Starts & Stops – T’s high-profile woes keep agency stuck in vicious cycle
By Noah Bierman – Globe Staff / November 8, 2009

About a half-dozen MBTA inspectors crouched inside a dark and sooty Red Line tunnel Wednesday afternoon, banging and clanging away on the rails to make sure nothing was loose or out of joint.

It made for good television footage and a nice front-page picture in this newspaper. The images illustrated a fairly abstract and complex topic: the MBTA’s abysmal financial condition and the resulting decay of the subway system.

But that simplification of the wide-ranging financial and public safety problem has long contributed to making things worse at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.

In this case, leaks and subsequent corrosion have put the tracks at risk of falling out of alignment in the section between Alewife and Harvard stations. It would cost $80 million to fix, and the MBTA does not have the money. So Governor Deval Patrick, who ordered the independent review that identified the problem publicly last week, called on track inspectors who found no urgent problems.

But it’s important to remember the scene on the Red Line tracks demonstrated only a fraction of the MBTA’s problem.

That’s right, the Red Line was only a single example among 51 unfunded projects considered critical to preventing “a danger to life and limb.’’ All told, the MBTA would need more than $500 million more than it currently spends to fix the most crucial problems, $3 billion to tackle the entire backlog.