Seth Moulton speaking with Iowa educators in August 2019. (Photo via Creative Commons/Flickr by Gage Skidmore)

SOME GOOD NEWS for the Commonwealth: we have a talented new transportation secretary. The bad news: the MBTA just announced that it will take $24.5 billion to get the system back to normal working order.

$24.5 billion is a big number, but it’s not shocking given the accumulation of decades of under-investment. Compare that to the $64.1 billion we spend every single year to subsidize driving in Massachusetts. The result? The fourth worst traffic in the world. 

Housing costs in Massachusetts are also soaring; the median rent for a one-bedroom is $2,500 and the median price for a single-family house hit $600,000 this August. The system is broken when people cannot afford to live where they work, and don’t have a reliable, affordable option to commute without a car. 

Instead of just repairing old highways and bridges, and restoring the T to what it was 50 years ago, it’s time to put a realistic plan in motion for a truly multimodal transportation system that relies far less on driving and far more on options that will get us where we need to go faster than we can today. 

Modern high-speed and regional rail and dedicated bike lanes didn’t exist when our 1950s highway-centric national transportation network was developed. Americans, especially younger Americans, want and deserve options like the rest of the world.

The closest thing we have right now to a comprehensive vision for transportation across the Commonwealth is the Transportation Improvement Plan, a document that simply outlines all the projects using federal funds. Take a close look and you’ll see that something as simple as electrifying the commuter rail, which cities across the world accomplished decades ago, accounts for only 0.61 percent of spending. New York did it a century ago.

MassDOT’s spending plan for the next five years is another example of how we haven’t been taking the right approach. Out of $15.7 billion in funding, 75 percent of it is for roads and highways. It is no wonder we have modern highways and antiquated trains. 

To solve today’s problems, everything must be on the table. We must look at integrated transportation challenges, not just separate highway or transit issues.

High-speed East-West Rail 

Just imagine if you could get to Springfield from South Station in 45 minutes. This would be transformative. Suddenly you could work in downtown Boston and be home in Springfield—a place you can afford to live—in time for dinner.

Commuting that far, that fast, is an option most of us can’t even imagine today, even though it’s commonplace in many other parts of the world. Even in Morocco, an entire nation with only 22 percent of the GDP of Massachusetts, you can travel that fast, over the same distance, by high-speed rail.

East-West Rail would make this possible, but we need a more realistic plan for getting there. A recent study shows the state’s design attracting only 1,500 riders a day. That’s a joke. The Turnpike it parallels sees 48,000 drivers every day.

The reason is simple: the train they’ve proposed will be slower than driving. Much like MassDOT’s approach to the T, it will simply restore train service that we had 100 years ago while the rest of the world is building modern, high-speed railways.

This can be done by building the project in phases as France has done with its high-speed rail system. With each step, travel time will improve with more service extended westward. The first step, getting from South Station to Worcester, could take the same time that it takes to get from South Station to Alewife on the Red Line, and we shouldn’t have to wait 20 years to get it.

High-speed rail is many times safer and more efficient than driving, produces less carbon emissions, and contributes more to local economies. Other countries do this kind of analysis, which is why they build high-speed rail. Our DOT should do the same.

 Commuter rail becomes regional rail

We already have something the rest of the country would kill for: a vast, 400-mile commuter rail network. Los Angeles is building a new rail system from scratch at great expense. Yet we’re chronically underutilizing our most valuable asset: our commuter rail trains today are slower than they were in the 1920s.

Think about that every time you see traffic congestion in the Commonwealth, and then consider that our commuter rail uses only about 5 percent of the capacity those tracks can handle.

Lynn, a city with a remarkably undeveloped waterfront, is the same distance from downtown Boston as Brooklyn is from Manhattan. Brooklyn is one of the hottest places to live in all of America. The difference? Brooklyn has about one train a minute to Manhattan; Lynn has – at peak – one train every 30 minutes to downtown, and off peak every hour.

It is long past time we build a regional rail system with all-electric, all-day service with trains every 15 minutes or better. Pair this with modern, nicely appointed trains and we can modernize our current 20th Century system into one with service faster and more comfortable than driving. 

Instrumental for delivering a high-functioning rail system is a North-South rail tunnel connecting North and South Stations because it allows you to travel seamlessly from any commuter rail line in the Commonwealth to any other. Suddenly you can live in Salem or Lowell and get to work in Plymouth or Quincy in 45 minutes. Those trips take two hours of driving at rush hour today. The tunnel also connects the Northeast Corridor from Virginia to Maine, making it much easier to travel beyond Massachusetts. 

The path forward

Some will see our faltering system as evidence that transformation is impossible. However, the $24.5 billion backlog represents aging assets that we will be replacing no matter what. We can either invest in solutions like regional rail that both address the sorry state of the T and enable a better future, or use the same old technology that fails to serve our needs. 

And it’s not just trains. A multimodal system is one that integrates safe walking, fast buses, and dedicated bike lanes. It gives us more places to live and work, more freedom to choose how to get there.

Nothing that I’ve proposed is impossible. Most of the rest of the world already solves their transportation issues through multimodal investment, and there’s no reason Massachusetts can’t do so, too.

Gov. Maura Healey, Transportation Secretary Monica Tibbitts-Nutt, and MBTA General Manager Phillip Eng are poised to bring serious change to a failing, old-fashioned transportation system that desperately needs it. Let’s give them our encouragement and support: go faster, go farther—and do it quickly.

Seth Moulton is a Democratic congressman from Salem.