Some major movement with Orange and Red Line slow zones this week!
I'm going to attempt to address all the areas that the MBTA cited this week as still being slow, along with a few others (I don't have a ton of time this evening sadly).
Orange Line
North of North Station
Northbound: the North Station to Wellington stretch, as of yesterday, now runs at nearly the same speed as before this summer's pre-shutdown slow zones were instituted.
The residual delay appears to be mainly due to a minor speed restriction between Assembly and Wellington:
as well as a restriction from Community College to Sullivan Square (note the dip around October 10....)
This is the graph for the North Station to Community College stretch, by the way, since it was cited by the MBTA this week; it's now roughly on par with pre-slow zones.
Southbound: As of today, the southbound stretch from Wellington to North Station is now running only about a minute slower than before the shutdown.
The continued slowdown appears to be primarily driven by a residual speed restriction from Community College to North Station, though they have made significant gains on that stretch this week.
As of today, the brutal 4-minute slow zone between Sullivan and Community has been mostly lifted, but trains are still running about 30 seconds slower than before the shutdown in this area.
Elsewhere along the line...
Back Bay to Tufts
Northbound: no recent changes.
Southbound: Woah. This week, trip times decreased by about 45 seconds on the stretch:
As you can tell, it has run faster as recently as June of 2021 (and I *believe* it has run closer to 1 minute even in past years), but this is still a notable improvement.
Stony Brook to Jackson Square (crossover at Jackson)
TransitMatters dashboard keeps timing out here. Will add graphs later.
I don't have time for the Red Line at the moment but the overall graph also shows a major improvement yesterday; as I noted yesterday, the agonizing Central to Harvard slow zone is gone. I heard on a discord server that Davis to Porter southbound also got lifted today so I will check in on that later. The Orange Line chart will dip even further as it has not yet accounted for the Sullivan to Community southbound slow zone being mostly lifted.
With the improvements yesterday, the slow zones on the Orange Line are now better than the pre-shutdown condition, according to the TM algorithm.