Action Alert: ⚡🚉 What's Going On With The Service Cuts & What You Can Do About It

MBTA Service Reductions: Take Action!

What Happened?

As of Monday, June 20th, 2022, the MBTA has cut service on the Orange, Red, and Blue lines, running Saturday service schedules on all three lines on all weekdays for the rest of the summer, with the exception of the July 4th holiday.

What does this mean?

Longer waits, more crowding on trains, and more inconvenience for riders.
 

Why did this happen?

These changes come as a result of Federal Transit Administration emergency directives, aimed at remedying long-standing and unsafe conditions at the MBTA. 

Here’s a list of actions you can take immediately to help address the deep-seated issues driving these disruptions, as well as some deeper background on what’s happening and how we got here.

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What Can You Do About It?

As a rider, there are several ways that you can make a difference. Talk to your elected officials, tell the MBTA Board this week that you want a plan and a promise for a full return to service, and reach out to your local government to see how they can help support the MBTA.

Talk to your State Representatives and Senators. Reach out to your elected officials on Beacon Hill and make it clear that there are many reasons the MBTA needs more dedicated, reliable, and predictable operating funding, and that there are several actions the legislature can take to achieve this. Here’s a list of helpful talking points:

Reasons the MBTA Needs Stable Funding

• MBTA needs operating funds that can be designated only for operating expenses, preventing the Authority from raiding the Operations department for Capital projects - this money is needed to:

  • pay operators more and retain staff

  • compete with other transportation providers offering higher pay and better starting conditions

  • bring a large pot of money to the bargaining table with the unions in order to drive up wages for new employees

  • build up its internal HR department and simplify the hiring process in order to speed up rate of hiring

  • pay for a drastically increased preventative maintenance program

  • pay for training and retention of employees

The MBTA needs stable and increased funding overall 

• so that important priorities such as capital and operations do not need to be in conflict with each other. Formerly, the MBTA often shifted capital dollars to fill operating budget gaps in previous years. However lately, the inability to hire staff has meant that the T has moved operating funding to fund capital projects. Neither is ideal.

• that matches the fact that the region is growing and increased spending is necessary to provide high-quality, safe, and reliable service

Tools to Improve MBTA’s Fiscal Situation

• Relieve the MBTA of the costs of providing expensive but statutorily required paratransit services ($130M in savings annually)

• Relieve the MBTA of the remaining debt, both interest and principal, from the Big Dig. These costs were incurred by mitigations for the highway project - it should be the responsibility of the Commonwealth to pay for them.

• Set aside $1 billion in funds from the current massive budget surplus and flush rainy-day fund for the MBTA, dedicated to addressing FTA directives

• The Fair Share Amendment, while necessary, is not guaranteed to pass, will not generate enough funds fast enough, and is not sufficient to meet all of our transportation needs.

• The Infastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Bipartisan Infra Bill) is a welcome increase in available federal funding, but it is nowhere near enough. The IIJA funds are expected to last just 5 years and the programs are super competitive.

Advocate for labor and workforce development

Tell your municipal leaders, councilors, and representatives that they should support MBTA labor and workforce development efforts - emphasize the importance of building a robust and resilient workforce, and encourage them to partner with the MBTA to drive recruitment efforts.

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Easy Action Item!

Tell the MBTA Board: Full Service by Labor Day

Send public comment to publiccomment@dot.state.ma.us before June 22nd to make sure that the MBTA Board Meeting on June 23rd hears your voice. You can also leave a voice message at 617-222-3337 by midnight tonight.

Demand that the Board commit to restoring service by Labor Day, and that the MBTA present to the public a comprehensive plan to restore full service by Labor Day.

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Background Information

What’s Happening

Since April 14th, the Federal Transit Administration - the federal agency responsible for regulating public transportation nationwide - has been conducting a Safety Management Inspection of the MBTA. This inspection is taking place because of the series of accidents, injuries, and fatalities that have taken place in the recent past on the MBTA’s system. On Wednesday, June 15th, 2022, the FTA issued a series of special directives - emergency orders for immediate action, issued prior to the completion of the inspection - to the MBTA and the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities, the state department responsible for regulating public transportation. 

