We had a town fight over a new library that I think illustrates a fundamental tension, at least in MA public projects.
- The town got a state grant to help build a new library - most of it would be other people's money.
- The town could have used a new library - the old one was small, cramped for its basic purposes, and underutilized compared to neighboring towns.
- The new plan was _beautiful_ - and expensive! It would still require a non-trivial amount of our money, partly because of how big the scope was. It was "future proofed" - we'd never need a new library again.
Since we're a town and not a city, this was the subject of a town meeting, in which there were two sides:
- People who didn't want the library because they didn't want to spend money. Their view was that the current library was totally fine, so they'd rather not pay higher taxes.
- People who wanted the new library. Their view was that the cost was small compared to the benefit.
These two groups were disjoint, and I think that's also how a project like GLX can get off the rails.
The people who want beautiful stations and bike paths are probably not fiscal hawks. They're not super concerned about the price - MA is already an expensive blue state, we all knew that coming in, and it's important to have nice public infrastructure.
The people who don't want to pay don't want to pay _anything_. They're not super concerned about the benefit, the whole project can be canceled and that's even more winning because it's even less money spent. MA is already an expensive blue state, so the right thing is to oppose everything.
The problem we have is that there's no overlap - there's no one going "yes we really should do the GLX, but also I really don't want my taxes to go up, so can we cut GLX to something minimal and not keep adding to it"?
The political constituency in MA who would say "this is too expensive" isn't necessarily motivated to show up and try to make the GLX a better value by proposing more cost-efficient changes along the way - they're motivated to try to get the thing canceled, or ignore it in the hope that it topples under its own weight.
Median family income for MA: $79k vs Kansas: $58k. I'm not sure exactly what income metric was used for WalletHub, but the WalletHub adjusted tax burden is within 1% for Kansas vs MA, where-as the median income in MA is like 36% higher.
It's not a bad thing, and one would have to be insane to say "no, I don't want biotech" or any of the other industries that drive job growth in the Boston metro area.
But I do worry that it can be an _enabling_ thing. You can have escalating home prices and a lack of building and it'll "be okay" because some people will have the incomes to afford the high prices and others will just have hellish commutes.
Then one day you wake up and you're the bay area and prices are completely insane and everyone has so much home equity tied up at the elevated prices that I don't know how you come back down.
So I worry that MA's high paying jobs could enable a California-style housing crisis.
Does MA have any policies artificially lowering housing costs for certain residents, like Prop 13 or rent control/stabilization? If not, or if the policies are limited in scope, I don't think you have as much to worry about.
When I was a kid my mother took me around when she went knocking on doors to try to get an override passed so that our school could remain funded. At age 8 or so I did understand why these people (in very expensive houses with no kids) were _so_ angry to hear from her.
The override failed and our school didn't have a librarian for a few years, despite being in a town with some crazy high medium income.
In the Boston suburbs, it's zoning, not rent control that keeps the housing supply low. You can zone for no condos, no apartment buildings, no duplexes, etc. and eventually you just can't build anything else - in some towns the development is just _bigger_ houses, driven by the high land values, which doesn't get you more capacity.
It's not _not_ an expensive blue state. :-). That wallet hub list is ranking of tax to personal income, so a state's tax burden appears to be lower as long as everyone has more money.
Which is literally true, I suppose. But the Boston area also has expensive housing, and thus higher cost of living, and companies have to pay more.
So I'd argue we are an expensive blue state - it's more expensive to live here than other parts of the country, and our tax burden scales up to match that without showing up as a red flag on that list.
(Of coarse, it depends on which way you look - I thought having Kansas ranked lower than MA doesn't really capture the real experience of the two states. But yeah, we got nothing on NY!)
I wonder if, additionally, the high-cost crowd would also rather see the stations canceled, than get something they see as substandard? In a proper compromise, the high-cost crowd would trade off some elaborate amenities to get the no-cost crowd to grudgingly accept the project, but I wonder if the all-or-nothing attitude of the Left would have them hold out for every possible bike and ADA related feature until the project collapsed of its own weight.
Good question...in the case of our local library, my neighborhood was all in the "yes" category, and we had the attitude of wanting the project to have been scoped smaller so that it wold have passed - we would gladly have taken a bird in the hand. But our case might be weird because there's external funding coming in, and frankly I'm not sure how much the "no" attitude would have been defanged by cutting scope. Maybe at some insane ratio of state funding to local it'd be hard to say "no".
GLX might be different if constituencies arguing to drive up cost all have their own pet projects - "I don't need the whole thing to be a boondoggle, but I'm an activist for my one pet cause X, so my X has to be included."
In other words, on the expense-increasing side the problem might not be entirely one of 'no compromise' so much as different factions having different "most important" issue.
The development process in blue states have a lot of veto points, so if you gotta have your pet issue or nothing, there are mechanisms to advocate for that.
If SFMTA has taught me anything, it’s that elevators and escalators will inevitably be broken half the time, and should only be integrated into a design when absolutely necessary. Nominal ADA compliance is asymptotic to *actual* ADA compliance.
In the Union Square example you cite (requiring elevators instead of ramps) the inevitable long-term effect is to render these stations unreliable for people who cannot use stairs (folks in wheelchairs, etc) and force them into navigating a Swiss cheese system of “which elevators aren’t working today?” where they have to travel to additional redundant stops or bus lines and then circle back to their intended destination.
You're not wrong, but SFMTA and BART's elevator/escalator issues are insanely pathological _even by the standards of public transit systems in the US_. I think the 24/Mission street escalator was fully functional for maybe 2 out of the 8 years that I lived in that neighborhood.
I fully expect the current expanding corruption scandal in SF to touch on this eventually.
On an unrelated note, I’m baffled by the difference in escalator etiquette (right side for standing, left side for climbing) between BART and Muni riders, even within the same station. BARTers seem to sort themselves pretty well into passive and active lanes, but Muni escalators are constantly clogged. I can think of plenty of plausible reasons for this (commuters vs tourists, etc) but the starkness of difference gets me every time.
This is the kind of shit that just makes me nuts. How do you tell a small-government person that "no really, government isn't inefficient!" when this kind of waste is happening? It's maddening. What are we doing?
I lived blocks from the future Union Square station on the GLX for 10 years and was on the Mayor of Somerville's committee to advise on development related to it, and a co-founder of a Neighborhood Council for the neighborhood to hand that work off to. Your choice of Union Square, in particularly, is a poor one.
In Brookline, per your example, Boston's existing Green Line trams run at grade as basically another, physically protected two lanes of traffic. The stops are close together. It acts as a bus that later goes underground and integrates with a subway system.
