Choi has been particularly central to this push as the agency’s chief of staff through 2023, a position in which she took the lead on revamping the organizational culture. She ended her tenure at the T in January to become CEO of Virginia Railway Express (VRE), but before leaving she spoke with MIT Alumni News Explained his role in detail. Describing it as “being a master of everything and nothing at the same time”, Cho explained: “I’m here to make things happen. I find places where we have a sticky organizational knot that needs to be untied.”
Dullea, the MBTA’s senior director of service planning, is in charge of the team responsible for planning and scheduling every bus route in the system, as well as the Red, Orange, Green and Blue lines. His group also determines where buses operate and adopts both train and bus service patterns when the area changes.
Subramaniam, the MBTA’s senior director of rider tools, leads the team that manages the agency’s digital ecosystem: the website, real-time signage and the MBTA Go app, which provides riders with live transit information, including arrival times, vehicle tracking and closure updates for buses, trains and ferries.
Innovation, in Choe’s view, is a practical necessity in a system whose infrastructure dates back to the opening of the Tremont Street Subway in 1897. There are old assets to maintain and modern expectations to meet, all with public resources that never stretch far enough. There was a tendency, she says, to plan endlessly for years in the hopes of making everyone happy, but in the end making no one happy because very little progress was actually made. Resources were consumed by process rather than progress.
The way out of that cycle was to rethink how projects were delivered, structure contracts differently and streamline operations by relying more on in-house expertise. The result, she says, is an increasingly “can do” culture that focuses less on drafting plans and more on delivering results, a change she sees as essential to maintaining service reliability and supporting the region’s economic dynamism. And while older Red Line cars, which perform poorly in extreme cold, will continue to present challenges until new cars replace them and planned service disruptions are ongoing for needed repairs on all subway lines, overall service is improving. Since the spring of 2024, the number of scheduled weekday trips on the Red, Orange, and Blue lines has steadily increased, due to extensive track repairs, new operating procedures, and the addition of more railcars.
The new innovation mindset – including an emphasis on faster, more efficient project delivery and cross-department collaboration – is likely to shape the MBTA for years to come.
Innovation underpinned by public service
Cho has spent her career in the public sector, a choice she attributes in part to the sense of responsibility instilled in her at MIT. “The biggest difference at MIT is that when you graduate, you graduate with the expectation that you’re going to change the world,” she says.
Choe joined the MBTA in early 2020, after more than six years as chief engineer and director of construction management at Boston’s Department of Public Works. In 2023, he launched the Innovation Hub, an initiative that highlights and promotes internal improvements as part of a public agency’s quest to provide the best possible service to riders on a limited budget. “How do we do this more efficiently? How do we really keep our costs down, how do we find new ways to do things so we can better provide that service for all of our riders?”
