Choe in particular has been at the center of this push as the agency’s chief of staff since 2023, a position in which she took the lead in revamping organizational culture. She wrapped up her tenure at the T to become CEO of Virginia Railway Express (VRE) in January, but before leaving, she spoke to MIT Alumni News extensively about her role. Describing it as “owning everything and nothing at the same time,” Choe 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. Her group also determines where buses operate and adapts both train and bus service patterns as the region changes.
Subramanian, the MBTA’s senior director of rider tools, leads a team that manages the agency’s digital ecosystem: the website, real-time signage, and the MBTA Go app, which offers riders live transit information—including arrival times, vehicle tracking, and closure updates—for buses, trains, and ferries.
Innovation, in Choe’s view, is a practical requirement 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. For years, she says, the instinct was to plan endlessly in hopes of pleasing everyone, only to end up pleasing no one because little actually moved forward. Resources were consumed by process rather than progress.
The way out of that cycle was to rethink how projects are 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 producing results, a change she sees as essential to maintaining service reliability and supporting the region’s economic mobility. And while aging Red Line cars, which perform poorly in extreme cold, will continue to pose challenges until new cars replace them and planned service disruptions for needed repairs on all subway lines are ongoing, service is improving overall. Since spring 2024, the number of scheduled weekday trips on the Red, Orange, and Blue Lines has climbed steadily, thanks to extensive track repairs, new operating procedures, and the addition of more railcars.
The new innovation mindset—including the emphasis on faster, more efficient project delivery and cross-department collaboration—is likely to shape the MBTA for years to come.
Innovation grounded in public service
Choe has spent her career in the public sector, a choice she attributes partly to a sense of responsibility cultivated at MIT. “The big differentiator at MIT is that when you graduate, you graduate with an expectation that you are going to change the world,” she says.
After more than six years as chief engineer and director of construction management at Boston’s Department of Public Works, Choe joined the MBTA in early 2020. In 2023, she launched the Innovation Hub, an initiative that spotlights and promotes internal improvements, as part of the quest to deliver the best possible service to riders on the constrained budget of a public agency. “We need to constantly be thinking about how we can do that better,” she says. “How do we do it more efficiently? How do we actually keep our costs low, find new ways of doing things so that we can provide that service better for all of our riders?”