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No late-night T service tomorrow
By adamg on Fri, 02/13/2015 - 3:33pm
MassDOT announced that MBTA service on Saturday night will stop at 12:50 a.m., rather than run to 3:30 a.m., so that T workers can try to get a jump on snow fighting.
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Comments
And the Charlie Baker MBTA
And the Charlie Baker MBTA budget cuts begin.
(for the record, that comment is intended to be sarcasm. til it starts happening every subsequent weekend for one reason or another.)
HAHAHA
Yup, Charlie ordered up another blizzard in his efforts to ruin the T.
Olympics 2024 planning...
This was clearly ordered by Olympics2024. There is no better way to drum up public awareness of a broken system then to trash it completely. This certainly puts a spotlight that "the public" will have to deal with. How else do you think the public would fund it?
Lets see if it pays off for them, Cotton.
I think you're onto something there.
That actually doesn't seem to be in tinfoil hat territory and would explain why the entirety of the green line could somehow be shoveled and plowed in a day when the red and orange lines have not been.
The Green Line tracks have no
The Green Line tracks have no third rail to clear, just the two tracks to deal with. There are probably also a lot more safety concerns dealing with the Orange and Red Lines' third rails, making things go slower even slower.
Actually.....
Just yesterday, the senate cut the MBTA budget by $14 mill, under assurance from Mr. Baker that "the cuts wont have an impact on service": http://www.masslive.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/02/massachusetts_senate_...
I loved Sen. Keenan's
I loved Sen. Keenan's response to that:
To be fair, one method of
To be fair, one method of budget cuts in the past at the MBTA have been to use ghost buses and ghost trains.
That is, on lines that run somewhat frequently, a scheduled departure is frequently cancelled. So the schedule shows no cuts, but money is being saved behind the scenes. IE, if a bus is to depart every 8 minutes, the :24 bus never happens.
They got smacked for that
One of those frequently ghosted buses was one that Rep. Sciortino needed to get into town.
He held public hearings and got an earful, raised hell, and got it stopped for a while.
The T started doing it again when he left office, though. Bus 326 7:42a is a regular ghost.
That would explain a lot! At
That would explain a lot! At least for buses.
Fewer ghost employees now
Than in past decades it seems.
"Ghost"
You make it sound as if someone sits in a room at the T, cackling away, while saying "I think this bus is the bus I hate the most! Oh, the money we'll save!". This is not the case.
The actual connection works like this: All of the bus garages have a certain number of operators assigned to "the list". These operators report to work and wait to be assigned the work of someone who has called in sick, failed to show up at all, retired unexpectedly yesterday, etc. But what goes first when you don't have enough operators because the rate of retirements/quitting is outpacing the rate of hiring? The list goes first. Sometimes a garage might only have two or three people on the list on a particular day at all! If four drivers call in sick, someone's work will get dropped that day. There is no conspiracy against particular trips. If you rely on a particular trip of a particular route, you will certainly notice its lack most often, in that human pattern-seeking way.
When the budget is especially tight, the rate of hiring tends to slow down (or stop if you're in a hiring freeze). Drivers pick their work shifts four times per year. It is conceivable that the number of drivers could fall so low that there aren't enough drivers at a garage to pick all of the shifts in the schedule, but this is really exceedingly rare.
One of the MBTA's biggest
One of the MBTA's biggest problems is that it is very top heavy (a lasting legacy of the Bulger era). Way too many administrators and inspectors (eating up the payroll) for too few maintenance staff and operators (no money left over to hire these people).
I concur
I concur with this entire post, 'T employee'. My bus driver friends say the exact same thing. This is 100% true.
But let's not confuse people with real hard facts.
Gee and I got lambasted on here for talking about the T's "lottery" when its posts like this that make it clear the MBTA cannot hire enough people fast enough to fill positions. Yeah all the "qualified" bus drivers are flocking to the T for jobs.. NOT.
The limiting factors on
The limiting factors on hiring drivers are just being allowed to hire them by the budget, and occasionally HR not having enough people themselves to process all the paperwork fast enough. There are always more people who have applied. Although the lottery exists to ensure unbiased selection of applicants for interviews, not primarily as a rate-limiting device.
Doesn't Mayor Walsh want us
Doesn't Mayor Walsh want us to support local businesses on Valentine's Day? Having said that, I'm guessing his request doesn't extend to locally owned bars and clubs.
Baker beat Walsh to the punch
by declaring all of next week as Valentine's Week.