The Most Dangerous Subway in America

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Writing by Sam Denby and Tristan Purdy
Editing by Alexander Williard
Animation led by Max Moser
Sound by Graham Haerther
Thumbnail by Simon Buckmaster

Select visuals courtesy the Boston Globe

References
[1] https://transitapp.com/apta
[2] https://www.massdottracker.com/wp/divisions/mbta/mbta-budget-capital-performance/#:~:text=This%20measures%20how%20much%20of,in%20FY19%20before%20the%20pandemic
[3] https://cdn.mbta.com/sites/default/files/2023-06/FY24%20Itemized%20Budget.pdf
[4] https://news.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/born_broke.pdf
[5] https://www.mbta.com/leadership/mbta-board-directors
[6] https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/2022-08/FTA-Safety-Management-Inspection-Report-for-MBTA-and-DPU_0.pdf

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

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