It’s immediately obvious to anyone watching the T’s new leadership up close that this vital piece of public infrastructure is in good hands. But that’s not a perspective the average person is afforded, and MBTA General Manager Phil Eng can’t afford to take their goodwill for granted.
To the rider stuck on a slow-moving subway train, the latest debacle on the Green Line Extension looks like another reason not to trust the agency’s competence. And who can blame them?
A brand-new train line is suddenly discovered to be borderline inoperable a year after former T leaders and a former governor lied through their teeth about what shutting down the Orange Line for a month would achieve.
And all this occurs while that same Orange Line is starting to slow down again after major efforts to alleviate its slow zones didn’t appear to stick, and while a combination of falling apart tracks and incompetence at the Springfield factory making new Red Line cars means riders on that line are stuck on the platform for up to 20 minutes between trains – performance more akin to a suburban commuter rail than what was once our busiest subway line.
One impassioned rider who spoke up at last week’s board meeting summarized the feeling well: “This system is in crisis. It’s inflicting a death spiral of transit and traffic on this city.”
Anyone who knows transit issues should have confidence that Eng and his team will be able to put the T back to rights over the next few years, given what they achieved at the Long Island Railroad. And Eng’s recent reorganization of top management appears to be a good step in that direction.
But Eng and Gov. Maura Healey are playing with fire if they don’t think the public needs to be shown a plan to get us out of this mess.
Repeated, massive failures to deliver promised subway and bus service mean vague promises from T officials have little credibility anymore. For a case in point, listen to Charlestown residents’ lack of faith, expressed to BPDA board members last week when reviewing a proposed rezoning plan, that promised upgrades to the Orange Line will ever come to pass.
As Eng himself has publicly said, it’s difficult to make specific promises about when proper bus or train service will be restored, and the governor herself is an obviously cautious politician. The MBTA was left to rot for decades, so one repair project may end only to have another component of the tracks or signals reach the end of its useful life – a difficult moving target that’s a ripe target for games of “gotcha.”
But it should not be hard for Eng, or preferably the governor, at least acknowledge the problems in some manner of specificity and lay out the road ahead with a rough timetable for when we’ll get there – even if it’s going to require a lot more painful, multi-week shutdowns of the lines.
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