The MBTA prepares to put subway slow zones in the rearview mirror

A 13-month plan to rid the MBTA subway of track-related speed restrictions is expected to wrap up Friday.

Leaders at the transit authority said once crews finish repair work on the final service disruption, which shutdown Green Line stations north of Park Street earlier this month, the subway system will have no more slow zones.

The T’s Track Improvement Program called for service outages along different portions of the subway system throughout the year. Riders endured alternative routes and shuttle bus service for days or weeks at a time as crews worked around the clock to repair and replace tracks.

“As a result of the continuous effort, we were able to eliminate speed restrictions across the entire system,” MBTA Chief Engineer Sam Zhao told the agency's board members during a Thursday meeting.

Zhou said crews were able to do more work than initially projected when launching the track improvement plan.

“We lifted 226 speed restrictions, 35 more than we planned,” he said. Zhou explained that as crews worked to address problem areas, other speed restrictions kept “popping up.”

Zhou’s presentation listed that crews ultimately replaced about 47 miles of track across the subway system over the last year, nearly double the amount they projected for replacement.

To date, the track improvements have saved riders an estimated “93 minutes of travel time,” across all subway lines, Zhou said.

Some riders seem to be enjoying those benefits.

Orange Line rider Zaden Ruggiero-Boune, of Roxbury, said his commute has “definitely been noticeably better,” since track work wrapped on the line in November. The line is now free of slow zones for the first time in over a decade.

He said the train is “a lot quicker” and he experiences “a lot fewer stops randomly along the way.” Ruggiero-Boune described himself as “a pretty happy T rider.”

Quincy resident and Red Line rider Erin Garvin said she used to find the branch unreliable. 

“[I] didn't know what I was going to get into each day," said Garvin. "But now, it's been solid.”

But other riders aren’t ready to praise the T over the track repairs just yet. Rebecca Mechura, who lives in Cambridge, said she finds the Red Line trains she takes are still very slow.

“I thought that they would improve when they did the shutdowns, but it seems like, between Harvard and Central especially, it's really slow,” she said.

MBTA General Manager Phil Eng said while he is excited and proud of his team’s effort to rid the T of slow zones, “we're going to continuously look to improve.”

“We're going to always challenge ourselves, and we're not going to rest on any successes, because we know that the system still needs a lot more work.”