MassHighway is just one piece of the transportation system here in Massachusetts, which makes it just one of the agencies that don’t get what they need to ensure that our roads and bridges are safe. The Transportation Finance Commission found that “virtually every transportation agency in the state is running structural deficits and resorting to short-term quick fixes that hide systemic financial problems.” The Turnpike Authority, which oversees the Mass. Pike as well as the infrastructure associated with the Big Dig, has a backlog of maintenance projects, and just saw a bond-rating firm lower its outlook from stable to negative.

The MBTA, despite raising fares three times since 2000, remains plagued by poor service, and is going broke to boot. And then there’s the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation, an agency primarily concerned with parklands and state-owned skating rinks, golf courses, and pools, and which for some reason also controls 275 miles of roadways—among them Storrow and Memorial drives—and 187 bridges, including the neglected Longfellow and every other span crossing the Charles River in Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, and Watertown. The department, known as DCR, is the worst offender when it comes to infrastructure maintenance. The Transportation Finance Commission found that “DCR has little technical expertise related to managing these transportation assets.” Put another way, the agency charged with taking care of some of the most heavily used roads and bridges in Greater Boston has no idea how to do so.

This is insanity, of course, and so a plan has been worked out to transfer eight DCR repair projects, including the Longfellow and the Storrow Drive tunnel, to…the already overburdened, underfunded MassHighway. But MassHighway hasn’t been given the necessary additional money to actually do the DCR work, which will come to $400 million, so, as the commission notes, the projects have been put “in direct competition for funds” with MassHighway bridges that also need critical repairs.

The driver, naturally, cares little about which division or department or authority happens to oversee the particular piece of infrastructure he happens to be using at the moment. But this seemingly insignificant detail becomes, in practice, quite important. There is little sharing among these agencies, and no easy way for anyone outside them to assess how they’re doing at taking care of their assets. “If you asked the governor which agency is doing the best job on maintenance,” says the Pioneer Institute’s Poftak, “I’d say he’d be hard-pressed to know. And that’s no knock on him. We just don’t have it set up for anyone to have that kind of information.”

Each of the state’s transportation agencies has its own budget, its own maintenance routine, its own priorities. Each is its own fiefdom. At the Pioneer Institute conference, Secretary Cohen said it surprised him to discover that MassHighway and the Turnpike Authority order road salt separately. When he asked why they weren’t pooling their orders to get a better price, the Turnpike Authority told him, “The people supplying MassHighway know they won’t be paid on time. We get better rates already because [our suppliers] know they’ll get paid.”

Salvucci, sitting on the same panel at the conference, told the room that he felt sorry for Cohen. As transportation secretary, Cohen chairs the MBTA board and the Turnpike Authority and also sits on the board of the Port Authority, but the only agency he has real oversight of is MassHighway. Looking down the table at Cohen, Salvucci said whoever had his job was little more than a “punching bag,” a referee with no policing authority.