MassDOT urges reflection on post-pandemic transit model
Published December 10, 2025 by State House News Service and wwlp.com
BOSTON – Sustaining the MBTA’s progress, according to a former top federal and state transportation official, is a central challenge after the 2020 pandemic disrupted travel and work patterns.
“In one sense, we’re in a good place of being able to say, ‘What do we want to spend that [T] capital program on, and can we make it bigger? And if we could make it bigger, what would we spend it on? But there’s no business model for transit in the post-COVID world, anywhere in the United States,” former Federal Highway Deputy Administrator and MassDOT Secretary Stephanie Pollack said on Tuesday.
The services doing the best when it comes to ridership recovery are buses and commuter rail, which have made the most changes in service since the pandemic, Pollack said. The T’s pre-pandemic business model has vanished because fewer people make enough round trips each week to regularly buy passes, she added.
“I’ve been in Massachusetts for decades, and the conversation is always on what the next project should be, right? The question for the T, before we get to the next project is, what should the T be? What should the service be? And that is not a question that you can answer inside transit,” Pollack continued. “It is a question that is about, what should the economy be? Where should the housing be? Where are trips going to start and end, and what is the best way to encourage as many of those trips that start and end?”
“We need to start from the question of, what is the T in 2040, in 2050? What is it serving? And to me, the biggest issue is, how are we going to connect investments in the T to communities that are willing to invest in being home to more homes and jobs?” added Pollack, who served in Gov. Charlie Baker’s administration and has spent the last year as a senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative.
While still facing a structural deficit, the T after years of underinvestment has seen service improvements under General Manager and now-interim MassDOT Secretary Phil Eng, who was the keynote speaker at a State House News Service and MASSterList event called “TransitNEXT” in downtown Boston on Tuesday.
Eng said the state has provided funding “to lay the foundation for the future and to provide stability, as we explore fair, progressive funding sources and other sources of long-term revenue.” The state is focused on “working with our federal partners to pursue every available dollar that is available, and to allow us to continue delivering essential services and further our commitments to rebuilding our infrastructure,” he said.
Much of the system’s recent investments have been possible due to funding from the state surtax on high earners, which Transportation Committee co-Chairs Rep. Jim Arciero and Sen. Brendan Crighton said is not a sustainable way forward. The surtax has prevented the T from falling off a fiscal cliff and helped the state give $100 million in extra Chapter 90 funding for roads and bridge work, Arciero said. A $1.3 billion surtax surplus budget in June funneled $758 million to one-time transportation funding and $561 million for education.
“We’ve been doing all of this using our surtax and strategic investments from the Commonwealth without federal interruption. Is that sustainable? No, but I do feel that we’re in better shape than most states in the country,” Arciero said. “Without a committed federal partner, it’s unsustainable for us moving forward.”
The Trump administration has threatened to pause or canceled federal funding for some Massachusetts transportation projects, including canceling $327 million for the Allston/I-90 Multimodal Project and potentially pausing billions of dollars for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers across the country, which could impact the Cape Cod bridge replacements.
“On the federal side of things, I also think that we’re going to need to have a conversation about modernizing our transportation revenue as we look to the gas tax, you know, not being able to deliver, as we look towards certainly the past in, you know, what we did [with] dedicated revenue for the T — it was based [on] sales tax, but with the expectation that it would be increasing year to year, 6-to-8%. We’ve only seen that really around 2%,” Crighton said.
But the “revenue question” isn’t where the state should start, Pollack said.
“If you think about the way businesses and households work, you do not start with the revenue question. You start with the need question,” Pollack said. “There’s three questions, revenue is the third. The first is, what do we need? The second one is, what’s in the way of getting what we need? And then the third one is, how much revenue do we need?”
Pollack said the state needs to adopt laws to make its roads and transportation system safer.
“Every day for the last 10 years in Massachusetts, someone has died because of our transportation system,” she said. “Nearly 3,700 people over the last 10 years.”
She added that the state also needs the T and regional transit authorities to meet people’s needs in a post-COVID world, which she said “means it’s not about commuting exclusively, but getting places seven days a week.”
Crighton and Arciero, who have known each other since they were State House staffers in the early 2000s, labeled regional equity and micromobility as two additional priorities. Crighton confirmed that they anticipate recommendations on micromobility regulations by Jan. 31, 2026. The fatal crash of a teenager on an electric dirt bike in Stoneham in November spurred a conversation about e-bike safety. Micromobility involves smaller, man-powered vehicles like electric bikes, hoverboards and scooters.
“One of our basic pieces is to regulate based on speed, and there’ll be more recommendations when the report comes out to talk a little bit more about that. But certainly, I think we look at tiering these vehicles and regulating them by speed,” Arciero said. “Piece that together with safety and infrastructure and sort of balancing multiple users, as well.”
Commenting on his suggestions at a Boston Chamber of Commerce meeting in November that the state shouldn’t take congestion pricing off the table, Crighton said that while it’s controversial, that’s the point.
“For some reason you’re villainized as soon as you say that it should be on the table, which I think when you’re looking at transformative policies like transportation revenue and how we fund it, it’d be irresponsible for us to take anything off the table,” Crighton said.
Transportation for Massachusetts Senior Policy Director Pete Wilson said that people from Transportation for Massachusetts are going to New York next month to meet with officials to discuss congestion pricing and how implementation has gone since New York City implemented it in January.
“It’s a real conversation, because the Fair Share revenue, as it increases more and more over time, more and more of it is getting allocated. So we had a $1.3 billion Fair Share supp[lemental budget] last year, most of that went to transportation, but that’s excess or unallocated surtax dollars from prior years,” Wilson said.
“As we move forward, and the Legislature appropriates more funds and obligates them towards really important educational programs like free school meals and other programs like that, that excess is going to go down. We’re not going to be in the same position moving forward,” Wilson added. “That cliff may be a little bit further away from the T, but we’re still driving towards it.”
A Better City President and CEO Kate Dineen, who was a member of the state’s Transportation Funding Task Force, said that their conversations surrounded taking “a Fair Share first approach, but not a Fair Share only approach.”
The January task force report, Dineen said, included a category focused on “right-sizing existing transportation user fees, whether that be a gas tax or our existing tolls or fees on Uber and Lyft.”
In the longer term, Dineen said recommendations suggested the state assess how it prices its roads.
“How do we take a phased approach to establishing a more equitable roadway pricing strategy? Taking a look at where we have current tolls on roads and bridges and tunnels and where we don’t and why, taking a look at our existing tolling amounts and how they compare to peers, and then looking at where we might want to add or take away tolling infrastructure,” Dineen said. “Once you have that infrastructure in place, tolling is a rather flexible mechanism, and we could experiment with pilots, for example, around variable time of day pricing or congestion pricing.”