Around New England

Peter Lucas: Problems With T? Mike Capuano Doesn’t Work Here Anymore, and Voting Rights for 16-Year-Olds Won’t Get the Trains Running Again

July 4, 2019

As Massachusetts state officials struggle to figure out how to keep the damaged Red Line on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority running while it’s getting fixed from a derailment June 11, there’s one member of Congress they can’t call on for help with federal dollars:  Michael Capuano.

Capuano, a 10-term congressman from Somerville, was in line to become chairman of the Transportation Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives this year, but that didn’t happen when Ayanna Pressley, then a Boston city councilor, defeated him in the September 2018 Democratic primary with an identity-politics campaign that titled left.

Lowell Sun columnist Peter Lucas says:  “Capuano’s loss was a serious setback for the MBTA and for the transportation needs of the Commonwealth. Capuano directed millions of federal dollars into the MBTA, as well as to construction projects, over the years.”

No more.

“That is all gone now,” Lucas writes in the Lowell Sun. “The voters in the 7th Congressional District (Boston-Somerville-Cambridge) voted to replace a fighter for transportation with a social justice warrior.”