BINJ receives critical MBTA safety documents after successfully appealing agency’s public records request denial
As the editorial director of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, I am comfortable being candid with readers about the position of our work in the New England media ecosystem. Notably, it’s important to communicate with the public about the relevance of our reporting over the long term, since most local outlets, from the newspaper of record to five o’clock news crews, are reluctant to immediately amplify our revelations on this front.
There is no intentional conspiracy in play. Rather, producers and editors have their own agendas in reporting on the MBTA, if they cover it at all, and they tend to cover the effects, not the causes. A good example of the general reluctance to impugn the agency before things break down or catch fire is from late 2022, when BINJ predicted a severe Red Line shutdown months before others reported the closure on the MBTA’s terms.
A similar thing happened with the recent rollout of new T fare collection technology. While radio and TV barkers read press statements about convenience, we delivered the most extensive reporting to date on the state’s debacle of a multimillion-dollar partnership with multiple opaque private companies to get to this point in the Automated Fare Collections project.
Regarding being transparent about our methods and mission to shine light on critical info that isn’t readily available, for months, BINJ has pressured the MBTA to release documents related to “the status of the MBTA workforce,” including “strengths and weaknesses,” “calculations of mission-critical resource needs and current resource capabilities,” and a systemwide “safety risk assessment.”
As we noted: “The MBTA is paying $3 million for crucial studies that show whether the agency has enough trained workers to operate the system safely. The agency is unwilling to share that information, however, which could inform the public about how safe it is to ride the T.”
Transit officials initially refused to share these studies in response to public records requests. But following our appeal, and the commonwealth’s supervisor of public records writing that the MBTA “must clarify these matters,” the T released a trove, including a final Workforce and Safety Risk Assessment report.
We will be processing that report and others, along with several supporting documents, over the coming weeks, but it’s already posted here for other journalists and the public to read. We will share more of the documents as soon as we have time to properly label and parse them. In the meantime, if you ride the T, try to stay as safe as possible.
