By Casey Ross, Boston Herald

2/16/08 - Top MBTA officials acknowledge that for years the agency has been secretly cutting thousands of bus and train trips from published schedules to lower costs - a practice that has left legions of customers waiting for rides that arrived late or not at all.

T General Manager Daniel Grabauskas told the Herald he has moved swiftly to end what he called “hidden service cuts” on bus and subway lines throughout the system. But he said customers have been lied to for years so the T could claim to operate at a level of service it was not delivering.

“We were not telling the truth to our customers before when we were not delivering the service that was scheduled,” Grabasukas said in an interview. “But we began to remedy that when I came on two years ago, and I know we’ve improved service.”

Grabauskas, who was hired as general manager in May 2005, said the hidden service cuts have never been publicly disclosed and that he agreed to talk about them now because of a need for more truth in the agency’s budgeting.

At the height of the problem in fiscal years 2005 and 2006, he said, the T was cutting more than 3,000 trips a month. That’s a tiny fraction of the more than 600,000 bus and subway trips the T makes each month, but it still means countless commuters were relying on schedules that were routinely wrong.

In the current fiscal year, T records show between 1,000 and 1,800 bus trips are being dropped each month, and that the number has dwindled to about 80 per month among the four main subway lines.

Grabauskas attributed the improvement to hiring about 300 employees across bus, subway and maintenance divisions. In 2004 and 2005, he said, officials kept staffing at artificially low levels so the agency could keep up-front costs down but could not field enough employees to operate its bus and subway lines.

“I had one very (senior-level) person say to me, ‘We knew we were dropping bus trips, so we’d go to the communities where we were dropping trips out of garages - and we would lie to people,’ ” Grabauskas said.

State lawmakers have credited Grabauskas with improving the T’s performance, but some expressed anger at the continual overburdening of a transit system that has resorted to lies and budget gimmicks to remain financially solvent.

“Sadly, MBTA riders are now paying the price for a lot of bad decisions that were made in the past,” said state Sen. Robert Hedlund (R-Weymouth). “I’m not surprised whatsoever the agency is having service problems after undergoing a massive overexpansion when it was already broke.”

Much of the expansion was done at the behest of Beacon Hill policy leaders, who committed the T to new services such as the Silver Line and the Greenbush commuter rail without providing adequate operational funding, officials said.

Article URL