It was January 25, 1969 and Boston, Massachusetts
was buzzing. The night prior, thousands had poured into
the Boston Garden to watch the future NBA champion Celtics play their arch rival Philadelphia. The night following, the Boston fans would
be back again in droves to cheer on the ascending Bruins of the NHL. As for that night, not far from the garden,
just five stops or 10 minutes down the Orange Line, none other than Led Zeppelin was playing
a four hour set at the Boston Tea Party as part of their first ever North American Tour
that would go down as one of their best. For a city dealing with existential issues
of urban decay, draconian renewal projects, red-lining, and simmering racial tensions,
the pulse of Boston’s beating heart as a center of entertainment and culture was still
unmistakable. And for a group of 2,000 protestors that was
descending on the State House that January day, the hope was to keep it that way. People before Highways Day, as it became
known, was a manifestation of bubbling frustration toward the direction of Boston’s transportation
network that threatened to turn the densely populated, richly historical colonial city
into a car-centric roadscape. With the Interstate Act of 1956, then the
subsequent arrival of I-93 traumatically bisecting communities through the heart of Boston, the
expansion of massive roadways inside the city had only just begun by the 1960s. With the arrival of a new governor, Bostonians
and greater metro area protestors feared how far it’d go. For the highway-crazed urban planners, I-90
and I-93 weren’t enough, the city also needed a connective inner beltway along with a few
more expressways to split the distance between those already constructed. But in the eyes of a diverse set of stakeholders—working
class Cambridge residents, black power, women's liberation, and Native American Rights activists,
union workers, along with Harvard and MIT professors—these planned roadways wouldn’t
make the city more accessible, they’d tear down homes and kill communities. So they marched. Then something unprecedented happened—against
the tide of massive nation-wide urban overhaul and in response to the protest, Massachusetts’
newly elected governor, Francis Sargent, declared a moratorium on highway construction. Then, in 1972 he announced an outright construction
freeze on highways inside route 128. Rather than a massive expressway contouring
the city’s southwest corridor, it’d be mass transit lines—subways and commuter
rails that got the state’s green light. Boston was poised to remain for the people,
and no system was better positioned to benefit from this countering of American convention
than the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Agency, or the MBTA. Boston, as a walkable, human-first city already
had its advantages. For one, it was designed before the car, making
it uniquely dense, almost European. Second, it was home to a one-of-a-kind transit
system. With the adoption of this law establishing
the MBTA in 1964 the greater Boston area became the first combined, cohesive, regional transit
system in America, as it accounted for Boston along with the 77 separate communities surrounding
it. Under one big umbrella with a substantial
tax base were the Boston area bus lines, the street cars and light rail, and the subway
system—the very modes of transportation that would provide for commuters every morning,
and those living within the city every day. It was all falling into place. As the Boston anti-highway movement built
momentum across the 1960s, the MBTA began to expand. The subway, or the T, adopted the standardized
colored lines the system’s now known for—the Orange line running from North Boston to Forest
Hills, the Blue from Bowdoin street to East Boston, the Red from Harvard to South Boston,
and the Green, running rapid transit from Riverside all the way through downtown. Then it got bigger, and modernized. The Orange line, formerly elevated, now went
underground, street cars on the green route were replaced with buses, and both ends of
the red line pushed farther from downtown. Aside from a few holdovers on the green line,
nearly all the rolling stock was either replaced within the decade or had been replaced recently. By 1970, all the pieces were there: the nation’s
oldest subway, now organized in a one-of-a-kind regional structure with the support of state
and local politicians, along with the city itself, was ready to boom. Then it didn’t. Zoom to the 2020s: while the routes have changed
some and certain stops have flipped names, the promise of Boston’s subway has hardly
materialized. Instead of pacing the future, it’s a system
that looks like it’s frozen in time. What the arrival of federal regulators in
2022 served to say was that rather than the subway of the future, or a quaint, reliable
service of the past, the T was America’s most dangerous. But by this time close calls and outright
crashes were not new. In 2008, at the farthest outskirts of the
system along the Green Line’s D branch, one west-bound train missed a slow signal
and catastrophically rear-ended the train ahead of it. While the first was moving at little more
than a crawl, the second was cruising at 38 miles or 61 kilometers per hour, with the
