Governor Maura Healey last week announced the appointment of Phillip Eng as the next General Manager of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA). Eng is an engineer with nearly 40 years of experience in transportation, including serving as the President of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (MTA) Long Island Rail Road and the Interim President of New York City Transit.
To say that Mr. Eng will be facing a number of significant and immediate challenges is not even an understatement.
His appointment comes on the heels of an announcement by the T a few weeks ago that speed restrictions between 10-25 miles per hour on the Red, Orange, Blue, and Green Lines — in other words, the entire system — were to go into effect immediately because of the decrepit condition of the rail beds on the T’s tracks.
As we can attest after riding on the Red Line two weeks ago — in which we crawled along at a snail’s pace for almost the entire ride from South Station through Quincy — the T’s Rapid Transit system is anything but rapid and more aptly could be described as the Turtle Trolley. In addition to unsafe tracks, the T also has to deal with the roving gangs of thugs on its trains who terrorize passengers with seeming impunity, as has been the case recently on the other end of the Red Line, where passengers were mugged during rush hour at Harvard Square station.