MA: The MBTA is slow zone free. How much faster are trains running?

To see the MBTA’s turnaround plain as day, look no further than the Red Line.

On the line’s Ashmont branch, the average southbound ride lasts about 40 minutes end-to-end. Rewind to October 2023, and the same trip took nearly half an hour longer.

It’s been more than a year since the MBTA launched an ambitious plan to buckle down on deferred repairs in hopes of lifting about 200 speed restrictions by the end of 2024.

And what a year it has been.

To free up train tracks and stations for round-the-clock maintenance, officials closed expansive chunks of the transit network for sometimes weeks at a time, leaving riders at the mercy of shuttle buses and Boston’s circus-like streets.

Yet for the first time in more than two decades, the MBTA is free of slow zones.

“That’s as far back as our records go,” MBTA General Manager Phillip Eng said this month.

How much faster are trains running?

For those who live or work in the Boston area and ride the T, chances are a typical commute is quicker than it was a year ago. Data collected by TransitMatters, a public transportation advocacy group, show trains are arriving more frequently and reaching their next stop more quickly, though to varying degrees depending on the subway line.

Every line is traveling as fast or faster this month than in October of last year, before the year of maintenance the MBTA dubbed the Track Improvement Program.

The Red Line averaged roughly 19 mph the first week of December, compared to 13.2 mph the first week of October 2023. The Orange Line traveled 17.9 mph, up from 14.5 mph, and the Blue Line reached 18.9 mph, from 16.3 mph. Following two weeks of repairs this month, the Green Line averaged 10.6 mph, slightly faster than in October last year.

Still, the average rider probably can’t tell the difference of a few miles per hour on a moving train. What they can see is the difference on the clock when they get home earlier than a year ago.

On the Red Line’s Braintree branch, round-trip travel is nearly 35% faster heading south — down from an hour and 18 minutes to about 52 minutes — compared to October 2023. Heading north, the line takes about 54 minutes to traverse, compared to 70 minutes last October.

To put that in perspective, a person commuting to work from Braintree to Boston’s South Station is saving about 24 minutes a day. For a daily commuter, that’s two extra hours each week spent at home, rather than on the Red Line.

State officials said the repairs collectively save riders 2.4 million minutes every weekday. They estimated the economic benefit to Massachusetts to be nearly $1 million each day.

Each minute saved “is time back to the people of Massachusetts to spend more time with their families, pick the kids up from school, make a doctor appointment that they’ve been putting off for too long, or make a stop in a local small business,” Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll said last week.

Seth Kaplan, a software engineer who volunteers with TransitMatters managing its MBTA data collection, said he’s had friends who missed their stop on the Red Line because it was faster than they were used to.

“They meant to get off at South Station and looked up and it’s Andrew” station, two stops down the line, he said.

On the Orange Line, a full southbound journey that took more than 43 minutes before the last year of maintenance takes about 37 minutes now. Northbound, end-to-end travel times are faster by more than eight minutes.

On the Blue Line, outbound travel is 12% quicker — down by about three minutes — than last year. Inbound travel is 5% quicker.

The Green Line, which runs in some areas at street level, has seen varied effects from the year of work.

Its B branch is about three to four minutes faster end-to-end, while its D branch is seven minutes faster heading toward Union Square — a 10% improvement compared to last October.

While trains are running faster and more frequently, subway ridership has not recovered to pre-pandemic levels. For instance, an average of 94,000 people rode the Red Line each weekday in the first week of December. Five years ago, that number was roughly double, according to TransitMatters data.

What’s next for the T?

The last year-plus of work came to a close on Dec. 20 when maintenance crews finished two weeks of work on the Green Line.

Since launching the Track Improvement Program in November 2023, the T fixed all 191 slow zones then in place, plus another 35 that arose along the way.

But slow zones aren’t gone for good.

Things break. Though the MBTA has cleared its massive backlog of repairs, slow zones could still pop up as individual maintenance or environmental issues arise. But the transit agency is better prepared to make the needed repairs promptly, officials said.

There will also be some planned track closures in 2025, though T officials said they hope to schedule fewer repairs on weekdays and take other steps to limit the inconvenience for riders.

The next year is not going to look anything like 2024 did, MBTA Chief Operating Officer Ryan Coholan said.

High among the T’s priorities will be upgrading its signal system, a vital but hidden network of equipment that collects data on train locations and controls how trains move down the tracks.

The Red and Orange line signal systems were installed as early as the 1970s with an expected lifespan of about 40 years, according to the MBTA. The systems are safe to use but in need of modern replacements that would require less manual labor and save time and money spent on maintenance.

The signal work on the Red and Orange Lines should be done by early 2026, Eng said.

Other work will include improving station accessibility and maintaining a state of good repair throughout the transit network, to make sure the system doesn’t “fall backward,” Eng said.

“As things pop up, plans are immediately put in place to address them,“ Coholan said. ”We’re not going to wait for it to compound into something else ... That’s the new mantra.”

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