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Orange Line
Does anyone know why they have not even tried to open two-track service on the Orange Line north of Wellington? I don't use that part of the line much, but it sounds as if they've completely abandoned it.
They haven't given a reason
So it sure looks like that--like they just said, "We'll get to it later." Especially confusing since they shut down that part of the line over the weekend (in addition to the Tuesday closure) to remove snow.
Third rail fail?
Power issues maybe?
No trains
Just a theory, and a bad one for folks from Malden and points north.
Out of curiosity, I've been occasionally checking in on the number of trains on the line through the web apps. A short while ago, the number was 5. Peak number (on a good day) is 18.
I hope the poor slobs at Wellington whose job it is to rebuild have been working 16 hour days rebuilding the motors that keep breaking down. Not that I want to keep them from having a life- I just want the trains to run!
Curious....
How do you check that via the web?
Where is the T?
This is what I use: Where is the T subway page
Sorry
I was being lazy.
I looked at some of the T's apps.
One site at 5 trains running right now. This was verified by another source.
The app listed above was more depressing, and seemed to be less accurate.
Speculating...
- with limited trains running, reducing trip times (or stops/distance) can increase the headway (frequency of trains)
- the equipment is not operational or has a high probability of being failing.
Combine these two events and the rest of the subway effectively grinds to a halt. Kinda like getting bitten by a zombie on the arm and cutting them arm off to save the rest of it.
Just speculating of course... =/
As I noted in other threads
the outbound track between Wellington and Oak Grove is still not completely plowed out. As of 8:35 this morning, the snow removal machine hadn't yet made it to Malden Station, let alone Oak Grove.
Boo Hoosan
Go take a look at the same scene in Tokyo and get back to me. This is luxury we are looking at.
True....
All we need are they guy's with white gloves to help pack you in!
And in Tokyo do they
And in Tokyo do they regularly have disabled trains? It's one thing to be crammed in if you know the train is going to move as scheduled between stations, quite another when you could be stuck in the tunnel not going anywhere.
Exactly
In Tokyo, it's very rare for a train to be a minute behind schedule, let alone go disabled.
but
and I sound like a broken record....
But they FUND public transit properly unlike here. Over there many people ride public transit and its deemed as a necessity. Owning a car is a luxury there. Plus public transit does not have the 'poor people' stigma that it has here.
Then again because its well funded, they have new cars all the time, and trains that go everywhere so a car is really un-needed.
But until that mentality changes in the US, we'll always be dead last in public transit.
Agreed
on all points. And many nations manage to adequately fund both their highways and public transit systems and keep both to a very high level of maintenance and reliability.
Amazing what you can buy
When half of your tax dollars end up doing good things for everyone, and not being funneled into Halliburton's no-bid double secret contracts for "security" reasons.
So where did all our Stimulus
So where did all our Stimulus cash go?
making the system safe from
making the system safe from terrrrrrists. See something, say something.
To other states
Because the MBTA decided they didn't want to build the projects the Stimilus money was allocated for.
They also don't have to fund
They also don't have to fund a military there.
In this country, every other budget gets cut before the military's. God forbid you cut back on defense spending. We're ALL employees of Raytheon.
Yeah, about that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Self-Defense_Forces
hmmm.
my reliable public
my reliable public transportation is currently launching F-18s in the Indian Ocean.
and
the level of crime and vandalism in and around stations, yards, and cars in Japan is so much lower than here that less money is wasted on fighting those things. They don't have to go mending fences so much from trespassers either.
With all of Dr. Beverly Scott's travels on the MBTA dime, its surprising she didn't visit Japan or Switzerland to see how its done. Instead she concentrated on US conferences, networking with potential new employers it seems.
http://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2015/02/mbta_gm_...
ugh
Your last line is just false. Sorry. It's utter BS. And you have ZERO proof.
And I'm wondering why her travel expenses is even news. She'd be shunned as a non-innovator if she didn't go to these conferences. Its just expected as apart of the job to look at innovation
And as far as not going overseas. Cost comes to mind. And the way things are done over seas is far different than the US. Remember overseas they don't care about ADA or different laws we have that they don't. So things are done far differently.
ADA
That depends widely on where overseas. Japan definitely had ADA-like requirements so do England and France and many other countries. (Though they face some of the same obstacles we do with historic architecture...)
In some cases, those countries have better services, support and design for people with disabilities than the US does.
