More than two years after a federal investigation into the MBTA outlined a pattern of “systemic failures,” leadership unfamiliar with basic safety procedures, and infrastructure that was actively deteriorating, data show that the T is now showing signs of real improvement as the current crop of leaders tries to earn back the public’s trust.
The T is turning the corner on some major improvements — subway slow zones expected to be eradicated by the end of the year, speeds on the Blue and Orange Lines faster than before federal intervention, the largest workforce in years — and even advocates who previously hadn’t hesitated to criticize the T are now singing its praises.
However, there are financial problems on the horizon that are threatening to undo all that progress and send the T spiraling, unless state officials can agree on some potentially expensive solutions.
“It would be more than a backslide. It would be a wipeout, a deletion, of many of the positive steps the T has taken in the last year and a half under Phil Eng, eliminated in one fell swoop,” said Brian Kane, executive director of the watchdog MBTA Advisory Board. “You’re going to lose lots and lots of momentum gained by growing the workforce.”
From a train on fire to a hiring blitz
The T hit its nadir in the summer of 2022, when a series of high-profile safety failures triggered a Federal Transit Administration probe and investigators found problems stretching across the agency.
After the FTA warned that staffing shortages were putting riders and workers at risk, the MBTA in June of that year slashed weekday service on the Red, Blue and Orange Lines to weekend levels. Gov. Charlie Baker and his team shut the Orange Line down for a month for repairs that wound up not making much of a difference. And in a potent symbol, a train burst into fire on a bridge crossing the Mystic River, prompting one passenger to jump into the water below.
Even by the following year, riders were still fed up, especially after officials revealed in the spring of 2023 that they had blanketed the system with miles of speed restrictions that slowed down travel.
“Confidence in the agency is at an all-time low and the agency’s actions, or lack thereof, are only eroding further and making the job of advocates more difficult,” Jarred Johnson, executive director of the advocacy group TransitMatters, told T officials in July 2023, about two months after Phil Eng started as general manager. “The T is not doing a good enough job of demonstrating its care for riders.”
Today, though, the message coming from TransitMatters and other MBTA-watchers is much different.
“The way the T has been operating is night and day,” said Devin Matté, co-lead of the TransitMatters lab, last week. “They’re giving us a tentative shutdown schedule a year in advance, communications before each shutdown, making efforts to provide better alternatives, and when the T gets back up and running you can actually feel the difference.”
There are still plenty of hiccups, flaws and missteps, but the service the MBTA is running in the fall of 2024 is a noticeable change from what riders had to contend with two-plus years ago.
Since last month, riders have been able to tap a credit card or mobile wallet to pay their fares for subways, buses and trolleys, a transformation that was once delayed indefinitely. Lower-income Bay Staters have new access to half-priced fares, another idea that had been floating around the T for years before becoming reality.
Trip frequency on the core subway system has climbed, and in some cases has completely reversed the FTA-era cuts. Under the fall 2024 schedule that took effect last month, the T now plans to run 198 Blue Line round trips and 165 Orange Line round trips on a typical weekday — the highest level since 2016, according to TransitMatters data.
The Red Line isn’t quite at best-in-eight-years levels, but its trip frequency has grown, too, and MBTA officials say the line will improve even more once they finish a 23-day shutdown for repair work.
That closure, stretching from the JFK/UMass stop in Dorchester down to Braintree, is the biggest block remaining on the calendar after nearly a year of rolling shutdowns designed to fix the slow zones that erupted into public view shortly before Eng took over.
A few shorter diversions are still to come, and Eng said the T is on schedule to complete all of the work and lift the final slow zones — spots where trains cannot operate a full speed due to safety concerns with the tracks — by the end of the year.
Through Aug. 13, before the latest Red Line work began, MBTA officials said they had lifted more than three-quarters of the speed restrictions that once plagued the system and shaved a collective 45 minutes off subway travel time as a result.
With tracks now able to support higher-speed travel, trains are moving faster, albeit not quite at the same levels they once hit. Over the past 18 months, average train speeds have increased 33 percent on the Red Line, nearly 25 percent on the Blue Line and 12.5 percent on the Orange Line, according to a News Service analysis of TransitMatters data.
Eng attributed the upward trajectory to a combination of factors, especially an extensive repair campaign this year and a hiring blitz that pushed T staffing to the highest level in more than a decade.
“Talking with Green Line operators, for example, the track work that we’ve accomplished on the Green Line has allowed them to better adhere to their schedules. Better adherence means we can run more trains, and you can run more trains now because we have more operators,” Eng said in an interview with the News Service. “They go hand in hand.”
Bus driver hiring is up, leading to fewer dropped trips, Eng said. And on the commuter rail, ridership has been so strong in recent years that it’s basically returned to pre-pandemic levels — something no other MBTA mode comes close to achieving.
A high point, Eng said, was the June 21 championship parade for the Boston Celtics. The T ran rush-hour service across the subway system all day, plus boosted some commuter rail offerings to accommodate the crowds of fans who flooded into the city to celebrate.
“We could not have done that a year ago. The number of trains we ran all day long and the level of service we provided was something that would not have been able to have been done,” he said. “We would not have been able to allow those folks to enjoy that parade in the manner that they did, getting in and even leaving as early as they wanted to or throughout the day.”
The contracted repair work for all of the year-plus track improvement campaign cost roughly $300 million altogether, according to a T spokesperson, who stressed that figure does not include additional costs of shuttle buses, materials and some other factors. (The Boston Globe reported Sunday that the shuttle bus costs could reach as high as nearly $194 million.)
