colonial streets) without it. The difference between farebox revenues and expenses is made up by the government but the level of subsidy is a political,not economic, decision.

    Usually what is needed is more capital spending to replace the now 100 year old infrastructure (and even a lot of capital spending gets diverted to inflated union construction wages, etc. so you get very little bang for your buck) but anytime more revenue is made available, it tends to get diverted to paying higher wages and pensions and the infrastructure remains shortchanged. All money is fungible, so the idea that you have some income stream that is dedicated just to capital spending is just window dressing. This just means that the remaining income stream will be dedicated even more to higher labor costs.

    One possibility is to privatize the system by bidding for whoever will run it for the lowest fixed subsidy given certain fare and quality of service parameters. But unions are politically powerful and don’t like that idea. Nor is it all that easy to put in place.

  2. That public employees have compensation and retirement packages ludicrously unthinkable in the private sector hasn’t been newsworthy for decades.

    BOSTON being unprepared for SNOW in FEBRUARY is still kinda surprising, though.

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