MBTA outlines plan for widespread service cuts in 2021

BOSTON — Starting next spring and summer, the MBTA would eliminate commuter rail service on weekends and after 9 p.m. on weeknights, cease running all ferries, scrap 25 bus routes, halt subways and buses at midnight, and scale back more transit options under a package of service cuts officials unveiled Monday.

The plan, which will be the subject of a month-long public comment period ahead of a final vote in December, would shave more than $130 million from what the T spends on running buses, trains and ferries.

MBTA General Manager Steve Poftak explained why service cuts are necessary in the first virtual public meeting for rider feedback on Tuesday. He started by saying the MBTA has, "seen a significant drop in travel and revenue.”

This first public meeting about proposed service cuts focused on the metro west area. Residents there are worried what the impact will be.

“People who are disabled people who are low income earners who need to get to their jobs and a 9 o’clock cutoff is not going to work for a lot of people," said Ellen Fine of Needham.

While the T has faced financial pressures for years, it was pushed into an unprecedented crisis by evaporating ridership and fare revenue amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The slide in T revenues commenced in March, just as the House was passing new transportation revenues, a push that has so far drawn no response from the Senate.

The plan unveiled Monday puts clear contours on how MBTA and Department of Transportation officials plan to cope with a $579 million shortfall, and could reshape transit in eastern and central Massachusetts for years.

MBTA lays out proposed service cuts for 2021 With a $579 million shortfall, the MBTA is proposing cuts that could reshape transit in Massachusetts.

T officials aimed the steepest cuts at routes where ridership has declined the most during pandemic and in areas where commuters have access to alternatives, but the vast majority of the system -- which hosted upwards of 1.2 million rides a day before COVID struck -- will be affected in some way.

Layoffs are almost certain, though the timing and number are not clear. Fare hikes are not currently under consideration, as the T evaluates a future in which many of its former users may continue working from home.

“Using limited resources to operate nearly empty trains, ferries and buses is not a responsible use of the funding provided by riders, communities, and taxpayers, and it does not help support the transportation needs of our region,” MBTA General Manager Steve Poftak wrote in an open letter to riders. “Saving resources now will help the MBTA to bring back service when it is needed after the pandemic has faded.”

Lawmakers, transportation justice activists and organized labor leaders responded with quick and pointed criticism, many describing the potential slashes as “austerity” imposed by the Baker administration.

Opponents argued that the cuts would make commuting more difficult for riders who rely on public transit to get to essential jobs, a large portion of whom are low-income or people of color, despite the T’s best efforts to limit the brunt of the changes to routes where they will have the smallest impacts.

They also warned that making transit less accessible could push more workers onto roadways, exacerbating traffic that had been among the worst in the nation before the pandemic hit and stalling the state’s efforts to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.

“It is the same old song of MBTA officials pushing austerity, rather than daring to ask the wealthy to pay their fair share, despite the strong public support for new revenues that will ensure high quality, affordable, safe public transportation,” said Jim Evers, president of the Boston Carmen’s Union that represents thousands of T employees, in a statement.

The union will push for a moratorium, he said, on any additional cuts that would affect essential workers in jobs critical to the state’s fight against COVID-19.

Under the plan outlined Monday, service levels would drop an average of about 15 percent on buses, 30 percent on subways and 35 percent on commuter rail.

The changes are likely to remain in place for years, although MBTA officials said they will monitor trends and respond accordingly if they notice increasing demand or crowding.

Staff will host a series of public meetings over the next month, focusing both on specific regions with T service and on the system as a whole, to solicit feedback about the plans before the Fiscal and Management Control Board votes on a final package on Dec. 7.

The T also published an interactive map on its website laying out the line-by-line and route-by-route cuts on the table.

All of the T’s core subway lines would run 20 percent less frequently under the proposal, saving tens of millions of dollars in operational costs. (T officials initially described off-peak changes as an “additional 20 percent,” but later clarified that there is no planned difference between peak and off-peak subway service changes.)

The Green Line’s E Branch would also stop running trolleys at the Brigham Circle stop in the Mission Hill neighborhood, replacing the final five stops with bus service for the fewer than 1,000 commuters that use those stations.

Both subway and bus service would stop at midnight, no longer running beyond that point until the start of service the next day, affecting more than 2,000 riders based on September figures.

The proposed changes to the bus network, which has had the highest level of pre-pandemic ridership and serves a significant portion of commuters deemed “essential workers,” vary significantly by route. Essential bus routes would see an average reduction in frequency of about 5 percent, while non-essential routes would cut trips by an average of 20 percent.

The T would eliminate 25 of its 169 bus routes, seven of which are within a quarter-mile of another route or subway, six of which have transit-critical riders but low ridership, and 12 of which have exhibited low demand and serve less dependent populations, officials said.

Another 14 routes would be consolidated and five would be shortened. Officials also proposed eliminating the suburban subsidy program partially funding additional service in Bedford, Beverly, Burlington, Lexington and Mission Hill, plus hiking fares on about 1 percent of trips using the RIDE paratransit service.

On the commuter rail network, T leaders will suggest cutting more than a third of pre-COVID service, largely by shutting the system down on weekends and after 9 p.m. on weekdays. The exception would be the Fairmount Line, which would be replaced by buses on the weekend and close up to an hour later than other lines during the week.

