Boston-area commuter rail bounces back, while other agencies lag

More than any other major mode of public transit, commuter rail lost the most riders in the years since COVID-19 first struck the country. Nationwide, only about two-thirds of riders have returned to commuter rail, which uses traditional railroad infrastructure to move people between cities and their suburbs.

But not in Boston. By one count, the commuter rail system there has recovered 96% of its pre-pandemic ridership.

There are a lot of factors at play, but one that sets Boston apart is the extent to which it has reworked its service to better serve people traveling in the middle of the day, in the evening and on weekends. It’s part of a larger movement nationally that has picked up speed after the pandemic to make commuter rail cater to more riders than just those who come downtown every day for work. The goal is to transform the service from commuter rail to regional rail.

“The T had already started some of that movement before COVID, but [changing travel patterns] provided them with an opportunity to really double down on it,” said Jarred Johnson, the executive director of TransitMatters, an advocacy group based in Boston, using a popular local nickname for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. “It was smart thinking about how to use resources more efficiently to respond to changing demand and ridership.”

The MBTA’s commuter rail system is the fifth busiest in the country, behind agencies serving the New York and Chicago metropolitan areas. With 12 lines covering nearly 400 miles, it has the third-biggest network in the country. Significantly, it owns most of those tracks, while many other commuter rail agencies have to use tracks owned by freight railroads for all or most of their routes.

But the MBTA—which also operates subways, buses, ferries and paratransit service in the Boston area—does not run its commuter rail service itself. Instead, it contracts with Keolis, a vendor, to run the day-to-day service.

Michael Muller, MBTA’s executive director of commuter rail services, said the agency is reworking its schedules to introduce “all-day consistency.” The goal is to get trains on a clock-face schedule, so people know what time their trains will leave—say, 10 minutes past the hour—without having to look it up.

“We were very, very deliberate when we emerged from the pandemic about changing our service model to accommodate what we thought the future of work was going to look like,” he said. “We knew that a lot of employers were going to have to continue to offer a level of flexibility even if they wanted to bring people back to the office. The old paradigm was broken forever.”

“If you have young kids that have to get to school, you can arrange your workday now so that if you have early morning conference calls, you can take those at home with a cup of coffee, take your kids to school like most parents want to, and then catch a train that's slightly later than the one that maybe you used to take before the pandemic in 2019,” he said.

The agency has been adding more trips, so that people don’t have to wait as long if they miss a train. That’s especially true during the middle of weekdays, which had two- or three-hour gaps between trains before the pandemic because most of the trains ran during rush hour. That meant that working parents who found out their kid was sick at school didn’t have many choices for getting back early, but now they do, Muller said.

The MBTA is also adding more night and weekend service. The later service is popular with people who want to go to ballgames, eat at restaurants or see shows and still take the train home, he said.

“Weekend ridership is off the charts,” Muller said. “It’s around 150% of what it had been pre-pandemic.”

Keolis has been advertising the service for non-work trips, like trips to beaches, breweries, vineyards, farms and museums that are easily accessible to one of the commuter rail stops. The MBTA also introduced a $10 weekend pass that lets passengers ride as much as they want over a Saturday-and-Sunday period.

“It’s hard to tell whether or not the demand was there, and we just responded to it, or whether we created some momentum on our own with the fare products, the increased frequency and the marketing of all these places,” Muller said, “because what you hear all the time is, ‘I had no idea you could go to Crane Beach on the commuter rail.’”

Abdellah Chajai, the CEO and general manager of Keolis, said in an emailed statement that the company “is proud of the work we’ve done with our partners at the MBTA to achieve the best commuter rail ridership return in the country. Transforming schedules for all-day service and introducing a more regional rail approach met the needs of post-pandemic ridership for flexibility. In addition, our strong on-time performance has given passengers the reliability they want.” 

Muller said MBTA has one advantage that many other commuter rail systems do not: It owns the tracks it runs on and doesn’t have to negotiate with freight railroads for access. “I do think that's one of the things that's holding the other systems back,” he said. “They're not able to expand, they don't have the flexibility for expansion and tweaking the schedule the way we do.”

Exceptional Recovery

The route that has had the biggest bounce back from the pandemic—at 130% of previous ridership—is noteworthy for other reasons, too. The Fairmount Line is the only route in MBTA’s system that is almost entirely within the city of Boston. It is the only route where the passengers are primarily non-white. And it is the only route where riders can use their Charlie card—the fare card they use for subway trips—to pay for their commuter rail trips.