One of these directives in particular called out the MBTA for severe understaffing of its Operation Control Center (OCC), the office responsible for the safe and orderly operation of the transit system. Some dispatchers were working 20-hour shifts multiple days in a row, with only 4 hours of rest between shifts - clearly an unsafe situation. The directive called for immediate increases in dispatcher staffing, along with a host of other safety improvements. On Friday, June 17th, the MBTA announced the service cuts that are now in effect, reducing the number of trains in operation at any given time and reducing the burden on dispatchers at the OCC.

This is primarily a funding issue, but it is also a matter of priorities and management - the MBTA has shoveled money into much-needed capital investments, but it has done so frequently at the expense of operations expenditures. Earlier this year, the current MBTA board transferred almost half a billion dollars from Operations to the capital budget - money that could have gone towards improved operator wages, a more robust HR department, or a beefed-up OCC. The end result is an MBTA that is unable to maintain safe operations and a safe system.

How We Got Here

A combination of factors have brought us to this point: insufficient operating funds, mismanagement, the pandemic, and a fundamental lack of institutional capacity.

The MBTA has consistently been starved of operating resources by a legislature unwilling to raise revenue and an administration that isn’t interested in providing reliable and frequent service. Beacon Hill has kept the MBTA Operations budget allocation flat since Fiscal Year 2016, essentially a decline in real terms relative to inflation. The MBTA is also burdened by debt, with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt service each year constraining the operations budget. Some of this debt is state debt related to the Big Dig, transferred to the MBTA by the legislature at the turn of the century. The aforementioned transfers from Operations to Capital have been regular features of budgets in the recent past, and reflect an administration more interested in shoveling money out the door than in delivering high-quality services. All of these factors contribute to cash-strapped operating budgets that make it difficult for the MBTA to offer higher wages and retain higher staffing levels.

These constraints also affect the Collective Bargaining Agreements that the MBTA reaches with labor - due to the limited budget, the MBTA is unable or unwilling to offer enough to the union to drive up starting wages for new workers through the negotiation process. As a result, the starting pay and benefits for a new bus or rail operator are far worse than those for existing operators. The wages are not even competitive with starting wages for bus operators elsewhere, such as at the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority or frequent MBTA contractor Paul Revere Transportation. New hires at the MBTA are only guaranteed 30 hours of work per week, for uncompetitive wages, and their schedules are determined by a seniority system that almost guarantees split shifts, odd hours, and inconvenient work locations.

COVID has also had an impact, and the booming economy and inflation mean that the MBTA now has to fight for workers where previously they held lotteries to distribute in-demand job positions. The MBTA has not been given the resources to compete for labor effectively, and indeed has continued to transfer money out of the Operating budget instead of investing in higher wages and better working conditions. The MBTA’s byzantine hiring process places extreme loads on an already understaffed HR department. This is a fundamental issue of administrative capacity, which prevents the agency from hiring workers quickly and alleviating shortages. In addition, due to a need for specialized agency knowledge, some positions, such as dispatchers, are only promoted from within the ranks of existing operators, limiting the number of available candidates. This means that a shortage of operators will inevitably lead to a shortage of dispatchers, which leads to unsafe operations and more accidents. These factors, combined with federal mandates for drug testing eliminating users of marijuana (which is legal in Massachusetts) from the pool of applicants, mean that the MBTA continues to struggle for workers at a time when their services are most needed.

Media Statement: Summer '22 Service Cuts due to OCC Staffing Shortage

BOSTON, June 17, 2022 —  Today's announcement of service cuts for the Red, Orange, and Blue lines due to staffing shortages at the Operations Control Center is a painful example of how badly the MBTA has been failed by poor oversight and a lack of stable, dedicated funding. Contrary to the current narrative, the FTA’s directives are not about the age of the system. All of the identified issues are the result of a decades-long, bipartisan aversion to funding the T adequately. Billions of bond authorizations for capital projects have masked the need for more funding and stability for the T’s operating budget. The T has been in and out of a state of fiscal crisis for decades; this is not how one builds a reliable system free from safety concerns. 

