Time for feds to take over the T

Does anyone trust our public transportation system anymore? The MBTA isn’t making it easy. On Monday, a smoking train put the kibosh on the afternoon rush hour. As the Herald’s Sean Philip Cotter reported, a southbound Red Line train just outside Broadway station started to belch smoke. As the delays stretched for riders trying to get home, T workers brought in fans to clear the air. The culprit? A “malfunctioning breaker.”

This happened mere hours after the T released its report on the June 11 Red Line derailment, when a car heading south into the JFK/UMass station derailed at the start of the morning rush. The damage to signal infrastructure was so significant that repairs to signals are still ongoing. The cause? A grease buildup that contributed to a broken axle.

There’ve been other derailments, on the Green Line and Commuter Rail. And after these incidents, T brass step forward, promising that the safety of the public is job one, and that they are working to correct these problems.

The riding public isn’t buying it — and why should they?

The Herald’s Rick Sobey spoke with commuter Victor Pachas, who said his trip to Brockton keeps getting longer.

“It just wasn’t moving,” Pachas, 38, said of the delays Monday. “The T has always been pretty bad, but it almost seems worse now with all these breakdowns happening.”

Deputy T general manager Jeffrey Gonneville told reporters that since the June derailment, the T has conducted ultrasound inspections on all its trains’ axles, and found seven defects that warranted the axles being brought in for repairs. The T has conducted ultrasound inspections every two years, but now will do so every year, he said.

Boston Carmen’s Union Chief Jimmy O’Brien, meanwhile, slammed the T in a statement: “Cuts to the operating budget and the elimination of jobs resulted in cuts to inspections and testing — including the ultrasonic testing that could have detected the problem that resulted in the Red Line derailment.”

The spate of derailments and mishaps has shaken confidence in the system.

“Safety is now always in the back of your mind, whether it’ll happen again,” said Jose Cruz, 25, of Braintree.

One very fed-up rider aired views on the latest Red Line rush hour delay on Twitter, “How many train engines need to burn up before there’s some damn accountability at the @mbta, @MassGovernor? How many commuters must be impacted? How many business must it affect? What’s the threshold? Seems to me like we’re there now.”

We are.

Which is why it’s time to call in the feds.

Washington, D.C., did in 2015, when its Metro was plagued with safety issues that went unresolved. The Federal Transit Administration used its muscle to influence how federal money for the Metro was spent, and made sure it went to address safety issues first. It put a backlog of needed fixes on the front burner.

When the National Transportation Safety Board was making its plea for the Federal Railroad Administration to step in, the NTSB said in a statement that the FRA “has established and developed robust inspection, oversight, regulatory, and enforcement authority and conducts regular safety compliance inspections of railroads” to make the Metro accountable.

Robust inspection. Oversight. Enforcement authority. Music to our ears.

T riders pay for, and deserve, safety and quality service when taking public transportation, not fresh rounds of promises after each mishap.

Get D.C. on the line.