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T commute what you'd expect
By adamg on Wed, 02/11/2015 - 7:22am
MBTA GM Beverly Scott in T control center this morning. Photo by MBTA.
It's shuttle buses instead of trains between Braintree and JFK and those buses are going nowhere fast because they're on the same roads everybody else is using. Of course, first you have to get on a shuttle - Riley Foster shows us the line at Wollaston around 7:45:
The Orange Line is running just one train on only one track between Oak Grove and Wellington. Thomas photographred the platform at Wellington around 7:30:
There's a switch problem on the Blue Line.
Green Line service is allegedly normal.
Commuter rail? Ice, other trains, the usual slowing things down.
A 7 bus died at E. 4 and N, blocking traffic and other buses.
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Best T synopsis
"We’ve had a perfect storm for decades, decades of serious disinvestment," the T’s chief said. "And every nondecision ultimately is a decision, figuring out through the years how to make it all work without having the investment — how to rob Peter to pay Paul." — source
That is probably the best and most succinct quote I've seen to describe the current T woes so far.
The sad thing is
..Baker is probably itching to fire her so he can replace her with one of his golfing buddies. And he probably will, because she's exactly the person we need running the T. Someone with enough of a spine to stand up to people like Baker, one of the architects of the current funding debacle.
Can you explain how she is exactly the person we need?
You say
Why? How has she stood up to Baker so far? By not communicating with him for three weeks?
Yes
The buck stops two rungs below the Guv'nah.
She hasn't seemed to have a problem coordinating with Marty Walsh, so the question is why is Bakers administration MIA?
Works well with Marty
Isn't the best bullet point to put on your resume these days.
Sure it is, it'll get you a
Sure it is, it'll get you a job with Boston 2024 ;)
The General Manager reports
The General Manager reports to the Sec. of Transportation, who reports to the Gov.
Two Way Street
it's a two way street too. However, BAKER is to blame on this. He's at the top, so its his responsibility to talk to his staff.
And sorry, I don't by this "well she doesn't report to me" bullshit he's spewing. Yes she reports to the the T board, but we're all under the same umbrella.
When my CEO or an top level exec at my company asks me to do something or to give him a status update, I do that. I don't look at him and say "Sorry I don't report you, go shove it". The CEO.. or in this case.. baker is at the top of the food chain.
The way I interpreted the
The way I interpreted the news that she hadn't met with the Governor since he took office, was that he was snubbing her, not the other way around. Isn't it the incoming Governor's responsibility to go around and meet with all agency and department heads? That he ignored her says he didn't think the T was important enough to communicate directly with.
Baker was devious and clever
He selected anti-car, public transit advocate from Dukakis Center and formally CLF, Stephanie Pollack as his Secretary of Transportation. This is a mess CLF helped create, and now its hers to deal with!!! Ha, ha, ha! She owns it!
Baker really doesn't have authority to fire Scott or meddle in the MBTA, its the responsibility of the MBTA board. He instead gets to throw rocks from the sidelines and eat popcorn.
Keep on grinding that
Keep on grinding that (nonsensical) axe, Markk.
Or, better yet:
Don't.
Since the previous MBTA discussion got surplanted by this one...
I'm leaving my response to your response on CLF and Forward Funding here.
Or he gets to be an adult.
This is Massachusetts. We are blessedly a small state, and so the governor is in essence a mayor. His job is to keep the lights on and the water running.
If he instead wants to engage in political theater like politicians in the rest of the country, then it's incumbent on us to make him regret this desire.
Actually,
she said that it was he that had not communicated with her for three weeks.
Funny that he hasn't done
Funny that he hasn't done that with any of his appointments yet.
Last years T budget
Was 1.75 BILLION!!!
That's serious disinvestment?
How much went to maintenance
How much went to maintenance and replacement of equipment, vs. debt, pensions, health care costs, expansion projects ...?
Context is for LIBERALS!!!
Some fancy-pants elitists might point out that $1.75bn is a useless data point without including facts like costs, revenues, etc., but Real Red-Blooded Americans know that "billion" is a big number and don't need egg-headed arithmetic to figure out what it means.
GAAP
GAAP is a librul conspiracy!
