The MBTA’s year-long effort to eliminate backlogged maintenance and remove speed restrictions across the subway system has returned millions of minutes of travel time to riders, General Manager Phil Eng told the Board of Directors.
Eng’s ambitious plan to move away from the transportation system’s past model of performing maintenance mostly at night while continuing train service through the day, and instead close lengths of track to allow concerted repair efforts on a 24-hour schedule, has resulted in a system that will be free of lingering slow zones by this weekend.
The impact, he said, is tangible.
“When we take a look at the work we’ve done to date, and the ridership looking at origin/destination and all the work we’ve done across the system — the team has shared with me — 2.4 million minutes a day being saved to all our riders on a weekday,” Eng said.
“That’s an incredible number that we’re giving back to the public,” he added.
When Eng joined the MBTA, the system was plagued by hundreds of speed restrictions and struggling to deal with decades of delayed maintenance work.
In the 14 months following Eng’s proposal to spend the next year and change focused on fixing those problems with a goal of getting the trains up to full speed systemwide, MBTA Chief Engineer Sam Zhou said the transit service has managed to accomplish about 40 years of outstanding work and virtually eliminate the slow zones, with the final surge of construction due to wrap up in the coming days.
“As of today, we have succeeded all of the goals that we set initially and, simply put, that’s because we’ve become more and more efficient,” he said.
Eng’s plan was a “bold” one, Zhou said, but the results speak for themselves.
With the added time to focus on larger projects presented by track closures, the Chief Engineer said, crews were able to replace 37,541 railroad ties and 248,262 feet of rail, complete tamping on 323,545 feet of railbed, and improve average travel time by a whopping 93.7 cumulative minutes.
Crews have eliminated all 191 speed restrictions originally identified when the plan was announced, as well as 35 others that popped up over the course of the last year, Zhou said.
Trips across all subway lines are up significantly, Zhou said, and wait times for individual trains are down.
“As a result of the continuous effort, we were able to eliminate speed restrictions across the entire system,” he said.
The MBTA has come a very long way from where they stood in October of 2023, he noted.
“At the peak of 2023, I recall, there were more than 240 speed restrictions,” Zhou said.
As of Thursday, the MBTA’s speed restriction dashboard showed just 3 slow zones. A restriction was added earlier this week between Orient Heights and Suffolk Downs, and there are a pair remaining on the Green Line between North Station and Government Center.
The efforts to remove speed restrictions follow a Federal Transit Authority safety management inspection, which was conducted in 2022 “in response to the pattern of safety incidents at the MBTA, including safety issues such as derailments, train collisions, grade crossing fatalities, and other incidents involving both MBTA employees and passengers.”
As of December 8 the MBTA has cleared 89% of the more than 600 safety concerns identified by the FTA, according to their FTA Safety Management Inspection Response dashboard.