To derail economy, put the T on hold

Every weekday the MBTA brings hundreds of thousands of workers to jobs in 175 cities and towns. Many of these jobs are in and around the urban core because Boston and its neighbors continue to provide a substantial share of the region’s jobs. A recent Brookings report found that Boston is the only large metropolitan area where job growth is concentrating in communities within 10 miles of downtown, rather than sprawling out into places where the jobs are accessible only to workers with the financial resources and patience to commute by car. The commuter rail system connects residents of smaller cities like Brockton, Fitchburg, and Haverhill to these jobs while catalyzing local development around stations.

Transit capacity and ridership need to expand as the economy grows. Cars alone simply cannot deliver enough workers to dense job clusters like Boston’s Longwood Medical Area. The recently adopted MetroFuture plan for Greater Boston projects that modest growth will generate 290,000 new jobs by 2030 and calls for two-thirds of them to be located near transit. Transit ridership must also grow if Massachusetts is to meet the ambitious goals in the state’s Global Warming Solutions Act, since transportation accounts for the state’s largest and fastest growing share of greenhouse gas emissions.

But transit ridership cannot grow if the transit system does not. Capacity can be expanded by adding trains and buses and increasing service frequency. Increased and improved service can spur ridership - but only if the new customers can fit onto trains and buses. The state’s projections for 2030 show ridership nearly doubling on the Red Line and almost tripling on the Green Line. Anyone who has elbowed their way onto a rush-hour subway knows that such ridership growth is physically impossible. For ridership to grow sharply, the transit system needs to serve more places.

Freezing the current system, by contrast, will stifle ridership growth and punish communities that have been shortchanged in the past. Neighborhoods along the Fairmount Line and Urban Ring corridors and cities like Somerville, New Bedford, and Fall River will remain poorly connected to the regional economy if expansion projects are slowed or shelved.

The problem, according to D’Alessandro’s report, is that the MBTA can no longer afford to grow. Most transit systems spend a small fraction of their budget on debt service. But when the MBTA became financially self-sufficient nearly a decade ago, it was saddled with $5.6 billion in debt, a figure that has soared to $8.5 billion. The report revealed that MBTA financial managers struck a “Faustian bargain,’’ deferring interest and even principal payments into a future that has now arrived. In five years, yearly debt service costs will grow to $525 million - for a transit agency that costs roughly $1 billion annually to operate.

High debt service costs are not the exclusive cause of the MBTA’s financial woes. Relieving the T of responsibility for paying off the debt is, however, the closest thing there is to a silver bullet solution. If the Commonwealth were to incrementally assume responsibility for paying off the MBTA’s debts, the T could instead invest hundreds of millions of dollars each year to improve operations, make needed repairs and invest in strategic expansion.

Why should Massachusetts take on billions in debt? On Nov. 1 the Commonwealth - literally overnight - assumed responsibility for repaying $2 billion in bonds issued by the now-abolished Massachusetts Turnpike Authority. Massachusetts is in the midst of issuing $3 billion in bonds to fix deteriorating bridges. Building and maintaining roads and bridges is acknowledged to be the state’s responsibility. The same is true for transit.

The MBTA cannot afford to maintain, upgrade, and strategically expand the state’s transit capacity. The Commonwealth, however, cannot afford not to.

Stephanie Pollack is associate director of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University.