The Fairmount Line runs south from downtown to serve the neighborhoods of Dorchester, Mattapan and Hyde Park. But its use has grown over the last decade, as MBTA added four new stations along the existing line and began offering weekend service.

Even before the pandemic, ridership patterns on the Fairmount Line offered a glimpse of how commuter rail could better accommodate non-work trips, said Lindiwe Rennert, a researcher for the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute.

“Folks are taking the Fairmount line for local trips: think shopping, think entertainment, think visiting with family,” Rennert said. “In a sense, it’s not a ‘commuter’ line, but it does still have the benefits of that slightly heavier, more attractive and even higher on-time performance infrastructure that the commuter rail network has over the local subway, light rail and bus networks.”

MBTA has been trying to attract riders to the Fairmount Line who previously took the bus, she said. The trains have fewer delays—the Fairmount Line has an on-time performance of 97.9%, the best of any MBTA route—and offers more comfort for passengers. The fares for taking the Fairmount Line downtown are the same as it would cost to take the subway. And this spring, the agency cut down the weekday wait times between trains on the line from every 45 minutes to every 30 minutes. The trains started running every half hour on weekends too, compared to every 90 minutes beforehand.

“It’s an enjoyable ride, which is also important for retaining riders,” Rennert said. “You’re no longer creating transit riders who feel like transit is something they're choosing because they must, or even because it may be cost- and speed-competitive, but because it’s actually enjoyable.”

The Fairmount Line currently handles about 3,500 riders per weekday, making it one of the MBTA’s lower-ridership lines (the busier lines carry 15,000 to 20,000 people a day).

But Rennert said the Fairmount Line could become one of the system’s busiest “in no time,” especially as state and local leaders are trying to build denser housing around transit stations to address housing shortages.

Johnson, from TransitMatters, noted that adding new stations has reinvigorated neighborhoods on other lines, too, pointing out that the Boston Landing station on the Framingham/Worcester line exist a decade ago. “It was an industrial corridor wedged between low-density housing and a highway,” he said. “It has now transformed into a high-rise neighborhood with the Bruins (hockey team) practice facility, a public radio station, a music venue and more high-rise housing on the way.”

Straining Infrastructure

The rapid recovery for the MBTA’s commuter rail system stands in marked contrast from how the system performed following a series of massive snowstorms in 2015. More than two feet of snow fell on Boston in one day that January, prompting local residents to call it “Snowpocalypse” or “Snowmageddon.” Commuter rail services were delayed, and sometimes suspended, and took weeks to fully recover.

“The winter of 2015 really revealed and exposed the vulnerabilities of a system where we had aged assets that were approaching or beyond their useful life and needed replacement,” Muller said.

In response, the agency replaced all of its jointed rail with a continuous welded rail, which improves performance, Muller said. It also upgraded crumbling stations, bridges, switches and interlockings. A federal mandate for all passenger rail lines also forced the agency to upgrade its signal system, too.

“The big reason you’ve seen Keolis improve in the last decade, in my opinion, is the T threw a ton of money at infrastructure. It’s not rocket science,” said Brian Kane, the executive director of the MBTA Advisory Board, which represents cities and towns in the transit agency’s service area. “If you have fixed your signals and your right-of-way so that you can improve reliability, reliability will improve.”

These days, he said, most of the delays on the commuter rail system are the result of human error, either by trespassers or operators.

But other infrastructure challenges loom. All of the commuter rail lines that go into North Station go over a 125-year-old bridge that needs to be rebuilt. Meanwhile, South Station on the other side of downtown will be over capacity when service to New Bedford begins this summer, and coming into the station, five lines share a single track through a tunnel.

And, of course, the MBTA still has to worry about its day-to-day finances, including for commuter rail, said Kane, who is a member of a gubernatorial task force on transit funding.

“The big thing is that the ridership is back, but the revenue hasn't necessarily come back,” Kane said. “People aren’t buying monthly passes anymore because they’re not traveling five days a week. I don’t think anyone's sort of figured out how to price that adequately yet.”

“South Station capacity is a concern. The financial underpinnings are a concern,” Kane added. “But you know what? With what they can control from a scheduling and operations perspective, I think they’re doing a hell of a job.”

This story was updated on June 4, 2024 at 11:53 p.m..