Earlier this year, when I was writing about concerns that the tech scene in Massachusetts is slowing, one of the power players I talked to noted — in passing — that, though the state faces problems with high costs and talent retention, it’s good, at least, that the T has been fixed.
I wanted to stop the conversation and take an hourlong detour into why the T is still incredibly unreliable and too often disappointing, but I swallowed it and stayed focused.
Yes, some improvements have been made. After 2024 — dubbed “the year of the shutdown” — speeds on the Orange Line and Red Line improved considerably, though, as Transit Matters noted, the Red Line was still plagued by “frequent delays caused by disabled trains and signal problems.”
The improvements are not nearly good enough. And the quality of the T has real bearing on Massachusetts’ competitiveness and its ability to retain workers trying to build careers here.
Can you be a world-class city when getting to work means relying on a slow, uneven transportation system that has years of rolling shutdowns? Can you truly offer a green alternative to driving — despite what Massachusetts leaders might hope — when your public transit system is so poor?
Let’s be honest. In this state, most people who worry about global warming still commute in their SUVs.
On a Saturday in August, my mom boarded the Green Line to meet me. Because it was closed down for nine days from North Station to Kenmore, a trip that would have taken 24 minutes involved both a train and a shuttle, and took 90 minutes.
You’d be crazy to take public transportation in that situation, unless you have to. But my mom gave up driving years ago and mostly tries to take the T.
Of course, you might argue that you have to endure some pain during a temporary shutdown. But at least it’s temporary!
I wish.
The Green Line had a partial shutdown Aug. 8 to 16.
It will also be shutting down Sept. 19 and 20.
And Sept. 26 to Oct. 4.
Earlier in the year, there was a partial shutdown from April 22 to 30.
And another one from May 30 to June 5. (And that’s just the Green Line. The other lines have had their own issues.)
The T website cautions that “Riders using shuttle bus service should budget ample extra travel time.” But who can possibly plan for commutes that are sometimes double what they should be? What are you supposed to do with your children, if you have to leave home far earlier than normal and get home far later than expected?
As the Globe recently found, parts of the Green Line had been shut for nearly 80 days by Aug. 30. Who can rely on public transit, if they can’t get to work a quarter of the time?
But it gets worse. Imagine if your commute touches two lines, which have different shutdown weeks.
Unfortunately, I don’t have to imagine. My husband, Zhe, often takes the Green Line to the Red Line, and he’s generally so angry about the T, it’s a bad idea to broach the subject. Especially if you’re hoping to have a peaceful dinner or entertain hopeful thoughts about the future.
During the shutdowns, he has spent $500 on Ubers in a single week, because he just can’t lose three hours of his day to commuting on the T and still get any work done.
But it’s more than shutdowns.
Even when the T is functioning — and I use the term advisedly — it’s simply not equipped to serve a large, busy city. Frequently, at the Longwood stop, there are masses of people flowing out of hospitals at 5 p.m. And you can see, up on the board, that the next train is 16 minutes away.
Everyone at the stop is screwed, and they know it. By the time the T arrives, the crowds waiting to get on will be three-people deep. Many folks won’t be able to board. And nobody can get an Uber because dozens of people are trying to call them.
People who ride the T know that it’s slow and often crowded. Two years after “the year of the shutdown,” the Green Line runs more slowly than it did in January of 2023.
Guobiao Mei, who boards the Green Line in Newton and works in tech, said that when there are shutdowns, alternative transportation can be too annoying or time consuming. “Sometimes I try to work from home,” he said.
Overall, he believes “the T is doing OK,” though he “would like more transparency about what’s going on.” After shutdowns, the improvements aren’t apparent to him. Mei also wishes that guides were positioned at stations during closures. He remembers once getting out at Park Street, finding no shuttle bus, and seeing only similarly confused riders.
The Red Line — while running faster than three years ago — generally experiences between two and five hours of delays each week, similar to the weekly numbers from the fall of 2022. And if you’re at a standstill — or “standing by,” as they say on the T — it doesn’t really matter how much faster the train could go.
Lots of people give up and drive. They stop caring about the T, because they don’t feel like it serves them. And I can’t say that I blame them.
But how did we get here — to a place where rolling shutdowns and delayed trains fall particularly heavily on those who don’t have cars or parking? How is there not an outcry in a state that values both government services and equality?
When the Globe reported on Aug. 15 that the MBTA will pay $495,000 to a former employee whose hair was pulled by general manager Phil Eng, it felt like adding insult to injury. This is a dispute between two people, so why is it an expenditure of the MBTA? Doesn’t the T have transportation-related items it could spend this money on?
What is most disappointing about the T is that it leaves us without a real choice. Either venture out on car-choked roads or use a public transit system that’s out of commission or overburdened. It’s a competitiveness issue, without question.
The view from T leadership, of course, is very different. Eng told me that he has made huge strides in his three-year tenure as general manager. “What we did in 14 months, eliminating every speed restriction, really got our head above water where the public felt the immediate benefit right away after each opening,” he said.
He notes that he has grappled with decades of deferred maintenance. The MBTA, he said, is “really building a new system, a modern system.” And what the public will see “over the next three, six months, year or [future] years, [is] that service has been reliable.”
When will the shutdowns end?, I asked him. Eng didn’t answer directly. “I don’t have an exact answer on how much more work needs to be done,” he said. “But what we don’t want to do is keep kicking it down the road to the point where all of a sudden we find a condition that we didn’t touch, and now we’re closing something.”
The morning after I spoke to Eng, Zhe texted to tell me that there was a disabled train on the track, and passengers were complaining about long delays. I asked Zhe how he would sum up his experience with the T. “It’s an organization that does not value my time,” he said.
Kara Miller is the host of the podcast It Turns Out. Send comments to [email protected].