Years of chronic delays, frequent breakdowns, and freak accidents have imbued the city and surrounding communities with a defensible collective angst against the transit agency. But do Bostonians, their patience worn down by the T’s shortcomings over the years, take the T for granted?
“It’s not as bad as you think it is,” Nigel Wilson, a public transportation expert at MIT, said of the T system writ large. “Obviously, everyone has their own perceptions about what bad is and what good is, but I think relative to peer cities in the US, Boston isn’t at all bad in terms of the quality of the public transport system.”
What follows is a lighthearted attempt to compare the T to some of the nation’s other subway networks across a number of metrics — size, speed, reliability, and so on. This is not a definitive report on which system is best; available data don’t invite simple conclusions, and experts caution that city-to-city comparisons can be fraught with caveats.
Another thing to note: The trains that likely spring to mind when you imagine a “subway” — several tubular metal cars latched together, barreling through a dark tunnel, at times breaking to the surface — are heavy rail vehicles.
This story only focuses on heavy rail vehicles — the trains crisscrossing the T’s Red, Blue, and Orange Lines. The T’s Green Line and the Mattapan trolley classify as light rail, a generally slower service capable of carrying fewer passengers.
The United States, a country of more than 340 million people, has 16 active heavy rail systems.
The T’s heavy rail system spans just over 76 miles, about 38 miles in each direction. Its Red, Orange, and Blue line trains stop at 54 stations over that distance.
New York City’s subway system is a colossus in comparison: a sprawling network with almost 500 miles of track and 472 stations.
Chicago and D.C. also boast larger systems than the T, by both station count and track expanse.
Philadelphia’s system is roughly the same length as the T’s, but has almost two dozen more stops.
New York and Chicago are, of course, much larger urban areas than Boston. The Philadelphia and D.C. regions also surpass the Boston area in population, but by a slimmer margin.
D.C.-proper is slightly larger and more populous than the city of Boston. But the District’s subway branches deep into the city’s outskirts (its westernmost terminus is about 25 miles from the White House). Braintree station, by contrast, is roughly 11 miles from the Massachusetts State House.
The D.C., New York, and Chicago systems, unlike Boston’s, are tread by heavy rail cars.
Boston’s subway system is, famously, the country’s first, launching service in 1897. The New York City subway opened for business in 1904, but boasts the country’s first publicly operated heavy rail line, unveiled in 1932, according to the Federal Transit Administration.
The Chicago and Philadelphia systems took shape in the same era. Chicago’s first actual “subway” (underground passage) opened in 1943, but the majority of its trains travel above ground.
“The goal was to get people into and around the city center, where the jobs were,” Jacob Wasserman, a transportation researcher at UCLA, said of the country’s legacy systems.
A second generation of heavy rail subways arrived around the 1970s and early 1980s — in Atlanta, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., among other cities.
These networks service downtown areas but tend to blend into “more like commuter rail, with very wide stops, at the ends,” Wasserman said.
Then there are the new(er) kids on the track. Los Angeles opened a heavy rail route in the 1990s. (Most of its urban rail system is covered by Green Line-type vehicles.) Honolulu opened a comparatively short but automated stretch of heavy rail in 2023.
The T’s heavy rail fleet, as of last year, is almost 25-years-old on average. (The agency is still in the prolonged process of replacing its decrepit Red Line cars.) Heavy rail cars in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City clocked roughly similar average ages.
Raj Ashar, a 25-year-old attorney based in the D.C. region, studied at Harvard Law School between 2022 and 2025. He said he usually rode the Red Line to get downtown.
“I think I prefer the D.C. Metro,” Ashar said. “I think it’s a little bit faster, a little bit more reliable.”
Experts and agencies tend to judge a service’s reliability, in part, by how frequently its vehicles break down.
The Federal Transit Administration defines a “major” mechanical failure as one that prevents a vehicle from completing or starting a trip because of hampered movement or safety concerns.
The T’s heavy rail vehicles experienced a major failure about every 70,000 miles in 2024, according to data compiled by the federal government. Only Philadelphia and Atlanta’s subways were more prone to major breakdowns. Miami’s heavy rail system fared only slightly better.
Part of the disparity can be attributed to age, according to experts.
Vehicles riding the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system, San Francisco’s heavy rail network, are just over two years old on average as of last year, according to the federal government.
Why did Boston register a worse failure rate than New York City and Chicago?
When posed this question, the T replied: “The National Transit Database reporting is based upon what each agency considers a major mechanical failure. Each agency is different.” (The National Transit Database did not respond to a Globe request to comment on the T’s reply.)
Han Wen Zhang, a 27-year-old former schoolmate of Ashar’s at Harvard who now works in New York City, recalled there being a specific stretch of the Red Line between Kendall and Charles/MGH that she felt was especially sluggish. The T removed speed restrictions along the Red Line in November 2024.
“There was a lot of bonding amongst my law school friends around having to take the T and how slow it sometimes was,” Zhang said.
The Federal Transit Administration calculates average speed by dividing the distance vehicles travel by the number of hours they spend in service.
By that count, the T’s subway traveled at roughly the same pace — around 16 miles per hour — as New York trains this past August (the latest month with the relevant data available for all analyzed agencies). Philadelphia’s subway, and the Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH) subway, which links New York City to New Jersey, were a bit slower.
Subway trains in Atlanta, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., seem capable, on paper, of blitzing T trains in a sprint.
Experts note that differences in system age and design could help account for the speed disparities.
The country’s legacy subways — built for dense urban areas, with frequent stops — offer fewer opportunities to travel flat out for long stretches.
The New York City subway, as New Yorkers often boast, is open 24/7. Some, but not all, of Chicago’s heavy rail lines also run around the clock.
The T this summer extended its operating hours on weekends. Orange, Red and Blue line trains now begin their final runs on Friday and Saturday nights between 1:30 a.m. and 2 a.m.
The T subway opens between roughly 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. and starts wrapping up service between 12:30 a.m. and 1 a.m.
Philadelphia’s heavy rail lines generally begin their runs between 4 and 5 a.m. and wind down between 12 a.m. and 1 a.m., according to official schedules (one SEPTA line, the M, runs a bit later).
BART runs from 5 a.m. until midnight on weekdays; it begins an hour later on Saturdays, and three hours later on Sundays, but still concludes service at around midnight on weekends. BART also shuts down two of its lines between 9 p.m. and midnight.
In D.C., WMATA runs its weekday trains between around 5 a.m. and midnight. Like the T, WMATA also extends its service on Friday and Saturday nights (until around 2 a.m.)
SEPTA, the New York City subway, and its neighboring system, PATH, charge the highest standard one-way fares among the country’s most popular heavy rail networks.
SEPTA and the New York subway charge $2.90 per trip; PATH charges $3.00. New York is upping its fares by 10 cents in January.
Boston, Chicago, Miami, and Atlanta occupy a similar price rung, ranging from $2.25 per ride to $2.50 per heavy rail ride. BART charges fares based on trip distance and plans to up fares 6.2 percent Jan. 1 to help shore up the agency’s finances. WMATA’s fares depend on the day, time, and distance you ride.
Jaime Moore-Carrillo can be reached at [email protected].
