BOSTON

TRANSPORTATION reform deserves a closer look because it’s vital for the future of Massachusetts. We face a massive bill for deferred maintenance. “Our Legacy of Neglect,” a Pioneer Institute study, found that the current backlog is over $17 billion and rising daily. That study also found that deferring maintenance is far more expensive in the long run than making repairs in a timely manner. Deferring maintenance has added at least $40 billion to $80 million to the cost of fixing Boston’s Longfellow Bridge alone, and there are over 500 structurally deficient bridges in Massachusetts.

In the wake of the Big Dig, Massachusetts also faces a credibility gap when it comes to transportation. Taxpayers are suspicious about just how those billions of tax dollars are being spent.

The first step toward solving our transportation problems cannot simply be more money, as some have suggested. We have to fix the broken system that got us into this mess in the first place. The proposed transportation reform package begins that process.

Under the proposed reforms, the performance of our transportation system and maintenance efforts will be transparently measured. Information about all state projects, including on-time construction and on-budget completion rates, will be available to the public. These reports will also move beyond a focus on inputs like new dollars spent and pavement laid down to demonstrate the impact of transportation spending on real performance measures like congestion, travel time, maintenance levels and road closures.

The reform package addresses a systemic flaw by placing a high priority on maintenance. By including maintenance covenants in future state bond offerings, we will stop the vicious cycle of building new roads and bridges only to watch them rapidly decay.

In a broader sense, transportation reform represents a paradigm shift in how we figure the cost of infrastructure. Public debate over new projects focuses myopically on the initial cost of construction — yet operation and maintenance account for up to 80-90 percent of total project costs. For the first time, life-cycle costs will be front and center in the planning and budgeting process for transportation projects. This means that before we approve a new road or rail line, we will have to consider the true lifetime cost of owning that asset.

Beyond these major items, there are number of other important reforms in the bill, including new regulations that loosen the requirement that police man roadside construction sites and an end to free lifetime health care for MBTA retirees.

Massachusetts’s broken transportation system threatens our long-term economic growth and compromises public safety. We must embark on a series of reforms to both fix the system and restore citizens’ faith. This package of reforms represents a crucial first step on that journey.

Steve Poftak is research director at Pioneer Institute and the co-author of “Our Legacy of Neglect: The Longfellow Bridge and the Cost of Deferred Maintenance.”