The GLX, however, is being constructed 100 below grade, in an uncovered below grade "deep ditch" route used by the MBTA's commuter rail. The "ditch" is being widened in places, the bridges exapnded / reinforced / replaced as needed, and the commuter rail tracks must be lifted from the center position and put on one side to accommodate the laying of the GLX tracks. This whole system is "above ground", but in a cut below grade.
This means, though, that the major commercial centers through which the GLX cuts have artificial hills built 100 years ago that cross up and over the grade. Sometimes that is just 1 road that makes the "hop" but in Union Square it's two that cross each other in an "X" at the apex of the "fake hill". The gradient on these roads are quite steep since they were built prior to the ADA, and they are on bridges that are the property of a state agency outside of the MBTA and the City of Somerville. They get icy. It gets dicey.
The purpose of the more complicated stations what to allow passengers to get to grade at the top of the hill and/or provide more direct access to the south side of the tracks. Currently the only entrance/exit, regardless of whether you are going inbound or outbound, will be on the north side of the tracks.
This is all important because this station abuts three major neighborhoods: Somerville's Union Square, which has direct access because it is to the north, and Somerville's Boynton Yards, where there are already a number of new lab and office buildings underway, and Cambridge's Inman Square which abuts Kendall Square, which is world famous for the amount of health science companies it houses.
The life science corridor from Kendall is reaching very quickly towards Union Square, but it is now basically cut off from this station from the south. The only route requires a person coming from the south, if they were standing within yards of the station, to walk up and over the significant grade and the once at level grade at the next intersection (well past the station) to double back. Total extra distance is about 0.4 miles.
This is a usability killer for transit. The jobs are there and more are coming. More workers for them are moving to these neighborhoods every day. Will they bring their cars? That depends on wither developers overbuild the parking. And at this point, the developers see these details and want to include more spaces in their plans to be able to entice new residents. The developers want to provide spaces because they fear residents will demand it. The people then bring/get/use cares because they get free parking. It's a bad cycle.
And although Union Square is the most glaring example of this, there are similarities within other stations on the GLX.
Believe me, I was among those arguing to abandon the stations if that was what it took to get the GLX. But these are not just "fancy stations". They have a point.
The real culprit is that 20+ years ago the MBTA was cut, and as a result unexperienced novices were left in charge of procurement for the project and got rolled. Because it was a project based on establishing equity for Somerville, which bore the traffic brunt of the Big Dig's driving expansion and used to be majority minority, Deval Patrick basically wrote a blank check because he was dedicated to get it done. A perfect storm!
Even once the fancy stations were removed the budget was still insane and many of use feared the project would STILL be killed. What saved it was having the whole enterprise re-bid. And my then, so much nonsense was baked in because construction was already in progress, that the only options left to significantly reduce costs were those elements that come at the very end of the project and therefore had not started yet. The stations were the biggest piece of this, and the most visible (so that the current governor, GOP Charlie Baker, could show that they were "doing something". In reality, the stations are a sacrificial lamb here. Don't blame them. It's not fair.
I just read the full report that you linked to. I had not had a chance when I made my initial comments.
I don't mean to be overly critical, because you are making a valid point. Prior to my decade living in Somerville, I liked in Manhattan for over a decade, so I was a first-hand witness ALSO to the overbuilding of the post-9/11 Path and Fulton Street subway stations. Those were designed first as commercial real estate deals and second as transit hubs. Add federal funds post 9/11, and that's where it led. I am entirely with you!
However, the section in the report on the stations ("Big, Expensive Everything: Stations" pages 42-50), is only 9 pages long and only half about the stations. The other half is about the Community Path, which I had forgotten to mention.
The outright addition of the Community Transit Path to the GLX project was a 1000% worthwhile endeavor. As the report mentioned, that is actually the part of the while project that will be used more frequently by people actually living in Somerville. It completes a MAJOR bike network to the north and west of Boston and will encourage cycling because a section where bikers need to take to the streets will be replaced with a separated path that cuts straight to downtown Boston.
Unfortunately, it was not in the initial cost estimate. This is because this project has been planned for so long now that what society values has shifted. Climate Change is something cities and (blue) states are now actively trying to grasp with. That was not true back then. Racial and economic equity have come more to the fore, so now planners need to incorporate these elements into planning. It's the baseline number that was wrong in the end, for these reasons.
By contrast to the 9 pages on building in "extras", the section related to Procurement, Contract Management, and Project Management runs 16 pages ("Managing the Managers: Project Management and Delivery" pages 26-41). I feel vindicated!
It is the way American politics intrude on being able to manage these projects. It all began when Gov. William Weld gutted the agency in the 90s, and spiraled from there. The man that did the gutting: his budget director Charlie Baker, current governor. The last Dem governor: Deval Patrick, who, along with US Rep Mike Capuano (who is from Somerville) decided that the priority was on getting the project far enough along so that it could not be killed, out of fear of Baker, who did eventually win.
The procurement, the contracts, and the project management all suffered from this conflict. If we could "just agree to build, then plan, then fund, then build" these types of projects, in a straight line, we'd be better off.
Finally, I want to both be fair and unfair to you, since I reread your post as part of this:
"To be clear, this station bloat is not the whole cause of the cost overruns that nearly derailed the project. But what’s striking about it is that it’s so willful and so dumb. Nobody who had ever seen a Green Line surface station could possibly have had a good faith belief that this was necessary."
Your acknowledge the complexity of it all, so thank you. However, you fail by calling this a "Green Line Surface Station". The GLX is a misnomer. It IS an extension but the modality is as far off from the C line trolley running down Beacon Avenue in Brookline as the Brookline stop are from the underground subway stop downtown. Does the Park Street station that connects to the Red Line and is underground need to be different from a simple elongated bus shelter? Absolutely. The same is true of the GLX stations. As you said, the Green Line is weird.
This is probably more than I have ever commented online, but I have read you for years and appreciate this new effort and know that you are generally a man who understands complexity and nuance. I never would have bothered to write this, say, at Marginal Revolution.
I appreciate it when someone who a) has expert knowledge and b) was on the inside of this planning process takes the time to share that knowledge with the rest of us—I learned from Erik’s post.
If you don’t want to read a long post, it’s easy to skip it! And kinder to everyone, yourself included.
Your photos of the Brookline/Newton stations are even being too generous. most of the surface stops, especially along B and C lines, have no structure whatsoever, just a sign where the T stops and opens its doors. You pay on board. The huts are already for fancy major stops!
Great piece. Transit authorities seem to want to build stations that look like airports. But the nature of airports is that people spend a lot of time there, hours, sometimes many hours. People generally spend no more than a few minutes in a transit station. If they don’t have a place to sit or there isn’t much shelter, it jut doesn’t matter.
Yeah, in the DC area they were hyping up the fact that they had outlets at a certain number of train stations. Totally nice in a vacuum, but if you're waiting around for a train long enough to charge your phone then there are bigger problems at hand.
