Whopping $24.5 Billion Needed To Bring MBTA To 'State Of Good Repair'

SALEM, MA — A staggering $24.5 billion is needed to bring the MBTA infrastructure up to a "state of good repair" according to a sobering new public transportation analysis that is being praised for its brutal honesty about the massive deficiencies in the system after decades of underselling the issues.

"It's clear that years of underinvestment have added to the cost of bringing our system up to a state of good repair," said MBTA General Manager and CEO Phillip Eng of the internal analysis released on Thursday. "Timely and appropriate actions are key to mitigating and avoiding more costly and potentially impactful efforts. Know that we are committed to aggressively addressing our immediate needs — like the recent 16-day outage on the Ashmont Branch to perform track work — as we strive to deliver a modernized system to serve future generations."

While the MBTA has instituted a series of rolling service shutdowns — including last year's 30-day Orange Line and Green Line closures — to address slowdowns, derailments and mounting safety concerns ranging from train fires to stations with pieces of the ceiling falling on passengers, critics such as U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Salem) have repeatedly said that a complete overhaul of the system was required instead of claiming that Band-Aid approaches would fix a rapidly worsening problem.

"(This) announcement by the MBTA is the honest assessment we've been waiting for," Moulton said in a statement on Thursday. "While other transit agencies are building automated rail with fast trains every minute, we've let ours erode to the point that it's faster to walk in some places. How do we expect to reduce our terrible traffic if you can't even trust your train to not derail or catch fire?

"Last year, I called for a fundamental change in how the T functions as an organization. This is yet another wake-up call. If major changes are not made, we'll be dealing with the exact same, or worse, issues for years to come. Whether you use the T or not, every one of us in Massachusetts suffers from having a transit system we can't trust."

According to the MBTA, State of Good Repair does not indicate the level of safety, but rather is representative of an asset operating at its optimal and expected level of performance. An asset "out of SGR" is more likely to require rehabilitation or replacement.

The MBTA estimates the current overall SGR Index for assets in need of rehabilitation or replacement to be approximately $24.5 billion. This estimate includes:

• Facilities: $6.4 billion (35% of assets)
• Rolling Stock: $2.4 billion (55% of assets)
• Equipment: $52 million (28% of assets)
• Structures: $5.3 billion (22% of assets)
• Signals – CR: $1.3 billion (80% of assets)
• Signals – Transit: $753 million (53% of assets)
• Track – CR: $1.2 billion (9% of assets)
• Track – Transit: $2.0 billion (89% of assets)
• Power: $5.1 billion (76% of assets)

The estimate is an increase of $14.5 billion from the last assessment performed in 2019 with the MBTA saying that the nearly 150 percent increase is caused by a more comprehensive assessment of the inventory, significant infrastructure and construction cost increases because of inflation and supply chain challenges, the continued aging of the oldest public transportation system in the country with four more years of mostly neglect, and the lack of inclusion of the impact of some repair projects that have begun but whose benefits have yet to be realized.

"It's not shocking given the accumulation of decades of under-investment," Moulton said of the eye-popping $24.5 billion price tag that he said will ultimately be worth the expense. "Compare that to the $64.1 billion we spend every single year to subsidize driving in Massachusetts, costing each family $14,000 a year.

"Investing in the MBTA is investing in the future, and it's critical that restoring 'state of good repair' means modern standards, not the century-old standards of slow trains, inadequate and unpleasant stations, and no-faster-than-driving travel times we've grown used to."

Moulton has long advocated all-electric regional rail, North-South rail connecting North Station and South Station in Boston, and East-West rail that helps address the affordable housing crisis by making a daily commute from the Springfield area to the Boston area via train viable and reliable.

The MBTA report said that "understanding the MBTA's SGR needs and the level of investment required to address them is a critical step toward improving the system" and the MBTA is working to incorporate the findings of the analysis into the capital project pipeline.

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. X/Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)