The biggest change in government in the last 15 years may be its discovery of corporate public relations. Mostly gone are the press secretaries who wouldn’t lie on the record, and to trusted reporters would tell the truth unvarnished. Nowadays, spokes-persons tend to be low-level employees who don’t know the truth themselves. Their job is to relate scripted messages. The MBTA still has a spokesman, Joe Pesaturo, who tells the truth or nothing. But it also has an office devoted to the propagation of feel-good stories. Customers collar a groper! Conductor rescues a wedding ring! My favorite was the then MBTA General Manager Richard A. Davey’s confronting a fare evader, on-camera, on Dec. 8, 2010. Though amply photographed, the miscreant wasn’t caught. He got away with the evidence that the whole thing wasn’t staged.

The truth is the MBTA isn’t feeling-good at all. It is up against a 40-year history of reckless purchasing-practices and personnel-policies, and 20 years of irresponsible external mandates connected with the Big Dig. The system now has unsustainable annual deficits and long-term debt. Its first answer seems to have been more public relations. Draconian service cuts and fare increases were floated. On cue, the public vigorously protested in well-attended fora. Now, lesser cuts and smaller fare-increases may be accepted with a sigh of relief.

Forgive the cynicism; this has happened before. The MBTA is being manipulative at a time when, it seems to me, the public is ready to be told the truth. If any good has come of the ritual public-relations dance, it is the correct assertion by Mr. Davey – now the state’s Secretary of Transportation -- that from Duxbury to Roxbury to Tewksbury, public transportation is an economic issue affecting all of Greater Boston.

To begin to understand where we need to go we need some understanding of where we have been. Until 2000, the MBTA spent as it liked one year, then was reimbursed by the legislature the next year. Beginning with the new century, “forward funding” was deemed a great reform. Like every family, every business and every other government agency, the MBTA would have a budget it would have to live within. In return, a penny of the then five-percent sales tax – a growth tax – would come its way.

The first problem was that with a short recession (2001-’02), followed by a deep and prolonged one (2008-present), sales-tax revenue hasn’t grown as projected. Secondly, what will come to $4 billion in Big Dig “environmental remediation” was agreed to by the state. The cost of some projects, such as the relocation of the Green Line at North Station, had to be paid for by the MBTA . Others such as the restoration of the Greenbush Line, were paid for by the state and federal governments (though never accounted for in the Big Dig’s official cost). But future maintenance and operating subsidies fell to the MBTA.

The deepest problem is purchasing. In 1980, Gov. Edward King signed a “management rights” law, proposed by State Rep. Barney Frank, for the MBTA. This helped curb some of the traditional personnel- and purchasing-abuses. But in 1998 when he was running against Scott Harshbarger, Gov. Paul Cellucci negotiated a contract surrendering many of Governor King’s gains. The subsequent abuses have been well-documented. But the idea that “reform” is popular is false. MBTA unions representing the status quo fairly don’t want to give anything up, and they are tenacious. As the Tammany Hall politician George Washington Plunkett said a century ago. “Reformers are only mornin’ glories!”

What is to be done? Where to begin? First, it seems to me, is to give service some semblance of alignment with ridership. Typically, buses serving poor neighborhoods during rush hours run too fitfully, causing them to be overloaded, and often forcing riders to wait for the next bus. Yet at off-hours, buses run all but empty throughout the system. We have all seen them.

At one time the MBTA estimated its ridership by weighing the money. Today, its feel-good public relations brags that ridership is higher then ever before. If one takes the former entities that make up today’s MBTA, the claim is undoubtedly false. The better point is, they can’t know – ridership is mostly still only estimated.

Bus by bus, train by train, trolley by trolley, the first imperative is accurate counts. Then there needs to be a minimum threshold for service. On buses, it might be 25 riders on either leg of a round trip. Such could lead to increased or late-night service on some routes, while cutting back on empty runs elsewhere. Decisions would not be automatic. Some lightly-used runs between city and suburb are the only way people who do not drive can get to work. But using good counts is the first mile in a very long ride to common sense.

–  D.A. Mittel, Jr.