True
But they basically made up budgets in the early '90's so it looked as though they weren't in as bad a shape as they actually were (not budgeting for increases in health care costs/pension obligations). Now, they're a disaster.
Sure is
When you forgo 200 million a year in maintenance, for 20 years, due to being saddled with big dig debt and getting your revenue tied to the plunging sales tax during the last great recession.
Surely we can all agree that plan was for the state to move it's Big Dig and MBTA funding burden to the MBTA solely to shore up it's bonds, while burdening them with debt payments. Mass gets to keep it great bond ratings and good credit, and well, the MBTA is on it's own.
Yes, it is
Of course it is. The annual GDP of the Boston area is $370 billion dollars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._metropolitan_areas_by_GDP
Just this one week of T disruption has likely taken a serious bite out of the $7billion that this region would have produced this week. Its complete madness to under-invest so heavily in the infrastructure that we need to make this whole economic engine work.
And the maintenance budget was?
From what I've seen, in past years it was whatever was left over at the end of the year before. Great budgeting, but I guess it's like Waquiot Jr.'s college fund (we are expecting a scholarship for him.)
Like white trash retirement plan
Lottery tickets. Hope, against all odds.
The T is Detroit
You're acting like if the state raised more money it would have gone to the T. The T budget isn't arrived at in a vacuum. Funding the T takes from health care, takes from education, takes from etc. Democrats have been in control of the state exclusively for 8 years. If they wanted to rebuild the T they would have done it!
The problem with this state is it has big liberal eyes and a conservative wallet. Beverly Scott was the perfect aspirational speaker for that attitude as long as she never had to call in the promises the T made.
For instance, how many people can the T really carry? Is there simply a throughput level at the chokepoints that can't be exceeded? Will expanding lines outward simply increase pressure at those chokepoints?
If this was a terrorist attack, how confident would you be in the T's emergency response plan?
If the T was a city, it would be Detroit. Maybe we should think about scrapping it and moving to a more flexible system.
Kinda
Outside of the "democrat" vs "republican" stuff you are spewing, which btw is pointless considering we've had REPUBLICAN Governors prior to Patrick who repeated axed a lot of funding the DEMOCRATS were trying to push thru. Your point about that is invalid.
And your comment about funding the T takes away from others, you'r partially right on a simplistic term. But the way the T is funded comes from different buckets than education and other state budgets. (and much of it comes from the Fed too)
Considering any anti-terrorism training came from the Fed and was funded by the Fed, I'd say it could be as expected for any public transit agency. Hell they even have a training facility in an abandoned rail tunnel in southie for this response.
(and of course we may not have trains that run but we had a ton of money ear marked for security!)
And scrap it for what? And what do we do in the mean time for transit? It's not like we can wave a magical wand and all new trains and rail lines appear. It would be just like the MBCR -> Keolis contract transfer. Same equipment. Same Employees. Same BullShit.
And before you even say "Privatization" please research private transit companies to see how well they fair these days. Not well.
*Cough* BERy *Cough*
Well I did a great job right up until Eisenhower subsidized the heck out of highways.
Privatization
= Republican patronage
T needs to go bankrupt
Shrink the system to something the state is willing to pay for.
Get out from adding additional expensive train extension they can't maintain.
Get out of runaway health care and retirement commitments.
Default on debt.
Pave over red/orange line for bus rapid transit and cancel order for new train cars.
Put smaller vans on underused bus routes. Use cheaper drivers for vans.
Robot drones.
Finally watched her presser
Finally watched her presser last night. Amazed how many people were praising her on here yesterday. That was embarrassingly pathetic and unprofessional. She should have been fired before the presser ended. It's a tough job, sure, but you're paid 200K+ to answer the tough questions.
"I'll let the public decide" she says.
Disgraceful.
That's actually nnnnnot her job...
If you believe that any current MBTA administration should be fired over this debacle, then you're near-sighted and misunderstood. The problems we're having today are a direct result of decisions made 20, 30, and 40 years ago. There is an army of MBTA workers set to "retire" at the age of 50 and collect a 70% pension from the state's transportation budget. On top of that, the mismanaged Big Dig debt, the one that was paying overtime for like 10 extra years to anyone who asks, got transferred right on to the lap of the MBTA.
