General MBTA Topics (Multi Modal, Budget, MassDOT)

HenryAlan said:
Which begs the question -- how did it get so bad so quickly if it was essentially slow zone free 2 years ago? There has to be some way to keep these lines in state of good repair without multiple multi-day shutdowns every few months.
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I thought the documentation and diligence on repairs was so poor that the track has actually been in poor condition for a decade and they were just running trains over it at full speed with no knowledge of that.
 
sneijder said:
I thought the documentation and diligence on repairs was so poor that the track has actually been in poor condition for a decade and they were just running trains over it at full speed with no knowledge of that.
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From what I understand, a combination of that with minor stuff that they were aware of prior was now being treated with what may be called an overzealously conservative approach. Basically zero tolerance policy for even the smallest of defects. I'd be willing to bet the system-wide infrastructure is in the best shape it's been in for a long time right now.
 
Delvin4519 said:
Found a red line rider who does not take the Orange Line or any of the buses; on zombie reddit.

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Bold statement to make. It may have been better to write "As of right now, The Red Line has been the best it's ever been in years.", not "As of right now, The T has been the best it's ever been in years."

The Orange Line is still slower than the Summer 2022 monthlong shutdown, painfully slow on the outer rims of the line. Buses are still only 85% of pre-COVID levels. A bus rider transferring to the Orange Line is still suffering the worst service cuts and commute slowdowns yet, with very little alleviated or improved over the past 2 years.

Compared to when Eng started in April 2023; the Orange Line had 8 - 9 minutes of slow zone in May 2023. Today, Orange Line is a smidge below 8 minutes of slow zone, compared to 5 and a half minutes of slow time prior to the 2022 monthlong shutdown. Very little has improved on the Orange Line's speeds since May 2023.

Buses are less frequent today than in May 2023, many bus routes had service cut in July 2023, very little of those cuts have been reverted, with more trips removed from the Fall 2024 schedule than added.

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While Red Line riders taking the subway from Braintree to Alewife have certainly seen their biggest gains in restored services and speeds, the T's improvements are not evenly distributed.

Bus riders are still suffering the worst of the Summer 2023 service cuts. The Orange Line is still running at its slowest speeds slower than Summer 2022, and almost as slow as May 2023. Orange Line riders need to wait until Election Day Eve. For bus riders, it's still a mystery when they will get their pre-COVID service levels back (BNRD phase 1 doesn't count, we're talking today's bus routes in today's neighborhoods, not the future redevelopment of Everett's 2nd St).

It is more than fair to say, for some MBTA riders, they have hardly felt anything improve meaningfully at all in the past 2 years, as it depends on which subway lines they take, which parts of those subway lines, and whether they ride the bus system at all or not.
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So, some 21 days later, how's the orange line doing? ;) Might check in in 9 days as well...
 
stefal said:
So, some 21 days later, how's the orange line doing? ;) Might check in in 9 days as well...
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What's with this rush to prematurely celebrate? Can we wait for all T riders to get their turn before saying "the T is at its best"? Orange is not done until November. Red after Thanksgiving, Green and buses in 2025.

If you wait 9 more days, then wait 5 more days, national voters may decide that Agenda 47 and Project 2025 is the better outcome for our nation, and you'll be in for a pleasant surprise next summer when the T watches Agenda 47 gut away federal funds on top of the 700 million deficit, turning it into (a) billion(s) of dollars in the black hole.

Be patient. Wait everyone's turn. If you look at the speed graph right now it looks like Orange is hardly faster at all.

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Delvin4519 said:
What's with this rush to prematurely celebrate? Can we wait for all T riders to get their turn before saying "the T is at its best"? Orange is not done until November. Red after Thanksgiving, Green and buses in 2025.

If you wait 9 more days, then wait 5 more days, national voters may decide that Agenda 47 and Project 2025 is the better outcome for our nation, and you'll be in for a pleasant surprise next summer when the T watches Agenda 47 gut away federal funds on top of the 700 million deficit, turning it into (a) billion(s) of dollars in the black hole.

Be patient. Wait everyone's turn. If you look at the speed graph right now it looks like Orange is hardly faster at all.

View attachment 57098
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The Orange Line is the fastest it’s been in 20 months, up from 12.8 mph to 16.8 mph. Whether that’s worth celebrating or not is up to you, but let’s not misconstrue the data. You conveniently cropped out the slowest period early last year.

People mostly rebut your attempts to misconstrue reality, not your pessimism (which is kind of fun to see how consistently pessimistic you are about everything).
 
