Biggest waste of money. Why are we spending a billion dollars on fare collection when the trains are not even maintained properly?

I know the MBTA is not a household but the analogy holds that of that if you have a fixed budget you should pay your rent/mortgage before you pay your cable bill.

The T needs to get its deferred maintenance backlog caught up before it even thinks about a luxury like this. And you can’t “chew bubble gum and walk at the same time” if you have a finite ammount of money to spend like the T does.