Bus
TransitMatters
TransitMatters Reveals The MBTA's Slowest And ...

[The Pokey/Schleppie Awards] identifies the most unreliable routes and suggests bus priority infrastructure implementations, operations modernization, and policy and planning changes to create a better bus network for riders.

TransitMatters Reveals The MBTA's Slowest And Most Bunched Buses
Public Comment
TransitMatters
TransitMatters Director's Public Comment At ...

“I'm excited to see [the Low Income Fare] program increase access, change lives, and save riders and the Commonwealth money.”

TransitMatters Director's Public Comment At March 2024 MBTA Board Meeting
Public Comment
TransitMatters
TransitMatters Executive Director's Speech At ...

“The lack of sustainable, long-term funding hurts the ability of public transit to operate, plan, or build efficiently. I hope that the recently announced task force will give us some of those options to fully fund public transit.”

TransitMatters Executive Director's Speech At Governor Healey's Press Conference
TransitMatters
Valentines For Transit Workers

Join TransitMatters in showing our appreciation for transit workers by giving Valentine’s Day cards to frontline transit workers on February 14!

Valentines For Transit Workers
Commuter Rail, Advocacy
TransitMatters
2023 Regional Rail Retrospective

As Regional Rail gains momentum, we at TransitMatters are fine-tuning our advocacy strategy to keep pressure on the state and T to invest in the system.

2023 Regional Rail Retrospective

design

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Celebrating 10 Years Of Advocacy: TransitMatters' Guerrilla Poster Campaign

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For the next 6 weeks, we will be highlighting landmark moments in our organization’s history so far. First up: Our guerrilla diversion poster campaign, which inspired the T’s current diversion signage.

In December 2009, our founder, Marc Ebuña, came across a Red Line service advisory lying face-down on the floor. This advisory was from a "seat drop," which was one of the ways the T used to communicate with riders about service advisories. Seat drops were not effective. They often ended up on the floor, content side down. Seat drops could not communicate a message to an entire train car, let alone every rider.

The Red Line service advisory Marc found was poorly designed and written more like a press release than an alert. It had too much text, few visual cues highlighting the most important information, and poor branding, making it look unofficial.

We redesigned it, taking a page from the New York City Subway’s advisories at the time. We pulled key information into a high-contrast header, edited down the text significantly, and added the T’s official branding with contact information.

Our redesign posted above a service advisory from the T.

We offered the redesign to the MBTA and received a prompt response from the Deputy Director of Subway Operations. He referred us to the Red Line Chief of Operations, to follow up on design issues. We never got that follow-up.

In March of 2010, the Director of Innovation and Special Projects at MassDOT reached out via the MassDOT Developers Twitter account to invite us to a stakeholder roundtable with the incoming MBTA General Manager, Rich Davey. Here, we mentioned to the incoming General Manager our previous attempts to improve service advisories with staff. He encouraged us to post our designs the next time we saw diversion posters.

Early May 2010, we posted the redesigns. This seemed to push through the internal inertia required to get this prioritized. By mid-June 2010, the T was officially starting to pilot the new signs! Designs continued to evolve internally after then.

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Rolling Out Our Data Dashboard

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Rolling Out Our Data Dashboard

Today, we at TransitMatters Labs are proud to introduce our first tool for independent analysis of MBTA performance, the TransitMatters Data Dashboard.

For the Red, Orange, Blue, and Green lines, we now have trip by trip performance data for the past three months. For any station or station pair, you can see information on how actual MBTA trips performed on that day. We also have real-time updates for the current day!

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Podcast 20 - Advocacy Updates: Fares, Late Night Service, Commuter Rail, GLX and Service Planning to make the MBTA network more effective

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Podcast 20 - Advocacy Updates: Fares, Late Night Service, Commuter Rail, GLX and Service Planning to make the MBTA network more effective

This show is focused on MBTA advocacy, with the full crew sharing our thoughts on some of the things in the media lately, and which we've been working on.

Fares increases are proposed again despite the absence of a vision for upgrading and growing our network. It's hard to ask people for more money without real improvements. Some say we should give discounts to low-income riders and raise fares for everyone else. We explore why a two-tier transit system is a terrible idea that will lead to a death spiral and actually impact the poorest riders most. Also, if a transit fare is not a tax, is it a fee?

The MBTA board (FMCB) has proposed eliminating up to 28 bus routes, largely without any analysis of what these routes do or how they operate.  A better approach is to figure out why some routes are expensive and/or attract low ridership, such as poor service quality (on-time performance, frequency, connections) and many seem to be designed to fail. The existing late night service is one example, but rather than get rid of it, service should be vastly improved and expanded to full overnight service (don't forget the early morning needs!). Commuter rail come up too.

We talk about the importance of good service planning, the different levels of planning, and how we can not only make small routine changes but also design a better network. Aside from service cuts, no routes have changed since 2008 and a comprehensive review has never been done, even though travel patterns have changed a lot since the 1964 creation of MBTA. Most routes do not meet basic service standards like crowding and on-time performance. How can we plan for upgrades?

The Green Line Extension is way over budget and horribly mismanaged, largely due to schedule pressures, not enough MBTA staff to oversee this massive project (due to austerity) and as a result contractors scamming the T. Are we learning the lessons as the FMCB looks to cut the budget even more? We explain the importance of carrying out the GLX plan which was approved through an extensive public process, and how proposed project reductions would actually cause us to spend more in operating costs to run the line.