Delvin4519 said:
What's with this rush to prematurely celebrate? Can we wait for all T riders to get their turn before saying "the T is at its best"? Orange is not done until November. Red after Thanksgiving, Green and buses in 2025.

If you wait 9 more days, then wait 5 more days, national voters may decide that Agenda 47 and Project 2025 is the better outcome for our nation, and you'll be in for a pleasant surprise next summer when the T watches Agenda 47 gut away federal funds on top of the 700 million deficit, turning it into (a) billion(s) of dollars in the black hole.

Be patient. Wait everyone's turn. If you look at the speed graph right now it looks like Orange is hardly faster at all.
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You are taking people way too literally with this. People are rightfully celebrating T victories and you're coming across as sour grapes because it's not 100%. I hear you; there are substantial issues with the T still and many users are still having a poor or terrible experience, but that's doesn't mean that we can't ride the hype wave that is actual hope for a better T just because OL users haven't fully tasted it yet. People are allowed to be happy when their personal situation changes and, also, there has been a tremendous amount of celebrating for each slow zone removal so the full OL will certainly see its share of exuberance.

As a last point: There will always be policy, funding, and infrastructure developments that alter the trajectory of the MBTA. The implication that we shouldn't discuss them until everything is settled is both not realistically possible and defeats the entire point of a forum such as this one.
 
bigeman312 said:
Regular service resumed on the Orange Line yesterday, after track work suspended service between Back Bay and Forest Hills for a couple of weeks. The work appears to have been very successful, with all slow zones cleared. The Orange Line is now slow-zone-free between Community College and Forest Hills!

Some highlights from yesterday's (10/21/24) data:
  • At 3:01, the Orange Line had its least slow zone time since February 20, 2023, weeks before The Great Slowdown of 2023.
  • At 16.8 mph, the Orange Line had its highest average speed since March 6, 2023, days before The Great Slowdown of 2023.
  • Forest Hills -> Community College averaged 23:41, the fastest for that trip since December 6, 2022, months after the full, monthlong closure of the line.
  • Forest Hills -> Downtown Crossing averaged 16:51, the fastest since December 4, 2022, a Sunday, months after the full, monthlong closure of the line.
Overall, the Orange Line is the fastest its been in 20 months.
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A new day and another day of data on the Orange Line!

Some highlights from yesterday's (10/22/24) data:
  • At 2:48, the Orange Line set a new 2024 slow zone low, still the lowest since February 20, 2023.
  • Forest Hills -> Wellington averaged 29:18, the fastest for that trip since November 24, 2022, which was Thanksgiving Day. Other than that Federal Holiday, the last time that trip was that quick was June 14, 2020, when ridership was obviously much lower due to the COVID-19 pandemic!
Bottom line: northbound rides between Forest Hills and Wellington (which is most of the line) yesterday were the quickest they’ve been in over four years!
 
bigeman312 said:
The Orange Line is the fastest it’s been in 20 months, up from 12.8 mph to 16.8 mph. Whether that’s worth celebrating or not is up to you, but let’s not misconstrue the data. You conveniently cropped out the slowest period early last year.

People mostly rebut your attempts to misconstrue reality, not your pessimism (which is kind of fun to see how consistently pessimistic you are about everything).
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TransitMatters has a limit of 150 days before it switches to weekly view. There is only a single week of data and it's less than a week so far.

You can use weekly view on TransitMatters for up to 2 years period.

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jbray said:
You are taking people way too literally with this. People are rightfully celebrating T victories and you're coming across as sour grapes because it's not 100%. I hear you; there are substantial issues with the T still and many users are still having a poor or terrible experience, but that's doesn't mean that we can't ride the hype wave that is actual hope for a better T just because OL users haven't fully tasted it yet. People are allowed to be happy when their personal situation changes and, also, there has been a tremendous amount of celebrating for each slow zone removal so the full OL will certainly see its share of exuberance.

As a last point: There will always be policy, funding, and infrastructure developments that alter the trajectory of the MBTA. The implication that we shouldn't discuss them until everything is settled is both not realistically possible and defeats the entire point of a forum such as this one.
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Well this upcoming election has big implications for the future of transit and cities. If people haven't seen CityNerd's videos about Project 2025 and Agenda 47 then we're going to end up with a lot of disappointment right after celebration.

Well the improvements are of course concentrated on prioritizing subway rides first before buses. If you mostly ride the subway and don't use the bues at all, you are likely having the fastest commutes in ages, especially on the central core of the Orange, Blue, and most of Red. If you ride the buses, you are still having the worst commutes since the mid-2023 service cuts and hardly anything has been improved or restored at all.

