I can still remember the night the MBTA died. It was February of 2015, during one of the worst snowstorms Boston had seen in years. I boarded a Commuter Rail train at South Station at 6:15 PM hoping to beat the storm. I was too late. Just a few minutes after we left, the train stopped. The snow was walloping us from all directions, dropping in heaps from the sky. Then the lights went out. Sitting in the dark, trying to see anything from the window, I figured I was in for a long commute. But what could you do? Extreme weather happens. When the snow melted, everything would go back to normal.

That was the month then-GM of the MBTA Beverly Scott resigned. It was a shock for everyone. Scott had just won a vote of confidence from the MBTA board and had been working with Governor Charlie Baker on improving service during the snowstorms. Her resignation was a sign: there would be no light at the end of the train tunnel. Days after the announcement, Scott warned riders that the trains would not recover from the winter storms for at least a month. The warning was optimistic. In my mind, the MBTA, in particular the Commuter Rail, has never really recovered. It died for me that night in February, but its ghost still shuffles along the train tracks one power outage or switch problem at a time.

For the rest of that winter, weary riders sat on aged, beaten-down trains that struggled to get from station to station. The MBTA drastically reduced schedules so that crews could work on repairs, but it wasn’t enough. At one point they were forced to shut down the entire system, from buses to the T to the commuter rail – twice. Commuting into Boston required building an extra hour or two into your schedule. If you had a meeting at 9 AM, you had to leave at 6 – or earlier, if there were any trains running.

Not all of this could be blamed on the weather. It was simply a breaking point, a months-long event that exposed a decade of unaddressed problems. 40-year-old trains were operating with half-century-old engines. Damaged switches and third rails were freezing and breaking even more. The MBTA had been filling up a multibillion-dollar backlog of necessary repairs for years, but its massive amounts of debt made paying for them difficult. The government knew about all of this. A 2009 analysis of the MBTA under Governor Deval Patrick revealed a large number of safety issues with the T, but concluded that most of the repair projects didn’t have the funding.

Five years after the Great Winter of 2015, the MBTA had to weather yet another storm: a global pandemic that saw ridership and employment plummet. Forced to cut and suspend services, their debt increased even more. But now that the pandemic fades into a bad memory the MBTA is still dealing with the same problems it was a decade ago. Safety issues, damaged equipment and tracks, and ancient train cars whose insides look like German airplanes from the 70s are all part of the contemporary commuter’s experience with the MBTA.

In just the last year, two Green Line trains collided with each other, leaving over 20 people hurt. An escalator at Back Bay malfunctioned and injured at least 9 people. A man was dragged to his death after his arm was caught in a door on a Red Line train. At the end of June a man was killed by a Commuter Rail train in Natick. Orange Line trains were vandalized and damaged last month, with windows and doors broken. Brand new Orange and Red Line trains had to be taken out of service after battery failures. Now service on the Green and Orange Lines is being suspended because of a “structural issue” at the Government Center garage. Things are so bad that federal authorities are demanding the MBTA make improvements and submit a report to them in August.

All the while, current GM of the MBTA Steve Poftak takes home over $300,000 a year, and just received close to $80,000 in bonuses. The news has angered commuters who wonder why money can’t be spent on simple repairs and new trains. There are calls for Poftak to resign, but he insists he and the MBTA can fix their problems. At this point, what do the solutions look like? What exactly does the MBTA need to do?

One urgent problem is hiring enough employees. The agency is currently understaffed, and a lack of people to operate trains or work at stations could exacerbate safety issues. Another obvious step is for the MBTA to halt or slow down expansion until it solves the safety and service problems it’s faced for a decade or more. The MBTA website tells us that “the T is evolving everyday”, and multiple new projects are in development. But if the trains lines we currently have can’t even be trusted, why would we want new ones?

There are some other puzzling new ideas. The MBTA recently announced a pilot program of placing “urine-detection” sensors in four subway elevators in downtown Boston, and they will decide whether or not to implement it across the T by the end of the year. I could find nothing about how much this would cost, but we can imagine that the technology is not free. Keeping stations clean and sanitary is no doubt important in the age of the pandemic, but this is almost funny. Of all the problems the MBTA could choose to focus on and promote, it’s urine detection. At least the elevators will smell better when we’re trying to escape a derailed train.