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Eight Minutes to Park Street
By adamg on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 11:02am
Photos of a bygone Harvard Square, including the famous sign atop the subway entrance.
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Comments
Probably closer to ten minutes now
because when that sign was still up, the Red Line didn't have to make a sharp, slow 90-degree turn just south of Harvard Square station. Before 1979, the tracks went gently southwest under Brattle Street to a storage yard where today's Harvard JFK School of Government is, rather than north towards Porter Square.
The MBTA trip planner does
The MBTA trip planner does show it as 10 minutes today.
The old Harvard Square subway platform
was under the part of Mass. Ave. near today's Au Bon Pain. The current one is under the next part of Mass. Ave., near the Coop,
BayBankBank of America, and CVS.Is it only 10 minutes?
Is it only 10 mins in practice? My memory like to say it feels like 15 minutes.
Ah, those signs, I seen similar pictures online before. It reminds me of why I started finding this site. I was looking up mbta history because I am a history buff like that. Then I found that Bad Transit blog (anyone know what ever happened to that site?) that recorded so much BS of the MBTA system and how so many things is going so wrong. Then later, that site lead to this site with its occasional MBTA posts. So messed up that the MBTA was once cleaner, faster, reliable, and well... works. Even if it still only takes 10 minutes from Park street, it breaks down way too much these days along with all the other problems.
Bad Transit
I remember it well - was a great site back in the day. I think the guy behind it got a new job and burned out, alas.
There is one better thing about the Harvard-Park trip: The excitement you feel every time you pass that animated ad for Coraline. Only -2 less years until it opens. I can't wait!
The same coraline ad was in
The same coraline ad was in the DC red line last summer. It's probably still up as well.
Well, if you want to see if
Well, if you want to see if it really takes 10 minutes without going out and taking a ride, go to this link and time how long it takes a random little arrow icon to make it from Harvard to Park
http://mbtaplot.appspot.com/?route=Red&a=Display+Map
Oh wow
Did it! 10 min, 4 sec.
Man, I could watch that thing for hours. Except I don't like how the trains crash into each other. They really should make two separate tracks.
Cool!
I'm amazed there are what appear to be 13 trains running at 11:20 on a Sunday night.
You can do Blue and Orange, too. But not Green -- which we knew.
mbtaplot isn't exact
That site is useful, but the movement of the arrows doesn't represent the train or bus's exact location. The arrows continuously move even when there are no data updates.
But this is more useful than the official nextbus.com, where under certain circumstances a bus will disappear from the map, and its time estimate will disappear, only to suddenly reappear later with a much shorter estimate.
Just under 9.5 minutes
I rode it around 12:15 this afternoon. Nine minutes, 26.5 seconds from door closing at Harvard to door opening at Park Street.
It took over a minute to get up to full speed after going around the 90-degree turn just south of Harvard station, so that accounts for almost all of the time increase.
Great pictures. But they
Great pictures.
But they were copied without attribution from the MIT Libraries' Perceptual Form of the City site: http://dome.mit.edu/handle/1721.3/33656
For example, see:
http://dome.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.3/35359/...
http://dome.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.3/35234/...
http://dome.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.3/35364/...
Photos are attributed, though incompletely
The bottom of the page says "My thanks again to the Rotch Visual Collections
Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Cambridge"