The Globe "story" is a true "rip and read" (or in this case, rip and post) item.

The newspaper failed to do the math, and failed to include the enormous subsidies which the transit "authority" running the scheme up here sucks from the public revenue stream.

Case in point is an unwanted commuter rail line, built over considerable environmental and community objection, whose true cost is yet to be fathomed - but using the numbers when it was in work one organization determined that the transit authority could purchase a home closer to the city for each of the projected 1,700 riders and still have some cash left over.

The disparity between what is charged for what passes as service and the actual costs would be untenable in almost any public and certainly private business setting. But here, where the streams of revenue are always ready to be tapped, and where there are plenty of the otherwise unemployable ready and willing to loaf, we will have what somehow passes as "public transportation".

When American citizens return from China to the Home of the Free, their laptops will be stolen (allegedly legally) by the US border guards. Spied upon in China by the Chinese. Spied upon in China by the US. And get your electronics confiscated coming back in. I'd say the current maladministration has nothing to crow about.