operator assumed literally asleep at the wheel on account of their struggles with sleep apnea
that hadn't been identified in the hiring process. What exactly happened could never be ascertained
in a post accident interview by National Transportation Safety Board investigators, though, as the
operator died in the crash while another 14 were injured. Despite the unique circumstances, the crash
wasn’t a one-off. Less than a year later, another accident on
the Green Line occurred underground near the heart of the city. This time, a bunch-up of westbound traffic
had created a full stop between Government Center and Boylston. Train 3808 had heeded yellow and red signals
and come to a stop, while train 3612 didn’t, slamming into the stationary train at about
25 miles per hour. Injuring 68, the federal investigators again
made their way to Boston, and after checking train brakes, signal lights, and underground
sight lines, it was deemed that the operator had missed the warnings because they were
trying to send a text. Operator error and ineffective vetting processes
were to blame in both crashes, but the system’s dangerous flaws were more structural than
just individual mistakes. From 2019 to 2020, trains running the Orange
Line near the Wellington stop derailed six separate times, once because of weather, the
rest because of an unforeseen incompatibility between new rolling stock and old rails. Then in 2022, the most horrific of recent
accidents rocked the MBTA. Exiting a Red Line train, a passenger’s
arm caught in the door, but due to a short circuit within the train's wiring, rather
than the train remaining stopped to clear the exit, it took off, ripping the man off
the platform to a gruesome death. It was this accident that resulted in this
90-page report four months later that effectively quantified what was becoming increasingly
obvious—Boston’s subway system was the nation’s most dangerous. It first pointed out that MBTA collisions
and derailments far outpaced national averages, then it acknowledged that Boston rails, from
2017 to 2021, were responsible for an incredible 94% of all light rail injuries nationwide. While safety or a lack thereof rightly receives
much of the attention when it comes to Boston’s struggling subway, it also obscures another
major limitation of the transit system: that it’s just plain slow. Whether it’s safety issues with worn infrastructure,
maintenance projects, or upgrade installs, the T’s running as slow as it ever has. There are so many speed restrictions, in fact,
that the MBTA has released its own interactive tool to track where the slow downs are, and
just how slow these sections get. As of early December, 2023, the subway system
had a total of 179 slow zones, with around a quarter of all rail sections falling under
speed caps that in some cases cut to as low as 3 miles or 5 kilometers per hour. Then, on top of slow downs, there’s outright
stops—the month-long closure of the Orange line in summer of ‘22, the 16-day closure
of the Red in the fall of ‘23, the 9-day closure of the green line the winter of ‘23—all
projects designed to stem spreading problems and keep the network hobbling along. While presented as solutions to slow zones,
these full closures are really only keeping slow zones at bay, as the totals of slow time
on each line have only gone up in recent years. In fact, since 2016, average speeds along
the Orange, Red, and Blue lines have all decreased, signaling the continued prevalence of slow
zones and the lack of efficacy of total closures to actually fix the problem at hand. Now some of these problems are understandably
hard to fix. Being the earliest American city to embrace
the subway, Boston dug lines that put them at the forefront of subway development in
the US, but left them with tight, screeching turns and extremely narrow tunnels across
the network that makes access, alteration, and expansion difficult. On top of tight tunnels, the network’s plagued
by aging infrastructure—from worn rails to a fleet of train cars that mostly dates
back to at least the ‘90s, or at worst the ‘60s. But no matter the reason for a slow zone or
an outright closure, these service alterations are more than inconveniences—they’re the
difference between making it to work on time, they’re the difference between picking up
a kid from daycare on time—the very things that then inform choosing to take the subway
in the first place, to re-up on a Charlie Card, or, if one has the luxury, to just take
a car. But the source of these cracks stem from the
very foundation of the system: the mere shape of the T shepherded the subway towards its
current death-spiral. You see, this shape is the epitome of radial
network design—essentially every route originates from the downtown core and heads outwards,
at different angles, towards the suburbs. This is quite typical among American subways
systems—similarly-sized systems in DC and Philadelphia look quite similar. But this certainly is not the global norm. The systems of London or Paris just look different. They’re far more convoluted. Even more modestly-sized systems like those
of Copenhagen and Oslo have notably different shapes than their American counterparts. A system that does look similar to Boston’s
