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Breakdowns and ticket problems on first workday after fare increases

UPDATE: The T reports the pass problem has been fixed in time for the evening rush.

There were two dead trains on the Red Line this morning. Meanwhile, Kristin MacDougall tweets she asked a woman at a customer-service window at Downtown Crossing what to do about the fact that her July pass didn't work:

Woman at T Cust Svc window said: Bad batch of July passes indeed went out. Should work in 2 days. Till then, duck or piggyback.

Which no doubt will prove to be very handy advice when she tries it in front of one of those plainclothes T cops.

She adds that when she got there shortly after 9 a.m., there were 8 people in front of her - and 40 behind her.

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Comments

The T had no problem updating the ticket machines overnight with the new commuter rail fares.

Yet a ticket for zones 9 or 10 is still impossible to buy from a machine.

I think that shows the priority of T management toward everything Charlie: If it directly impacts revenue, it will be updated pronto. If it affects customer convenience, it is of little consequence.

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If they know some of the passes are malfunctioning why can't they just transfer the data from the broken cards to a new card? It seems like that is something the T should be able to do fairly simply, it must be similar technology to how the hotels/parking garages do it and that takes 5 seconds to re-program a card.

Peterborough
http://www.bostontipster.com

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It's with the paper CharlieTickets.

And North Station subway was a total cluster this morning - they had at least 5 CSAs and two Transit Cops directing people through one faregate that was jury-rigged open.

This story just made boston.com, but with the Globe's usual "nothing to see here, the T says they're fixing the problem and what the T says is gospel truth to us' slant.

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Oh ha ha ha. Where was the "writer" on unpaid internship from - a grad school in Nebraska or something?

If only it were a truly sprawling system - you could get there from here.

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I would argue that a system that runs from Warwick RI to Newburyport is in fact sprawling. The problem isn't so much that it doesn't sprawl, but that it doesn't concentrate. We need more focused, density of connections in the core and maybe one ring out from there. Sprawling means too much focus on the exurbs.

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Telltale sign: A commuter rail expansion forced through at an obscene $180,000 per rider that can't even sustain weekend service (Greenbush), vs the Green Line extension estimated at a reasonable $20,000 per rider that has to fight for scraps.

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$20k per GLX rider is as fictional as the number of riders high speed rail projects will attract. Cost cuts were needed. Simple stations like Green Line and commuter rail stops. No sound barriers - property owners already live with the noise and vibration of faster, heavier trains. Barriers are just to line their pockets courtesy of taxpayers.

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That $20,000 per rider is from the estimate with all the bloated crap in it. I agree that the stations are too expensive, and this should be a lot cheaper since they own the ROW already. But even so, it's still a good value.

American light rail projects tend to have ridership projections that turn out to be slight underestimates.

And I'm not sure what that dig at HSR was -- most HSR projects around the world, unless a complete screw-up, turn out to be very popular. Even the Acela attracts enough customers to cover operating costs, and it's not high-speed.

But you do seem to be lost in some ideological fantasy world where the only solution is WIDER WIDER roads. Do us a favor and get a clue, or just scoot on back to the Herald comment section where you belong.

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The press release wasn't talking about the extent of the commuter rail when it used "sprawling system".

"Sprawling system" was used here to describe the points where the commuter rail runs into the subway system, which is where the magnetic strip on the passes becomes relevant. Somehow Porter, South Station, North Station etc. are "sprawling", even though they are all within a 3 mile radius of City Hall.

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Commuter rail also connects directly at Quincy, Braintree and Malden, and there are people with zone passes who use them all over the system. If you try to use your Zone 3 monthly ticket at Riverside becuase you decided to park and take the Green Line today instead of riding commuetr rail from Wellesley, the pass readers there won't like it any more than the pass readers at North Station. If you take a bus from Salem station after you get off the commuter train, the pass reader on the bus won't read your Zone 3 monthly ticket even though your pass should be valid on the bus. If you you try to use your zone pass for West Medford station on the 94 bus, the fare box will make some ugly beeps and the driver will might you for cash. (Hopefully, they have told all bus and Green Line drivers to accept a visual inspection of zoned monthly passes at fareboxes until they fix the problem)

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If you take a bus from Salem station after you get off the commuter train, the pass reader on the bus won't read your Zone 3 monthly ticket even though your pass should be valid on the bus. If you you try to use your zone pass for West Medford station on the 94 bus, the fare box will make some ugly beeps and the driver will might you for cash.

Unlike Charlie Cards, Commuter Rail passes have LARGE PRINTED NUMBERS on them and other markings that say "THIS IS A TOTALLY LEGIT JULY T PASS". I have a Zone 1A pass so I can use the commuter rail from West Medford. Most of the time, when I go to use it on buses, the driver sees it and waves me on without using the farebox because it is faster that way.

FTR, one of my kids just used my gronked pass this afternoon on the 94 bus. Yes, it did make ugly beeps, but guess what? Driver looked at the JULY ZONE 1A printed on it and waved him on. (it did scan properly when he got on the Red Line at Davis due to the reprogramming). Coming back on the Greenline after his visit to Landmark Center, he was waved onto the trolley at Fenway without a worry

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The point is that the zoned passes are used all over the sprawling network, not just North Station, South Station, Back Bay. Yes there is a greter concentration there, but they are used elswhere on a routine basis.

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Dead train at Harvard at rush hour? But of course.

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25 minutes for a train at Arlington this evening. No announcement over the speakers, nothing on the screens and when the dead train rolled by and T worker got out no word from him either.

A few of us forced our way onto the D line and then took me another 35 minutes to make it to Chestnut Hill.

Glad those fare hikes are working for us.

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I last lived in Boston in 2006 and over the last 12 months stopped riding the green line entirely. It was better to walk, even in the rain.

6 years later and it just gets worse and worse and worse, I cannot imagine having to depend on it now.

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And yet another one-hour wait to get out of the Alewife garage (5:20 to 6:35 in my case). When there are extra people exiting the train, it occurs to no one to start managing the traffic exiting the garage.

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Traffic wasn't so bad around Alewife until the City of Cambridge needed more property tax revenues and allowed all the business parks to go up in the area without any increase in roadway to support them. How stupid is that? Not enough apparently, now new apartments or condos are going up where Faces used to be. Cambridge cares more about expanding their government as a communist state than even the fragile wetlands environment at Alewife.

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I used to work at Arthur D. Little before it folded. They have restored wetlands where there used to be a parking lot that frequently flooded. There is also less office space in that area than there was in the 1990s, as the building I worked in and a couple of the other ADL buildings have been torn down.

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The vast majority of traffic at Alewife is through traffic and T garage traffic. The half-dozen office buildings and one apartment building are a drop in the bucket.

I blame the T, the DCR, and Arlington for the traffic. They never finished the original 2-16 interchange, which would have had a free-flowing ramp from the T garage to 2 west.

Another lesser cause of traffic is the mess at 16 and Mass Ave, which is Cambridge's fault since they own that traffic light.

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I hope garage traffic gets better once the new parking payment machines in the T station are turned on.

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