The optimist vs. the seeming impossible
Phillip Eng has big goals for the T, and no patience for its hidebound ways
‘We’re going to reinvent ourselves, that’s the key.’
PHILLIP ENG, general manager of the MBTA
It was a good day so far. No trains had derailed. No station ceilings had collapsed. No fire had filled a station with smoke — yet.
But as new MBTA general manager Phillip Eng toured Wonderland Station last month, he zeroed in on a problem. The countdown clocks that tell riders how long they’ll be waiting for the next Blue Line train were off. By a lot.
With the same urgency one might display in a graver crisis, Eng brought his phone to his ear. The signs were wrong, he explained. Trains were coming every six minutes, he said, not every nine to 13. Could someone please fix that, and quickly?
He had other to-dos for his team: Nearby stairs needed support beams before they could be reopened; train operators should be advertising that the Blue Line would soon be free to ride.
The state agency most known for its epic failures now has a leader attacking even the smallest ones. If the countdown clocks are wrong, Eng reasoned, how can the public expect us to do anything else right?
“It’s the little things that can add up to the big things,” he said.
The 61-year-old engineer is just three months in to what is widely considered one of the most impossible high-profile jobs in state government. And he wants you to know he can turn the system around.
Instead of pushing riders away, he imagines, public transit here will be the quickest, most reliable, most appealing travel option, freeing millions of people from cars’ fumes and fatalities, and liberating the region, once and for all, from its notoriously rage-inducing gridlock.
Yes, he knows just keeping today’s subpar bus,
subway, commuter rail, ferry, and paratransit service running will soon require a huge influx of money, never mind the billions needed to repair the T’s crumbling infrastructure and deliver on its many broken promises of expansions and upgrades. Yes, he knows he must rewire much of the T’s broken safety culture. Yes, there are a lot of challenges in the system — more than he knew about when he started.
But, no joke, the longtime New Yorker insists, he’s happy to be here.
Welcome to Boston
It would be fair for someone who took over the T in the spring of 2023 to believe the agency had hit rock bottom. Because in most places, this is what bottom looks like: Last year, an old Red Line car that was supposed to be replaced in the 1990s malfunctioned, dragging a man to his death. Part of a rusted old Orange Line car fell off, forcing passengers to make a dangerous escape from the flaming train atop a bridge. Green Line trains kept colliding, sending people to the hospital, after the T delayed the installation of a new anti-crash technology. And unbearably long waits for buses and trains grew longer as the agency failed to hire and retain enough workers.
And yet, a steady series of new fiascos has greeted Eng, a former top official at New York City’s public transit authority and Long Island Railroad, the busiest commuter railroad in North America. He started in Boston on April 10.
Trains here have come dangerously close to hitting workers, prompting harsh intervention from federal regulators already scrutinizing the T. Parts of ceilings at crumbling subway stations keep falling, imperiling riders waiting below. The regular drumbeat of service cuts, derailments, and new slow zones hasn’t let up. And many long-awaited projects like the new Red and Orange Line cars, a modern fare collection system, and electric bus garages remain seemingly stuck in limbo.
Eng says he isn’t here to just fix these long festering problems. He envisions a future where taking the T is a no-brainer, and not just for commuting. He sees throngs of New Englanders happily choosing to travel by train from brewery to brewery (he’s a big beer guy), instead of driving. Trying a new restaurant, seeing a show, visiting a friend across town? In Eng’s fantasy future, you’ll obviously take the T: It will be better.
In a region of millions of people familiar with the MBTA’s woes, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone more optimistic about the system’s future.
“Once we get it back to where we are above water, then we can do things in a planned manner,” he said. “We’re going to reinvent ourselves, that’s the key.”
The son of Chinese immigrants, Eng grew up listening to Mets games on the radio as his parents washed other people’s clothes at a laundry on Long Island. He began collecting hard hats in the early ’80s when he started working for the New York State Department of Transportation, fishing his first one out of the water after it tumbled from a bridge he was working on. Now that hat sits in his office at 10 Park Plaza, next to seven others, marking a long career in transportation, including his most recent one with a T on the front.
