Transit riders (like me) love to complain about how long certain trips take. We wish trains, trolleys, and buses could go faster. But a lesser known factor making trips longer is dwell time — how long you spend at stops and stations waiting for people to board. New York City has instituted a “Select Bus Service” strategy on several key routes, instituting a couple of tactics to reduce trip time by reducing dwell time. (Its also worth noting that this type of bus-rapid-transit-like service is incredibly low cost to implement relative to almost any other transit expansion or enhancement). Most importantly, this service lowers dwell time by taking fare payment off the bus. Each station on the route has fare […]

As a sometimes commuter rail passenger, it’s depressing to contemplate that a plan to replace almost 20% of the commuter rail’s passenger cars is now at least a year or more behinds schedule. The need for an upgrade to the fleet was brought home to me in sharp relief during a recent trip to the Danbury Railway Museum. Among the old trains from the golden age of rail on exhibit was a passenger coach whose interior would have been indistinguishable from some of the older commuter rail coaches (that date back to the ’70s and ’80s). In procurement, hindsight is always 20/20. The MBTA took a much lower bid from a far less experienced manufacturer. And it looks like at […]

(Co-authored with Pioneer’s partner, Muckrock, which has extensive experience with public records requests at the federal, state, and municipal level) Hot on the heels of “Sunshine Week”, when MassPIRG celebrated the Patrick Administration’s commitment to transparency, we thought we’d collect some best practices in transparency we’ve learned over the years from the Administration. Massachusetts’s Public Records Law was created to allow citizens to access important government documents and provide another avenue of government oversight. After all, the documents are paid for by our tax dollars and in some cases, such requests are the only avenue to provide public accountability. But over the years, Commonwealth bureaucracy has developed increasingly “creative” interpretations of transparency, saving the public the trouble of having to […]

Our next adventure in accountability and transparency in state government starts with the Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development, helmed by Greg Bialecki. That office (or at least one of its subunits) oversees the Capital Access Program. The intriguing thing about this program is that a single private entity, the Massachusetts Business Development Corporation (“MBDC”) is named in statute as the manager of the program (and recipient of funds). The state retains oversight through a contract that is renewed every two years and a statutorily-mandated “annual review and assessment of the performance of the MBDC.” So, we were curious what the program was achieving with the millions it has received from the state over the years. On January 20, […]