As long as we’re wondering what’s going on, I would love to know why DC’s indoor stations are all so dark. Surely decent lighting isn’t that expensive!
I'll recommend the fantastic "The Great Society Subway" by Zachary Schrag to answer any questions about "why is metro that way?" Basically, if I remember correctly, they're dark because designer Harry Weese wanted them that way. In recent years much of the underground Blue and Orange line stations have been brightened with new LED lights, but the last time I took the Red line it was still the original dark style.
I think the emergence of Urbanism as a "prestige hobby" creates a kind of conceptual inflation as well. Too much brainpower chasing too little real need. Its not clear the consultant grifting would find so much purchase were there not such an intellectual market for it
I can compare the stations of the subway systems of Lisbon, Amsterdam and Berlin from when I lived there. Lisbon and Amsterdam have small subways with large to very large stations, especially newer ones, while Berlin has a large subway system with frequent and small stations without centralised entrances, automatic gates or even ticket selling machines in most of them.
It is not just that small stations are easier to build and you can build more of them with the same budget, it’s also that small stations are much more ergonomic. Large stations create unnecessary commute time inside the station, the time wasted going through the station paired with the fact that larger stations are always further apart, means that an Uber/taxi ride is much more appealing in Lisbon and Amsterdam than in Berlin.
Transit attractiveness varies wildly based on journey time, the size and complexity of a station can increase that time by a lot in short trips or longer trips when you need to switch lines.
I must say that as someone who lives around the corner from one of the new Green Line station, I liked the nicer ones better and think they would have been worth it. But your essential point surely remains: Given a political reality that won’t raise taxes to fund high quality infrastructure, I’m much happier with stripped-down stations than I would have been with the project’s cancellation.
@ David: Serious question: why would it have been worth it? Would there have been an improvement in service? I ask this as both a long time Massachusetts resident (and one time fairly frequent T rider) and a public sector fan in general. But I got zero problem with strictly functional, utilitarian infrastructure, if it gets the job done and (as in this case) it makes affordable and feasible an otherwise unaffordable and infeasible project.
(But there may well be a level of functionality the more expensive station would have provided I'm not aware of, hence my question). Don't disagree that Union Square proposed station *looks* awfully nice, though.
The access issues for the Union Square station described by another commenter are exactly right. But even beyond that, have you noticed that private businesses don’t put their offices in the cheapest structures they can build, but rather think it worthwhile to pay for (often much) nicer facilities? I think they are right to do so. Nicer spaces and architecture are valuable because they elevate the people in them, and the space around them—they make us happier, more creative, and more productive. You may not see the value, but private businesses spending their own money sure do.
Right?!? :-). My first apartment was a few blocks from one of the new stops and when I see that shiny station some part of me just goes "yeah, that would have been really nice."
But...when the plans get discussed and you see the pics, no one ever draws that diagram with a $100 bill in the center and the shiny station, the budget station, the easter bunny and Santa Clause on the sides and goes "who gets the money? the budget station because the other three things on this picture are just fantasies."
David, I'm curious how you think having the GLX get canceled and then re-booted affected opinion of it in Somerville and Medford? E.g. is the view more of "why are we getting so much less than we were promised" or "we're lucky to get an extension at all"? (Or just "man the MBTA is a hotmess"? :-)
I am definitely in the “we’re lucky to get anything at all“ camp. And I bet if they hadn’t already poured so much concrete they’d be canceling it now. I think folks who are paying less attention are mostly flabbergasted that the price could vary so dramatically, up and then back down.
Your point about the contractors and such still being able to do (and charge for) the same amount of work if there's less grift involved is powerful.
Your final point about "what are we doing here?" also basically haunts me. When the politicians and unions treat transit like a way to make visual statements or like a jobs program, everyone who actually relies on transit to get places suffers, and it's awful.
The 86th St station in NYC, part brutalist airport & Chuck Close exhibition, is perhaps my favorite public space in the city. And a perfect example of everything wrong with our transit spend for the reasons outlined.
Never thought I’d see a DC-based political journalist write about the little hut at the Newton Centre T stop. Very cool! There is something nice about that station where you basically just walk right up to the train (its outdoors, not far below street level, and no turn-styles). It’s very well integrated into the surrounding environment, as opposed to “you are now the entering the train station” kind of vibe (especially at the DC metro stations). Would be cool if that’s replicated in Union Square, etc.
I do think that things like bike parking, and even public bathrooms (cities just need more in general) are nice to have from a customer experience standpoint. But I imagine those aren’t the most expensive part of the plans. If the goal is to get people out of their cars, planning these stations needs to have a “human-centered design” component where it is simple and seamless to use. It sounds fancy and consultant-y, but that could mean a lot of really cheap design tweaks or actually simplifying the design of the station.
My guess is that American planners (outside NYC) feel that each time they build a new rail station they need to “sell it” to people in the area to convince them it’s a better way to travel than what they did before (usually cars). It would make more sense to just focus on putting it in a good location and making the trains run on time and frequently. But certain design tweaks — like secure bike parking or protection from bad weather — could outweigh their cost by attracting more loyal riders. I don’t think a fancy mezzanine is going to pay for itself by attracting more loyal riders.
As a follow-up to my long rant, one expensive thing that I think we should spend more $ on is more station entrances/exits. It can drastically increase the # of people who live within a reasonable walking distance of that station, which could lead to a lot more riders and pay for itself down the line. In Hong Kong some of the stations have like 15 exits!
I was really surprised to see that public bathrooms made it into the station proposals - I think _none_ of the non-commuter-rail stations in the system have that, so it seemed like sort of obvious scope creep.
How do you disincentivize dumb? What’s the oversight mechanism/feedback loop to get this under control? If we just rely on the self awareness of individual bureaucrats then we may as well call it quits.
Any structural ideas here?
Asking for a friend who is horrified by the $29 billion gateway proposal.
What's frustrating about the entire debate here is that the thing that is supposed to disincentivize dumb _is the cost_. Given a choice between a $30 Billion project that accomplishes X and a $3 Billion project that also accomplishes X, you would normally expect any sane person to maybe take 3 minutes out of their life to laugh heartily at the $30B proposal before moving along.
I had a comment on the bad interest rate predictions thread that’s a corollary to this. That if I had a model predictably wrong in the same way over and over I’d be fired ... yet the interest rate forecast errors persist. Some things seem to be just structurally broken in a way I can’t quite comprehend
Lol yes that should be the thing. People still do dumb things anyway. Can we fire them? Can we make it more transparent so that we know who to fire? Which country has the easiest to replicate planning process so that we can implement it here?
In the way we need to remove veto points from housing planning we need to remove individual actors/decision points here too.
