Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority - Criticism

Criticism

Ahead of the MBTA's 2009 restructuring with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT), the MBTA had a total debenture of over US$ 8 billion. As a direct result, MBTA fares and parking fees have increased significantly. In July 2009, the MBTA proposed a 20% fare increase and significant service cuts. The MBTA has endured criticism that the increases have outpaced inflation.

When the Orange Line was realigned in the 1980s, its course was altered away from the lower income areas of Everett, Chelsea, and Roxbury, where residents are less likely to own cars, and depend more on public transit, toward the more affluent towns of Malden and Medford, as well as sections of the Jamaica Plain neighborhood (where car ownership is higher, and thus, reliance on public transit is far lower). In response, the MBTA built a bus line operated by articulated silver buses equipped with specialized dispatching equipment. The MBTA named the service the Silver Line, and classified it as though it were a rail transit service. The service has been criticized in many respects, most notably for its slow speed, and the fact that it utilizes the same roads as cars and other "street" traffic, subsequently increasing gridlock and collisions, earning it the nickname "Silver Lie" among many.

Transportation advocates in Boston have raised the issue that residents cannot go from one outlying area to another without first riding downtown and changing lines. The Urban Ring Project, which would provide more circumferential service, is in the planning stages and has largely not yet been implemented due to lack of funding. This problem also occurs in the Washington Metro system, where customers cannot travel between suburbs on the same side of Washington without going through downtown, and Chicago's Metra and CTA systems, where all lines lead into and out of the central business district, rather than around it.

The T stops running at 12:45 a.m. each night, despite the fact that bars and clubs in most areas of Boston are open until 2 a.m. Like nearly all subways worldwide, the MBTA's subway does not have parallel express and local tracks, so rail maintenance can only be done when the T is not running, and "with a 109-year-old system", says the MBTA press secretary, "you have to be out there every night." The T did experiment with "Night Owl" bus service from 2001 to 2005, but abandoned it on account of the $7.53 per rider cost to the MBTA to keep the service open, five times the cost per passenger of an average bus route.