AFTER YEARS OF underinvestment and disrepair, the MBTA is well-positioned to build on crucial recent improvements, according to the man tasked with turning the blighted system around. 

With the system moving more than 800,000 passengers around its service area every day, facing the ire of frustrated riders and public pressure from elected officials to get the system on track, General Manager Phil Eng said he entered the transit system’s top job when it was hard but essential to “think big, think bold” to shake loose from a “status quo” spiral of worsening service. 

“The future is bright,” Eng told reporter Gintautas Dumcius on The Codcast, about two and a half years into the MBTA job and just after lawmakers and the governor approved a sweeping supplemental budget sending $548 million to the MBTA. When he started, Eng said, the system was “slowing down. We were degrading service, and confidence had been lost.”  

The culture at the T at the time was reliant on “external experts” rather than internal institutional knowledge, Eng said. There were also issues with decision-making and “accountability” for those decisions, he said.  

A civil engineer, Eng came to the MBTA from his post as president of the New York commuter railroad, the Long Island Rail Road. From his vantage point as a newcomer, “we were basically going towards shutting down the system, if you ask me, if we’d continued down this path.” 

Leadership had to juggle several priorities at once, like building and retraining the workforce and leadership team, making signal improvements, getting delayed new subway cars on the tracks, tackling the dozens of dreaded speed restrictions that dragged several lines to a crawl, and building a better process to handle new slow zones quickly if they appear. 

“The idea is to not let it get back into that state of disrepair that we were facing,” Eng said, “and that’s why, this year, we continue to have diversions to actually bring the condition of that track to where we want it to be.” 

Last year, Eng said, the light and heavy rail system was at about 65 percent in a state of good repair, and by the end of this year he estimates the system will be 75 or 80 percent in a state of good repair. Frequency of service is up, he said, and the number of dropped bus trips is down to just 0.6 percent this spring from 8.8 percent in 2023. 

Eng emphasized that MBTA leadership is constantly keeping an eye out for service expansion and improvement opportunities – be that through boosting water transit or long-term changes to the commuter rail system as the T works on a new commuter rail operator contract.  

One lesson he brought with him from his postings in New York – including roles at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the New York State Department of Transportation – Eng said, is even if “mega-projects” are the focus of headlines, “the smaller projects that are out in the suburbs are just as important to those communities. And whether it’s 50 people or whether its millions of people, those transportation projects support quality of life, support housing, support businesses. It’s just a different magnitude.” 

During the episode, Eng talked about the overall state of the MBTA system (1:30),  balancing the needs of current riders with future ones (14:30), and the future of the commuter rail (16:00).