Transportation secretary wants new subway cars -- soon

By Christopher Baxter, Globe Correspondent

Noting that rising gas prices have spurred an increasing amount of people to take the MBTA, Transportation Secretary Bernard Cohen said today he would like to accelerate the deployment of 146 new Orange Line cars and 74 new Red Line cars.

"While I don't think fuel prices are going to go down in the near future, we really have an opportunity to take advantage of a change in the marketplace and a shift toward public transportation," Cohen said. "But we are going to need vehicles to carry people."

The Orange Line vehicles are currently scheduled to arrive by 2012, and the Red Line vehicles by 2015, MBTA General Manager Daniel A. Grabauskas said in a phone interview earlier this week.

Cohen, the chairman of the MBTA board, asked Karen McGann, the authority's director of vehicle engineering, at a board meeting today whether the new vehicles could be brought on line sooner. She said she would look into it.

Ridership on the system was up 5.3 percent in May, compared with the same period a year earlier.

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