I never said we can't discuss them, but at least state that it's the subway system right now that's improving the most and quickest, and don't forget to acknowledge the huge risks that this upcoming election will have on public transit nationwide 2 weeks from now. (Mostly if you don't want to be disappointed)
 
Delvin4519 said:
Well this upcoming election has big implications for the future of transit and cities. If people haven't seen CityNerd's videos about Project 2025 and Agenda 47 then we're going to end up with a lot of disappointment right after celebration.

Well the improvements are of course concentrated on prioritizing subway rides first before buses. If you mostly ride the subway and don't use the bues at all, you are likely having the fastest commutes in ages, especially on the central core of the Orange, Blue, and most of Red. If you ride the buses, you are still having the worst commutes since the mid-2023 service cuts and hardly anything has been improved or restored at all.

I never said we can't discuss them, but at least state that it's the subway system right now that's improving the most and quickest, and don't forget to acknowledge the huge risks that this upcoming election will have on public transit nationwide 2 weeks from now. (Mostly if you don't want to be disappointed)
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I'd be willing to put a substantial amount of money on this section of the forum almost universally watching CityNerd. Most people here have not buried their heads in the sand relative to the current and potential states of transit funding at local, state, and federal levels. At the same time, movements like this require momentum to achieve political victory. Think about how Camberville's cycling community went from painted lanes, to plastic bollards, to wholesale redevelopment of major thoroughfares that changed the conversation for Boston and the entire region. If the goal is to get broad support for transit investment, you certainly don't get new participants by downplaying the victories just because you might lose a different side of the political battle. Positive word of mouth about the subway lines may improve ridership and convince people that the idea that "increasing transit funding=cronyism waste" is not accurate, both of which allow us to win local and state funding streams even if the federal monies dry up. Better to enter into a holding position than a retreat. This also doesn't mean that we cannot acknowledge these hardships that are continued. There's a fine line between maintaining pressure to improve those items and not lose sight of them and creating discouragement by always bringing up failures whenever a victory is won. I would say that you're falling into that latter camp. Low morale loses the war so pick your battles (timing) carefully.

I don't wholesale agree with your bus assessment. We're building new bus depots to acquire new state of the art buses, new lanes continue to be funded with the Columbus ave lanes being a major demonstrator of the value of bus facing infrastructure, the fare-free program on the 28 corridor was also a big display of concept, the T is pushing to hire more bus operators to improve stability of frequencies, they're launching phase one of the Better Bus redesign. There is a lot to celebrate on the bus front and I know that Monica Tibbits-Nutt was a vocal proponent of Bus investment when she was the Vice-Chair of the FCB. It's simply not as easy to improve bus service because the shared road is the ROW and each road is owned, maintained, and regulated by different municipalities. Anecdotally, I'm a regular bus user and it's pretty easy to see why it's prone to delays and dropped trips. There's also a lack of will power to push for bus specific infrastructure and enforcement on the community level because not enough of the community sees it's value. It's certainly bad out there for many, many bus users, but it's not all doom and gloom with no light cast upon it.
 
sneijder said:
I thought the documentation and diligence on repairs was so poor that the track has actually been in poor condition for a decade and they were just running trains over it at full speed with no knowledge of that.
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Okay, that makes sense, so maybe we can look to a bit more stability going forward.
 
jbray said:
I'd be willing to put a substantial amount of money on this section of the forum almost universally watching CityNerd. Most people here have not buried their heads in the sand relative to the current and potential states of transit funding at local, state, and federal levels. At the same time, movements like this require momentum to achieve political victory. Think about how Camberville's cycling community went from painted lanes, to plastic bollards, to wholesale redevelopment of major thoroughfares that changed the conversation for Boston and the entire region. If the goal is to get broad support for transit investment, you certainly don't get new participants by downplaying the victories just because you might lose a different side of the political battle. Positive word of mouth about the subway lines may improve ridership and convince people that the idea that "increasing transit funding=cronyism waste" is not accurate, both of which allow us to win local and state funding streams even if the federal monies dry up. Better to enter into a holding position than a retreat. This also doesn't mean that we cannot acknowledge these hardships that are continued. There's a fine line between maintaining pressure to improve those items and not lose sight of them and creating discouragement by always bringing up failures whenever a victory is won. I would say that you're falling into that latter camp. Low morale loses the war so pick your battles (timing) carefully.