I’m also curious if this particular project would, even at an insane price, still have positive roi. Would it make gateway a good project in that case? In a vacuum yes, but on an opportunity cost basis compared to the multiple line extensions you could for that much? Idk
If politicians could get behind a lot of infill development I bet a lot of overpriced transit would still have positive roi. On a purely cost benefit basis, I wonder if density (good) would make cost controls even less important (bad). I guess I should have asked how we get a system interested in maximizing returns on transit investment at a system level in addition to per project basis.
Then again, so much dumb stuff to eliminate before we have to think too hard
Yes a little analysis goes a long way. Cost benefit estimates should def be required. This is in part why gateway hasn’t been funded. It unfortunately didn’t bring the cost down, just means it simply isn’t happening. What’s locking the system in place to make it say gateway needs federal support bc it’s too expensive for states but not ask if we can do it more cheaply?
It's something Massachusetts_ does on a regular basis - we bring in a moderate Republican to get the fiscal situation under control. It was interesting to read in the GLX report that it was under Weld (and Baker) that the MBTA lost its capital planning capability. I can't say whether that was worth it or not (since we don't have the counterfactual) but I can say that when Republican governors get our fiscal house in shape, they're rewarded for it politically, not punished.
Mass transit is, mostly, used by politicians to signal their virtue.
1. People will vote for "Stan" because he showed himself to be Serious About The Environment by voting X billion for mass transit, not because he got Y thousand people to their jobs on time.
2. Contractors, consultants, the whole food chain, have become well aware of this. They plan (like NASA contractors) on the basis that high cost doesn't hurt, in fact higher costs are better because that way, politicians can show they're Even More Serious. Low performance doesn't hurt either, because neither "Stan" nor most of his voters want to use the transit. (When my family were touristing in Boston, we used the T rather than risk Boston's traffic, but punctuality was very low on our priority list.) As long as your trains and your Space Shuttles don't crash, little else matters.
3. The few mass transit projects that are sincerely meant to be used become collateral damage to this mindset.
The remedy, therefore, is to stop the signalling. Stop advocating for transit projects you won't use, and stop voting for politicians who are so Serious.
John Hickenlooper was one of the few people, briefly in the national spotlight, emphasizing government efficiency and service quality as a core agenda: https://durangoherald.com/articles/166290
I am not saying he's the guy to do it. I am just shocked this mantle hasn't been taken up by more candidates. It seems like catnip for the theoretical swing voter. Gettable voters are most likely less ideological and more focused on results.
Every issue in this category is a layup. Nobody was ever opposed to getting more for less. Nobody ever protested improved quality in government services. On the contrary, it's praised as quite an anomaly. Large stations seem like an obvious box to check.
It’s boring? I was talking to a friend about life in Switzerland where there is never so much as a blade of grass out of place. They didn’t want to live in a world where everything ran smoothly and efficiently.
High trust society. I really think that has a lot to do with it. I see my own psyche unintentionally pulled this way. I am a broadly optimistic person, but I am hardening and becoming more suspicious of people that are unclear about their objectives. You can only repeat a bad cycle so many times.
The clear folks, even when I disagree with them: no problem. I generally respect someone that can articulate their goals and speak to foundational beliefs, even if they are different from my own. My patience has waned for incoherence, hypocrisy, and all manner of shell games.
Matt, you make the offhand comment that above ground light rail is not that different from busing, and that the stations are not that different from bus stations...remind me why we're building all of this rail service that is functionally the same as a bus but drastically more costly and less flexible? Do you have any insight into why bureaucrats have this weird rails fetish? Buses are the unloved step-child in every city's mass transit system.
In this case it’s not at all the same, as these run in dedicated, existing rail rights of way, and connect to existing rail. It would have been much more expensive, and less useful, too create comparable bus service. Also, Boston has terrible roads so buses don’t work well here. It’s different in newer cities with more space away from the coast.
I agree that the fact that the GLX is an extension of existing rail makes the case for doing this with rail. But operating in dedicated right of way is not a reason to lay down rails. You can certainly operate buses in dedicated ROW (it is done all over the world). Further, there is no reason why fully dedicated ROW can't be built for buses in Boston. The roads would have to be maintained, just as the rails need to be maintained. It's a matter of political priorities.
The problem is not that the roads are poorly maintained. It is that they are narrow, with no space to widen them, and often go the wrong places. In Somerville, for example, many of the major roads were largely laid out to bring workers to factories that no longer exist; they don’t point in the right direction for current commuting patterns. The rail lines are better—they tend to point downtown.
A few years ago, I was the technical lead for a study group in Boston, looking at where bus rapid transit in the Boston area could be implemented. The truth is that road space is a political issue. If the city is willing to reallocate space for buses, you don't need that much space. Many cities have implemented full BRT through narrow city center streets. Sure, you could do rail instead, but it is far more costly and if it's underground, you miss out on the potential for streetscape improvements.
I'd say the green line is sort of in between. The C line has dedicated right of ways but it also has to stop at traffic lights, so the above ground sections are really slow. The GLX would be better because the commuter rail is already not at grade. Some of the past green line spurs that didn't have their own right of way have been closed.
Agree 100% (see my comment above). Buses on their own can't accomplish what rail can but there is infrastructure that can be (and has in many places) built for buses that allows them to operate like rail (but with additional benefits) but at a fraction of the cost. There is indeed an unhealthy fixation with rail in this country and internationally.
Freeman Dyson wrote an essay relevant to your excellent point. While mentioning a wide range of stupid "cadillac choices," he focused on an African water project that required a choice a simple-and-cheap option and a complex-and-very expensive option. The latter was chosen, to a predictable catastrophic end. Dyson concluded that the politician making the choice was more concerned about increasing his prestige than about providing convenient safe water.
See also new weapon systems perhaps? The managers involved may have an agency problem because they're not necessarily incentivized to keep costs down or deliver value - and there might be something intangible like prestige or empire building driving costs up.
We had a town fight over a new library that I think illustrates a fundamental tension, at least in MA public projects.
- The town got a state grant to help build a new library - most of it would be other people's money.
- The town could have used a new library - the old one was small, cramped for its basic purposes, and underutilized compared to neighboring towns.
- The new plan was _beautiful_ - and expensive! It would still require a non-trivial amount of our money, partly because of how big the scope was. It was "future proofed" - we'd never need a new library again.
Since we're a town and not a city, this was the subject of a town meeting, in which there were two sides:
- People who didn't want the library because they didn't want to spend money. Their view was that the current library was totally fine, so they'd rather not pay higher taxes.
- People who wanted the new library. Their view was that the cost was small compared to the benefit.
These two groups were disjoint, and I think that's also how a project like GLX can get off the rails.
The people who want beautiful stations and bike paths are probably not fiscal hawks. They're not super concerned about the price - MA is already an expensive blue state, we all knew that coming in, and it's important to have nice public infrastructure.