Kane, whose organization represents cities and towns that help fund the MBTA, said the agency has “turned a corner” during Eng’s tenure.
“It’s a proverbial battleship turning in the ocean. You’ve got to start the turn way in advance. The building blocks were put in place by the [Fiscal Management and Control Board], the end of the Baker administration, and certainly this current Healey-Driscoll administration have been critical,” Kane said. “The lion’s share of credit has to go to Phil Eng and the governor for hiring him.”
Crews have also grown much more efficient and successful at the actual repair work, Eng said.
He pointed to the 2022 Orange Line shutdown — which all occurred under Eng’s predecessor, Steve Poftak, and Gov. Charlie Baker — as a comparison. Over that 30-day span, Eng said, workers replaced 6,000 feet of rail. In the first week of the current Red Line project, workers replaced 44,000 feet of rail.
Eng was not alone in pointing to the original Orange Line closure as a far cry from today’s efforts. Both Matté and Kane made the same comparison unprompted.
“Nothing changed. That was a disaster. People saw that and said, ‘we don’t want to do that again,'” Kane said of the 2022 shutdown. But now, he added, “people are starting to realize” tangible benefits after their commute is disrupted for a few weeks of repairs.
Asked if he had any idea why shutdowns are so much more productive today than two years ago, Kane replied, “Nothing that I’d like to say on the record.”
Matté described the Orange Line fire, followed by the month-long shutdown that yielded few tangible results, as the peak of public distrust in T.
“Things had not improved. Speeds had not gotten better,” Matté said. “So I think there was a big expectation among people that these shutdowns don’t do anything.”
Matté continued, “Since Phil Eng has come in charge — and we look at every shut down, we’ve been tracking them — in 2024, with few exceptions, they say, ‘We’re going to clear x number of issues saving riders y number of minutes,’ and they have been meeting that with almost every shutdown.”
Eng himself compared the shutdowns happening under his tenure to the ill-fated 2022 Orange Line closure, though he held back from disparaging his predecessors. He pointed out the extra 38,000 feet of rail his team has already replaced during the first week of the Red Line shutdown, and when asked what has made the project so much more productive, he said it’s all about communication and pre-planning.
“I always believe that the technical stuff is not the hard part. It’s the people skills, the communication,” he said.
‘Nobody wants us to go back there’
Eng said he thinks the biggest hurdle on the horizon for the T is the enormous backlog of work needed to bring the entire system into a state of good repair. Last year, the agency put a $24.5 billion price tag on fixing every asset that’s currently not in a state of good repair.
In addition to the track program, Eng said there’s a number of things on his to-repair list: upgrading the subway’s signals, getting new Orange and Red Line cars on the tracks, eventually replacing Green Line trolleys with new Type 10 cars, modernizing stations, and improving accessible service.
For everyday riders, Matté said he hopes the T will focus next on shortening headways.
“You want to be able to just show up at the stop and know that it’s not going to be that long until your next train if you miss one. You don’t have to plan around a schedule, you’re not late because of the T. You just know you have to get up, get to the T, and know how long it’ll take you to get to your destination,” Matté said. “For everyday riders, it’s about dependability.”
Unlike the public campaign to eradicate slow zones by the end of 2024, Eng didn’t identify any one specific area among the $24.5 billion state of good repair backlog as his primary goal for the upcoming year.
“All of these go hand in hand, and then where are the bigger things that we need to look at? And there’s a lot of desire to see: where do we envision taking the T in the future?” Eng said, identifying “workforce, safety and accessibility” as key components of what he sees as the T’s roadmap.
There’s another, more immediate financial chasm looming that has Kane especially worried. The MBTA continues to spend significantly more money than it brings in through combined state and local assistance, fares and other sources of revenue, and the agency plans to drain a final tranche of stashed-away federal aid this year.
In fiscal year 2026 — which begins in July — T budget-writers expect to face a roughly $700 million budget shortfall, and they forecast the gap will grow in subsequent years. Without additional assistance or major cuts, the MBTA could run out of cash in the first quarter of fiscal 2026, the latest agency-produced forecast suggests.
Kane said a solution will need to emerge quickly, especially because the T would need to notify workers in the spring about hypothetical layoffs — putting at risk much of the improvement accomplished.
“In 2021, the T put a series of draconian service cuts on the table,” he said. “They expected to net $142 million from that. This deficit is five times greater than that deficit. There isn’t five times more service to be cut and still call themselves a public transportation agency. It’s an existential crisis.”
Warnings about the T’s financial outlook are a perennial feature on Beacon Hill, and some skeptics might view them like a modern-day boy who cried wolf.
Kane insists that the situation is worse now because of lingering effects from the pandemic. Ridership — and the fare revenue it brings with it — still remains stuck well below pre-COVID levels, and commuters who have come back appear more likely to pay for individual trips rather than the weekly or monthly passes that steer more money to the T.
Eng said MBTA officials are talking about potential cost savings, and he suggested he is not “panicking” about the potential shortfall. He stressed that “we’re not going to be able to find all of those savings on our own,” seemingly hinting that the T might look for an infusion of state aid.
T officials in recent months have cast heightened attention on the agency’s funding history, delivering lengthy public presentations about the “forward funding” system that dedicates a portion of the state’s sales tax revenue to the agency.
“We saw the disinvestment in our infrastructure, we saw the disinvestment in our workforce, and that absolutely was the wrong direction. That’s why we want to make sure that we continue to talk about how we got to where we were just a year and a half ago, and where we’ve come from from that point,” Eng said.
He continued, “That is just to show, starkly, that we don’t want to go back there. Nobody wants us to go back there.”