I don't wholesale agree with your bus assessment. We're building new bus depots to acquire new state of the art buses, new lanes continue to be funded with the Columbus ave lanes being a major demonstrator of the value of bus facing infrastructure, the fare-free program on the 28 corridor was also a big display of concept, the T is pushing to hire more bus operators to improve stability of frequencies, they're launching phase one of the Better Bus redesign. There is a lot to celebrate on the bus front and I know that Monica Tibbits-Nutt was a vocal proponent of Bus investment when she was the Vice-Chair of the FCB. It's simply not as easy to improve bus service because the shared road is the ROW and each road is owned, maintained, and regulated by different municipalities. Anecdotally, I'm a regular bus user and it's pretty easy to see why it's prone to delays and dropped trips. There's also a lack of will power to push for bus specific infrastructure and enforcement on the community level because not enough of the community sees it's value. It's certainly bad out there for many, many bus users, but it's not all doom and gloom with no light cast upon it.
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Buses have not recovered service levels, at best the T has only barely added any new bus service since the great Summer 2023 bus service cuts. As of February 2024 we were at 85% of pre-COVID bus trips, which is about where it fell down to at its low in Summer 2023. Right now we are only at 88% of pre-COVID bus service hours. Keep in mind the T removed more trips from the Fall 2024 schedule than trips added, even though service hours is slightly higher.

Bus service is at its worst since June 2023. It hasn’t recovered. Riders are still enduring unusable headways for much of the time even today. It’s October, not December.
 
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The messy headways on the NB Red Line trunk continue to be an issue. This isn't exactly a new issue, but it does seem to have gotten worse and is the kind of management problem a guy like Eng might be able to finally solve. Maybe they have the schedule set for the eventual 50mph operations?
 
737900er said:
View attachment 57100

The messy headways on the NB Red Line trunk continue to be an issue. This isn't exactly a new issue, but it does seem to have gotten worse and is the kind of management problem a guy like Eng might be able to finally solve. Maybe they have the schedule set for the eventual 50mph operations?
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We really shouldn’t have so many headways under 3 minutes and over 10 minutes. I wonder if this will be resolved after the Broadway <-> North Quincy shutdown in two weeks.
 
From the MBTA board meeting, here's the PDF for the MBTA Strategic Plan Annual Update for 2023-2024 (note, they made this PDF a bit wonky, so it's double-wide after the first page). Here you'll find what the MBTA has done for the year regarding their stated goals.

Here's a screenshot from the presentation at the meeting that summarizes the update.
Screenshot 2024-10-24 at 2.01.06 PM.png
 
The MBTA is proposing changes to the service delivery policy, and they sound like legitimately good ways to better quantify how useful service is:

  • Heavy rail (Red/Orange/Blue) switches from on-time performance to excess trip time: compared to a benchmark fastest trip time and nominal wait time, how long were actual trip times and wait times and whether than excess falls into an acceptable range. This does a much better job of accounting for dropped trips and slow zones - OTP has been 80-90% for the last several years on the Red Line, but ETT has been between 15% and 60%.
  • Dropped bus trips are now penalized in OTP calculations, rather than excluded. The presentation notes that frequent routes have more dropped trips.
  • Span of service changes from first arrival/last departure to first departure/last arrival, which is apparently more standard for other systems. The expected spans have been appropriately widened - light rail went from 6am-12am to 530am-1230am, for example - so that the effective span is really the same.
  • Minimum frequency for frequent bus routes is now 15 minutes all day every day, rather than 10 peak / 15 off peak / 20 nights and weekends
  • New accessibility measures for bus stops, ferry docks, and ferries
  • Most elevator outages (even when shuttles are provided) are now considered inaccessible platform hours. Only specific situations like planned replacements are excluded. (This knocks platform accessibility from 99.4% to 97.6%)
  • Crowding metrics added for heavy rail because new data is now available.
  • Updated terminology: “Key Bus Routes” are now “Frequent Routes”; “Commuter Rail” referred to as “Regional Rail”; “Community” routes are now “Coverage”
 
More interestingly, the line about new accessibility measures for buses is intriguing. Could that mean we finally stop pretending all the Silver Line stops where the buses could crouch down and extend a ramp are as accessible as level boarding?
 
commonwealthbeacon.org

My roadmap for funding the state’s transportation system

Ultimately, Massachusetts’ political leaders need to do two things next year: stop the T from falling off the coming fiscal cliff, and then build a financial bridge enabling the T to reach across the chasm to the other side, which is the future. That means not simply solving the fiscal cliff...
commonwealthbeacon.org commonwealthbeacon.org
 
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