BOSTON — Any hope Boston-area commuters had that current speed restrictions on much of the rail transit network would be short lived faded on Monday, as the interim general manager of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority said riders should allow 40 more minutes of travel time daily until further notice.
The Boston Globe reports the MBTA’s acting head, Jeff Gonneville, said, “People using the heavy rail or light rail systems should give themselves an extra 20 minutes for their commute” in each direction.
That advice follows the move that saw the MBTA impose a systemwide 25-mph speed restriction on the night of March 9 because of lack of documentation for previously completed track inspections. That blanket limit was lifted the next day, but the 25-mph limit — instead of the usual 40 mph — remains in place on the Green Line, the Mattapan Trolley Line, and about a third of the other transit lines [see “MBTA lifts blanket speed restriction …,” Trains News Wire, March 10, 2023].
An MBTA press release said that 31.9% of the track remains under speed restrictions on the three heavy rail subway lines: 39 on the Red Line, 19 on the Orange Line, and six on the Blue line. Those are in addition to restrictions already in place before the March 9 order.
That release indicates the agency is currently verifying results of recent track geometry car testing, and once those results are verified, the MBTA will proceed to validating that defects have been repaired or repairing those that have not been addressed.
“We’re going to make incremental improvements to the speed restrictions as the days progress,” Gonneville said. “But it is too soon for us to really project how long these restrictions are going to remain in place.”
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