Its not like they can just buy new trains tomorrow. The people who criticize the loudest often have no idea where money even comes from. They'll often times be the first to complain when taxes are raised...
Um
Because she has the balls to actually say what everyone has been thinking for decades about the T. And she's 100% correct.
So what? I think if I had been working non stop for 3 weeks and being blamed for something I had little to no control over. I'd go all postal on people too.
Too many GM's have been appointed "yes men", which is probably who Baker will replace her with. And what do "Yes Men" accomplish... nothing! They sit back and take the punches thrown at them until they either no longer can take it anymore, or get fired for problems that were out of their control. And how does this improve service? Nothing..
Maybe we need a leader who is going to say "What the fuck" and buck the system to force changes that the MBTA so desperately needs.
I agree. She can only do so
I agree. She can only do so much with what she has. I respect that she's being honest about it and expressing that she's pissed. One of the reporters asked her if she was going to resign over this and she said no--that frankly, if someone could step in and do a better job, they should step up. I don't see how anyone does a better job in this situation given what the MBTA has. I will agree they should've been honest about what service would actually be like earlier this week--they probably should've done the reverse and canceled service Monday and then run limited yesterday. But other than that, what else do you do?
Who says she hasn't?
Closed doors and all, the public message of the government isn't usually the same as what she's telling Walsh and Baker in meetings. For all we know that's exactly why she was so pissed off at being thrown under the bus; because she had been telling them exactly what was going to happen and to be prepared, and they were not prepared or willing to take the heat.
Who hasn't had a boss that expects blood from stone?
Agreed on that presser
Folksy aphorisms she had. Plenty of those. But her grasp of the technical details of running this system seems thirty feet wide and a half an inch deep. If I was delivering less than 10 per cent of what I signed on for this week and the boss and my clients wanted to know why, I damn well better do more than: "This isn't my first Rodeo!" and "We're gonna fly like an eagle!"
When you have the facts, pound the facts. When you don't, pound the table. She's absolutely killing that table.
Needham Line packed to capacity
7:58 A.M. train from Roslindale to Boston on the Needham commuter rail line was packed to capacity. Out of approximately 50+ people waiting for the train, maybe 15 got on. The conductor said the train doors were frozen shut, and he couldn't guarantee that the next train would be running.
Why not set up temporary bus-only lanes?
for those JFK-Quincy-Braintree shuttle buses?
Because
We live in a country that doesn't give a damn about you if you aren't in a car.
That is very true
But why? Can't figure it out.
Because people in cars
Because people in cars continue to vote down any additional money for public transit (even though it would mean less cars on the road and better commutes for them), which makes the public transit fall to hell (see: current MBTA status), which makes more people take cars, who don't want to pay any more money for public transit…. the cycle continues.
I must have missed that vote
When did the public vote on this? I must have missed it.
The only people that allocate money are your state reps.
Gas tax indexing initiative
Remember remember the 4th of November (2014), when 53% of voters decided that having the gas tax keep up with inflation was a bad idea?
^^ that. gas tax indexing. it
^^ that. gas tax indexing. it wouldn't have completely fixed the problem, but it sure wouldn't have hurt it either.
I believe thats called...
...taxation without representation. How quickly you've forgotten history... It was simply to stop the tax from being indexed or increased whenever state legislators like. We live in a representative democracy. If the state wants to raise taxes, put it to a vote
"The Reason Foundation did a study in September about how much the states spend on highways. Massachusetts averages $675,000 per mile a year, versus a national average of $162,000. "
And you're saying, MA needs more tax payer dollars???
Useless to compare to national average. where is link to study?
Comparing something that is highly weather dependent to a national average doesn't make any sense. I bet we spend way more on fixing potholes caused by frost heaves and on snowplows than Florida does. What does that prove? At least *TRY* to make the comparison apples to apples.
No
Just no, to all of your points above.
Indexed and increased whenever state legislators like are different from each other, in fact, they are actually the opposite. The reason you index taxes is so the politicians can't decide when to increase and decrease them, and they just move according to an appropriate benchmark. That way, your revenues move in line with your expenses, and everything works the way it should.
