Yet rising property values don’t translate into more revenue to keep the system functioning. Instead, the contributions that the T receives from the cities and towns it serves are shrinking as a percentage of the agency’s operating budget, according to the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, from 14 percent in 2001 to 8 percent in 2015. The seeming impossibility of seeking more from the 175 Eastern Massachusetts municipalities that qualify helps explain why the T’s financial woes persist year after year.

The value of reliable public transit is evident at least to real estate agents. While the looming extension of the MBTA’s Green Line through Somerville won’t be completed for years, home values have already soared in neighborhoods along the planned route. “Steps to T,” property ads across Greater Boston declare, even in cases when those steps number in the thousands.


Most public transit systems run at a loss. If riders had to pay full freight, they’d drive instead, creating crippling gridlock, or not be able to work at all. Since Greater Boston is the state’s main economic engine, and the MBTA is vital to its proper operation, the state should pay a part. But a state lawmaker from, say, Western Massachusetts might reasonably wonder whether, in the T’s time of crisis, the cities and towns that benefit most from the agency’s service might also do more to help.

State Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack raised that possibility in a recent Globe news article. Boosting those towns’ contributions, she indicated, could make the MBTA more accountable to them.

Few towns, it seems, would take that deal. Geoff Beckwith, head of the Massachusetts Municipal Association, argues that Proposition 2½ limits towns’ ability to capture the benefits of rising property values. A larger assessment for the T, he said in an interview, is therefore “not affordable for the communities because they don’t have a way to pay for it.” He also predicted that, even if towns were to be promised more oversight, other stakeholders, such as transit riders and the T’s employee unions, would lobby the Legislature to thwart meaningful controls.


More MBTA coverage Unfortunately for the T, each interest group has just enough influence to dissuade state legislators from adopting anyone else’s preferred solutions to the T’s woes, but not enough political clout to jam through its own. The result is what you’d expect: an agency whose longstanding inefficiencies are exacerbated by a perpetual state of lurching from crisis to crisis — even as the T’s very presence pushes up the net worths of property owners all along its major routes.

Dante Ramos can be reached at dante.ramos@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @danteramos.