It will be at least a year before MBTA riders start to see a major improvement in their daily commute, T board chair Thomas Glynn said.

The public may experience “incremental improvements,” such as faster trip times as speed restrictions are lifted in the days and months ahead, but the groundwork new MBTA General Manager Phillip Eng is laying to turn around the embattled agency won’t translate into sweeping changes anytime soon, Glynn said.

Eng is trying to fix the decision-making and organizational culture at the T. He’s also striving to get major projects like fare transformation and the Green Line Train Protection System, both of which are years late, back on schedule, Glynn told the MBTA Advisory Board at a Thursday forum.

“A lot of these things need to be integrated to have a significant impact,” said Glynn, who chairs the T’s board of directors. “I think people will see a different T a year from now, but I don’t know if they’ll see a different T in two months.”

Quincy Mayor Thomas Koch, who sits on both boards, offered a more sobering timeline, saying that it could be a year and a half before the agency’s “huge structural issues” are addressed in a way that translates into better service.

There’s no “magic bullet” that will fix all of these problems, he said, but there are a number of solutions that will contribute to a “better MBTA as we know it.”

“I think there’s a realization that you can’t point to somebody, (that) this was somebody’s fault,” Koch said. “This was years of neglect, that we all have a responsibility to address.”

Eng said his biggest priority in the months ahead will be to improve the safety and reliability of the region’s public transportation system.

This includes not only the subway, a mode that has been heavily scrutinized since repeated safety failures there resulted in a rare federal investigation last year, but also commuter rail, buses and ferries, Eng said.

He compared the T’s current crisis to what he encountered when he took the helm of the Long Island Rail Road in 2018, after years of rampant overtime abuse, pension disability fraud and poor on-time performance at the agency.

“In both cases, service and reliability of service was at some of its low points in its history,” Eng said. “Public confidence had waned. And the challenge was, how do you accomplish this tremendous amount of effort to restore state of good repair, or at least start moving in the direction of state of good repair?”

Getting to that point, Eng said, will involve chipping away at a long backlog of track maintenance work; beefing up staffing levels, which includes shaking up leadership positions; and following through on major capital and service improvement projects, some of which are years behind schedule.

“Moving forward, being on time and being on budget is going to be important to me,” Eng said.

He spoke specifically about rethinking contractor schedules, which are often delayed depending on track access. The MBTA, as a result, incurs more cost than initially agreed upon for these outside projects.

Eng also mentioned the erosion of public confidence that has resulted from the agency’s inability to deliver on several large projects that were at one point, widely touted by T and elected officials.

A roughly $1 billion fare transformation overhaul that will digitize payment, for example, was already three years behind schedule and $200 million over budget when the MBTA announced in February that it would not be able to meet its 2024 timeline for project completion.

Amid concerns about the vendor, Glynn said the T board requested a project update at a future meeting.

Eng also mentioned the production of new Orange and Red Line trains, a project with a roughly $870.5 million price tag, which is years late. In addition, the cars that have been delivered by Chinese company CRRC have been taken out of service several times, due to battery, braking and power cable failures.

Ensuring that contractual obligations are met with that project, and other major projects are completed on or ahead of schedule, will “change the narrative” and “start to show that this agency can deliver.”

“I think what has happened here is that maybe, to some level, if a project slips to the right, it almost becomes acceptable, not only from our perspective, but the industry,” Eng said. “What I want to do is hold ourselves accountable, and start demonstrating that this is a new way of doing business here.”