You may need to re-read those history books yourself. Taxation without representation is when a legislature levies taxes on you, and you have no representation in that legislature to speak for you. If you have gone through a process to elect the people in a legislature, and then they decide to implement a tax, you are actually being taxed with representation, which is how most democracies work.
All wrong
The bunk catchphrase of taxation without representation has already thoroughly been discredited with another reply.
Every other tax you pay goes up with inflation, because it's a percentage. Gas tax can't be a percentage due to the wild volatility of gas prices, but when it doesn't keep up with inflation, then it goes DOWN by default.
The Reason Foundation study compares MassDOT money spent to MassDOT controlled road mileage. The problem is that Mass is unusual in having a very low percentage of state controlled roads. As a result, MassDOT spends a lot of money in the form of local assistance designing and reconstructing non-state roads. That money is not wasted, but in the pointless metric of total money spent/state road mileage, it appears to be wasted.
Such a small drop in the bucket
That is such a small drop in the bucket, it's insignificant.
I voted against that question because I don't think a tax should raise automatically just because. If the legislature wants money, they need to ask for it. Having an automatic raise is extremely lazy and they just want to make their job easier. Sorry, no dice.
Also, I have been an advocate of raising the gas tax a lot, like a dollar, and I'm an everyday driver. Of course, that would be political suicide for any politician. Even when Patrick tried to raise it 19 cents, it failed miserably.
Just because?
It was tied to inflation. It wasn't arbitrary (as "just because" denotes). Basically, pretend the tax is currently set to equal 0.01 pennies of every dollar you spend. In a few years, when your dollar is worth 10% less because of inflation, you shouldn't still be spending 0.009 pennies on the tax. You should still be spending 0.01 pennies of your dollar on the tax. It's going to cost that 10% more to pay for the supplies to do the work that the gas tax is paying for to fix roads and transit systems. So, don't pay relatively less money in tax as a result of nobody getting around to arguing over increasing the gas tax a portion of a penny to cover inflation.
It was also set to DECREASE the tax if inflation is negative in a given year (but only to a specifically declared minimum). But nobody ever talked about that seemingly positive aspect of the law which has now been killed by ballot question. The only reason not to index taxes to inflation is when salaries don't keep pace with inflation either. But whose fault is that?
Also, if letting taxes fluctuate with inflation is wrong, then why do we not set the sales tax to a specific amount per transaction or item or something? As consumer goods cost more (inflation), the sales tax keeps pace. Let's convert the gas tax to a percentage tax too. Let's put the gas tax at 6.25% of your total fuel cost instead of $0.24/gal. If fuel costs more, then it will automatically cost more in roads projects and transit projects that require fuel as well, so best to index the tax to the cost of gas and not just some arbitrary per gallon rate.
There, happy now?
November
http://www.sec.state.ma.us/ele/ele14/pip141.htm
Thanks for paying attention to the political process? Or maybe that was sarcasm on your part. My Internet is very slow this week, sometimes the sarcasm doesn't come through.
Not worth it. Reserved lanes
Not worth it. Reserved lanes are only worth setting up for IOC members and Olympics athletes
And Patriots players. And
And Patriots players. And knuckleball catchers.
C'Mon Ron
Traffic, for those of us who do not want to stand in the Nanook Conga Line at Wollaston, would be backed up to North Andover to the north and Hanover to the south. Dorchester Avenue, East Milton, and West Quincy traffic would come to a standstill.
What would help are Staties at Morrissey and Freeport and Neponset Circle to regulate the light cycles, and then keep the buses on Newport Ave / Burgin Parkway, and not Hancock Street. The buses can then go to Quincy Adams then down Washington Street in Braintree. That would keep them off of Route 3 and the merge off from Burgin Parkway.
Also, would someone please explain why the Boat isn't running from Hingham? We have a Coast Guard, right? Charlie couldn't pick up the phone and have them do a few runs with a boat to keep the ice free? The CG was very good following the boat with their machine gun carrying zodiacs on a nice summer day whenever John Ashcroft got scared. How about stepping up today? That would have relieved a lot of congestion today.