The people who don't want to pay don't want to pay _anything_. They're not super concerned about the benefit, the whole project can be canceled and that's even more winning because it's even less money spent. MA is already an expensive blue state, so the right thing is to oppose everything.
The problem we have is that there's no overlap - there's no one going "yes we really should do the GLX, but also I really don't want my taxes to go up, so can we cut GLX to something minimal and not keep adding to it"?
The political constituency in MA who would say "this is too expensive" isn't necessarily motivated to show up and try to make the GLX a better value by proposing more cost-efficient changes along the way - they're motivated to try to get the thing canceled, or ignore it in the hope that it topples under its own weight.
Blue states with a higher tax burden than MA include such liberal bastions as Kansas and Arkansas.
https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-highest-lowest-tax-burden/20494
I'm not sure how useful this is, and it's a little old, but...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_income
Median family income for MA: $79k vs Kansas: $58k. I'm not sure exactly what income metric was used for WalletHub, but the WalletHub adjusted tax burden is within 1% for Kansas vs MA, where-as the median income in MA is like 36% higher.
Right Ma has a lot of high paying jobs. That’s not a bad thing.
It's not a bad thing, and one would have to be insane to say "no, I don't want biotech" or any of the other industries that drive job growth in the Boston metro area.
But I do worry that it can be an _enabling_ thing. You can have escalating home prices and a lack of building and it'll "be okay" because some people will have the incomes to afford the high prices and others will just have hellish commutes.
Then one day you wake up and you're the bay area and prices are completely insane and everyone has so much home equity tied up at the elevated prices that I don't know how you come back down.
So I worry that MA's high paying jobs could enable a California-style housing crisis.
Sorry, total tangent there!
Does MA have any policies artificially lowering housing costs for certain residents, like Prop 13 or rent control/stabilization? If not, or if the policies are limited in scope, I don't think you have as much to worry about.
Ha ha ha ha YES! MA has prop 2 1/2, which is a prop 13 clone that requires a town "override" vote to raise property taxes more than 2.5% per year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposition_2%C2%BD#Voting
When I was a kid my mother took me around when she went knocking on doors to try to get an override passed so that our school could remain funded. At age 8 or so I did understand why these people (in very expensive houses with no kids) were _so_ angry to hear from her.
The override failed and our school didn't have a librarian for a few years, despite being in a town with some crazy high medium income.
In the Boston suburbs, it's zoning, not rent control that keeps the housing supply low. You can zone for no condos, no apartment buildings, no duplexes, etc. and eventually you just can't build anything else - in some towns the development is just _bigger_ houses, driven by the high land values, which doesn't get you more capacity.
Mass isn’t an expensive blue state.
It’s state tax burden is 22 out of 51.
https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-highest-lowest-tax-burden/20494
It's not _not_ an expensive blue state. :-). That wallet hub list is ranking of tax to personal income, so a state's tax burden appears to be lower as long as everyone has more money.
Which is literally true, I suppose. But the Boston area also has expensive housing, and thus higher cost of living, and companies have to pay more.
So I'd argue we are an expensive blue state - it's more expensive to live here than other parts of the country, and our tax burden scales up to match that without showing up as a red flag on that list.
(Of coarse, it depends on which way you look - I thought having Kansas ranked lower than MA doesn't really capture the real experience of the two states. But yeah, we got nothing on NY!)
I wonder if, additionally, the high-cost crowd would also rather see the stations canceled, than get something they see as substandard? In a proper compromise, the high-cost crowd would trade off some elaborate amenities to get the no-cost crowd to grudgingly accept the project, but I wonder if the all-or-nothing attitude of the Left would have them hold out for every possible bike and ADA related feature until the project collapsed of its own weight.
Good question...in the case of our local library, my neighborhood was all in the "yes" category, and we had the attitude of wanting the project to have been scoped smaller so that it wold have passed - we would gladly have taken a bird in the hand. But our case might be weird because there's external funding coming in, and frankly I'm not sure how much the "no" attitude would have been defanged by cutting scope. Maybe at some insane ratio of state funding to local it'd be hard to say "no".
GLX might be different if constituencies arguing to drive up cost all have their own pet projects - "I don't need the whole thing to be a boondoggle, but I'm an activist for my one pet cause X, so my X has to be included."
In other words, on the expense-increasing side the problem might not be entirely one of 'no compromise' so much as different factions having different "most important" issue.
The development process in blue states have a lot of veto points, so if you gotta have your pet issue or nothing, there are mechanisms to advocate for that.
If SFMTA has taught me anything, it’s that elevators and escalators will inevitably be broken half the time, and should only be integrated into a design when absolutely necessary. Nominal ADA compliance is asymptotic to *actual* ADA compliance.
In the Union Square example you cite (requiring elevators instead of ramps) the inevitable long-term effect is to render these stations unreliable for people who cannot use stairs (folks in wheelchairs, etc) and force them into navigating a Swiss cheese system of “which elevators aren’t working today?” where they have to travel to additional redundant stops or bus lines and then circle back to their intended destination.
You're not wrong, but SFMTA and BART's elevator/escalator issues are insanely pathological _even by the standards of public transit systems in the US_. I think the 24/Mission street escalator was fully functional for maybe 2 out of the 8 years that I lived in that neighborhood.
I fully expect the current expanding corruption scandal in SF to touch on this eventually.
On an unrelated note, I’m baffled by the difference in escalator etiquette (right side for standing, left side for climbing) between BART and Muni riders, even within the same station. BARTers seem to sort themselves pretty well into passive and active lanes, but Muni escalators are constantly clogged. I can think of plenty of plausible reasons for this (commuters vs tourists, etc) but the starkness of difference gets me every time.
This is the kind of shit that just makes me nuts. How do you tell a small-government person that "no really, government isn't inefficient!" when this kind of waste is happening? It's maddening. What are we doing?
I lived blocks from the future Union Square station on the GLX for 10 years and was on the Mayor of Somerville's committee to advise on development related to it, and a co-founder of a Neighborhood Council for the neighborhood to hand that work off to. Your choice of Union Square, in particularly, is a poor one.
In Brookline, per your example, Boston's existing Green Line trams run at grade as basically another, physically protected two lanes of traffic. The stops are close together. It acts as a bus that later goes underground and integrates with a subway system.
The GLX, however, is being constructed 100 below grade, in an uncovered below grade "deep ditch" route used by the MBTA's commuter rail. The "ditch" is being widened in places, the bridges exapnded / reinforced / replaced as needed, and the commuter rail tracks must be lifted from the center position and put on one side to accommodate the laying of the GLX tracks. This whole system is "above ground", but in a cut below grade.
