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EOT and MBTA Do Good with BRT

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Enough acronyms for you? BRT stands for Bus Rapid Transit. The state’s transportation planners (yes, you, Jim Aloisi!) are doing a very good thing with their latest plan to implement aspects of Bus Rapid Transit on the existing Route 28 Bus Route. They are marketing it as “28X” and they will be implementing (as feasible) dedicated lanes, stand-alone stations (as opposed to stops) and off-board ticketing. See details here, here, and here. This last item is of particular importance. On-board fare collection on buses has proven to be the Achilles Heel of automated fare collection (which this space has long supported). The continued use of paper tickets (versus CharlieCards) results in serious dwell time delays. Moving that delay off the […]

Chicago 45, Boston 0

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After watching Beckett pitch masterful innings of shutout, no-hit ball against Detroit last night, I thought I would go back to my national series on other cities big education wins and the whiffs Menino has been making on charters. (A wink to my colleagues who know that I don’t even know who the running backs are for the Patriots; all I can say is that drinking was involved last night, so watching the game worked.) After the New York 20, Boston 0 post, which highlighted the fact that Mayor Bloomberg is starting 20 (count ’em) new charter schools this summer, let me chime in with Chicago’s big win over Boston — this time 45 to zippo. Azam Ahmed of the […]

St. Patrick’s, er, I mean Evacuation Day

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Couple of items on the manufactured scandal over Evacuation and Bunker Hill Days. (For those of you who don’t know, the two days are official Suffolk County holidays celebrated, respectively, on March and June 17ths. Bunker Hill Day is pretty self-explanatory. Evacuation Day is a little more arcane – it celebrates the day in 1776 when the British army evacuated Boston. Both houses of the Legislature recently considered amendments to eliminate the holidays, in what I would guess is a vain attempt to throw beleaguered taxpayers a bone. Both amendments were narrowly defeated.) First, despite some rather overblown rhetoric emanating from the Legislature – cue Angelo Scaccia, whose defense of the holidays includes this tidbit (You can read the full […]

A Few Wrinkles in the DiMasi Indictment

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Former House Speaker Sal DiMasi was indicted today. You can read the indictment itself here. I won’t belabor the obvious, but a few secondary points stuck out to me: – COGS at Cognos — Cognos agreed to pay one of the other indictees, Joe Lally, a 20% commission on sales. Is that standard in the industry — to pay a middleman 20% of the deal? Maybe it is standard, but it doesn’t make me feel great about our IT procurement process if that’s built into the price of a typical deal. – Conflict of Interest Laws — Part of the allegations involve DiMasi receiving a kickback for referrals that went to his law partner. I’m not sure how you fix […]

We will be able to do this soon

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My favorite Education Intelligence Agent Mike Antonucci had this news out of California: There are 3,000 retired educators receiving a six-figure state pension. And that’s out of a total of just over 5,000 for all types of state employees. Pretty outstanding performance for educators in the Golden Parachute State. Now the good news. Pioneer is building MassOpenBooks.org as well as a number of other government transparency sites for release this summer and fall. We’ll be able to pull out all kinds of gems like that back here in the Bay State for folks who are interested in understanding how the numbers stack up.