When it comes to transportation reform in Massachusetts, it seems like for every step forward that we take, we end up taking two steps back.
The Legislature passed a transportation reform bill several months ago, which took effect this month.
It sounds like a great improvement, but there were several problems with it. First, the reform itself actually cost money to implement. True reform is usually geared toward savings and efficiencies. Second, although the reform bill eliminated the Mass. Turnpike Authority, it actually created new forms of bureaucracy that take us back to the same place. This larger bureaucratic system without any clear accountability and roadmap for reform were the major reasons I voted against the bill.
On Sunday, we learned that our current need for reform actually grew over the past two years under Governor Patrick. In other words, it looks like our already bloated and broken transportation system has grown in size over the past two years, making the need for reform even greater than we once thought. The Boston Globe reported on Sunday that, since Patrick became Governor, the state’s transportation agencies more than doubled the number of six-figure jobs, and there are double-digit surges in payrolls at some of the state’s top transportation agencies. It looks like most of the reform that we are going to implement will just undo some of the waste we’ve seen creep into the system over the past two years.
And it’s worth noting that, even with all of this restructuring, we still have problems with roads and bridges in Massachusetts.
What all this means to me is that we are probably going to need a whole new round of real reforms in the near future to help us address some of the real problems plaguing the transportation system. The reform needs to be more than just moving people around, we need a wholesale restructuring of agencies and possibly privatization of certain functions to get us moving in the right direction. And we need to turn attention back to customer service and quality of our infrastructure and not so much on internal, bureaucratic concerns.
