Legislature airs ideas for making the T safer — and bigger – The Boston Globe

For obvious reasons, proposed safety reforms got the most attention during last week’s Beacon Hill hearing on the future of the T.

The mother of David K. Jones, the professor who died at the JFK/UMass Red Line station after falling through a dilapidated staircase in 2021, was there to plead with lawmakers to establish a new, independent safety body to oversee the T.

That function currently belongs to the Department of Public Utilities, an arrangement that isn’t working, several witnesses said.

But though the safety bills were certainly the main event, the hearing also touched on a potpourri of plans for making the agency better — and bigger.

First off, a witnesses testified in favor of legislation to electrify and increase service levels on the Fairmount Line in Dorchester.

And tucked away at the end of the hearing was an idea that was new, or at least new to me: legislation filed by state representative Michael J. Moran to create a rapid bus line called the “science corridor,” connecting the Longwood Medical Area, North Brighton, and Kendall Square.

It’s an interesting notion. The large educational, medical, and research employers in Longwood already operate their own private shuttles, which carry 2.7 million riders a year — more than the entire ridership of the many of the state’s regional transit agencies.

But getting to Longwood — a 213-acre area crammed with 22 major institutions — remains an exercise in frustration, and a 2022 white paper by the Longwood Collective found that the number of non-driving commuters had “flatlined” in recent years.

Nor are the employee shuttles particularly useful if you’re not actually an employee of one of the member institutions – if, say, you want to take one of those buses to meet your spouse after work, you’re out of luck. (Ask me how I know.)

And while an MBTA “urban ring” was proposed decades ago that would have connected Longwood and Cambridge, the idea stalled out and was officially shelved in 2010.

There’s clearly economic synergy between the medical and research titans in Kendall and Longwood. But a good, publicly accessible one-seat ride between the two areas would make them both better.

Alan Wirzbicki is Globe deputy editor for editorials. He can be reached at alan.wirzbicki@globe.com.