A one-time fare increase for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority will not solve the organization’s financial crisis, researcher Stephanie Pollack said in a talk Wednesday evening.
Pollack, the associate director of research at the Kitty & Michael Dukakis Center for Urban & Regional Policy and a professor at Northeastern University, spoke about the state of the MBTA finances to a room of about 30 residents and transit board members.
Pollack’s presentation centered on the help the MBTA will need in erasing its debt, projected to hit $161 million in 2012 and to nearly double to $330 million by 2016, according to MBTA projections.
“If service cuts and fare increases happen, in two to five years, the same thing will happen again,” Pollack said.
She said not to expect a single round of service cuts and fare increases to solve the MBTA’s financial problems.
“Before the end of the year, we’ll all know how bad the bad news is,” Pollack said.
Pollack said that Wednesday’s presentation was to encourage the public to open its eyes to the issues facing the transit system.
“This conversation is all about making smarter choices,” she said.
She said that choices will be difficult, hard and distasteful, “but they’re necessary.”
“We’ve made choices in the last decade that has mortgaged the future of the transit system,” Pollack said.
These choices, Pollack said, are partially due to the MBTA’s sale of bonds. This resulted in millions of budget dollars being re-allocated away from important capital investments, causing an aging fleet and infrastructure.
“Bills are coming due to bonds and the transit system we haven’t invested in and that’s literally falling apart,” Pollack said.
Pollack said the MBTA is not alone in its financial struggles, with two thirds of the Commonwealth Transportation Fund being used to pay off debts.
“The highway department is in worse shape,” she said. “This is a problem endemic to transit finance, not just to the MBTA.”
However, because mass transit is a public good, it will forever remain in debt, she said.
“No major transit authority is not in the red,” Pollack said. “They’ll always remain underfinanced if paid at market price—it should never be able to pay for itself.”
For the deficit at hand, Pollack said the MBTA must find a new source for funding.
“We need to have a bigger conversation than just a fare increase,” Pollack said. “We need to say ‘this is where we want to be in five years’ and then figure out how we are going to get there.”
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
