Federal Transportation Administration safety review of the MBTA: thumbs down! #mbta #charliebaker #mayorkoch

Federal Transportation Administration safety review of the MBTA: thumbs down!

– News and commentary about Quincy Massachusetts from Quincy Quarry News

The Feds give the MBTA an F
A meme

Quincy Quarry’s preliminary review of the Federal Transportation Administration’s Safety Management ninety page report follows below.

For starters, the report would have been even longer had it not used abbreviations and so greatly reduced the length of the report if the feds had not done so. 

Fortunately, a key to the abbreviations was provided early on in the report.

Granted, while the report ultimately comes as not all that much of a surprise to both the Quincy Quarry News newsroom as well as long suffering straphangers, putting such things as the following to print were unarguably hard shots to the soft underbelly of the T.

In particular, the following pretty much slips the shiv where it is deserved: into senior management.

“(The Federal Transportation Administration’s Safety Management Inspection – “SMI” – team) found that MBTA does not have sufficient capabilities for identifying priorities to address safety concerns from the agency’s operations, maintenance, and capital project delivery programs.  Throughout the SMI, FTA found that while MBTA leadership was aware of many of the issues raised in the special directives they had not evaluated the information as is necessary to effectively assess system-wide safety and prioritize action ..

… (The Federal Transportation Administration — “FTA”) also issued the special directives because MBTA and (the Massachusetts Department o Pubic Utilities) have been slow to complete corrective actions to address safety concerns, averaging almost two years to close a CAP (Corrective Action Plan).  Persons interviewed in the SMI process articulated concerns about MBTA leadership’s lack of urgency to address safety deficiencies in a timely manner.  MBTA’s front line workers expressed a lack of confidence that safety issues, once reported, would be addressed. In addition, senior technical leadership expressed similar concerns, providing numerous examples where operational or maintenance issues with potential safety impacts had been raised but were not addressed, as agency resources were unavailable or focused on other areas ….

(… The Federal Transportation Administration) observed that MBTA’s approach to implementing SMS lacks sufficient detail and explicit direction from MBTA’s leadership.  MBTA has not developed the necessary tools and capabilities to support the management of safety risk.  As a result, MBTA has been unable to prioritize safety risk and, subsequently, resources to mitigate safety risk.”

Shoveling it at an MBTA “Edifice Complex” groundbreaking that later went bust
A Quincy Quarry News exclusive file photo

Further, the Federal Transportation Administration heaped further umbrage upon the MBTA’s spending on big ticket new infrastructure projects and equipment rather than simply taking care of the essential business of safely and reliably transporting straphangers to and fro.

Finally, be sure to note that these shortcomings pretty much remained to be problems given the T’s less than encouraging response to the Federal Transportation Administration’s 2019 “Safety Review Panel” investigation that was undertaken in the wake of the catastrophic train derailment at the Red Line’s JFK station, a review which pretty much addressed the same concerns as did this latest Federal Transpiration Administration investigation.

“FYI – not my fault” – an MBTA Board of Directors member
A still image from a YouTube file photo

Needless to say, it will be interesting to see if the T again fails to heed obvious needs that are long overdue addressing in spite of the fact that the feds have posed the potential for their imposing grave sanctions if MBTA management again fails to take care of business.

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