Coasties don't listen to the
Coasties don't listen to the governor. They are feds.
The governor is important.
The governor is important. If he calls the commander of the Boston Coast Guard installation, he'll get through.
The National Guard are feds
The National Guard are feds too and yet...
Not quite...
Not quite...
The State National Guard units are under the command of their home governor until activated by the National Command Authority (the President, Secretary of Defense, and so forth on down) for federal service.
See page 47 of this Powerpoint from the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs for detail: http://ra.defense.gov/Portals/56/Documents/OSDRACommandBrief.pptx
Not quite.
Not quite.
The Coast Guard is a branch of the armed forces no different than the Navy or Air Force.
I thought coasties were DHS
I thought coasties were DHS now.
It's a complicated issue.
It's a complicated issue. They are an armed service of the US, so they are part of the military. Yet unlike everyone else in the military, they don't report to the Secretary of Defense, normally.
They are a part of the DHS, but they can also be assigned to the Dept of the Navy by order of the president or if it is a time of war, by the Congress. So they are unique.
Drivers won't give a lane to
Drivers won't give a lane to emergency vehicles and they treat the bike lane like its there personal parking spot so there is no way they'd be ok with a lane for buses.
Traffic sucks, too.
Can we cry yet?
Traffic & public transportation
Let's all remember that traffic conditions could improve with better public transportation. Traffic today was horrible because people (like me) didn't trust the T to run reliably and drove in. If more people could trust the T - if it served more people - fewer people would drive and traffic would improve.
Go ahead.
Scream! We're miles from where anyone could hear you!
What a mess
http://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2015/02/mbta_sto...
David D’Alessandro for next MBTA general manager?
I could get behind that. Or how about you, Paul Levy?
Scott Brown
is available.
All buses and trains will be
All buses and trains will be scrapped. Instead, you will be issued a truck and a barn coat by the state. Make and model to be determined by the enthusiasm of your Tomahawk Chop.
Can you hear
the collective orgasm over at the Herald?
Bus lanes now!
Cities need to exclude private vehicles from key bus routes and red line shuttle routes during this crisis.
I can think of few things
I can think of few things more dangerous for cyclists than a dedicated bus lane next to a dedicated bike lane.
False
First of all, several cities have combined bus/bike lanes (Madison, Wisconsin, for one). The thinking is that even if the bus has to go behind a slow cyclist, it's still faster than the traffic next to it.
I mean, even Boston has this, sort of, with the queue jump lane south off the Harvard Bridge. More would be great.
But a bike lane next to a bus lane would be fantastic. The trick is to have the whole thing buffered, and have the bus lane towards the sidewalk from the bike lane. So the bus always stays in the bus lane, and doesn't have to pull across the cyclist's path to get to a bus stop. The cyclist always stays to the left of the buses. Most of the time, the cyclists would have more room, and it might take some getting used to with buses passing cyclists on the right, but there wouldn't be the constant crossover you currently have with buses having to pull across the bike lane to service passenger stops.
What of parking? Use it to buffer out the bus/bike lane to create a cycletrack (with a narrow curb there, too). Or get rid of it all together since bicycling and transit will be better served.
Most bus lanes allow biking
Most bus lanes allow biking. I know the bus lane outside South Station does. I think you're also allowed to bike in the Silver Line lanes on Washington St, but I can't confirm this. The BTD Complete Streets guide actually explicitly endorses them, saying:
No
Most major roads are down to one lane in one direction. You can say you want dedicated lanes all you want, but that's not possible.
The MBTA is the one thing
The MBTA is the one thing keeping Boston from truly being that shining gem of a first class city. And they want to bring the Olympics here?
I like Beverly Scott. She has no problem saying what needs to be said. Boston is such a forward thinking, technologically advanced and innovative city, with an antiquated, decrepit, crumbling transportation infrastructure.
It's obvious that politics have put the T in a situation where it may never be fixed, without stripping everything down to bare bones and rebuilding from the ground up (organizationally speaking).
How in the world does a city's transportation system become $9 BILLION in debt with a $3 BILLION maintenance backlog? That doesn't happen overnight. As she said, that takes decades of morons running it into the ground.
