>o one questions whether roads are making enough money because it's understood that they enable productivity in the areas they serve. Meanwhile we expect the T to pay for itself rather than act as a utility

I'll get slammed for saying this, but a big part of the problem with a non-competitive public service like the MBTA is that, in the long run, the unions and the contractors will extract all of the benefits from the system until it's too expensive to maintain. Thus, it becomes a never ending money pit.

But then again I don't really have any good answers to solve it.