Her contract was up anyway
Her 3 year contract was up in December, so building and maintaining contacts was prudent for her to do anyway. Maintaining contacts must be more important than maintaining equipment, which doesn't need/use sexy new technology. WiFi before why failing.
Maintenance is unglamorous making it the poor stepchild in a culture wanting the latest electronic toys and apps. This is a problem of our culture showing up. New automobiles too are horrible, with video game-like consoles while buyers forgetting that driving is the primary task.
How can politicians and T managers grab headlines for themselves announcing more maintenance rather than new service? Its the same problem with winning votes - sexier to promise more stuff than responsible action.
Backroom operations like maintenance always gets the shaft compared to media and customer facing ends of things. Operations centers used to be behind the scenes, but the T now has a shiny impressive one looking like the War Room to show off to media. When was the last time the media toured maintenance facilities?
Travel expenses aren't news?
Are you kidding, or trolling?
Twenty six months, 30 junkets, $55K-plus in expenses. Meanwhile, the entire system that she's being paid $225K/year to manage is falling down around us. (Not her, she apparently wasn't here.) No wonder she couldn't deliver a coherent statement at any time in the last three weeks. It was crisis, not a convention, so she was completely at sea.
And when the shit finally hits the fan, and it's time for heavy lifting and she's called in to actually do her job, she does a dixie. Poof, see 'ya wouldn't want to be 'ya!
Good riddance.
A 63 year old career
A 63 year old career executive with umpteen years of experience should be making $45,000 a year and living in a hovel and thanking us for it, dammit!
Go see how much the CEO of YOUR company makes, including perks, how much he spends in travel, and get back to me on that.
$55K would have bought us 1
$55K would have bought us 1.28% of a new Red Line subway car (based on the numbers from here, $566.6M for 132 new cars, meaning $4,292,000/car). That's, like, less than a foot of a subway car.
You need to find numbers with a few more zeroes in them to cut from the T, if such cuts are going to be useful toward upgrading the equipment.
$55K, or less than a foot of a subway car?
New betting pool.
Will Dr. Scott's accrued "unused vacation" payout be greater or less than that amount when she finally terminates employment, some two months hence?
I'm going to go out on a limb and take the over on this one.
Thank you for saving my time
It's really convenient that I don't have to visit the Herald website to get my daily dose of idiotic slack-jawed drooling political insight.
Fucking MBTA has 6000+ employees, a budget upwards of 1.7 billion dollars, and serves over a million people a day.
I once worked for a multinational which was of similar size. The CEO of that operation traveled a whole lot more than once a month, and you can bet he spent a crapload more than 2 grand a trip.
I wouldn't know Beverly Scott from Willard Scott, but she's not the problem.
well
Willard's got less hair.
Annnndddd
just to deflate the story a bit more, the intrepid Herald reporters are not reporting on whether these travel expenses were reimbursed through any other funds other than the MBTA's normal sources. Some of the travel mentioned was part of her role as a Board member of different groups, which sometimes pay for travel to meetings. Also there is the possibility that reimbursement for travel was provided by other outside groups, such as charitable foundations (the Barr Foundation has sent MassDOT/MBTA employees to "learning sessions" and such in the past, for example).
Don't know if that is the case here or how that sort of thing gets accounted for in the financial reports that the Herald was looking at, but at the end of the day the amount of money we're talking about is not exactly earth-shattering in relation to the scale of the financial problems at the T. The Herald is just doing its best to keep the focus on Bev Scott so that people don't go off on Baker's first act of mismanagement (he hadn't even spoken to the women in all this time?? Why not invite her to the bunker in Framingham during the blizzard?)
And it looks like people are noticing:
they are not
Sorry. This is pocket change for travel. You obviously never worked closely to executives.
If you think what she spent is a lot.. come over to the private sector, I have some expense reports to show you that would make your head spin. Just saw a 900 dollar receipt for dinner come the Admin Assistant's desk for the CEO. One dinner for two people.
And no I'm no trolling. As someone who deals with execs who travel, I know what the costs are. This is nothing compared to the private sector.
