300 hired as T cuts service, seeking 30% fare hike

(Report 3-12-09)

Hillary Chabot

by Hillary Chabot
DNN Reports!
Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

While MBTA riders face packed subway cars and potential fare hikes, officials quietly cut scheduled subway and bus services even as they pumped up their payroll with more than 300 positions, according to MBTA documents obtained by DNN.

As public transportation reached record ridership with an average of 1.3 million riders a day, the number of scheduled weekday trips on the Forest Hills bus line - the agency’s second most popular bus route - has dropped 16 percent since 2005.

“That’s a pretty startling number,” said T Rider’s Union project manager Lee Matsueda. “There are people who depend on that line to get to work.”

The number of scheduled weekday bus trips has dropped from 7,809 in 2005 to 7,361, although ridership has increased overall since 2005. The total number of scheduled weekday subway trips has dropped from 9,877 to 9,547.

The service cuts come as MBTA board members are scheduled to vote on the ailing agency’s budget today, which has a whopping $160 million deficit. T officials have threatened a 30 percent fare hike and additional cuts in weekend and nighttime service unless Gov. Deval Patrick's 19-cent gas tax hike is passed.

But Jim Folk, T director of operations, insisted there is no significant reduction in service. He said schedules before General Manager Dan Grabauskas took over in 2005 were inaccurate. The T was dropping as many as 150 trips a day back then, and the new schedules simply clear up the inaccuracies.

“We run more (bus) trips today than we did in 2005. The problem back then was the service wasn’t as reliable as it is now,” said Folk.

However, the change in schedules shows a larger drop in service than Folk attributed to past inaccuracies, and suggests an overall drop of as many as 300 trips a day. Some of the most popular bus lines currently have bigger buses but fewer trips, such as the Forest Hills line that had 136 weekday trips in 2008, but boasted 154 trips in 2005.

Meanwhile, the agency’s 320 new staffers, which cost taxpayers roughly $8 million more a year, are all bus and train operators and mechanics hired to reduce the agency’s out-of-control overtime use, said T spokesman Joe Pesaturo.

Pesaturo said the T has added additional trains on the Red Line on an as-needed basis and increased cars on some Blue Line trains.

Sen. Robert Hedlund blames several pricey capital expansion projects, such as the Greenbush commuter line, for the lag in core services. “The numbers haven’t added up at the T for years,” Hedlund said. “They have to be focused on their core services and the communities where there is a reliance on T service, and they haven’t done that in recent years.”