T officials explained state of good repair using as an example a car with an expected useful life of eight years. The officials said maintenance costs during the car’s first two years on the road are minimal but start increasing in year three through eight. Beyond year eight, the vehicle may continue to run well but the odds are that maintenance and repair costs will start rising to a point where the vehicle should be replaced.
Ronnie Valdivia, the MBTA’s director of asset management, said the car example illustrates the challenges of managing assets, deciding when it’s time to replace rather than repair.
You know I see these billion-dollar estimates all the time and I just have to call crap. There’s no way a fleet of new cars would cost a billion dollars. Let alone 28 billion. As for electrical infrastructure and Subway infrastructure I can see that costing hundreds of millions but there’s no way again that it would cost more than one or two billion dollars.
Not sure how they deserve a budget increase since they are consistently more expensive, offer less coverage of space, and are far less reliable than every other public transportation system for a population this size ON THE PLANET.
They aren’t a business, they are a service. You have to fund services for them to be effective. The MTBA has been under funded for decades which is why we are here. Funding them is the only way out of this