This is a non issue. It's called 'professional development' any professional position out there has it built into its employee budget. Without, she'd get called out why 'she wasn't learning more about new technologies' or trying to 'attract talent to the T'. She can't win.
she's a 63 year old woman who
she's a 63 year old woman who makes $220,000 a year. If this were a job in the private sector, she'd be making much more and we wouldn't hear a thing about her travel. But this is the Herald, which is a lot of Baker readers who scorn public funding and like to complain about taxes. (I wouldn't be surprised if there's some thinly-veiled racism in their article about her being a 'welfare queen' as well). So naturally, as a public servant, she doesn't 'deserve' a salary and perks on par with the private sector, her career or experience level - she should be making $45k and living in a shoebox and thanking us for it! Please.
Issue isn't just a lack of
Issue isn't just a lack of funding but a lack of effort by the agency itself to at least try to do its job. Being flat broke and lacking a work ethic to begin with is not a recipe for success.
I'd like to see someone do a
I'd like to see someone do a comparison between their funding levels and level of service, and ours, and our level of service. (IOW, the ROI.)
I read an article recently that compared European public spending on health care and what they get for it, vs. Obamacare and what we're getting for it. We're paying something like an order of magnitude more, and getting an order of magnitude less services for efforts.
I have a feeling comparisons in public transit would turn out much the same.
It's not Japan but
Some researchers compared Germany and the United States in transportation costs and benefits:
http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/02/all-the-ways-germany-is-less-car-...
Germans pay less while getting better outcomes. American public policy is very inefficient.
It's mostly due to our car
It's mostly due to our car-centric culture.
No, not exactly: http://chi
No, not exactly: http://chi.streetsblog.org/2014/02/05/transit-gets-shortchanged-in-chica...
We spend far less than most major European cities with comparably complex transit systems.
They get so much more bang for their buck in healthcare thanks to single payer systems (reduction of complex billing admin costs), or public regulation of insurers, drug companies, and medical device makers, such as with utilities. They also embrace that end-of-life care shouldn't automatically default to heroic, invasive, and expensive life-saving measures, all the time.
I was in Tokyo last September, rode the trains during rush hour.
It's not that bad. Crowded, sure. Millions of people, yep. But it's clean and efficient and everyone gets where they're going reasonably well.
It sounds like you read one exaggerated yellow news post about "omg Tokyo trains stack bodies three layers deep to save space!" and just never bothered to look any further into it. Because I went there and it was nothing like that.
I WISH this were like Tokyo.
Maybe then people would actually move into the train instead of standing in front of the door when another 30 people are behind them.
Google..
"Mexico City Metro rush hour"
then feel better. every single day is worse than the one before. just when you think "oh of course there's no room left", someone finds it. and they just keep getting on.
and good luck getting off at your stop.
yuuppp
Took me an hour and half from Porter. Arrived to the platform at 7:50am. First 4 trains absolutely packed. Eventually hopped on an Alewife train to Davis and got on there. Another lovely commute, courtesy on the MBTA!
Bags
look at the space near their feet, take your bags off your shoulders and backs when possible and you get more room.
The T needs a Kramer-style
The T needs a Kramer-style innovation. No more seats - just drawers. Drawers for all of you!
[img]http://mapsaboutnothing.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/japan.png?w=300[img]
Pfft, look at all that empty space!
Pfft, look at all that empty space above people's heads. They should install bunks or hammocks or something so we can cram more people on there...
Maybe if you're under 5'6", you have to carry someone else on your shoulders...
You're right. It doesn't
You're right. It doesn't quite look like a slave ship yet, but it could if we put the effort in.
I was on their side... until this
I actually got run down by an MBTA bus this morning. There's no bus stop to stand (we know why, I can work with that) so I was standing in a clearing near the bus stop. The bus driver opened the door and told me to "run" to the next stop. I had to run to the next stop, while the bus barreled down behind me. There were no sidewalks cleared, just Tremont street. I was sure I was going to be run over. Which by the way the stop ... doesn't exist because it's covered in snow. The stop is actually in the middle of the busy street.
Either shovel out the stop or stop threating customers with giant buses. One or the other.
Why didn't you call a cop? I
Why didn't you call a cop? I would have. Call a cop and get the driver thrown up against the nearest wall.
That is on the line for calling police or TPD...
...but at the very minimum get a bus # and route # and send it to the T. Won't always get a response, but you might be surprised. If no reports the driver, they won't know what's going on in a case of aggressive behavior.
Actually I did report them to
Actually I did report them to the T. I got all the digits... and I work for the state :). Be careful of which 50 old woman you try to run down, we can be more powerful than we look.