subway, yet on a larger scale, is its own commuter rail system, and this is no wonder. Radial networks such as these primarily service
downtown commuters—people who live in the outskirts and work downtown and they can service
this simple out-and-back commuter-demographic well, but they’re not good for much else. If, for example, someone lives in Winter Hill
and works in downtown Boston, the T provides a 18-minute commute that is both faster and
cheaper than driving during rush hour. But if that same person had a third node in
their daily commute—let’s say they played in a rec soccer league in Cambridge—they’d
have a convenient outbound from work to this after-work activity, but getting home would
be a problem. A trip that would take just 10-minutes by
car or 40-minutes walking would take 45-minutes by subway as this passenger would have to
head all the way downtown, wait for a connection, then all the way back out to the suburbs. In practice, wealthier commuters likely won’t
do this and opt for the car instead, leaving radial networks like this with two core user
demographics: those who use them for simple out and back commutes but otherwise drive,
and low-income individuals who don’t have another option. That’s to say, this and other American subway
systems have essentially developed as miniaturized commuter rail systems, disproportionately
servicing the lower-income demographics that tend to live in the zone between wealthier
downtowns and wealthier suburbs. This is in contrast to a system like Paris’
who’s less radial design allows for viable subway routings between most all destinations
in the urban core, meaning it is competitive versus cars on trips with more than two nodes. But the difference in design matters even
more when lines need to shut down. You see, Paris’ line four has been going
through sporadic shutdowns across 2023 to allow for modernization work, but it hasn’t
been a big deal. What might normally be a nonstop trip typically
turns either into a one-stop one or one with a bit more walking thanks to this overlapping,
less radial design. For example, if one were trying to get from
Gare du Nord to Saint Placide, one could instead just take line 2 from Barbès - Rochechouart
to connect onto line 12 down to Rennes—a 21-minute trip instead of the normal 16-minute
one. The situation is very different in Boston. In 2017, for example, the red line was closed
on weekends between Boston and Cambridge, and that meant there was simply just no subway
option between Boston and Cambridge. A network like this becomes single-point-of-failure
which, in a system with as many maintenance issues as Boston’s, means the entire line
is unreliable to the downtown-commuter demographic that it was primarily designed to serve. And what that leads to is a further degradation
of the demographics that use it—the already-shrunken demographic of commuters who only have simple
out and backs can no longer rely on it, so they might commute by car instead, which they
can always rely on. That focuses the ridership demographic even
further into the primarily low-income group that has no other option. The direct solution is simple—ring routes. Intersections between lines, especially out
of the downtown core, provide resiliency and improve the ability for subways to effectively
service more than just the out-and-back commuter crowd. Not only that, but they divert traffic away
from the downtown core where construction, operation, and maintenance is often trickiest
and costliest due to density. This is something Boston clearly understands
because it has these—ring roads. While the highway system is also primarily
designed in a radial pattern, since so much traffic is headed in and out of Boston, it
also has these two rings helping facilitate quick suburb-to-suburb routes that avoid the
congested downtown core. Boston even understands this on the transit
level too as it once had unfunded plans to develop a ring rail system, but eventually
it couldn’t even get funding to develop the bus routes that comprised phase one of
that plan. Other cities in America are also working to
rectify this design flaw—after decades of pushback by some of the wealthier communities
it’d pass through, the DC area is finally building a light rail line through its Maryland
suburbs which will connect to the DC metro at four points, facilitating suburb-to-suburb
routings that avoid the downtown core entirely. New York City, which already has a stronger
subway system outside of its downtown core than perhaps any American city, is working
on increasingly serious plans to build the so-called Interborough Express between Brooklyn
and Queens to connect underserved communities in the city’s outskirts to the subway system
at seventeen different connecting points. The T, meanwhile, has but a fragile design
and an over-reliance on commuters. One can understand this by looking at its
incredible morning and evening traffic peaks in 2019. But then COVID happened, and the commuters
went away. With a more hybridized and flexible work schedule,
fewer people are commuting daily to their downtown offices and, when mixed with poor
service, the T’s passenger volume during commutes has nearly halved, while traffic