Weekday service at both the peak and midday would be trimmed, too, with the T cutting the number of trains per day from 505 to 430.

Six stations would be shuttered: Plimptonville in Walpole, Prides Crossing in Beverly, Silver Hill and Hastings in Weston, Plymouth, and Cedar Park in Melrose. Construction on two other stations -- Winchester and South Attleboro -- would be paused indefinitely.

All MBTA ferries, including the Charlestown, Hingham and Hull ferries, would cease operations indefinitely if the plan is implemented.

Another separate section of the T’s plan involves shifting resources from the agency’s capital side to its operating budget.

The Legislature gave authorization in a budget bill approved last week to pay capital project salaries with bond funds, a change that T higher-ups have been seeking for years that will help free up additional funding. Officials also proposed reallocating $380 million in federal funds from capital projects to preventative maintenance over the next two years.

Several capital projects could wind up paused indefinitely to redirect tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, such as purchase of new commuter rail cars or improving signage across the system.

“We are very aware of how anxiety-producing the conversation about service adjustments is, but we’re confident that making the changes now to avoid spending money on service that people are not using is the best prescription we have for having the money we need to run fuller service when our riders come back, whenever that may be,” said Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack.

The T says it is now only transporting 330,000 trips on an average weekday, but is running the same levels of service it ran to serve 1.26 million daily trips prior to the pandemic.T staff had previously said that the changes are likely to be permanent, but Pollack and Poftak clarified Monday that they are not seeking immutable cuts to the agency’s spending on service. They said they hope to use the changes as an opportunity to build back a more equitable system than existed before the pandemic.

Officials prepared a menu of service packages, largely reflecting the cuts they could impose, that the agency could choose to reintroduce when it finds itself on stable footing -- which, according to MassDOT modeling, might not occur for several years.

Evers said the FMCB “would be failing riders and the public yet again” if the board approves cuts before President-Elect Joe Biden takes office, hinting that he believes a Biden administration would authorize additional stimulus or infrastructure funding.

However, several officials said Monday that they do not intend on reversing course even if a new batch of federal aid arrives, cautioning that it would be foolish to close next year’s budget gap with one-time funding only to face a new process of planning cuts the following year if fare revenue remains severely diminished.

The T already exhausted about $827 million from the CARES Act to close gaps in fiscal years 2020 and 2021, and Poftak said he wants to wait until revenues are “durable” before officials begin to think about selecting which services to restore or which new options to embrace.

“Even if we were to get an infusion of money from a third party, it’s important not to just react and say, ‘Okay, let’s put the old schedules back together and let’s call it a day,’” Joseph Aiello, chair of the FMCB, said at Monday’s meeting. “There’s certainly going to be some elements of the system that are going to take much longer to recover than others, and I don’t think any of us are interested in not being efficient with the use of taxpayer money.”

Boston City Councilor and mayoral candidate Michelle Wu called the plans to cut service “short-sighted and dangerous.” The council unanimously opposed the cuts in a resolution last week.

“These cuts will impact the very essential workers -- many from low-income communities and communities of color -- who have been the heroes of this pandemic and who rely on the MBTA daily,” Wu said. “Longer waits, loss of weekend service, and eliminated stops means more risk to public health, more traffic, and more burden on the very communities devastated by the pandemic.”

The proposal turns a spotlight toward Beacon Hill. Activists groups have been pushing the Legislature since last month to intervene and raise revenue that could help stave off or at least soften the cuts.

In March, just before Gov. Charlie Baker ordered a public health state of emergency, the House approved a package of tax and fee increases that Democratic leaders estimated could raise roughly half a billion dollars a year for transportation needs.

That proposal hasn’t emerged in the Senate, where the chamber’s leaders argued that they could not support tax hikes during a pandemic-fueled recession.

Legislative leaders since March have grappled with broader state budgeting questions and efforts to direct spending increases toward other areas like health care and rent relief and food security.

House Democrats opted not to splice any of their previous transportation revenue proposals, such as a five-cent gasoline tax hike or higher fees on ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft, into the fiscal year 2021 spending bill they will debate this week.

In a briefing unveiling the budget proposal last week, House Speaker Robert DeLeo indicated that he hopes to see his chamber’s original transportation tax and fee bill revived in the Senate.

“Hopefully, with what we have passed in the House in terms of the transportation legislation, will be looked at actually by the Senate as a separate piece of legislation than the budget, and we’ll hopefully move forward with that,” DeLeo said.

Signs emerged Monday that some lawmakers might try to force focus on public transit during the lame duck session. Several legislators, including Rep. Mike Connolly of Cambridge and Sen. Jason Lewis of Winchester, voiced opposition to the proposed service cuts at Monday’s FMCB meeting.

Connolly said an amendment he filed to the House budget would increase the long-term capital gains income tax rate from 5 percent to 9 percent, and could raise $1.7 billion in revenue to help prevent cuts at the T.

“I understand that the dropoff in ridership that has occurred in the wake of the pandemic has brought us to this point, but let’s remember that for months, the state has been pushing forward with reopening,” Connolly told the board. “I don’t see how, on one hand, we have the Baker administration determined to bring everyone back to work, determined to bring people back to school, and on the other hand, we have this announcement today of significant transit cuts.”

Sen. Becca Rausch, a Needham Democrat, tweeted that she “will be fighting this” after she learned about “seriously concerning + frustrating service cuts” during a morning briefing.

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