There could be a light at the end of the tunnel for MBTA passengers, and not from a subway train that’s on fire.
As the Herald reported, safety oversight of the T could fall under a new independent agency, if Inspector General Jeffrey Shapiro gets his wish.
Shapiro was responding to legislation filed by state Rep. William Straus that called for safety oversight to be moved to Shapiro’s office. The IG gave that idea a thumb’s down.
Testifying Monday at a Joint Committee on Transportation hearing, Shapiro said that he instead favors moving this watchdog role from the Department of Public Utilities to a new independent agency “focused solely on safety of the MBTA.”
Amen to that.
MBTA safety is too big of a chronic problem for it to share bandwidth with other department functions. We’ve been through safety review panels, a blistering report from the Federal Transit Administration, apologies and promises.
Through it all, riders have had to cope train derailments (one of which hobbled the Red Line for months), accidents, a train fire over the Mystic River, the dragging death of a man whose arm was caught in a subway car door, a plummeting ceiling panel, and a falling utility box which injured a woman on the Harvard T station. To name a few.
Vows to do better aren’t going to cut it, neither will re-arranging the deck chairs.
Safety on the MBTA needs to be one agency’s sole focus if any substantive changes are to be made. They are desperately needed.
Shapiro envisions two branches within this potential entity, one for the region’s subway system, which aligns with the Federal Transit Administration’s oversight authority; and a smaller one focused on everything else: buses, regional transit authorities and ferries.
“I do believe that a new safety agency, as defined by the FTA, is needed,” Shapiro said, referring to the feds’ critique in last year’s safety management inspection that state safety oversight be independent from the governor’s office.
“That agency should not be the OIG,” he added. “Rather, the OIG would have oversight of the new safety agency.”
There are political details to be hammered out – who appoints who, for example, but that shouldn’t be enough to tap the brakes on this idea.
MBTA passengers need to have something that was lost a long time ago – confidence in our transportation system. The recent “slow zones” made for excruciating commutes, but that annoyance is a relief compared to riders who’ve had to disembark from a train in a tunnel and walk in the dark to a nearby station, or cool their heels waiting for a derailment up the line to be cleared, or worry that station escalators could go haywire in the middle of their ascent.
We are long past “re-sets” and solutions without muscle. It’s time for an independent agency to be tasked solely with overseeing safety on the MBTA, and empowered to take action to fix problems.
T passengers have been standing on the platform, waiting for safety changes to show up for years. Hopefully an independent safety agency will pull into the station soon.