This means, though, that the major commercial centers through which the GLX cuts have artificial hills built 100 years ago that cross up and over the grade. Sometimes that is just 1 road that makes the "hop" but in Union Square it's two that cross each other in an "X" at the apex of the "fake hill". The gradient on these roads are quite steep since they were built prior to the ADA, and they are on bridges that are the property of a state agency outside of the MBTA and the City of Somerville. They get icy. It gets dicey.
The purpose of the more complicated stations what to allow passengers to get to grade at the top of the hill and/or provide more direct access to the south side of the tracks. Currently the only entrance/exit, regardless of whether you are going inbound or outbound, will be on the north side of the tracks.
This is all important because this station abuts three major neighborhoods: Somerville's Union Square, which has direct access because it is to the north, and Somerville's Boynton Yards, where there are already a number of new lab and office buildings underway, and Cambridge's Inman Square which abuts Kendall Square, which is world famous for the amount of health science companies it houses.
The life science corridor from Kendall is reaching very quickly towards Union Square, but it is now basically cut off from this station from the south. The only route requires a person coming from the south, if they were standing within yards of the station, to walk up and over the significant grade and the once at level grade at the next intersection (well past the station) to double back. Total extra distance is about 0.4 miles.
This is a usability killer for transit. The jobs are there and more are coming. More workers for them are moving to these neighborhoods every day. Will they bring their cars? That depends on wither developers overbuild the parking. And at this point, the developers see these details and want to include more spaces in their plans to be able to entice new residents. The developers want to provide spaces because they fear residents will demand it. The people then bring/get/use cares because they get free parking. It's a bad cycle.
And although Union Square is the most glaring example of this, there are similarities within other stations on the GLX.
Believe me, I was among those arguing to abandon the stations if that was what it took to get the GLX. But these are not just "fancy stations". They have a point.
The real culprit is that 20+ years ago the MBTA was cut, and as a result unexperienced novices were left in charge of procurement for the project and got rolled. Because it was a project based on establishing equity for Somerville, which bore the traffic brunt of the Big Dig's driving expansion and used to be majority minority, Deval Patrick basically wrote a blank check because he was dedicated to get it done. A perfect storm!
Even once the fancy stations were removed the budget was still insane and many of use feared the project would STILL be killed. What saved it was having the whole enterprise re-bid. And my then, so much nonsense was baked in because construction was already in progress, that the only options left to significantly reduce costs were those elements that come at the very end of the project and therefore had not started yet. The stations were the biggest piece of this, and the most visible (so that the current governor, GOP Charlie Baker, could show that they were "doing something". In reality, the stations are a sacrificial lamb here. Don't blame them. It's not fair.
I just read the full report that you linked to. I had not had a chance when I made my initial comments.
I don't mean to be overly critical, because you are making a valid point. Prior to my decade living in Somerville, I liked in Manhattan for over a decade, so I was a first-hand witness ALSO to the overbuilding of the post-9/11 Path and Fulton Street subway stations. Those were designed first as commercial real estate deals and second as transit hubs. Add federal funds post 9/11, and that's where it led. I am entirely with you!
However, the section in the report on the stations ("Big, Expensive Everything: Stations" pages 42-50), is only 9 pages long and only half about the stations. The other half is about the Community Path, which I had forgotten to mention.
The outright addition of the Community Transit Path to the GLX project was a 1000% worthwhile endeavor. As the report mentioned, that is actually the part of the while project that will be used more frequently by people actually living in Somerville. It completes a MAJOR bike network to the north and west of Boston and will encourage cycling because a section where bikers need to take to the streets will be replaced with a separated path that cuts straight to downtown Boston.
Unfortunately, it was not in the initial cost estimate. This is because this project has been planned for so long now that what society values has shifted. Climate Change is something cities and (blue) states are now actively trying to grasp with. That was not true back then. Racial and economic equity have come more to the fore, so now planners need to incorporate these elements into planning. It's the baseline number that was wrong in the end, for these reasons.
By contrast to the 9 pages on building in "extras", the section related to Procurement, Contract Management, and Project Management runs 16 pages ("Managing the Managers: Project Management and Delivery" pages 26-41). I feel vindicated!
It is the way American politics intrude on being able to manage these projects. It all began when Gov. William Weld gutted the agency in the 90s, and spiraled from there. The man that did the gutting: his budget director Charlie Baker, current governor. The last Dem governor: Deval Patrick, who, along with US Rep Mike Capuano (who is from Somerville) decided that the priority was on getting the project far enough along so that it could not be killed, out of fear of Baker, who did eventually win.
The procurement, the contracts, and the project management all suffered from this conflict. If we could "just agree to build, then plan, then fund, then build" these types of projects, in a straight line, we'd be better off.
Finally, I want to both be fair and unfair to you, since I reread your post as part of this:
"To be clear, this station bloat is not the whole cause of the cost overruns that nearly derailed the project. But what’s striking about it is that it’s so willful and so dumb. Nobody who had ever seen a Green Line surface station could possibly have had a good faith belief that this was necessary."
Your acknowledge the complexity of it all, so thank you. However, you fail by calling this a "Green Line Surface Station". The GLX is a misnomer. It IS an extension but the modality is as far off from the C line trolley running down Beacon Avenue in Brookline as the Brookline stop are from the underground subway stop downtown. Does the Park Street station that connects to the Red Line and is underground need to be different from a simple elongated bus shelter? Absolutely. The same is true of the GLX stations. As you said, the Green Line is weird.
This is probably more than I have ever commented online, but I have read you for years and appreciate this new effort and know that you are generally a man who understands complexity and nuance. I never would have bothered to write this, say, at Marginal Revolution.
“They get icy. It gets dicey.”
Next time just say that.
I appreciate it when someone who a) has expert knowledge and b) was on the inside of this planning process takes the time to share that knowledge with the rest of us—I learned from Erik’s post.
If you don’t want to read a long post, it’s easy to skip it! And kinder to everyone, yourself included.
Guess what?
1. It was a very good comment.
2. I don't come here to receive humorless advice from the likes of you.
Your photos of the Brookline/Newton stations are even being too generous. most of the surface stops, especially along B and C lines, have no structure whatsoever, just a sign where the T stops and opens its doors. You pay on board. The huts are already for fancy major stops!
Great piece. Transit authorities seem to want to build stations that look like airports. But the nature of airports is that people spend a lot of time there, hours, sometimes many hours. People generally spend no more than a few minutes in a transit station. If they don’t have a place to sit or there isn’t much shelter, it jut doesn’t matter.
Yeah, in the DC area they were hyping up the fact that they had outlets at a certain number of train stations. Totally nice in a vacuum, but if you're waiting around for a train long enough to charge your phone then there are bigger problems at hand.
As long as we’re wondering what’s going on, I would love to know why DC’s indoor stations are all so dark. Surely decent lighting isn’t that expensive!
