After years of driver shortages, the T has finally has enough bus operators to be able to exceed its pre-pandemic levels of bus service, according to MBTA General Manager Phillip Eng.
Eng appeared on GBH's Boston Public Radio talk show on Friday afternoon, and shared the good news about bus service at the beginning of his conversation with hosts Margery Eagan and Jim Braude.
"We've been rebuilding our workforce and restoring service. And starting with this spring's schedule, our bus service will be exceeding what we had had in 2019," Eng said. "You know, this is just another testament to our operations folks, to the governor, to the legislature for the support we've gotten... The ability to say that we are now back to pre-pandemic levels of service is huge."
In the years after the Covid-19 pandemic, low entry-level pay and a surge of retirements left hundreds of bus operator positions vacant and forced the T to cut bus service.
In summer 2023, newly-elected Governor Maura Healey helped enact a new, more generous labor contract for MBTA bus drivers, and the T has slowly been rebuilding its workforce in the years since.
The upcoming spring service changes, which were announced last month and will take effect on Sunday, April 5, include:
- Increased evening and weekend service on the 87, which runs between Arlington and Union Square in Somerville;
- More service, including Sunday service, on routes 40 and 50 in Roslindale and Hyde Park;
- More service to Burlington Mall Road on the 350;
- Routes CT2 and 85 will merge into a new Route 85 from Assembly to Ruggles via Kendall Square and Fenway.
The T also recently announced a one-year pilot program to double service on the 714 (Hull to Hingham) and 716 (Mattapan to Canton). Both of those suburban routes currently operate with a single bus under existing schedules; beginning Sunday, April 5, 2026, the T will deploy a second bus for each route, cutting wait times between buses in half.
Under its current schedule, the T is running 99.4 percent of the weekly service-hours that it offered in the fall of 2019.
The last round of schedule changes, which took effect in December, added 1,426 weekly service-hours, the equivalent of putting 10 more buses on the region's streets for 20 hours a day, 7 days a week.
