Local News

New report shows which lines benefited most from MBTA shutdowns

The Red and Orange lines improved most, while the Green and Blue lines lagged behind.

February 15, 2025

2 minutes to read

The MBTA is “back on track” and heading in the right direction following its Track Improvement Program (TIP), according to a recent analysis by a public transit advocacy group.

The T announced the improvement plan in November 2023, which aimed to fix all slow zones throughout the system by the end of 2024. As of now, there are no slow zones in the MBTA’s rail system. But to accomplish that, T riders endured a year of shutdowns across every line.

According to TransitMatters, a portion of the system’s rail service was out of commission for 236 days last year — nearly two-thirds of the entire calendar year.

But according to a recent analysis by TransitMatters, the effort paid off for riders — mostly.

The Red and Orange lines saw the most improvement, with those riders experiencing faster travel time across the board. Travel along the Red Line quickened in both directions, leading to a time savings of about 20 to 30 percent. Travelers also saw more frequent service. The Orange Line ran 91 percent of its scheduled trips in January, up from 85 percent by the end of 2024, according to the analysis.

The Green Line, however, made the least amount of progress despite experiencing 13 diversions in 2024, eight of which lasted a week or longer.

The western branches of the Green Line saw the most minimal time improvements, with riders still experiencing significant weekly delays due to disabled trains, emergencies, and long periods of time between trains arriving, the analysis found.

However, the report factored in the time trains spent at station stops, and the Green Line experiences slower speeds due to the proximity between stops.

“For all the shutdowns on the Green Line, you don’t get a lot of actual time savings, which is what people are really looking for, and that’s just because it’s light rail,” Seth Kaplan, labs co-lead at TransitMatters, told the Boston Globe.

The Green Line did see some slight improvement between Kenmore and Government Center, though its travel time is still relatively slow at 9.8 miles per hour in January.

The Blue Line was the least impacted by TIP work, with only 17 days of disrupted service over three diversions in April. But that line’s improvements were “not as drastic as on the other lines.”

The main issues slowing down rail travel continue to be signal problems, power and wire issues, and disabled trains, according to analysts. But the T’s focus on fixing power and signal issues, as well as the arrival of new Red, Orange, and Green Line cars, may help overcome those obstacles.

“We should be seeing those delay levels come down over the year if the T does what it says it’s going to do, which is make things more reliable,” Kaplan told the Globe. “Hopefully, people can start to trust the T a little bit more and that ridership number starts to creep up.”