BOSTON (WHDH) - Several members of Massachusetts’s congressional delegation are weighing in after the Federal Transit Administration released a 90-page report detailing extensive safety failures and more at the MBTA.
“As Bostonians, we’ve been frustrated with the T for years, but now the federal government has made it official,” said U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton, who slammed the MBTA Wednesday.
Moulton questioned the transportation authority’s ability to meet goals laid out in the scathing FTA report, which dug into the T, particularly for its prioritization of long-term projects over day-to-day maintenance.
The report found that the MBTA “has diverted management attention and resources from the agency’s operations and maintenance,” has “adopted limited safety practices in the field,” lacked effective safety communication and hasn’t met its own standards for training and quality control.
“The T is a disaster,” Moulton told 7NEWS. “We’re not gonna fix this just by closing the Orange Line down for 30 days.”
Fellow Massachusetts Rep. Stephen Lynch largely concurred with his colleague.
“With fatalities and serious injuries, we’ve gotta get this thing in order,” Lynch told 7NEWS.
“What’s so shocking about this report,” Moulton said, “is how basic it is, how fundamental the failures are that the MBTA has been committing for years.”
Moulton added that he thinks the MBTA is not equipped to meet the FTA’s expectations from the report, noting that MBTA General Manager Steve Poftak said that over half the recommendations laid out in the report “are things that the T hasn’t even considered.”
While Lynch said he was glad to see additional oversight come to the MBTA via the creation of a new Quality, Compliance and Oversight Office, Moulton said it’s “just absolutely not enough,” and called it “a relatively small change.”
“I don’t see how you can come to any other conclusion after reading this report that we need a lot of people fired at the MBTA,” Moulton said.
In a tweet, U.S. Senator Ed Markey said the FTA report “underscores what we already know: the MBTA’s current crises are the consequences of systemic negligence, underinvestment, and mismanagement.”
“It’s shameful,” the tweet read. “The state must take robust safety measures and we’ll keep fighting for additional bold federal investments.”
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