I'll recommend the fantastic "The Great Society Subway" by Zachary Schrag to answer any questions about "why is metro that way?" Basically, if I remember correctly, they're dark because designer Harry Weese wanted them that way. In recent years much of the underground Blue and Orange line stations have been brightened with new LED lights, but the last time I took the Red line it was still the original dark style.
Agreed - great book
I think the emergence of Urbanism as a "prestige hobby" creates a kind of conceptual inflation as well. Too much brainpower chasing too little real need. Its not clear the consultant grifting would find so much purchase were there not such an intellectual market for it
I can compare the stations of the subway systems of Lisbon, Amsterdam and Berlin from when I lived there. Lisbon and Amsterdam have small subways with large to very large stations, especially newer ones, while Berlin has a large subway system with frequent and small stations without centralised entrances, automatic gates or even ticket selling machines in most of them.
It is not just that small stations are easier to build and you can build more of them with the same budget, it’s also that small stations are much more ergonomic. Large stations create unnecessary commute time inside the station, the time wasted going through the station paired with the fact that larger stations are always further apart, means that an Uber/taxi ride is much more appealing in Lisbon and Amsterdam than in Berlin.
Transit attractiveness varies wildly based on journey time, the size and complexity of a station can increase that time by a lot in short trips or longer trips when you need to switch lines.
I must say that as someone who lives around the corner from one of the new Green Line station, I liked the nicer ones better and think they would have been worth it. But your essential point surely remains: Given a political reality that won’t raise taxes to fund high quality infrastructure, I’m much happier with stripped-down stations than I would have been with the project’s cancellation.
@ David: Serious question: why would it have been worth it? Would there have been an improvement in service? I ask this as both a long time Massachusetts resident (and one time fairly frequent T rider) and a public sector fan in general. But I got zero problem with strictly functional, utilitarian infrastructure, if it gets the job done and (as in this case) it makes affordable and feasible an otherwise unaffordable and infeasible project.
(But there may well be a level of functionality the more expensive station would have provided I'm not aware of, hence my question). Don't disagree that Union Square proposed station *looks* awfully nice, though.
The access issues for the Union Square station described by another commenter are exactly right. But even beyond that, have you noticed that private businesses don’t put their offices in the cheapest structures they can build, but rather think it worthwhile to pay for (often much) nicer facilities? I think they are right to do so. Nicer spaces and architecture are valuable because they elevate the people in them, and the space around them—they make us happier, more creative, and more productive. You may not see the value, but private businesses spending their own money sure do.
Right?!? :-). My first apartment was a few blocks from one of the new stops and when I see that shiny station some part of me just goes "yeah, that would have been really nice."
But...when the plans get discussed and you see the pics, no one ever draws that diagram with a $100 bill in the center and the shiny station, the budget station, the easter bunny and Santa Clause on the sides and goes "who gets the money? the budget station because the other three things on this picture are just fantasies."
David, I'm curious how you think having the GLX get canceled and then re-booted affected opinion of it in Somerville and Medford? E.g. is the view more of "why are we getting so much less than we were promised" or "we're lucky to get an extension at all"? (Or just "man the MBTA is a hotmess"? :-)
I am definitely in the “we’re lucky to get anything at all“ camp. And I bet if they hadn’t already poured so much concrete they’d be canceling it now. I think folks who are paying less attention are mostly flabbergasted that the price could vary so dramatically, up and then back down.
Your point about the contractors and such still being able to do (and charge for) the same amount of work if there's less grift involved is powerful.
Your final point about "what are we doing here?" also basically haunts me. When the politicians and unions treat transit like a way to make visual statements or like a jobs program, everyone who actually relies on transit to get places suffers, and it's awful.
The 86th St station in NYC, part brutalist airport & Chuck Close exhibition, is perhaps my favorite public space in the city. And a perfect example of everything wrong with our transit spend for the reasons outlined.
Never thought I’d see a DC-based political journalist write about the little hut at the Newton Centre T stop. Very cool! There is something nice about that station where you basically just walk right up to the train (its outdoors, not far below street level, and no turn-styles). It’s very well integrated into the surrounding environment, as opposed to “you are now the entering the train station” kind of vibe (especially at the DC metro stations). Would be cool if that’s replicated in Union Square, etc.
I do think that things like bike parking, and even public bathrooms (cities just need more in general) are nice to have from a customer experience standpoint. But I imagine those aren’t the most expensive part of the plans. If the goal is to get people out of their cars, planning these stations needs to have a “human-centered design” component where it is simple and seamless to use. It sounds fancy and consultant-y, but that could mean a lot of really cheap design tweaks or actually simplifying the design of the station.
My guess is that American planners (outside NYC) feel that each time they build a new rail station they need to “sell it” to people in the area to convince them it’s a better way to travel than what they did before (usually cars). It would make more sense to just focus on putting it in a good location and making the trains run on time and frequently. But certain design tweaks — like secure bike parking or protection from bad weather — could outweigh their cost by attracting more loyal riders. I don’t think a fancy mezzanine is going to pay for itself by attracting more loyal riders.
As a follow-up to my long rant, one expensive thing that I think we should spend more $ on is more station entrances/exits. It can drastically increase the # of people who live within a reasonable walking distance of that station, which could lead to a lot more riders and pay for itself down the line. In Hong Kong some of the stations have like 15 exits!
I was really surprised to see that public bathrooms made it into the station proposals - I think _none_ of the non-commuter-rail stations in the system have that, so it seemed like sort of obvious scope creep.
How do you disincentivize dumb? What’s the oversight mechanism/feedback loop to get this under control? If we just rely on the self awareness of individual bureaucrats then we may as well call it quits.
Any structural ideas here?
Asking for a friend who is horrified by the $29 billion gateway proposal.
What's frustrating about the entire debate here is that the thing that is supposed to disincentivize dumb _is the cost_. Given a choice between a $30 Billion project that accomplishes X and a $3 Billion project that also accomplishes X, you would normally expect any sane person to maybe take 3 minutes out of their life to laugh heartily at the $30B proposal before moving along.
I had a comment on the bad interest rate predictions thread that’s a corollary to this. That if I had a model predictably wrong in the same way over and over I’d be fired ... yet the interest rate forecast errors persist. Some things seem to be just structurally broken in a way I can’t quite comprehend
Lol yes that should be the thing. People still do dumb things anyway. Can we fire them? Can we make it more transparent so that we know who to fire? Which country has the easiest to replicate planning process so that we can implement it here?
In the way we need to remove veto points from housing planning we need to remove individual actors/decision points here too.
