Gina Fiandaca (Questrom’90) when she served as Boston’s transportation commissioner. She faces big challenges as the state’s new secretary of transportation under Governor Maura Healey. Photo by Jonathan Wiggs/the Boston Globe via Getty Images

Transportation

Gina Fiandaca Commuted to BU on the MBTA. Now, Her Job Is to Fix It

Questrom alum is new Massachusetts secretary of transportation

If you’re wondering about Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation Gina Fiandaca’s bona fides as a T rider, consider the shortcut she adopted as a BU student.

Commuting to campus from East Boston on the Blue and Green Lines, she figured out it could be quicker to walk from Government Center to Park Street to catch a B trolley than it was to wait for a crowded C or D trolley for that short hop.

A little thing, perhaps meaningful only to veteran Charlie Card holders. But Fiandaca (Questrom’90) wants you to know that she gets it.

She grew up in East Boston, riding the Blue Line to get to jobs, school, Filene’s Basement. She has a business degree from Suffolk University and an MBA from the Questrom School of Business, and she wasn’t driving to classes. She understands how much a working transportation system matters, to residents and to the city. And she understands that people are tired of delays and shutdowns and fearful for their safety on the MBTA.

“Nothing is more important to us than the safety of our passengers and employees,” she says.

Fiandaca was Boston’s transportation commissioner for four years before moving to Austin, Tex., to serve as assistant city manager for mobility projects, which included getting a multibillion-dollar light rail project off the ground. Now she is back in Eastie “and back on the Blue Line.” 

In December, incoming Governor Maura Healey named Fiandaca secretary, overseeing the four divisions of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT): Highway; Rail and Transit; Registry of Motor Vehicles; and Aeronautics, which regulates all non-Massport airports. As secretary, she also serves on the Massport and MBTA boards. 

The list of T disasters over the last couple of years is long and ugly: a Green Line crash that injured more than two dozen passengers on Comm Ave, a passenger dragged to death by a Red Line train in Southie, passengers bailing out of a burning train on a bridge over the Mystic River. Then there are the mundane but ever-present delays and derailments, the slow zones and the shutdowns, the late delivery and maintenance problems of new rolling stock. All of that on top of a lack of sufficient employees to tackle many of these issues.

It all culminated last August in what the Boston Globe called a “scathing” Federal Transit Administration Safety report that indicted the T for a host of safety failures and that required numerous corrective actions.

“I think last year, beginning with the FTA audit, was a low point for us, and it was just like a punch in the gut. It’s sad,” Fiandaca says. “It was a signal of a lot of neglect, and that no one’s paying attention. The challenge is to address all of those issues.

“There are very, very real issues in terms of the safety and the operations and the infrastructure, the investments that we need to make in personnel and our resources,” she says. “But it’s also a signal to us that we need to get back to the basics.”

The biggest factor in Fiandaca’s success or failure may be Phillip Eng, who took over as general manager of the T in April. Eng is an engineer with nearly four decades of high-level transportation experience, including as president of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (MTA) Long Island Rail Road and interim president of New York City Transit.

“He gets it,” Fiandaca says. Eng is known as a hands-on manager who can tackle everything from restoring employee and rider safety under the watchful eye of the feds to hiring enough bus drivers to keep the system moving. 

“He’s already been out on the system, even before he took the job. He understands that you have to see it yourself,” Fiandaca says. “There’s no substitute for managers being out there on the system, experiencing what the customer experiences and addressing it immediately.

“That, hopefully, sends a message to our own workforce and our community and our riders, that this has the attention of top levels here, that we care.”

Eng reports to Fiandaca but “in reality, it’s a partnership,” she says. “I think what I have tried to instill across the agencies of the secretariat is a collaboration, and that our agencies cannot operate in silos.”

Another question she faces is how to pay for needed changes.

“I think the big question for us as a society is how we’re thinking about transportation funding in general,” she says. “We’ve been looking around the edges of that issue for decades. Really, ever since the advent of electric vehicles and connected technology, we see that there’s a different way of getting around. But [for revenue] we’re pretty reliant on everything related to the automotive industry, from the gas tax to [when she worked in Boston] excise and parking tickets and parking revenue.

“That said, I think that there’s a big conversation around, what does the future for transportation funding look like?”

Another long-term issue is climate change. It’s one Fiandaca, Eng, and the rest of the transportation department will have to start dealing with even as they take on the immediate problems. For starters, rising sea levels caused by climate change could swamp big portions of the T and some area roadways, and force society to think differently about how we get around.

Healey has named Monica Tibbits-Nutt, a former member of the MassDOT board of directors and executive director of the 128 Business Council, as undersecretary of transportation. She’ll be responsible for building out a climate change office in MassDOT “so we will have a point person,” Fiandaca says.

“The other thing we have going on here is the electric vehicle infrastructure program, the repository for all things related to electric vehicle charging and infrastructure and what that means for our own fleets and for the commonwealth in general. So, we’re building out that capacity here.”

Still, it’s a lot.

“I’ve been in public service my whole life,” says Fiandaca, whose sister is WBZ-TV investigative reporter Cheryl Fiandaca. “We get to make an impact in a way that there is in no other profession that offers you that opportunity.

“Boston’s my home,” she adds, “and [I] have the opportunity to serve here, to maybe right the ship with the MBTA and rebuild some trust, leave it a little better than I found it.”