'A fix, not a vision:' An MBTA historian on how the T got to its current state

The fallout continues after a fire and chaotic evacuation on the MBTA's Orange Line Thursday morning. About 200 passengers had to flee after a train car caught fire on a bridge over the Mystic River. T officials say a loose piece hit the third rail, starting the blaze. But how did we get here? Steven Beaucher, a historian of the MBTA and author of the book "Boston in Transit: Mapping the History of Public Transportation in the Hub," spoke with Morning Edition host Jeremy Siegel about how the T’s history affects its present. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Jeremy Siegel: What can history tell us about what happened on the Orange Line yesterday?

Steven Beaucher: The older equipment gets, the more prone they are to malfunction. No matter how many heroic efforts are made at the MBTA — and there are some people who are heroic in repairing these aging vehicles — they are decades past their lives. The one that caught fire recently, the Orange Line car, that's from the 1970s. The T was only a decade old when that car went into service. And that car shouldn't [still] be in service. We have a reactionary system now where we are getting new Orange Line cars, we are getting new Red Line cars, but I feel the executive branch reacted to it as a fix, not as a vision.

Siegel: Given how turbulent things feel with the T right now with accidents, with derailments, with service problems and delays, are you looking back at history to peak T, when things felt sort of like they were as good as possible? When you weren't seeing delays, or you weren't seeing accidents?

Beaucher: I would describe "peak T," in your terms, as their first decade. They came on the scene in 1964 primed to tap new federal funds. They were a new agency. They were well funded. There was political will both at the state and federal level, and there was funding at both the state and federal level to expand transit in Boston like never before. So the '60s into the early '70s is really that was when the T, I believe, was at its prime, and it's been an up and down rollercoaster since.

Siegel: The T started then, but they were using systems that had been around for decades and decades at that point. Boston's is the oldest transit system that there is in the United States, right?

Beaucher: Boston technically has the oldest public transit subway in the United States, part of the Green Line today. But yes, when the T came online in 1964, they were using systems that were from the late 19th century, some even earlier.

Siegel: So thinking about everything that's going on today, its safety problems, the federal investigation rooting from those safety problems, its delays on some of the most-used lines, it feels like chaos every day for a lot of riders. Is there any time in the T's history that we can look back to where there were any similar issues that maybe we could learn, from or at least look back on and have some commiserating with?

Beaucher: I do believe where we are now, especially in the last five years, many more things are happening in short order and in a shorter period of time. That doesn't mean that history was absent of issues — infrastructure issues, performance issues, management issues I'm thinking of. There was a lack of funding right around 1980; the T had to shut down for 24 hours until the state stepped in to turn it back on. So imagine waking up and the T was just turned off in the morning.

There were various issues with new equipment over the years: the Breda cars, the Green Line Type 8 cars that came in in the late '90s, early 2000s. I mean, it was almost a decade before the T really got those smoothly operating. There were a lot of derailments, a lot of damage to the tracks with these new cars. The Blue Line cars that came on in the 2000s, Siemens-built S700s, those had smoking air conditioners. But I feel like where we are today, we feel it more acutely and we feel it more often.

Siegel: You mentioned thinking of the possibility of waking up and T service is gone. And it sounded like you were talking about that sort of hypothetically. But given that it is under a federal investigation, do you think about the possibility, with everything going on, of something like the T having to shut down, either for safety or other issues?

Beaucher: Well, what we are seeing right now, especially in the last year, we're seeing micro-shutdowns of portions of the T, whether it's under their responsibility or not. The Green Line tunnel shut down under the Government Center Garage for emergency repairs because of the building being demolished above it. I don't think we're going to wake up one day and have the T turned off.

But as I write at the end of my book, the cyclical nature of inconsistent funding and political will for funding adequate and useful and meaningful public transit in Boston has been going up and down throughout the T's period, and those ups and downs seem to be getting tighter and tighter. It's not just through executive administrations in the state. It's actually sometimes year by year, or storm by storm, or building demolition by building demolition. That's why we're all in this period of 'Oh my God, what's going to happen tomorrow?' And the way to get out of this is a high level of political commitment at the state and federal levels to fix things, not just to react to things.

Siegel: Is there anything about the history of the MBTA, either the T itself or looking back at events that does make you hopeful looking forward, or have a positive attitude despite all of these wild things going on right now?

Beaucher: I wanted to read you something from the MBTA's mission when they were established. This is part of their founding legislation in 1964: "The MBTA shall have the duty to develop, finance and operate the mass transportation facilities and equipment in the public interest; and to achieve maximum effectiveness in complementing other forms of transportation in order to promote the general economic and social well-being of the area of the Commonwealth."

And when I read that, that was written by the state who created the MBTA. That was vision, that was thinking broadly, that was thinking to the future and thinking about the commonwealth as acommonwealth, how the T could fit in with other transportation infrastructures. There aren't as many people with that vision anymore who are making decisions. There are people with vision, but I feel like we need more.