At the final MBTA board of directors meeting of 2024 on Thursday morning, MBTA General Manager Phil Eng shared a striking statistic about his agency's efforts to fix hundreds of slow zones since 2023.
"When we take a look at the work that's been done to date, and the ridership, looking at origin and destination... 2.4 million minutes a day are being saved to all our riders on a weekday," said Eng.
That figure implies that Boston-region subway riders are saving 40,000 hours every weekday from faster subway trips – roughly 5.7 minutes per day for every rider.
MBTA Chief Engineer Sam Zhou later told board members that "our transit system was riddled with speed restrictions. At the peak of summer 2023, I recall there were more that 240 speed restrictions on our entire system."
The MBTA's track improvement program, a series of short-term subway shutdowns that repaired tracks one segment at a time, aimed to eliminate all of those slow zones by the end of 2024.
"We are almost there," said Zhou.
The last subway shutdown of 2024, which has closed the Green Line between downtown Boston and Medford for the past two weeks, is scheduled to end tomorrow.
Track work enables more service
In addition to faster trips, the work has let the T run more service, reducing the time that riders need to wait at stations for the next train.
Zhou reported that compared to December 2023, wait times between trains have been reduced by 31 percent on the Red Line, 15 percent on the Orange Line, and 21 percent on the Blue Line.
Faster Braintree trains coming 'soon'
"In the near term, we will be able to accelerate the speeds of the Red Line. Down by the Braintree-JFK area, we have long tangent (straight) sections where the track, as you can see here, has been rebuilt to a fantastic standard where we're confident that soon, with all the safety certifications, we'll be able to run at 50 mph. That will save an additional 3 minutes a day for every rider who takes that round trip," said Eng.
