The MBTA let the Lynn commuter rail station fall apart. The T should now expedite its reopening.

When the MBTA announced it was shutting down the dilapidated Lynn commuter rail station to make critical repairs last fall, the news was a gut punch to the state’s eighth-largest city. But then things got worse: As reported in a recent Globe Ideas essay, T officials said it would take until 2030 to open a new station. Even a temporary platform would take between a year and 18 months to construct.

That timetable is ridiculous, unacceptable, and just one more sign of disrespect for a city whose transit needs have long been ignored. Adding to the insult, the station shutdown comes at a time when Lynn Mayor Jared Nicholson is trying to revitalize Lynn’s downtown with new transit-oriented residential and commercial development — a concept that’s impossible to attain without train service. A parking garage next to the rail station is now slated for demolition due to its condition.

“Seven years is nuts,” said Jim Smith, a lobbyist and former state representative from Lynn, who was a force behind building the garage — he keeps a shovel from the 1988 groundbreaking in his office. A garage like that “should last 80 years,” he told the Globe editorial board. As to why it didn’t, he said, “No maintenance. It didn’t fall apart in one day.”

Phillip Eng, the T’s new general manager, acknowledges that “deferred investment and maintenance” led to this woeful situation. “I am very interested in better understanding some of the choices that were made” and “how we can do things, whether it’s differently, quickly, and more efficiently, to start to demonstrate we can deliver on time and on budget,” he told the editorial board.

How, then, did the station and parking garage get to this point? Its long, sad, downward trajectory began decades before Eng arrived on the scene.

The MBTA awarded a $41.3 million contract to build a new railroad station and garage to J.F. White Contracting Co. in April 1988. According to a Globe news report at the time, the contractor was the low bidder but still came in 23 percent over engineering estimates. The bid was determined to be reasonable because “the MBTA underestimated costs for demolition and for galvanizing — or coating and treating — the 107,000 pieces of steel that will be used,” the Globe reported. The new station was slated to open in the fall of 1989.

It didn’t. Instead, in January 1992, state and city officials celebrated the opening of what was then described as a $50 million new station and parking garage in

Lynn. With that opening, “The daily climb up the dreary steps to the city’s old train station and the scramble for parking ... will become a thing of the past,” the Globe reported.

So much for optimism. Dreams of connecting the city to the Blue Line, which ends in Revere — and for which the downtown parking garage was prospectively built — never came to fruition. Because of that, the swell of projected parkers and commuters did not show up. The station did continue to serve the commuter rail line that runs from Rockport to North Station. But in 1995, the

Globe reported that the five-story garage “stands as a monument to unrealized hopes and to an era of more generous government spending.” Then in 2005, the Globe reported on commuter complaints about litter and broken elevators at the Lynn station.

Last October, citing “safety concerns about deteriorating conditions,” the MBTA shut down the station it opened with such fanfare 30 years prior. That closure came after several meetings between Lynn and T officials. It took heavy lobbying from Lynn officials to get the T to provide a shuttle bus from Lynn to the Swampscott

The timetable is ridiculous, unacceptable, and just one more sign of disrespect for a city whose transit needs have long been ignored.

commuter rail station. As Smith, the former lawmaker, points out, in order to board a Boston-bound train, Lynn residents now have to get on a bus “that goes backward to Swampscott.”

To the question of when safety concerns involving the Lynn station were first noticed, the T provided a timeline that goes back to 2016, when unspecified “high priority repair items” were identified and addressed. A station elevator failed an inspection in October 2021 and again in May 2022.

As to what contributed to the structural problems that forced the closure, the T provided a list of likely problems including: “the quality of original construction, choice of materials, design detail choices” as well as “deferral of regular and preventative maintenance activities.” Add to that exposure to “a marine environment“and “aggressive use of deicing salts” and you have the recipe for a station falling apart well ahead of schedule.

(Executives listed on the website for the company that built the station and garage, J.F. White Contracting Co., did not respond to e-mails seeking comment. The company is now owned by a firm called Dragados, which is controlled by a holding company named ACS Group.)

According to the MBTA, its team “is actively pursuing ways to deliver this project more efficiently with respect to both cost and schedule.” That includes shifting the station location to reduce the station length and changing methodology to allow construction and procurement to start prior to the completion of the design.

Last week, state and city officials celebrated the launch of commuter ferry service between Lynn and Boston. It’s a sliver of good transportation news for Lynn. But it does not change the very bad news the city has been dealing with since the rail station closed, and it does not change the need for the T to find a way to make it right sooner rather than later.

Mass transit not only connects workers to their jobs, it also anchors development that can alleviate the region’s soaring housing costs. Lynn was trying to do the right thing by zoning for new housing near its train station. The fact that it has been thwarted by the MBTA should be dismaying to people everywhere.

“He’s promised me to take a new look at Lynn,” Representative Seth Moulton, who represents Lynn, said after meeting with Eng last week. “But the jury’s out until we get a concrete new proposal worthy of the city.”