If you’ve ever spent an eternity on a stalled Orange Line train — only to hear the crackly conductor’s voice tell you that it’s going out of service and you’ll have to trudge upstairs with all the other grumpy commuters to be shoehorned into a COVID-y shuttle bus while you text the boss about another late arrival — your ambitions for the region’s public transit system may be modest.

Couldn’t it just work a little better?

Dan McNichol says we need to be thinking bigger than that. Much bigger.

McNichol worked as a spokesman for the Big Dig and literally wrote the book on the project. But these days, he counts himself a public transit evangelist.

Read the full story: https://apps.bostonglobe.com/ideas/graphics/2022/06/the-next-big-dig/fixing-t-is-not-enough-we-need-massive-expansion#top

(excerpted from The Boston Globe; image H. Hopp-Bruce / Globe Staff)