BOSTON First of two parts -- NO ONE BETTER understands the financial trap that has ensnared public transportation in Massachusetts than Charles Chieppo, a veteran of state government and the Pioneer Institute, who helped the MBTA implement the 1999 law requiring “forward-funding” budgeting. (Previously, the legislature simply reimbursed the MBTA for whatever it had spent the year before.) Mr. Chieppo now writes about fiscal issues in many newspapers, including for these pages.

In a recent Boston Globe piece, Mr. Chieppo noted that last year the MBTA spent more on interest on its $8 billion debt than it collected in fares. Yet the agency currently has a $2 billion backlog of delayed maintenance.

This fiscal debacle has many fathers, including a dead-end mix of strong unions and weak governors. But if I understand him correctly, Mr. Chieppo’s first culprit is two decades of commuter-rail expansions. In their ardor for these, officials ignored normal maintenance, and ignored the inconvenient truth that new lines bring new operating deficits from the day they open.

The situation is bleak and is going to get bleaker in years to come with the opening of the Greenbush Line to Scituate later this year; with the construction of a $1 billion Silver Line connector under Boston; and with the extension of the Green Line into Somerville. Mr. Chieppo believes Governor Patrick’s plan (if you can call it that, given the pittance in proposed funding) to extend commuter rail to Fall River and New Bedford cannot and will not be honored on the governor’s timetable.

Mr. Chieppo is right. For 20 years, Massachusetts has, as it were, been planning a trip to Reno, Vegas, Disneyland and Disney World without noticing that the bus — i.e., the MBTA in all its dysfunction — has needed new tires, an oil change and a steering mechanism that turns the bus in the same direction the driver turns the steering wheel. Now the governor says let’s take the same bus to Cancun and Tijuana. It isn’t going to happen. In terms of major new public transportation projects, we are paralyzed for an indefinite period.

Fault lies everywhere. This writer first published his ardor for restoring Greenbush in 1974, when Fall River was only a place boys from the South Shore drove through on the way to the Newport Folk Festival. A wiser mind would have asked if four suburbs of Boston (Weymouth, Hingham, Cohasset and Scituate) should rightly come before Fall River and New Bedford.

What is to be done? For the next five years I think we need to think small and tactically: To plan those improvements, expansions and necessary contractions that will make service marginally better, without adding great new sums to the MBTA’s debt. Then, perhaps, we can think grandly and strategically about a plan that links air to rail and the motor car to public transportation.

Before we do either of those things we need to understand another inconvenient truth: What we have done in the last 20 years isn’t nearly as good as it could have been, and in many cases is rather bad.

Take the revival of commuter trains to Kingston/Plymouth and Middleborough/Lakeville, which opened in 1997. Granted that this heavily subsidized service has been a small boon to the environment, a big boon to real-estate prices in the communities served, and a preventative for what by now would be 18-hour-a-day jams on Routes 3 and 24. But as riders have pointed out to me, commuting by train every day isn’t a particularly pleasant experience. The seats are hard, and the ride from Cordage Park in Plymouth takes longer than the New Haven Railroad’s Myles Standish Express did from Plymouth Center in 1935.

It gets more unpleasant if one transfers to rapid transit. In times gone by, quaintly sour motormen would announce the stations. Now, incessant electronic babble pierces the air and prevents any thought of quiet reading. “Don’t spit on the escalator . . . don’t throw babies into the pit . . . don’t carry explosives in the bags under your eyes.” Or so it seems. All then repeated in Spanish.

If one transfers to the Silver Line at South Station, one gets a bumpy ride on a trolley bus to Logan Airport that is faster than the Red-to-Orange-to-Blue Line transfers used to be. But it is nowhere nearly as good as a through subway would have been. When one returns from the airport, one finds that the stops for the Silver Line and the stops for the bus to the Blue Line are many yards apart. Riders do not have the option of taking whichever bus arrives first.

Obtuse!

Riding the bus, one finds that the soft seats Rosa Parks knew half a century ago — even at the back of the bus, and even in Boston — are now bony plastic. One sees empty buses flying by at 10 p.m., while at rush hour they either come two at a time or they make one wait for 10 or 15 minutes.

The latest imposition on bus riders is the “Charlie Card,” which takes so long for most people to use that drivers wave them through 30 at a time without paying. So far, the thing is costing the MBTA millions, which, as Charlie Chieppo (no relation to Charlie Card) notes, it can ill afford.

David A. Mittell Jr. is a member of The Journal’s editorial board.