Today the financial leadership of the House, the Senate and the Governor’s office held their annual “consensus revenue hearing”. In short, the outlook is fair — a continuing moderate budget squeeze with some warning flags about long-term issues. But those long-term issues — health care, pensions, and financial reserves — mean that the budgetary choices over the next few months won’t be easy.
Leadership — the scarce resource in the transportation system
Leadership is scarce in the transportation system in Massachusetts. By that, I emphatically do not mean that the current leadership is weak. Rather, I mean that every management team has a finite capacity to plan and to solve problems and that the range of challenges facing MassDOT’s management team is very broad.
Ridesharing Legislation
The regulations that exist in different cities and towns across Massachusetts do not contemplate the type of service offered by Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) like Uber and Lyft. Five bills have been filed in this session relative to TNCs. The bills offer different flavors of regulation within a few primary areas: state oversight, insurance and public safety. Here are brief summaries of them.
12/11/15 Bowker Overpass Construction Schedule Update
MassDOT has provided this updated construction schedule for the work that is currently underway on the Bowker Overpass. The work on the travel lanes has proceeded from west to east. (Note from Will: the phasing for this project is straightforward and, while the schedule has slid a few months, the basic plan has not changed.)
MBTA cancels contracts for Green Line extension
Dear Will, Following our discussion on the Waverley square ABA renovation, here is another news demonstrate the incompetence of DOT and MBAT http://www.boston.com/news/2015/12/10/mbta-cancels-contracts-for-green-line-extension/WGWg5TobNPN3dQYxD9QXHN/story.html?p1=menu_business_latest Thanks god Beverly Scott was fired during last winter fiasco. And a lot more is needed to correct the ship. Voluntary retirement will not work for MBTA. We need to keep firing …
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No Fly List/No Guns
Blue Mass Group is reporting on a bill introduced by Rep. Lori Ehrlich, H. 4331, which would ban sales of guns in the Commonwealth to anyone on the federal No Fly list. I’m interested in Sen. Brownsberger’s position on this. According to the Blue Mass Group report, the bill has numerous co-sponsors, including Rep. David …