Sic transit
IN 1991, AS PART OF an environmental agreement intended to avoid lawsuits over the Big Dig, Massachusetts committed to restoring trolley service on the dormant Arborway line in Jamaica Plain and building a connection between the Red and Blue transit lines at Charles Street. These transit projects were seen as necessary to reduce air pollution after the Central Artery/Tunnel project allowed for more highway traffic through the city. But on Wednesday, the Romney administration announced it was dropping both projects from its transportation plan.
One person that news suits just fine is David Luberoff, coauthor of ''Mega-Projects" (2003) a book on the politics of urban public investment, and executive director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. To him, the legally binding attachment of public transportation expansion to the Big Dig on air-quality grounds didn't make sense then, and makes less sense today.
In the spring issue of CommonWealth magazine (which I edit), Luberoff made a provocative case against the environmental rationale for the Big Dig-related transit plans, now the subject of renewed litigation by the Conservation Law Foundation, which extracted the state commitment 14 years ago. Luberoff argues that the state's own analyses have shown that these projects, including the extension of the Green Line through Somerville and into Medford (which the administration continues to support on an even bigger scale), will do very little to clean the air or relieve traffic congestionthe two major environmental goals for the projectsand that they will do so at very high cost.
For a price tag of $621 million, Luberoff shows, based on 2004 state estimates, these projects would eliminate no more pollutants than could be accomplished by giving tune-ups to a couple of hundred automobiles that don't meet current emissions standards. ''In fact," he writes, ''the state probably could identify and replace each of those 200 cars with a
Luberoff is equally dismissive of the idea that the three transit projects would relieve traffic congestion. They are expected to serve roughly 6,500 people daily, barely making a dent in the 770,000 who drive into Boston every daydespite the outsize cost. At $375 million to carry 3,500 people, the Green Line extension as originally conceived would add $16 million in debt service to the already beleaguered MBTA budget, or $18 a day per new rider for debt, plus $1 to $2 in operating subsidy. Cost per passenger would be a bit lower for the Red-Blue connector, but three times higher for renewed Arborway trolley service.
''Is it wise to spend $10, or $20, or $60 a day for each new rider on the transit system?" asks Luberoff. ''No, not when the MBTA is talking about cutting suburban bus lines, where subsidies amount to about $2 per rider per day."
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Predictably, Luberoff's view has not been well received among environmentalists and transit advocates, a number of whom lodged responses in a CommonWealth online forum (posted at www.massinc.org). Slamming Luberoff for his ''technocratic, cynical view of public transportation," Phil Warburg, president of Conservation Law Foundation, argues that the benefits go way beyond air quality. Expanded mass transit, he argues, would result in a ''revitalized Boston," which ''will translate into reduced urban flight. Reduced urban flight means lower car dependence. Lower car dependence means reduced air pollution throughout the Boston metropolitan area."
As for the small numbers of drivers who switch to rail, Warburg adds, ''very often it's hundreds, not thousands, of cars that make all the difference between free-flowing traffic and hopeless gridlock. Is it worth $18 a day in debt service for each new rider on the Green Line extension or $10 per day for each new commuter using the Red-Blue Connector near Mass. General Hospital? You bet it is!"
For his part, former environmental affairs secretary John DeVillars, who signed off on the Big Dig deal for the Dukakis administration, offered up to Luberoff a tongue-in-cheek mea culpa. ''OK, you got us. We were wrong," wrote DeVillars. ''But our error was not, as Luberoff suggests, because we went so far, but rather because we did not go far enough" by demanding even more and better mass transit, even sooner.
Luberoff also has his defenders. Tom Keane, former Boston city councilor and, until recently, columnist for the Boston Herald, sees in the environmental rationale for mass transit dissected by Luberoff an unacknowledged animosity toward America's favored mode of transportation.
''One wonders if the mistakes in the environmental arguments made in the early 1990s were a consequence of more than just poor data or weak analysis," writes Keane. ''Perhaps they were charades, covers for an agenda that simply dislikes suburbia and the automobile. If so, Luberoff has now ripped off the veil."
Still, none of the combatants in this debate have offered much of a basis for choosing between transportation investments, nearly all of whichhighways includedare expensive. After all, 200 Priuses might improve air quality as much as the three mandated transit projects, but they won't get 3,500 (or 10,000, as the state now projects for its new Green Line plan) Somerville and Medford residents to work every day without taking their cars, and they will do nothing to boost the development of Assembly Square.
Luberoff, who insists he is no enemy of transit, argues that public transportation ''should be geared to providing mobility for those who most need it: the elderly, the disabled, and the poor." Here, ''extensive and flexible bus systems" could do the job at a far lower cost than the proposed fixed-rail projects. But that seems too narrow a standard for investment in a public good. After all, we don't provide public education only for children whose families can't afford private schools, and only at the lowest cost possible.
But the environmentalists offer no way at all to distinguish between worthwhile transit investments and boondoggles. For Warburg and DeVillars, it seems, any air quality benefit, no matter how slight, is grounds enough to justify any subway or commuter-rail project, no matter how expensive.
Does the Romney administration's new plan, which substitutes improvements to the Fairmount commuter rail line in Dorchester, Mattapan, and Hyde Park and additional Park-and-Ride spaces for the abandoned Arborway trolley line restoration and a Red Line-Blue Line connector in downtown Boston, strike the right balance between transit improvement and cost, which is now up to $770 million? Hard to tell, since it was principally justified, in a letter to the state Department of Environmental Protection, as ''meeting the air quality requirements" of the Clean Air Act.
Robert Keough is editor of CommonWealth, a quarterly journal published by MassINC, a Boston-based think tank. The magazine will host a forum on the Big Dig and the future of public transportation on Thursday at 8 a.m., at the Omni Parker House Hotel in Boston. 
