And here’s the subhead to MassLive reporter Garrett Quinn’s piece, “Next Stop: Olympics,” which was published in Boston Magazine in February, 2014: “There’s only one way Massachusetts is ever going to be smart enough to fix the MBTA—and that’s by doing the stupidest thing possible.”

Quinn, it appears, was absolutely right. And that’s a shame. That’s no indictment of Quinn’s story; that’s an indictment of how state government would appear to function, if it takes the Olympics to get anything done.

“Hosting the Olympics is about the dumbest idea possible. But here’s the thing: We have to do it anyway,” Quinn wrote almost a year ago. Again, spot on. The T needs to be fixed. It’s always needed to be fixed. But, for some reason, hosting the Olympics is necessary to do that. Doing what Sochi, Russia was chosen to do – host an Olympic Games – is necessary for the future of public transportation in the state of Massachusetts.

The general narrative that the people of Boston “don’t want the Olympics because it would be bad for the city’s future” isn’t necessarily wrong, it’s just incomplete. If the roads weren’t deteriorating, the streets weren’t cracking, housing costs weren’t skyrocketing, and Green Line trolley doors weren’t falling off, one suspects people in these parts would be, well, “wicked f*&%in’ pumped.”

But they’re not. A lot – not just the T – needs to be fixed. The Olympics, apparently, would ensure things are.

“If you’re going to host the Olympics, now you have to get it done on a certain day,” Professor Stephanie Pollack, of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University, told Quinn. “It gives you a calendar that you cannot miss, and public projects don’t usually have this.” So, if this is in fact the case – be easy, commuters, the T will be more than efficient by 2024. Because, after all, the city – Boston – can’t afford to embarrass itself on a world stage.

The strange thing is that, on paper, the T has looked great as of late. The transit authority collected a record-setting $624.4 million in fare revenue in Fiscal Year 2014. After providing a record number of trips in October (37.28 million), ridership growth for FY2015 is growing at a rate 1.2 percent higher than FY2014.

Greater Boston relies on the T, on a daily basis. This is part of the nationwide trend of higher use of public transportation: The American Public Transportation Association recorded a record 2.7 billion public transit trips taken across the US in the third quarter of FY 2014.

The T’s general manager, Beverly Scott, told the New York Times, which reported on the growing use of public transit across the US, back in December, that this is indicative of a large-scale shift away from suburban lifestyles to an urban one – a shift from personal cars to public trains, buses and subways.

“[Dependence on cars] isn’t sustainable, and people know it now,” Scott told the NYT. “It’s a picture of what America was 30, 40 years ago. We’re painting a new picture in terms of where we’re going, and it’s very consistent with providing quality transit.”

That statement should have pointed, as Quinn wrote in reference to the Boston Olympic bid, “a gun to our collective head.” But the T is financially – and all too often, literally – broke.

“Certain revenue streams would be available to us,” City Councilor Matt O’Malley told Quinn, referring to the private investments needed to bring an Olympics to a city. “We need to think of some new partnerships and work with the business communities to expand and accelerate certain projects.”

Thursday night, the United States Olympic Committee endorsed Boston’s bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympics. Boston still has to win over various USOC delegates, who will visit and evaluate the city in coming months, before making a formal decision to submit a US Olympic bid; nothing is official. Even if a Boston bid is formally submitted, it would still have to beat out rumored host-city bids from a number of potential cities, including: Doha (Qatar), Istanbul, Paris, Rome; and possible bids from South Africa and Germany, who will choose either Hamburg or Berlin.

Bottom line: Boston is close – really, really close – to hosting the 2024 Olympics. “How nuts is that?” The Boston Globe‘s Yvonne Abraham wrote back in November, when Boston was still competing with Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. for a USOC endorsement, which came Thursday. Abraham concluded her piece with a poignant note: “Hosting the Olympics could make us great. So could rejecting them.”

Hosting the Olympics would indeed, very likely, lead to necessary improvements across the board, most importantly the T, which – imagine this! – would function like a world class public transportation system.

Why doesn’t it already?

ESPN Boston’s Gordon Edes, who isn’t a fan of Boston hosting the Olympics, writes:

We bought into The Big Dig. We won’t buy into The Big Lie, that in order for Boston to be considered a world-class city, it needs the Olympics. Think about that for a second. The tipping point for Boston greatness is another sporting event? Really?

There are so many visitors to Fenway Park, hundreds of thousands of them, that tours are conducted in English, Spanish and Japanese.

Of the 32,458 runners who started the Boston Marathon last April, 56 U.S. states and territories were represented, along with 79 countries, from Argentina to Zimbabwe.

The Patriots, Red Sox, Celtics and Bruins all have championship pedigrees and are among the most marketed teams globally, regularly playing in front of sellout crowds. And we’re supposed to believe that with a new velodrome and aquatics center, more of the world will come calling?

After that ringing endorsement, check out what New York Times reporter Katharine Q. Seelye wrote last week:

“Boston is a global leader in innovation, and in order to remain a global leader, we must be aspirational,” the pro-Olympic Boston2024 website says.

To Boston’s mayor, Martin J. Walsh, an initial skeptic of the bid, hosting the Olympics “puts us on a scale not too many cities can claim.”

Mike Ross, a former Boston city councilman, argued that the Olympics are a good idea “and not just for the reasons one might think, such as helping us get over our persistent ‘smaller than New York’ Napoleon complex.”

Seelye wraps up her post, writing with a tone that suggests annoyance, maybe anger – frustration:

Still, one might wonder if Boston’s proposal was actually made by The Onion: The athletes could live in college dormitories that are empty during the summer; the modular housing of an Olympic village could later become new dorms; and a proposed $700 million Olympic Stadium would be temporary, so it could be razed or relocated.

Does anyone think this might be carrying Yankee frugality too far? And are Olympic bigwigs serious about not wanting an extravaganza?

Either way, the Boston promoters are trying to win over naysayers by promising tangible benefits like upgrades in roads, bridges and public transit. But many wonder why it would take the Olympics to get those much-needed improvements. The Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi wrote that the promoters were giving Bostonians an impossible choice: Buy in to their bid to get a modern transportation system, or “be labeled a small-minded, provincial party-pooper.”

And there you have it: Without the Olympics, Boston supposedly cannot be world class.

Boston isn’t this poor little city in desperate need of attention. Boston is a great city, known worldwide; a tourist destination, albeit, a small(ish) one. But Boston doesn’t need an excuse to be great.

So why are we looking for one?

Photo via PBS

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