Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

Attention conservation notice: 900 or so words of whinging ahead about the MBTA, and about the city generally.

There’s an article in today’s Globe about the continuing MBTA construction delays at Kenmore. I would give a substantial fraction of my salary — seriously — if people could explain to me why MBTA projects are always overdue and wildly over budget, and if those same people could then solve the problem.

It’s been noted many times recently: in an era of expensive gas, a functioning MBTA would jump in and prove to people that mass transit is just what they’re waiting for. It’s not happening: the MBTA is falling even more apart at precisely the time when it ought to be working better.

To add insult to injury, the MBTA’s putative leader, Dan Grabauskas, drives an SUV to work every day from his home in Ipswich. This despite the fact that Ipswich is right on the commuter rail (Newburyport line, a couple stops shy of the end). And also despite the fact that the MBTA is now running a campaign it calls “Dump The Pump” to get people onto its vehicles.

Every time the MBTA could be overdue on a project, it is. The Longfellow Bridge is sort of fixed now, so trains passing over it can now go 25 mph rather than the 10 mph where they’ve been stuck since June; this is still slower than the usual 40+-mph travel speed over that bridge. Several times over the past few months, we’ve heard that the repairs would be completed within a weekend or two.

When an organization screws up this consistently, the press owe it to us to ask why it always screws up. Like Tom Friedman, the MBTA “does not get these things right even by accident.” I wish the MBTA itself had the honesty to explain this: after the hundredth T slowdown because of “signal work,” someone should be asking why signal work so consistently slows down the trains. Do other transit systems have so many signaling problems? Or are “signaling problems” cover for “breakdowns in union negotiation”?

I’m inclined to look at Boston generally. I’m unversed in the Big Dig, and of course I realize the fundamental fact about it: the city and the U.S. were moving an interstate highway under a 400-year-old major metropolis built on landfill. That’s nontrivial. I understand this. But it’s the same issue as with the MBTA: being Boston, the smart money would have bet that the project would go insanely far over its budget.

For a city with so many universities and so many smart people — and especially so many engineers — you’d expect that it would be the greatest city in the world, and that its construction projects would be monuments to man’s technological achievements. It’s not so, unfortunately. (Perhaps I flatter universities.)

The reason this gets to me so much, if it’s not clear, is that I love my city. I moved back here after being away for a year and really missing the place. Every time I flew into Logan, I would say a little something — seriously — to Boston upon first spotting its skyline. It was always something like “Hey Boston. Glad to see you. I missed you.” I still say something to Boston when I’m riding the red line over the Longfellow.

I want only the best for this city. I want it to succeed. When college students graduate, I want them all to stay here. I want the constant influx of new faces and smart people to make this place fun, livable, and dynamic. By all rights it should be the coolest town on earth: lots of young people means lots of restaurants selling good cheap food all night long. Like New York City, I should be able to duck into a diner at 5:00 in the morning. I should be able to buy noodles whenever the urge overtakes me.

Yet it’s not like that. I blame the T for some of that. We should be like Paris: no more than a 10-minute walk from any spot in the city to a T stop. The T should be running 24 hours per day like New York’s subway. And with all the smart people in this city, engineering problems should not grind the place to a halt.

It all smells very much like politics: buried deep within the MBTA and the city government, someone has paid someone else off; or the union won’t fix something because one of its members is pissed at Grabauskas; or there’s a feud going between the Italian wing and the Irish wing of city government. Something. If someone knows the politics, I’m sure that’s 99% of the story; I would love to hear it. And I would love for the Globe to dig down to this next level. When a bridge is effectively running at 25% capacity for a few months, I want my local media to explain the root cause, rather than constantly turning to “MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo.”

What I want to know is: as someone who loves this city very deeply, what can I do to fix what’s broken? I’m not leaving this place. I want to make it better.