The MBTA's a case study in incompetence, due to years of turf battles between the lege and governor's office.  It's run by a bunch of overlapping boards with an org chart that looks like a spider web.<p>So anyways, they're about 30 billion in the hole over the next 10 years for what it will cost to do routine maintenance on the system going forward, mostly because it was all neglected for 20 years during the big dig fiasco.<p>I continually wonder why we can't build these things in this country anymore..  in the 20th century, a whole bunch of cities went from 0 to a complete transit infrastructure.  These days, adding a single line or extension is a multi-decade fiasco (green line extension in Somerville, or the second east side line in manhattan).