Flashes of Panic

This article about MBTA refund fraud may explain our remarkably delayed refunds . But something still smells fishy.

If you’re experiencing “a huge jump in the refunds” for delayed service, isn’t it possible—in fact, a simpler hypothesis—that your customers have experienced a huge jump in delayed service? I’m not saying there isn’t fraud, but this does sound an awful lot like “the customer is always wrong and not to be trusted” to me.

The thing that really galls me is that when we were living in the western end of the state, we had the PVTA, and the PVTA was clean, comfortable, and largely on-time. And, if you were on one of the subsidized five-college routes, nearly free. But the PVTA kept cutting routes, because all the state public transit money was going to the MBTA.

Of course, the PVTA is under investigation now. I’m not sure why, but the degree to which this state is capable of bungling public transit boggles my mind. Mass transit doesn’t fail because people don’t use it; it fails because its administrators muck it up.