For years the administration’s laudable focus on increasing capital spending has come at the expense of attention to day-to-day maintenance and safety needs. Earlier this year in a misguided decision, the T shifted hundreds of millions from the operating budget. The administration and legislature need to treat the employee shortage at the MBTA like an emergency, because it is one. We call on the T to promptly convene labor and workforce development partners, along with the FTA, to develop a comprehensive plan to staff up the MBTA. The administration and legislature should work with this team to provide them with the resources to give competitive salaries and streamline hiring.

This action would not pass an FTA equity analysis if it happened in a vacuum; this should be a wake-up call to a legislature that has made equity a priority. The burdens of this action will fall disproportionately on the most vulnerable people in our workforce, who cannot work remotely and depend on the T to get to work. This action also likely would not pass any environmental test, as it will very likely suppress ridership, increase VMT, emissions, and congestion. 

The irony of these cuts being announced as we await the joint House and Senate Climate bill should not be lost on anyone. The MBTA is one of the most important tools to help us reduce emissions from the transportation sector. The legislature must find a stable source of funding to address state of good repair and operating funding to ensure reliable, safe service. They should act decisively this year in the transportation bond bill and the budget.  

We await hearing the T’s plan to fast track new safety and operations hires and reverse these service cuts. We also await hearing the plans of legislative leaders to address the chronic funding shortfall issues, and set aside funding for the T to use as it responds to the FTA’s directives. We call on municipal, legislative, and business leaders to help the MBTA hire the staff it needs to run a modern, safe system that responds to our economic, environmental, and equity needs.  

For media inquiries, please e-mail media@transitmatters.org. 

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Crawling Along: Introducing the Slow Zone Tracker

Crawling Along: Introducing the Slow Zone Tracker

Tracking Slow Zones on the MBTA

Do you ever find yourself sitting on a subway car that is just crawling along? Maybe you’re running slightly late already. And maybe you start to wonder… “Surely it hasn’t always been this slow. Is it just my train? Has it been like this the whole week? Is it getting worse?”

The TransitMatters Labs team is happy to announce a new tool that answers these questions. Our new Slow Zone Tracker makes it easy to tell when trains are running consistently slower than usual.

Slow zones on a rail line usually pop up due to infrastructure problems such as poor track condition, signal failure, or power issues. For example, StreetsblogMASS recently reported that the Orange Line has been given a lower speed limit in some sections due to deteriorating track conditions. And in 2019, for instance, the Red Line was severely delayed after the June 11 derailment took the signal system offline.

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Our line graph gives a high-level overview of these sorts of systemic slow downs—how much time is being lost compared to how fast the trains theoretically could run? Is it getting better or worse over time?

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Switching to the segment view allows you to dig in deeper: which pairs of stops are seeing delays, and how bad are they?

Clicking on one of the bars will take you to the data-dashboard page where you can see the data itself. In most cases, it will look something like this:

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Or like this:

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In some cases, severity may vary over time. Our algorithm looks at dwell times in addition to travel times, since waiting longer than usual at a station also counts as a delay. 

Our algorithm isn’t perfect, of course. If you notice any issues or want to send any other feedback, let us know at labs@transitmatters.org.

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FAQ:

What is this?

This is a tool to help find and track slow zones. That is, areas where trains have lower-than-usual speeds due to track conditions, signal issues, or other infrastructure problems.

How do we calculate this?

We look at the daily median travel time + dwell time for each segment along a route. Whenever that trip time is at least 10% slower than the baseline for 3 or more days in a row, it gets flagged as a slow zone. Currently, our baseline is the median value in our data, which goes back to 2016. It’s not a perfect system, but various algorithmic improvements are in the works.

Why did we build this?

There’s power in data, but it’s only useful when you can tell a story. Slow zones are a nice story to tell: they tie our observable results to a cause. With so much data available, it can be difficult to find the interesting bits. So we’ve built this tool to help us locate and track this type of issue (slow zones), and monitor the severity over time.

How can you use this?

Share it. Bring the data to public meetings. Pressure the T to do better, but also give them credit where it’s due.

What about the Green Line?

Due to variable traffic, much of the Green Line doesn’t have consistent enough trip times to measure. As for the main trunk and the D line? Coming “soon”.