Old Boston going new
An aerial photograph of the Boston Extension of the Massachusetts Turnpike in the New York Central Railroad employee magazine Headlights, February 1965. The New York Central is long dead. In the era of the photo, it was providing deteriorating passenger service, which later was provided by its successor company, the Penn Central (created by merging the New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad) taken over by Amtrak in the early ‘70s.
Paranoia Parkway
The eastern terminus of the Massachusetts Turnpike.
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
I’d guess that many readers have seen the video of some of the infamous road-rage incident on Jan. 25, apparently originating in some sort of minor sideswipe, on the Massachusetts Turnpike near Boston.FfrojFro
The video footage showed 65-year-old Richard Kamrowski hanging on for dear life on the hood of 37-year-old Mark Fitzgerald’s car as it careened down the turnpike. Then we see Army veteran Frankie Hernandez leaping out of his car and pointing his gun at Fitzgerald.
Now both Messrs. Fitzgerald and Kamrowski face criminal charges in the incident, which provided too much excitement for other drivers and could have easily resulted in one or more deaths.
Highways can be very scary places because you never know the mental and emotional state of your fellow drivers, who are, like you, operating large, fast and potentially lethal machines. And the drivers in and around Boston are particularly aggressive, impatient (and outpatient) and rude. Stay away from people who are driving fast and/or erratically or better yet, if you can, take public transportation. And pull over and call 911 if you see dangerously bad driving.
To watch the video, please hit this link.
More opportunities to watch you
The billboard eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, watching the bad behavior in The Great Gatsby. The novel's author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, wrote of the fictional optician: ''{H}is eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground'' through which the book's characters drive to and fro between Long Island and New York City.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's Nov. 3 ''Digital Diary'' column in GoLocal24.
And so EZ Pass has replaced the toll booths with humans (remember them?) on the Massachusetts Turnpike. This will presumably reduce congestion, speed up traffic, save the state money and reduce air pollution (from idling vehicles). It will also give law-enforcement personnel the opportunity to monitor the travel of suspicious people but, also, when EZ Pass is hacked (which of course it will be), it will let bad actors obtain what honest drivers might think is personal information about their activities.
For convenience and security's (of a sort) sake, we’ve signed into an ever more pervasive surveillance society.
Of course, one aim in all this is to lay off people. I wonder if some of the laid-off toll collectors might be rehired by the state to work at those turnpike rest stops with restaurants and gas stations to provide guidance for lost or curious travelers. Few people know a region’s roads and interesting sites and services as well as turnpike toll collectors.
Charles Chieppo: MBTA hole gets deeper
BOSTON The recent news that the estimated cost of an ongoing Boston-area subway-line extension has risen from $1.4 billion to nearly $2 billion surprised exactly no one. The more-than-two-decade history leading up to this most recent cost overrun contains a lifetime's worth of cautionary tales for state and local governments.
Almost everyone reading this should have some familiarity with Boston's "Big Dig." After all, you probably helped pay for it. The project included taking down an unsightly elevated roadway and running it underground, extending the Massachusetts Turnpike to Boston's Logan Airport and constructing a bridge over the Charles River. When it was finally completed in 2007 (nine years late), the original $2.8 billion price tag had swollen to $14.6 billion, more than a quarter of it covered by federal taxpayers.
Less attention has been paid to the court-ordered construction of 14 transit-related projects as environmental mitigation for the additional traffic the Big Dig would accommodate. Twenty-three years after the 1991 mandate, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) owes nearly $9 billion in debt and interest, almost half of which can be attributed to the transit-mitigation requirements. If not for a series of fare hikes in recent years, the MBTA would pay more in debt service than it collects in fares.
Cost overruns on the current 4.5-mile extension of the MBTA's Green Line are a microcosm of why the mitigation requirements have been a disaster. Engineers encountered more than 500 "utility conflicts" along the corridor. Then there are the add-ons: A community path for bikers and walkers and more drainage for a river that was long ago covered by landfill but apparently still wreaks havoc during rainstorms. It's mitigation for the mitigation.
Payments to the design contractor jumped by more than half because platforms had to be extended to accommodate longer trains than had been envisioned 23 years ago. That's what you get with government by mandate.
And since the MBTA had to dedicate so much money to financing the mitigation projects, corners had to be cut elsewhere. A large concentration of MBTA vehicles are approaching or have surpassed their useful life. If you can't get down to Havana to watch the parade of pre-1959 American-made cars, just take a ride on a Boston-area commuter train. Old rolling stock means compromised reliability.
That it's impossible to know what system priorities will be more than two decades down the road is just one lesson governments can draw from the unmitigated disaster of Boston's transit mitigation. The first lesson is that it's a spectacularly bad idea to mandate the construction of billions of dollars worth of new projects without a funding source.
But construction expenses are only part of the picture. Projects should be budgeted based on the cost of building, operating and maintaining them over their lifecycle. If that had happened in Boston, seeing more realistic numbers might well have resulted in some of the projects being eliminated.
Lifecycle budgeting also reduces the temptation to skimp on maintenance. The MBTA faces a maintenance backlog that topped $3 billion in 2009 and has only grown since. In the transit authority's fiscal 2010 budget, just six of 57 maintenance projects that received a safety rating of "critical" could be funded.
Budgeting based on transportation projects' real costs makes it less likely that government officials will be put in the position of robbing Peter to pay Paul by skimping on maintenance and not replacing assets in a timely manner. Forcing planners to take a clear-eyed look at real project costs might cut back on the ribbon-cuttings that politicians so enjoy, but it would result in infrastructure that functions better and lasts longer. And it might just avert disasters such as the one that the MBTA is facing.
Charles Chieppo is a research fellow at the Ash Center of the Harvard Kennedy School. This originated at Governing Magazine's Web site, governing.com