WASHINGTON — The Federal Transit Administration has issued four special directives to the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, giving the transit agency periods ranging from 24 hours to 30 days to address safety concerns.
Those concerns address procedural issues revealed by a series of five runaway-train incidents in yards since February 2021; maintenance procedures and programs; problems at the agency’s operations center; and certification issues for operators.
A fifth directive is addressed to the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities, which has safety oversight for the MBTA, regarding enforcement of the FTA directives, as well as outstanding safety issues from a 2019 FTA audit of the department.
“Safety is our number one priority and must be the primary focus for the MBTA and the DPU,” FTA Administrator Nuria Fernandez said in a Wednesday press release. “Every transit passenger deserves a safe ride. Every transit worker deserves a safe workplace. The MBTA must immediately take action to improve its safety procedures for its passengers and workers.”
The directives stem from an FTA safety review of the MBTA that began in April, following a series of incidents that resulted in one fatality [see “NTSB report: Door-system failure led to death …,” Trains News Wire, May 3, 2022] and several injuries.
The directives to the MBTA:
— Mandate corrective related to maintenance-of-way. They require consistent personal protective equipment requirements and documentation of compliance with those requirements; order repairs of a section of the rapid-transit Orange Line between the Tufts Medical Center and Back Bay stations, which have been under a speed restriction since 2019 because of excessive wear and defects; and call for changes in six areas of management practices, including providing inadequate time to complete maintenance work and developing a plan to address the 9.6% of track on its heavy-rail transit systems and 2 miles of the light-rail Green Line which are under speed restrictions. The MBTA must submit plans to address these issues within 30 days.
— Require development of procedures, along with training in and compliance with those procedures, on yard movements of equipment with known or suspected brake or propulsion defects. A corrective action plan to address these issues must be submitted to the FTA in 15 days.
— Require corrections of issues at the MBTA’s Operations Control Center, where dispatchers, supervisors, and managers overseeing all train movements are based. The FTA review found the facility is not staffed adequately and that the MBTA is not meeting its own requirements for training and certification.
Three corrective actions are required immediately. The MBTA must ensure that each employee on a shift is properly certified; has sufficient recovery time between shifts; and will no longer require OCC workers to act as both dispatchers and supervisors during the same shift. It will have to provide documentation to both the FTA and state Department of Public Utilities to show these requirements are being met, beginning on Friday, June 17.
Longer-term actions will require the MTBA to modify its hours-of-service policy to ensure sufficient rest for control center employees; address significant understaffing at the facility; address recruiting and training issues for dispatchers; and verify dispatchers have current certification. It must submit a corrective action plan outlining how it will address these problems within 20 days.
— Order that the MBTA ensures all operators are currently certified. It must immediately begin documenting this is the case in daily reports to the FTA and DPU, beginning June 17. In longer-term moves, it must develop procedures to make sure that only certified personnel are operating trains, and update training materials to address flaws in training and certification. It must submit a plan to address the latter two issues within 35 days.
The final FTA directive, for the Department of Public Utilities, requires that agency to ensure the MBTA acts on the above directives, and addresses the seven areas of non-compliance which remain from the FTA’s October 2019 audit which identified issues in 16 areas.
In its release, the FTA says riders “should not interpret the special directives … as a reason to avoid the MBTA subway or light rail. Rather, FTA’s actions provide system-wide measures to fix longstanding issues with the agency’s overall safety program and culture.”
And re: modifying hours of service policy to ensure sufficient rest for control center employees, MBTA should ensure its employees aren’t working a 2nd full time job in addition to the MBTA. A trolley accident in the not too distant past occurred because the motorman was sleeping at the controls because he had just come off his other job.
Well, if they don’t want to deal with the staffing issues at the OCC, they can always automate the whole system and only need supervisors to oversee the system.