A slew of recent good news coming out of the MBTA should give the state’s business leaders confidence the agency is on the mend. But huge challenges still loom that need immediate attention.
Most recent – and soon to be most visible to most riders – the T seems to be building up momentum to close the gaping hole in its workforce. Numbers presented to the MBTA board of directors earlier this month showed the agency is starting to reverse the exodus of staff, with a net gain of 307 new hires in the first seven months of this year with 1,000 more to go before it hits the total it budgeted for.
This is only bound to accelerate with a new labor contract that fixes some of the biggest hurdles to hiring back the legions of staff either lost due to a Baker administration hiring freeze during the pandemic or who retired in the face of a stinging federal safety investigation that gave lie to any claims the former governor and his complacent picks for the last MBTA board “fixed” the T.
The T’s bus drivers – the locus of the agency’s worst staffing shortfalls – are going from the worst-paid among the country’s major transit systems to the best-paid, with additional incentives and controls baked into the contract to make sure the agency can retain these drivers over the long haul. With ambitious plans to transform its bus network as the next big way the T is looking to modernize its service, this will hopefully head off what could have been an existential threat to the agency’s future.
Next, General Manager Phil Eng is bringing in a team of experienced hands he worked with in previous roles in New York. As Banker & Tradesman’s columnist Scott Van Voorhis wrote earlier this month, it’s a clear sign Eng “wants to get things done.” It remains to be seen exactly how Eng’s quartet of trusted lieutenants will interact with existing T staff – Eng described them to the press as “reinforcements” – but adding top managers with deep experience at a time when the MBTA has so many vitally important balls in the air is likely to be an unalloyed good.
But with all these positive signs, added on top of Gov. Maura Healey’s star-studded appointments to the T board and her hiring of the highly capable Eng to run the agency itself, huge new challenges loom.
Most pressing, slow zones on the Orange Line are creeping up again, and those on the Red Line are rising faster. In the case of the latter – the T’s busiest and highest-capacity subway – the slow zones and dispatchers’ inability to run trains either consistently or frequently have pushed the line to a crisis point.
The public, and businesses, need to know what the T’s plan is to fix these slow zones. They are simply too severe and to longstanding to ask for the public’s patience and trust – trust the T lost access to years ago, and which its refusal to be open about how track conditions got this bad won’t restore.
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