“Maura Healy hired a really good safety officer,” Thompson said. “It’s great that she hired really wonderful DPU commissioners, but it doesn’t solve this core problem of independent oversight that we have models of in the state and that the federal government is encouraging us to do.”

We talk about the current developments with the T and then look ahead to its future. MBTA Advisory Board Executive Director Brian Kane joins us in studio, as well as local public transportation advocate Stacy Thompson and WBUR transportation reporter Andrea Perdomo-Hernandez.

The MBTA has released more details about an incident that left one Red Line rider with minor injuries after a utility box fell from a column at the Harvard Square station. The transit agency said Monday’s incident was caused by “corrosion on the support straps that secured the box to the column.”

“We want to understand: What did they discover?” Thompson said. “Were there problems that weren’t noted before? What were they tracking?”

"The reality is free transit is working. We are seeing massive transit improvements in Boston, Merrimack Valley, and Worcester— these systems are bucking the trends of downward transit ridership that was happening before the pandemic," Thompson said.

“We are not looking for perfection, we are looking for people who will be engaged,” said Stacy Thompson, executive director of Livable Streets, a local transportation advocacy group. “If people the Healey administration is appointing do the work we assume they will do, in a year or two the T will feel different to the riding public.”

Stacy Thompson, Executive Director of “Livable Streets”, a group which advocates for equitable transportation solutions, talks about the MBTA possibly shutting down the Blue Line for repairs every night for a month.

Stacy Thompson, the executive director of LivableStreets Alliance, an advocacy organization dedicated to making city streets more pedestrian-friendly, joined Errol Louis on “Inside City Hall” Thursday to talk about some of the lessons that could be learned from Boston.

“I don’t think transit is dead,” she said. “I think we need to meet the reality of where a thriving global city should be, which is moving 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in different directions for different reasons.”

Stacy Thompson, the executive director of LivableStreets Alliance, said the T must balance both near-term safety and maintenance, while also working on expansion.

“Things like expansion and resiliency are not extras, or nice to have. They should be considered core to the viability of the system,” Thompson said.

“We need to hire enough bus operators that, by September, we’re running more service,” Thompson said. “It’s that simple.”