Gov. Charlie Baker on Thursday defended his five-year plan to modernize the MBTA's core system — calling the $8 billion he's committed to spend on it "record breaking" — and emphasized his desire to enact change while minimizing the short-term disruption to commuters.
In August, the Baker administration unveiled a plan to spend $8 billion over five years in long-term capital projects to modernize the T’s core system, expand the Green Line, and invest in the construction of the South Coast Rail line on the MBTA’s commuter line.
“We’re the first administration that actually came up with a permitting plan, and a capital plan to fully fund the South Coast Rail Project,” Baker said during an interview with Boston Public Radio, adding that MBTA commuters should start to see a difference "over the course of the next two or three years."
Baker said the three driving forces behind his plan are: "How much money do you have? How do you coordinate it? ... And do you have the sort of human capacity to pull it off?"
“With respect to the rest of the T’s transportation plan, the point I keep making to people is the biggest issue we’re going to face on implementing our $8 billion plan at the T, is doing it in a way that doesn’t create so much disruption that people despise the fact that we’re modernizing the system,” Baker said.
Some, however, don't think the plan is enough. On "Greater Boston" last week, Sen. Joseph Boncore of Winthrop and Rep. William Straus of Mattapoisett, the co-chairs of the Massachusetts Joint Committee on Transportation, said the problem isn’t better money management, but a lack of money itself.
“I view [Gov. Baker] as hopefully going to evolve on this,” Strauss said. “I think we need more money into the transportation trust fund to cover our roads, bridges and mass transit assets, and we have to do it right away.”
Boncore said that an increase in tax revenue via policies like an increase in the gas tax and an increase on the income tax of millionaires is needed. Boncore also critiqued the governor’s plan to fund his transportation plan through bond bills as not fiscally responsible.
“I think we need new money. We can’t exist on what we’re getting,” Boncore said. “The governor’s plan calls for a lot of bonding, so we’re borrowing against our future. So, we need new revenue today.”
Baker did not comment on the specifics of any tax legislation or if he would veto any bill that calls for an increase in taxes, but said that tax increases are not part of his calculus to address the transportation crisis.
“I hate commenting on legislation I haven’t seen and I don’t know what’s in it, but as a general rule, I don’t think our problem right now is a lack of available revenue and resources,” Baker said.
Baker did not commit himself to the idea of introducing congestion pricing, a policy that would raise toll prices during peak driving times to discourage drivers from being on the road simultaneously. In August, he vetoed a bill that would have initiated a pilot program to test congestion pricing.
Baker joked that he, like many Massachusetts residents, “whine[s] a lot about traffic, too,” and admitted that even he has had to alter his commute throughout the Boston due to traffic congestion.
Chief among Baker’s concerns, though, is ensuring that the daily routines of residents in the metro area are not disturbed. The governor said he’s aware of the desire to implement wide-scale reforms, but was quick to point out that massive construction could also create short term disruption to commuters, a problem he hopes to avoid.
“One of the reasons why we’ve gone so long without doing a lot of this modernization work is because it's complicated, and it lands on a system that runs seven days a week, 18 hours a day,” Baker said.
As an example, he mentioned one proposal that required shutting down the Green Line during evenings after Red Sox home games, and substituting them with buses to give workers an extra two to three hours a night to work on the system.
“We kicked [the proposal] around and talked about [it], and eventually concluded we couldn’t do it because the inconvenience that it would create would be so overwhelming for people,” Baker said. “We want to make sure that we do this in a way that doesn’t create real distress for people who are trying to get places.”
