Tell us: How would you grade Phillip Eng’s first year with the MBTA?
It has been a year since Phillip Eng took the helm as general manager of the MBTA. What do you make of his performance?
It has been a year since Phillip Eng took the helm as general manager of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, a role widely considered to be one of the hardest jobs in state government.
The most difficult part of the job?
“It might be myself because I want to do things quicker, but I also know that you can’t do everything overnight,” Eng joked during an appearance on Boston Public Radio on Friday.
Eng has faced a tough first year as general manager. Just a week into his post, the MBTA was ordered by the Federal Transportation Authority to get its act together regarding near-miss safety incidents involving track workers.
The April 18, 2023 immediate action letter was followed by another in September to prevent train collisions with track workers. After the September letter, Eng conducted a major overhaul of the agency’s top leaders by reassigning at least 16 senior executives and creating new positions to oversee each of the T’s five transit modes, according to MBTA records obtained by the Boston Globe.
“The leadership team that has been created is really moving the needle in the right direction,” Eng said during the radio segment. “The workforce knows that we care, we need to demonstrate that we care. Their success is going to be the success of the T, and ultimately, of winning back the public trust.”
Eng said the transit agency had initially struggled to know where to start with improvements because it had so much work to do.
“In this last year, the amount of work we’ve done in our system — well, anecdotally, a lot of people say we haven’t done that much work in years,” Eng said.
Much of that work has been spent on updating the T’s aging infrastructure through the Track Improvement Program, which includes eliminating all speed restrictions by the end of the year, as well as repairing and replacing miles of tracks and installing new signal and power systems. To complete this work, Eng launched a yearlong series of shutdowns to give crews time and unrestricted access to fix the infrastructure.
As of Wednesday, there were 109 speed restrictions in place system-wide, covering 15.5 miles. The number is down from 122 last month, and down from 228 in April 2023, according to the MBTA’s speed restriction dashboard.
Blue Line service will be suspended between Maverick and Wonderland for three days from April 17-19 and between Airport and Wonderland for nine days from April 20-28 for track repair.
In addition to the tangible upgrades made to the T’s tracks and stations, the agency has also seen a slight increase in the prediction accuracy rates for bus and train arrivals, and customers have indicated a slightly higher satisfaction with their ridership experience.
When Eng took over, the system-wide arrival prediction accuracy rate was 82% for the week of April 9, 2023, according to the agency’s accuracy dashboard. The most recent data available shows arrival prediction accuracy at 83% (for the week of December 24, 2023). However, year over year, prediction accuracy is down slightly from 84% for the week of April 11, 2022.
Customer satisfaction has also seen a small increase since Eng began his post. In April 2023, riders rated their satisfaction with their experience on the T at 2.5 stars out of five, the agency’s dashboard shows. In March 2024, the rating jumped to 2.7 stars.
Data aside, we want to know: What grade would give Phillip Eng for his first year on the job?
Tell us by filling out the form or e-mailing us at [email protected] and your response may appear in a future Boston.com article.
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