A Facebook page has also been created to protest the ferry elimination.
Jeanne Reynolds, a Hingham resident who rides the ferry daily and is spearheading the petition process, says she has already collected 1,600 signatures.
"My goal is to get as many signatures as I can," she said in an earlier interview. "Probably three to four thousand. Last year, I just did it through the boats, but now I will do it through the town of Hingham [and online]. It's really an important issue to me."
Yet it isn't only residents who are concerned about the elimination of the ferry service. Area politicians are also calling on the MBTA to introduce changes geared more toward financial planning rather than just service cuts.
State Senator John Keenan (D-Quincy) has backed a measure that would restrict future MBTA commuter rail expansion projects until the authority can identify how it will pay for them.
"At least three prominent reports issued over the past decade have urged the MBTA to refrain from major service expansion projects until it figured out a fiscally responsible way to pay to build and operate the new lines," Keenan said in a release. "It appears that this did not happen; that the MBTA simply moved forward with these projects, maxing out its credit card to pay for them, while being unable to afford day-to-day operating and maintenance costs."
Keenan pointed to numerous studies, including a 2009 review of MBTA finances by former John Hancock CEO David D'Allessandro, a 2007 Massachusetts Transportation Finance Commission study, and a 2002 Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation report entitled "MBTA Capital Spending: Derailed by Expansion," all of which conclude that expansion was not badly needed and the consequences would be severe.
"While public transit expansion projects can help spark economic development, it is clear that future expansions, particularly those not required as mitigation for the Big Dig project, should not happen until the MBTA tells us how it plans to pay for them, and whether building and operating these new lines will result in service cuts elsewhere," Keenan said.
