After inclement winter weather caused massive service delays to commuter rails, triggering customer complaints, Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority officials said in an oversight hearing on Tuesday that they plan to overhaul the system to prevent future delays.
“The level of service that our customers experienced this past winter season is absolutely unacceptable and not in keeping with the mission and values of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation,” said MassDOT Secretary Jeffery Mullan during the hearing with the Joint Committee on Transportation.
The hearing was called to inspect delays and breakdowns that have afflicted the transit system in past months, including a four-hour delay on Feb. 28 when a Worcester-bound train broke down in Newton.
“We are not here today to make excuses but rather recognize our shortcomings and to assure the customer and people of the Commonwealth that we are actively taking steps to address the problems that happened with the service and ensure that they never happen again,” Mullan said.
“We recognize how import public transit is to the economy of the Commonwealth and we need to make sure that we have a service we can depend upon,” said State Sen. Thomas McGee during the hearing.
The MBTA aims for trains to be on schedule 95 percent of the time, however, MBTA General Manager Richard Davey said that during December, January and February the commuter rail only ran on schedule 78 percent of the time.
“We will strengthen our operation and we are learning from the mistakes we learned from this winter in order to provide improved reliability for next winter and beyond,” Davey said.
The MBTA is collaborating with the Massachusetts Bay Commuter Rail Company, which oversees the commuter rail, to perform an extensive review of the winter delays and implement a three-part action campaign to improve the quality of the transit.
For the first part of the campaign, the MBTA is conducting fleet maintenance improvement throughout the system, Mullan said.
They plan to enact a thorough inspection of all locomotives, rebuild or replace the engines on 28 trains, perform overhauls on 23 of the oldest locomotives and retrain engineers to detect technical problems earlier.
The MBTA also added two new locomotives to the fleet, the first addition since 1988, to replace the oldest trains that date back to the 1970s, said James O’Leary, MBCR’s general manager. They are also looking to lease seven other trains from Utah for $300 a day because commuter rail ridership is up 400 percent from 1980.
“In addition, we are working on improving communications between commuter rail operations and MassDot customers,” Mullan said. “We completed handing out the commuter rail improvements to the MBCR, eliminating the middle man in communication operation.”
The MBTA plans on unveiling a new communication tool where customers send in pictures of things they think need to be fixed to improve the speed of communication between the MBTA and members of the Commonwealth, Davey said.
“The MBTA is introducing a multi-pronged effort to improve customer operations,” he said.
They plan on streamlining service alerts via text, email, Twitter or the MBTA website to keep T riders updated on delays, while also quadrupling access to the website and providing a special light weight website for use when demand is high for service information. This measure is in response to website crashes that occurred during peak delay times in the winter.
However, these plans to improve the locomotives are hindered by a lack of capital, Mullan said.
“We don’t have enough money,” Mullan said, who calculated the amount needed to successfully run the MBTA at around $1 billion per year.
Mullan said MBTA officials are looking into getting the private sector more involved in order to gain the funds to successfully run the operation.
“We all want to be in a place where transportation is safe so our economy can grow,” McGee said.
The Joint Committee of Transportation plans on holding another hearing on May 3 to examine the improvements that the MBTA has made and hear public opinions on the matter.
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