overall has spread out more evenly throughout the day. Now, on the one hand, a more distributed ridership
base is good for a transit system as over-reliance on commuters makes for inefficient asset use—they
have to have the capacity to move people when it’s busy, while still paying for that capacity
when it’s not. But in Boston’s case, considering the entire
system was designed for those commuters, and it simply does not serve the transit patterns
of other travelers as well, it’s not like the commuter traffic just got replaced by
other traffic. Rather, the commuter traffic just disappeared
leaving the T with a fraction of its previous ridership. The London Underground, as a point of comparison,
has reached 90% of its pre-COVID ridership level. Across the US, most transit agencies have
reached about 75% of pre-COVID levels. In Boston, only about half as many people
ride the subway compared to before the pandemic. Now, like most transit agencies in America,
the MBTA doesn’t even come close to paying all of its expenses through fare-revenue—pre-COVID
they only covered 43%. But pre-COVID, the MBTA was already in a dire
financial situation. Now, with ridership halved and fare-revenue
down to 19% of costs, that dire situation has become downright existential. You see, in addition to decades of deferred
maintenance and a constant need to rectify staffing shortages with costly overtime and
brand new rolling stock with design flaws and myriad other causes of exceptional costs,
the MBTA just has a huge amount of debt that it’s accrued from decades of trying to dig
itself out of this deepening hole. In a given year, 20% of all MBTA costs are
debt, and half of that is just interest on the debt. But interestingly, not all of the MBTA is
in such an existential state. The agency is also responsible for a sprawling,
region-wide system of bus routes, ferries, and commuter rail. And one component of that system has been
a rare bright-spot through all the turmoil: commuter rail. While not completely trouble-free, this network
has been comparatively reliable throughout, and the MBTA even improved it for the better. Like many American commuter-rail systems,
the MBTA’s used to concentrate its assets almost entirely on the commuters. During the 2018 summer schedule, for example,
the MBTA ran twenty trains a day from Worcester to Boston, with eight of those before 9:00
am. In the middle of the day, there were only
trains about once every two hours before higher-frequency service in the evening hours. Nowadays, the MBTA still runs twenty trains
a day from Worcester, but they’re more evenly distributed throughout the day with at least
hourly service between 4:15 am and 10:25 pm—this allows a more varied mix of passengers to
use it more like traditional regional rail transport, without worrying about being stranded
in Worcester for two hours in the middle of the day. According to the agency itself, this shift
towards less commuter-focused scheduling on this and other lines is a major factor behind
its rather strong ridership: it’s recovered to almost 95% of pre-COVID levels, meaning
MBTA’s commuter rail system is actually far outpacing average demand recovery relative
to other American transit networks. Now, many are quick to point out perhaps the
most glaring difference between the MBTA commuter rail and subway systems: the passengers. Boston commuter rail primarily connects those
living in small, wealthy suburban towns to corporate jobs in downtown Boston. Correspondingly, just 22% of riders are from
households with under $56,000 in annual income. Meanwhile, on the subway, this proportion
ranges from 36% to 43%, depending on the line. Of course, there is a dirty truth that all
transit systems confront: lower-income individuals rely on them, higher-income ones don’t. Therefore, many low-income T riders will keep
riding it, no matter how bad service gets, simply because they don’t have another viable
option. Higher-income riders, meanwhile, are perceived
as the needle-movers—they’re the ones that have options, and therefore they’re
the ones whose ridership will make a difference considering American transit agencies, and
especially their political leaders, often view getting cars off the road as their primary
success metric. That’s because in the US, transit systems
are pitched as alternatives to cars rather than creators of opportunity—after all,
lower traffic is a message that can land with even the most transit-averse driver. Of course, many of the MBTA’s issues stem
from the fact that it did rely on these higher-income riders who are now gone, leaving them with
an even greater budget shortfall. The most successful transit systems globally
are also the ones that recognize that it's not an either-or situation—well-designed
mass transit is the best option for all, leading to reliance by all, which not only allows
for a better functioning city but also levels the playing field between rich and poor: it
means that physical access to job opportunities is more equal no matter one’s existing financial
situation. Physical mobility induces economic mobility. The disparity between the commuter rail and
subway system go against this mission: it is easier, in many cases, for wealthier people
to get to their downtown Boston jobs by rail than the lower-income individuals living physically