He’s the proud father of four children, whose graduation portraits sit in a row next to his standing desk. His long days at work are punctuated by pings from his family group chat where photos of recent ramen dishes and fishing trips are exchanged.
Eng is unlike his recent predecessors; he’s the first T general manager since 2015 who had previous experience leading a US transit agency. He worked at New York’s state transportation department for more than 30 years, finishing there as chief engineer, before becoming chief operating officer at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and then president of Long Island Railroad until his retirement and move into the private sector last year.
He swears he wasn’t looking for a job when the search committee of Governor Maura Healey came knocking. In fact, he was growing quite accustomed to the more comfortable consultant life where vacations could really, truly be time off and dinner plans could be kept. He’d grown quite good at brewing and bottling his own beer.
But Eng prefers to be in the center of the action, not on the sidelines, he said, and so the chance to be an insider again, someone calling the shots, piqued his interest.
A colleague at the consulting firm said, “You’re nuts.” when Eng announced he was leaving to take over the T, he recounted, smiling.
“People think I’m crazy, but I’m happy I’m here,” he said.
Now, he figures the only vacations he’ll be taking are to the beach. After all, these days, it’s acceptable to look endlessly at your phone there.
How do you un-T the T’s culture?
Most of Eng’s days start at Lechmere Station in Cambridge around 7:30 a.m., a short walk from the new apartment he shares with his wife where he can see Green Line, Orange Line, and Commuter Rail trains running from his window.
He exchanges pleasantries with riders who’ve grown accustomed to sharing a morning commute with the system’s new boss. Most say they’re pulling for him.
“They’re rooting for the home team even when they don’t do well, like the Mets,” he said.
After he arrives at work, his days are full of crises, public events, and meetings, lots of meetings. A Globe reporter followed him from early morning until night for two days last month and watched him in meetings about some of the agency’s most pressing issues: How can track repair crews get more work done overnight, lifting painful slow zones faster than they’re putting them in place? How can the T hire and train enough drivers to improve subway service?
In every meeting, most held in the boardroom attached to his office facing the W Hotel, Eng seemed to be looking for ways to un-T the T, constantly challenging upper management to produce more tangible results for riders faster. He’s aiming to change the culture, he says, from one where fear of failure and stagnation often reign to one where managers are empowered to act and to imagine different and quicker ways of solving problems.
What if the T were to buy new subway cars each year, instead of waiting until its old cars were breaking down to place orders, he mused. What if instead of shutting down a stretch of subway for repairs in both directions, one side of the tracks could run a shuttle train back and forth while the other side gets worked on? What if a sign telling riders a station will be closed for “track work” instead told riders what the payoff will be for them? What if the T hired dispatchers and operators from other transit agencies?
Sometimes, when he hears how long it’s going to take the T to finish something (he sees you, Lynn commuter rail station, and thinks seven years is too long), his eyes open wide and he interjects.
A lot of the time, his interruptions include a tale from his days in New York, where he was able to finish projects “no one believed could be done on time,” seemingly in an effort to get his staff to think outside the T box.
“It’s crazy that tools exist in other states that we don’t have,” he griped. He’s looking to hire some trusted colleagues from New York soon, perhaps including a new head of stations he hopes will keep the falling debris at bay.
Occasionally, a staff member enthusiastically agreed with Eng. “Lowest bidder is a loser for us,” a T employee said after Eng proposed “spending more now to save later.”
But often, he’s told that things are typically
done a certain way at the T or in Massachusetts, a response to which he seems profoundly allergic.
“We wrote these policies, we can rewrite these policies,” he said at one meeting. “Let’s not dismiss it because we’ve never done it before.”
To outsiders, he’s constantly reassuring them he’s got this.
At a ribbon cutting for the new community path along the Green Line Extension, former US representative and former Somerville mayor Michael Capuano said, “Deepest sympathies to Phil Eng. I have no idea why he took this job.”
Behind him, Eng grinned.
‘Don’t have the luxury of time’
Eng’s phone lights up with text alerts every time something goes wrong. Sometimes, it’s a turtle crossing the tracks.
This time, on the day that had been good so far, it was a fire, spurring a call from deputy general manager Jeff Gonneville. A third rail fire filled Tufts Medical Center Station with smoke, requiring the T to evacuate the station and close part of the Orange Line.
