Since our transit system turned over in 2023 from the gentle touch of fiscal conservatism to its current leadership, a lot has changed at the MBTA. The T is finally making investments in maintenance, reliability has improved and communications are more detailed. At the center of it all is Phil Eng. A former Long Island Railroad executive and career civil servant, he is an improvement from previous MBTA manager Steve Poftak, a lifelong failson who was bounced from sinecure to sinecure by a dying think tank because he believes better things aren’t possible in the world.
So why on earth does Eng not understand how batteries work?
Eng certainly has good intentions, and this has earned him earned him praise. Before Eng was given the name, “Train Daddy” was Andy Byford, who worked for New York’s MTA. Byford was an overseas hire from a damp island who improved service and reliability and was appreciated by the public and his staff. His fame grew so much that the governor, renowned pest Andrew Cuomo, pushed him out, perhaps because Byford made him look small.
American transit professionals work in an ecosystem that rewards insular points of view. There are no international best practices. Each agency has its own way of operating, and these cultures are hard to change. Sometimes this hard-headedness makes sense: Transit executives contend with limited funding and politicians who don’t understand their product. As a result, Americans pay some of the highest per-mile transit costs of any peer country, and our systems always seem to be in the middle of a funding or a maintenance crisis.
One ingrained view that the MBTA suffers is the fear of overhead wire. Transit vehicles powered by overhead wires are a technology much older than cars – trolleys and trams have been reliably deployed for hundreds of years in climates colder and hotter than ours. Wires remain in use in the nation’s first subway, which runs under Boston Common.
The last trolleybuses ran in Cambridge, entirely on electricity, with no tailpipe emissions. It’s hard to describe how ahead of its time this technology was: Zero carbon transit, the holy grail of modern transportation? We had it. Until our government decided to throw it all away.
While wires are still up in some places, a lot of the infrastructure was quietly dismantled. The trolleybuses were sold to a junkyard and crushed, Silver Line tunnel wires were taken down and the garages were dismantled. Instead, diesel buses hum along roads in Cambridge, spewing fumes into its neighborhoods.
The MBTA promised it would replace these with battery electric buses. The thinking was that despite the high initial expense, the BEBs would deliver carbon-free transit to the entire network in just a few years: The MBTA is forbidden from buying more diesel buses by 2031, and all buses must be electric by 2041.
A consumer electric vehicle operates with a small battery that is good for a few hundred miles, max. A large bus needs a comparatively massive and heavy battery, a kind of technology that barely exists right now, and apparently works only a little better than that of a Tesla. The buses are expensive to procure and difficult to maintain. Batteries do not charge well or hold their charge in cold weather – meaning these supposedly electric buses must burn diesel to operate.
It turns out the buses the T bought have cold-weather reliability problems, and one of the newly purchased fleets was out of service this entire winter. The T’s aging garages aren’t built to service these vehicles, which have components on the roof that can’t be maintained under a low ceiling. The cost savings from a lack of wires? Those have been eaten up by the exploding cost of custom-built charging garages that are now needed for every bus in the system. The MBTA admits as much in its internal board presentations. With no end in sight, the T has reported that it already wants to give up on electrifying the buses, and that if the authority moved forward with the mandate as-is, it would have to make (even deeper) service cuts.
The thought was that with no wires to maintain, BEBs would be cheaper, and despite the risks, the tech would improve with time. Well, we’re here now, and they aren’t and it hasn’t. This is no surprise: Everyone, including transit advocates, said this would happen, but the T did it anyway. The reason is that no transit professional in the United States, especially not Eng, believes he has anything to learn from other systems around the globe. The prevailing belief is that we are special and constrained by different forces than other places, and cannot be expected to implement solutions that are proven elsewhere.
Multiple cold-weather systems – Moscow and Vermont, for example – have tried to switch to BEBs from trolleys and run into the same failures. One can argue that Eng’s hand was forced by his predecessors, but that doesn’t excuse doubling down on a bad idea. It doesn’t excuse refusing to acknowledge the well-known risks and limitations of this technology. What the leadership at the T practices is magical thinking, hoping things will work if they believe.
An especially frustrating aspect of this is that Eng is being led down the same path for another part of our system: commuter rail. Modern electric trains, on top of being emission free, are lighter, accelerate much faster, break down less often than diesel trains and work in a variety of climates. The battery trains the MBTA is buying have almost none of these benefits. They are slower, more expensive and unreliable. California electrified its commuter rail network with overhead wire and has seen improved ridership, frequency and reliability. Why can’t we have that in Boston? Eng doesn’t know how batteries work. The T is betting the entire commuter rail system on the idea that this technology will suddenly improve.
Being a leader of a vital public service organization requires more than just keeping the lights on and doing the easy things right. It also requires making wise decisions when answering hard questions. It requires humility and willingness to look elsewhere. I think the richest country in the world can afford to have trains and buses at least as reliable and efficient as anyone else – but does our government agree?
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