Good...
...a ton of T employees are working their a$$es off trying to squeeze blood from a stone. But the ones that make the whole place look even worse deserve to get nailed for it.
Good!
I say land on 'em with both feet. Hard.
That sounds like incredibly
That sounds like incredibly unsafe behavior (and unprofessional on the part of the driver) and you should probably report that to the MBTA. That guy should not be driving a bus.
See here for complaint contact info.
That sucks
I'm in the same situation (most winters, actually), as my bus stop on a busy road is never shoveled out. I feel really lucky that the drivers on that route understand my plight and will pick me up in the marginally safer spot I stand in, even though *gasp* it's at least 15 feet from the official stop.
I hope you have better luck (and a better driver!) tomorrow!
I'm with everyone else. Get
I'm with everyone else. Get his license plate # and call the cops. That is not only assault, but assault with a deadly weapon. And everyone on that bus was a witness, so you'll have that on your side.
Sardines and Mustard Sauce
Having nothing to do with normal public transportation cattle cars.
I love sardines - but only with mustard sauce. The peculiar thing is that in Boston very few stores sell sardines with mustard sauce. They come with olive oil, lemon juice and hot sauce. But rarely will a supermarket carry sardines with mustard sauce. But go down to Maryland and sardines with mustard sauce is the norm.
But then I will take a Chesapeake Blue Shell crab steamed with Old Bay seasoning over a dozen lobsters in butter any day.
hey now...
....that's just crazy-talk!
Welp, commuting by car has
Welp, commuting by car has been hell too. 1hr to go 5 miles. Granted, I'm not wedged in like a sardine, but it's still chaotically stressful. A world-class city indeed. Can't wait for another foot or two they're forecasting for this weekend and week.
My T bus (#62) had a giant
My T bus (#62) had a giant hole in the side of it last week, in one of the side doors. A chunk of the door was ripped off, with cold air rushing in through it. I wish I could upload the photo I took of it here. Before we left out of Alewife, the driver was outside the bus trying to fit the broken piece back into place. This wasn't a pin hole - it was 2x2 square chunk. I'd never seen anything like it. It sort of reminded me of my first car in high school, my mom's nearly-dead Plymouth that had a (much smaller) rusting hole in the corner of the floor near the brake pedal. My friends were certain we were riding in the Flintstones car.
That picture of the bus hole haphazardly put back into place by the driver was just a perfect visual depiction of the MBTA as a whole at the moment.
Uploading to imgur.com is
Uploading to imgur.com is free and doesn't even require registration.
Consider yourself lucky
The driver could just as easily declared the bus as "out of service" instead.
Duct Tape
All T vehicles need to be stocked with it.
This has hit the national
This has hit the national news, so it's getting embarrassing for the administration, especially on the heels of Boston's selection as the U.S. candidate for the 2024 Olympics.
Humiliation on a national stage hopefully means the state gets its s$%t together soon.
Curious...
1. We got a s&**t-ton of storms last winter, and I don't remember the T breaking down like this. Sure, there were delays and breakdowns at times, but nothing on this scale. What did they do to clear the snow last year?
2. Anyone know what the T did in the Blizzard of 78? did they shut down that entire week?
Like the rest of the state,
the T was shut down for most of the week following the Bizzard of '78. Then again, at that time we had leaders who recognized that it would actually take time to get our transportation facilities up and running again, instead of pressuring the managers of those facilites to get operating "as soon as possible".
Not quite
Since last winter was the first winter bring Waquiot Jr. to daycare, and seeing that we used a stroller to transport him, I was very sensitive to snow. Here are the numbers-
December- 11.7 inches of snow total, half coming on the 17th, and it did not go below freezing on the 29th.
January- 21.8 inches, the biggest snowfall on the 2nd and 3rd (over 15 inches), 59 degrees on the 11th, over 50 for highs 1th through the 14th, and highs above freezing the 11th through the 20th.
February- 22.9 inches, with 10.7 inches of that on the 5th, small storms of the 13th, 15th, and 18th. 55 degrees on the 2nd, and highs above 40 from the 20th through the 24th.
In short, that would be a typical winter. It snows a bit, it warms up, it snows again, it warms up, and so on. The T could handle one storm above a foot (though probably had a tough time of it right away.) 60 inches in 2 weeks, and only 2 days where Logan has seen temps above freezing- it's not in the same league as last season.