The answers to subway and bus rider problems may be literally at hand: The state’s transit agency is testing an app called MBTA Go that general manager Phillip Eng wants to be “one-stop shopping” for everything from delay notifications to potential refunds for rides not taken.
The app is in beta – available only for recent iPhone operating systems and not even in the App Store, which means to try it takes extra work on the part of the tester. Only around 2,800 people among the system’s nearly 800,000 daily riders are taking part, able to see expected arrival times for trains and buses and get information on individual vehicles as they move along their routes in something like real time. A decision is due within the next couple of months on when to launch the app officially to riders, first for iPhones and then for Andoid.
“Now, not everyone has a device,” Eng said during an interview Tuesday in his Boston offices. “Improved communications has got to be a multipronged approach.” He said that means better-informed drivers, clearer audio announcements and more useful information on video screens – largely missing from T vehicles despite a need for the hearing-impaired and certainly since the invention of the Sony Walkman in 1979.
Still, the MTA TrainTime app Eng helped put in place while working in New York is a model, he said. While the T has tested transit apps in the past, it just moved to include payment by phones in August. The TrainTime app, meanwhile, sells New Yorkers tickets, connects riders with live customer service representatives, plans trips, tracks estimated arrivals and departures and gives hints as to which cars on a train are full and which have room for more people. MBTA Go is expected to also offer guidance on which cars are accessible to people using a mobility device such as a wheelchair.
“We are working on how we want to communicate with our riders not only in planned situations, but in real-time situations – when a train is held, how do we communicate that?” Eng said. “People need to know, because then they may make the decision ’I’m not going to wait 15 minutes, or a half-hour. It’s better for me to get off and find another way.’”
That answer came in response to a series of questions mainly about how the MBTA manages customer service situations when things aren’t running right – something Eng has familiarity with, as he was brought on April 10, 2023, to fix a system struggling with safety concerns and slowdowns.
While Eng has been easing the slowdowns caused by tunnel and trolley rails badly in need of replacements, realignments and upgrades – on Tuesday the system was down to 33 speed restrictions – some T practices that predate him persist, at least for now. We came in eager to ask questions built up over years of ridership. We also handed off a couple of dozen reader comments and questions Eng wasn’t able to get to in the half-hour allotted to talk in his offices in Boston.
Those offices are large but not extravagant, messy with the air of someone too busy to think of using an office to impress. Similarly, his answers were forthright but could be a little messy as we struggled to fit a lot of complexity into a short time.
The ETA issue, refunds and more
The peeves we addressed (with Eng’s answers condensed and edited):
Arrival-time announcements tell riders a train will arrive in, say, four minutes – yet it might take 10 minutes for the board to tick down to say the train will arrive in three minutes. Is this getting fixed?
The predictions are fairly accurate, I would say, but we’re going to continue to improve. The GPS technology in some of the fleet is older and doesn’t update as fast as the new ones, but as we get newer cars we’ll have better GPS and be able to have even better real-time information. And our information technology team knows that what’s on the station signs is important, and they’re working on that piece too. One of the reasons that we’re working on the app is to give people the real-time reports to see where that train actually is sitting. You’ll be able to go into that app and see: If I’m at Airport Station, where’s the next train going to Bowdoin? You could see how many minutes away, and you can see it approaching. That’s what I want, to have that validation.
When you’re on one of those trains, you might be stopped for several minutes before the engineer comes on and says, “This train is going to be standing by.” We know! We’re on the train! And this announcement usually comes so late in the process that the train often gets moving immediately afterward. Can more information get to engineers when a train is stuck, so they can give riders something useful?
Real-time information is invaluable to the rider. We’ve been working internally with operations on how to shift from that perspective where the operator is focused just on operating a train and how do we give them the script of what to say when a train is being held. Some of that frustration is probably based on in the past when our on-time performance and our service has not been to the levels that it is today, but as we improve, the next step is to making sure we communicate. We’re working on technology to make announcements remotely from our operations center to a station and not put it on the operator, who may have other things that they’re taking care of – if there’s an issue going on on the red line to be able to just make an announcement into a station and say, “We have a track condition up ahead. We’re holding the trains. And we’ll come back to you in five minutes when we have an update.” The first alert should be we have a disabled vehicle, right? The next alert should be that we have vehicle maintenance crews en route with an anticipated ETA of 10 minutes.
Again, if you’re in a station and you’re getting that update, you might opt to go a different way. If you’re on the train, you’re a captive audience. But, you know, we want them to at least know we’re responding. Safety will always have to be our top priority, but I fully understand that when you don’t have information that adds to people’s frustrations.
During the slowdowns, we knew how slow trains might move – 12 mph, 5 mph. The MBTA does not promote how fast in general trains are supposed to run.
The max speeds are 40 mph on light and heavy rail. There may be talk about 50 mph like on the reopening of the orange line between Braintree and JFK. We did sufficient work where the tracks are capable of running trains faster – you need the length and the geometry to be able to run faster, because what we don’t want to do is have where trains are accelerating to 40 and then you’re braking instantly. You need to have it where it’s a good, smooth ride for riders, and that’s where you need the distances between stations. Obviously you can’t do anything that fast on the green line, but we anticipate being able to go in certain locations up to 50 miles an hour, which would give people back even more minutes of their day. We have to take a look at building the tracks to a certain level, the signal systems and does the location make sense? We want to be able to have a reliable schedule so the public knows when they get on at Point A and they’re getting off of Point B five days a week, that trip is going to be the same length of time every day.
With a lack of information, a rider may enter a station, paying for a ride, but wait so long for a train to come that they leave without getting the ride they paid for – maybe during a disruption such as a snowstorm. Isn’t that rider due a refund?
There have been situations where a rider has reached out and we’ve reviewed it and and we have offered refunds. I don’t know about a wholesale situation – but as we move into contactless payment, creating an account helps us better see where you entered and what time you entered. I think we’ll be able to say, “Yes, you entered here, and we didn’t run a train. Then how could you have taken the ride?” We would have to do it case by case.
Winning public trust
The MBTA says the app might be able to handle refunds – either through automated recognition that a ride was skipped, or by users requesting a review – but it is a technological puzzle likely to come first to commuter rail, which has rides that cost more and run fewer times a day.
The app has been in the works for around a year, since support for a third-party app was rescinded in 2022. Beta testing of the app, which is being built in-house by a team of eight with a budget described only as “subject to change as the project evolves,” began only in July through invitations to research participants and through community partners, the MBTA said. The public beta began in September.
“We need to build the public trust back, and we need them to know that we can deliver,” Eng said, contemplating the transit system’s future funding needs: another $700 million needed to fill a gap in a coming $3 billion budget. “That doesn’t mean every day is going to go perfect. We know we can always get better. But I’m confident about the work we’re doing.”
This post was updated Oct. 23, 2024, with information about the size of an app development team and its budget.
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