‘The results are clear’: MBTA responds to Trump admin safety questions after funding threat
Threatened with the loss of federal funding if it failed to comply, the MBTA has responded to the Trump administration's questions about the safety of the nation's oldest subway system.
In a Thursday letter to U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, the transit system's top official, Phillip Eng, said the T shared his "commitment to the safety of our employees and the public we serve. All riders must be safe - and feel safe - while using any part of our network."
"We value the strong relationships we have with all our federal partners, including USDOT, FTA, [and] FRA working together towards our mutual goals to ensure safety and improve public transit for all," Eng, the T's general manager, wrote.
Duffy fired off a letter to the T last month, threatening the agency's federal funding if it didn't share crime and safety data.
" ... We're not waiting for the next Iryna [referring to the stabbing death of a woman on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina]. Chicago and Boston are on notice to take actions that enhance safety and reduce the crime affecting their riders and transit workers — or risk federal support," Duffy said in a statement.
In that letter, Duffy said the MBTA must maintain a safe, clean and secure environment, and while those facts are "true across the MBTA system, particular focus must be on key transportation and intermodal hubs such as South Station."
Authorities also cited recent events on the MBTA — such as a woman pushed off a bus in Roxbury last week and a man who attacked someone with his belt on a bus in Cambridge — as the reason for its demands.
In August, a senior U.S. Transportation Department official suggested that Washington could take over the operation of Boston's South Station , which is managed by the MBTA. It came the same day the White House announced it was taking over Union Station in the nation's capital.
So far, those musings by Deputy Deputy U.S. Transportation Secretary Steven Bradbury have remained just that — musings.
In a Friday statement, the MBTA pointed to the hundreds of millions of dollars it had poured into the system to improve safety, along with an expansion of the ranks of Transit Police officers, from 195 in the 2022 budget year to the current complement of 228 officers.
Year-to-date crime also has decreased across the system by 16% from last year at the same time, officials said.
Eng also pointed to the extensive maintenance work that the agency has undertaken over the last year. That work saw the replacement of more than 250,000 feet of rail, the removal of more than 220 speed restrictions. That's restored 2.4 million minutes of service every weekday, the agency told Duffy.
The system's heavily traveled Orange Line "is on track to have its signal system 100% converted to a modernized, digital system by the end of this year," the T said in its statement.
"Since 2023, we've addressed decades of deferred maintenance, rebuilt a depleted workforce, and invested hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure improvements and service upgrades," Eng said in the agency's statement. "Our work is never done, but the results are clear: we are delivering a safer, more reliable system for our riders, and we will continue to challenge ourselves every day to get better."
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