Cost-benefit analysis. How much do transit riders benefit from having a more expensive station, and how much would they be willing to pay?
https://www.academia.edu/9811886/Cost_Benefit_Analysis_as_an_Expression_of_Liberal_Neutrality
I’m also curious if this particular project would, even at an insane price, still have positive roi. Would it make gateway a good project in that case? In a vacuum yes, but on an opportunity cost basis compared to the multiple line extensions you could for that much? Idk
If politicians could get behind a lot of infill development I bet a lot of overpriced transit would still have positive roi. On a purely cost benefit basis, I wonder if density (good) would make cost controls even less important (bad). I guess I should have asked how we get a system interested in maximizing returns on transit investment at a system level in addition to per project basis.
Then again, so much dumb stuff to eliminate before we have to think too hard
Yes a little analysis goes a long way. Cost benefit estimates should def be required. This is in part why gateway hasn’t been funded. It unfortunately didn’t bring the cost down, just means it simply isn’t happening. What’s locking the system in place to make it say gateway needs federal support bc it’s too expensive for states but not ask if we can do it more cheaply?
Maybe vote for Republicans every now and then? That’s something Boston hasn’t tried.
NY has had repub governors and NYC repub mayors. MTA capital costs still a scandal.
I think NY has a bipartisan consensus to never take any ownership over the MTA but to just observe and complain about it like a random citizen
NY has other problems, such as structural protection of incumbents.
It's something Massachusetts_ does on a regular basis - we bring in a moderate Republican to get the fiscal situation under control. It was interesting to read in the GLX report that it was under Weld (and Baker) that the MBTA lost its capital planning capability. I can't say whether that was worth it or not (since we don't have the counterfactual) but I can say that when Republican governors get our fiscal house in shape, they're rewarded for it politically, not punished.
Massachusetts is a fairly diverse state, all in all. They even drive a lot of pickups.
THAT explains how Scott Brown won! :-)
That and dissing Curt Schilling.
We currently have a Republican governor. And it’s the state, not the city of Boston, that runs the MBTA.
Mass transit is, mostly, used by politicians to signal their virtue.
1. People will vote for "Stan" because he showed himself to be Serious About The Environment by voting X billion for mass transit, not because he got Y thousand people to their jobs on time.
2. Contractors, consultants, the whole food chain, have become well aware of this. They plan (like NASA contractors) on the basis that high cost doesn't hurt, in fact higher costs are better because that way, politicians can show they're Even More Serious. Low performance doesn't hurt either, because neither "Stan" nor most of his voters want to use the transit. (When my family were touristing in Boston, we used the T rather than risk Boston's traffic, but punctuality was very low on our priority list.) As long as your trains and your Space Shuttles don't crash, little else matters.
3. The few mass transit projects that are sincerely meant to be used become collateral damage to this mindset.
The remedy, therefore, is to stop the signalling. Stop advocating for transit projects you won't use, and stop voting for politicians who are so Serious.
BTW, no insult intended to the T. It did seem to be well used, but whether by tourists or locals, we couldn't tell.
John Hickenlooper was one of the few people, briefly in the national spotlight, emphasizing government efficiency and service quality as a core agenda: https://durangoherald.com/articles/166290
I am not saying he's the guy to do it. I am just shocked this mantle hasn't been taken up by more candidates. It seems like catnip for the theoretical swing voter. Gettable voters are most likely less ideological and more focused on results.
Every issue in this category is a layup. Nobody was ever opposed to getting more for less. Nobody ever protested improved quality in government services. On the contrary, it's praised as quite an anomaly. Large stations seem like an obvious box to check.
It’s boring? I was talking to a friend about life in Switzerland where there is never so much as a blade of grass out of place. They didn’t want to live in a world where everything ran smoothly and efficiently.
I don’t really understand it.
High trust society. I really think that has a lot to do with it. I see my own psyche unintentionally pulled this way. I am a broadly optimistic person, but I am hardening and becoming more suspicious of people that are unclear about their objectives. You can only repeat a bad cycle so many times.
The clear folks, even when I disagree with them: no problem. I generally respect someone that can articulate their goals and speak to foundational beliefs, even if they are different from my own. My patience has waned for incoherence, hypocrisy, and all manner of shell games.
Matt, you make the offhand comment that above ground light rail is not that different from busing, and that the stations are not that different from bus stations...remind me why we're building all of this rail service that is functionally the same as a bus but drastically more costly and less flexible? Do you have any insight into why bureaucrats have this weird rails fetish? Buses are the unloved step-child in every city's mass transit system.
In this case it’s not at all the same, as these run in dedicated, existing rail rights of way, and connect to existing rail. It would have been much more expensive, and less useful, too create comparable bus service. Also, Boston has terrible roads so buses don’t work well here. It’s different in newer cities with more space away from the coast.
I agree that the fact that the GLX is an extension of existing rail makes the case for doing this with rail. But operating in dedicated right of way is not a reason to lay down rails. You can certainly operate buses in dedicated ROW (it is done all over the world). Further, there is no reason why fully dedicated ROW can't be built for buses in Boston. The roads would have to be maintained, just as the rails need to be maintained. It's a matter of political priorities.
Coming in late, but it is in fact done in Boston as well - the most recent example being the dedicated busway for the Silver Line to Chelsea, the SL3.
The problem is not that the roads are poorly maintained. It is that they are narrow, with no space to widen them, and often go the wrong places. In Somerville, for example, many of the major roads were largely laid out to bring workers to factories that no longer exist; they don’t point in the right direction for current commuting patterns. The rail lines are better—they tend to point downtown.
A few years ago, I was the technical lead for a study group in Boston, looking at where bus rapid transit in the Boston area could be implemented. The truth is that road space is a political issue. If the city is willing to reallocate space for buses, you don't need that much space. Many cities have implemented full BRT through narrow city center streets. Sure, you could do rail instead, but it is far more costly and if it's underground, you miss out on the potential for streetscape improvements.
I'd say the green line is sort of in between. The C line has dedicated right of ways but it also has to stop at traffic lights, so the above ground sections are really slow. The GLX would be better because the commuter rail is already not at grade. Some of the past green line spurs that didn't have their own right of way have been closed.
Agree 100% (see my comment above). Buses on their own can't accomplish what rail can but there is infrastructure that can be (and has in many places) built for buses that allows them to operate like rail (but with additional benefits) but at a fraction of the cost. There is indeed an unhealthy fixation with rail in this country and internationally.
Freeman Dyson wrote an essay relevant to your excellent point. While mentioning a wide range of stupid "cadillac choices," he focused on an African water project that required a choice a simple-and-cheap option and a complex-and-very expensive option. The latter was chosen, to a predictable catastrophic end. Dyson concluded that the politician making the choice was more concerned about increasing his prestige than about providing convenient safe water.
See also new weapon systems perhaps? The managers involved may have an agency problem because they're not necessarily incentivized to keep costs down or deliver value - and there might be something intangible like prestige or empire building driving costs up.