About two hours later, service was back up and running. At another system, the general manager may have spoken to the press or gotten involved.
And yet at the MBTA, a response from Eng wasn’t really required. It was still a good day, after all, by T standards.
Despite Eng’s buoyant optimism, some of his plans have already been thwarted. On his first day as general manager, he announced the T would soon publish dates of when each speed restriction on the subway system would be lifted.
Soon turned into never.
Each shutdown for track repairs, he said, requires discussions with elected officials and local business owners, and compliance with new federal directives to keep T workers safe, which means his original vision for radical transparency on slow zones is impossible. New slow zones are now cropping up faster than the T is eliminating them, and sometimes crews are discovering more work is required than originally anticipated.
At a meeting on speed restrictions with senior staff last month, Eng was on the edge of his seat asking questions.
Someone explained that because of an equipment problem during recent weekend and early evening track repairs on the Green Line, a large swath of the line will have to be shut down early for another month just so that a 10 mile per hour speed restriction can be lifted.
Eng interrupted. “Can we do one more weekend and get it done?” he asked. “We get in, get out, declare victory.”
The team glanced at each other. A beat. Finally someone said they’d come back with a plan.
At a meeting about hiring and retaining subway workers, Eng’s ideas for overcoming the staffing shortage (hiring back retirees, using veteran drivers instead of instructors to train rookies) roused opposition: Typically the unions don’t like it.
He urged the team to use contract language from other transit agencies.
“Let’s just steal their agreement if it works there,” he said.
“We don’t have the luxury of time,” he added.
Those Blue Line signs
It may be too early to tell whether Eng will be able to turn the T around. But riders’ patience has worn thin, and the metrics are grim, grim, grim.
Nearly a year after riders endured a 30-day shutdown of the Orange Line to fix slow zones, average trip time on the line is around 17 percent longer than before the overhaul, the T’s travel time data show, and speed restrictions persist in at least three of the areas where the T claimed it had “eliminated” slow zones, according to the T’s speed restriction dashboard.
An average trip on the Red Line’s Ashmont branch now takes around 29 percent longer than it did a year ago, and a trip on the Braintree branch takes around 35 percent longer, according to the T’s travel time data.
Ridership on the T’s most popular modes, its subway and bus systems, has largely plateaued, the T’s most recent ridership data show, while car traffic, conversely, is now heavier at times than it was before the pandemic, according to the state highway administrator.
The T now predicts that it will be short as much as $139 million come next July and $475 million the following year on just the funds needed to pay for basics like salaries, supplies, its commuter rail contract, and its debts.
The dismal ridership may have something to do with the dismal service.
Public transit is considered reliable when it doesn’t require coordination; you can show up to a bus or train stop and wait no more than a few minutes before your ride arrives. That’s no longer the case on many T subway and bus routes, where the agency has slashed service repeatedly over the last year and a half. There are around 20 percent fewer weekday bus and subway trips scheduled this summer compared to the summer of 2019, according to figures provided by T spokesperson Joe Pesaturo.
Already, outsiders are questioning whether Eng has the political muscle to advocate for the kind of mega investment from the Legislature and governor that it will take to not only pay for basic operations and fix what’s broken, but also improve service and expand the system with a vision for the region. And whether he has the courage to hold longtime T staff accountable for failures.
So far, the T does not have any targets for when it will restore pre-pandemic bus and subway service. And its plan for investments over the next five years has drawn criticism from advocates for largely maintaining the status quo.
Executive director of the MBTA Advisory Board Brian Kane said Eng was the right hire.
“The biggest challenges lie ahead though,” Kane said, because the T’s financial needs far outweigh its available resources.
“No amount of reform or any of the stuff that has been tried over the last 20 years has worked,” he said. “This is where GMs can get really jammed up, get stuck between what’s good for the governor and what’s good for the system.”
Still, Eng remains convinced that he’s laying the groundwork for a reinvention. Every little bit counts.
Andyet...
The morning after he implored staff to fix the countdown clocks along the Blue Line so they would tell riders trains came every six minutes, the one at State Station once again read: 9 to 13 minutes.