closer, yet on the subway system leading to the counterintuitive situation where a wealthier
person living further can get to a new higher-income downtown job easier than an equally-qualified
but less wealthy person living closer, creating opportunities for this transit system to perpetuate
the economic divide, rather than leveling the playing field. Now, the MBTA is overseen by a seven-member
board of directors appointed by the state’s governor. This, of course, creates opportunities for
disproportionate focus, as with anything related to the American political system, considering
a fundraising dinner for the next election is far likelier to take place in a commuter-rail
community than a subway one, given the disparity in income levels—yet the disproportionate
focus on commuter rail can be traced more tangibly. Four of these seven seats are currently held
by individuals with a direct professional connection to a community serviced by the
MBTA. Mary Roberts represents Boston itself—considering
commuter rail is primarily an inbound system, this means this seat is disproportionately
focused on the subway. Vice-chair Thomas Koch is mayor of the town
of Quincy—one that is on both the commuter rail and subway systems, but is likely to
be substantially reliant on commuter rail since it gets passengers downtown twice as
fast. Then there’s Thomas McGee and Charlie Sisitsky—mayors
of Lynn and Framingham, both on the commuter rail system exclusively. So that means that essentially two and a half
of the four location-linked MBTA board seats are taken up by commuter-rail, rather than
subway-focused individuals. This disproportionality becomes even more
notable when considering that commuter rail only represents 10% of the MBTA’s total
ridership—the subway represents half. While it’s hard to prove this board is disproportionately
focusing resources and attention on commuter rail, it’s a lot less hard to believe given
its composition and the current status of the systems. This overall environment all feeds into the
actual, nitty-gritty reasons why the T has been so dysfunctional—none of which are
particularly novel nor exciting, and all of which are covered in the Federal Transit Administration’s
sprawling 90-page report on the MBTA’s operational faults.
Running an effective subway system is not
some groundbreaking feat—it’s being done all around the world by cities of all sorts
of geographies, climates, and income levels. The reason why so many American systems struggle
is not because the country doesn’t know how to build good tunnels or maintain trains
or schedule them effectively or anything like that, but rather that there’s a culture
of going halfway: creating rapid transit systems for the sake of having them, rather than for
the end-result of them actually being effective. The MBTA is in a very dire state—its one-off
COVID-induced federal stimulus is nearly gone and it’s on a fiscal cliff with no clear
answers on how it’ll pay its bills, let alone fix its issues. Yet all physical issues can be physically
fixed with enough willpower. What can’t be fixed as easily is the context
with which American cities approach transport. It’s been relatively easy for these systems
to capture the reliant and the commuter, yet they almost all ignore everyone else. New York City is the notable exception: where
the design, schedule, and system works for the reliant, the commuter, but also the kids
heading to school, the after-work soccer player, the visiting tourist. This is perhaps the only place in America
where a city and its transit have become so synonymous and it’s created a rocky yet
on balance virtuous cycle towards increasing effectiveness. The MTA has its faults, and still struggles
in comparison to its European counterparts, but it's not anywhere close to the MBTA’s
situation. Altering the fundamental design of almost
all American rapid-transit systems is no small feat, and not something that can realistically
happen in a context anywhere close to today’s, but the path towards better American transit
starts with a simple idea: service shouldn’t follow success because service creates success. Improvements gain passengers leading to improvements,
while failures lose passengers leading to failures. So the question: should we invest to start
that virtuous cycle, or should we just let the vicious one happen? Now, I know this might go down in the record
books of cheesiest ad-read transitions, but if you want to invest in creating a virtuous
cycle, why not consider getting a Nebula lifetime membership. Earlier this year we tried this—offering
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that, getting that flat-fee now allows us at Nebula to invest in content and development
now, rather than when monthly or annual fees come in later, which speeds up platform growth. So that’s why we brought back the annual
offer for the holiday season: $300, and you get Nebula for life—it’s as simple as
that. But there’s one brand-new highly-requested
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Original content—we have the most ambitious slate ever rolling out right now. For example, quite soon we’ll release the
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