Two words: Michael Mulhern
Two words:
Michael Mulhern
MBTA Pensions
Just curious: how significant to all this is the pension boondoggle? Still can't believe that desk jockeys with 23 years cashed in with lifetime pensions and health insurance. What, exactly, is the true cost of this?
The pension benefits now
The pension benefits now require that the "desk jockey" pay their share of health insurance premiums. The pension fund is a privately managed fund, and aside from the contribution that the MBTA makes to match the contribution from the employees it does not pay the pensions of retirees.
Pensions
In reality the pensions haven't been the main reason for the overruns, but all these things do add up. This nugget from the 2009 MBTA Review Report sums things up nicely...
The Finance Plan inexplicably projected no increases in health care
costs between FY01 and FY08.
• In reality, employee and retiree health benefits costs increased
73%, growing from $60.6M in FY01 to $104.9M in FY08.
(http://www.mbtareview.com/)
The debt service projections actually were too high and that's helped keep the MBTA from sinking deeper in the red. They were overestimated by over half a billion for FY01-08. So I'm sure that someone could argue that Charlie and the MTA actually helped the financial situation there.
The projections weren't too high
The debt was refinanced. This allowed them to make the debt service lower to attend to other immediate problems like fuel and healthcare cost increases. If you then compare that to the projections, they appear lower. So the report said "well, it wasn't the debt payments that sank you". It's disingenuous. If they'd kept the debt payments at the projected levels and not refinanced then they wouldn't have been able to afford gas or healthcare, neither of which were mutable or able to be refinanced in the same way the debt was.
THEN, the 2009 report bashes them for not following the recommendation that the MBTA not refinance its debt as much as it did. Every complaint/analysis in that 2009 report is entirely skin deep. There's no "what if" such as "what if they'd not refinanced the debt and left the numbers at the projected levels? What year would the MBTA have run out of budget with all the other cost underpredictions like healthcare and gas?".
So, the 2009 report made some great hay by claiming the debt wasn't the problem but the report never says what the perfect path through the MBTA's troubled straits of 10 years being analyzed would have been given we can do the retrospective now. Don't restructure the debt, pay all the bills, how? It's one thing for that report to say "it wasn't the debt payments, those were low low low" and another to actually dig down and realize that if they weren't made that low by refinancing what would the MBTA have done those years?
right
But the fact is that the debt was refinanced. So if want to say that the MBTA lucked out that they were able to refinance and save money, then great. Bureaucrats have every incentive to fudge projections and make them seem rosier, it helps them buy shiny new things.
This woman is A joke!!!
This woman is A joke!!! Another finger pointer!! Listen put on your BIG GIRL PANTS and do your job!!
ARRRGGGG
People like you saying that. What does that even mean? The causes of these problems is freezing switches, old trains, and motor technology not designed to handle 70+ inches or snow. SO WHAT DOES BIG GIRL PANTS DO TO FIX THAT?
Empty rhetoric. Extremely irritating rhetoric. The only thing I can figure from you mind is the causes of these problems is because she spent the past few weeks spinning around or something. If that what you think she is doing, then what's your thought about the fact that trains are 40 years old? Or the endless switches frozen in snow that the crews can keep up (and they should be heated and she can't magically heat them)? Or the fact the trains are using motors that apparently not designed to even handle a few inches of light snow much less than 70 inches of it? Are you people just ignoring all of that? Or do you have some kind of reasoning to ignore that? Honest and serious question who are taking that viewpoint.
What it means
The commentator pushes burgers somewhere and likes to throw stones in glass houses. It make life easier to bear.
*clap*clap*clap*
Thank you Rhonin.. I've grown very tired of this 'get rid her' and that'll fix all our T woes mentality. It's stupid and very short sighted.
I'll keep repeating what I've been saying for weeks.
What does removing her accomplish? Nothing.
How will service improve by removing her? It won't
And she will just join the long list of MBTA GM ScapeGoats that have preceeded her. Because..
How did removing her predecessor improve service after? It didn't.
Get it? Stop with this useless argument that has zero weight in actually fixing the problem.
A modest proposal
Hi, Adam. I'm a U-Hub regular who is 100% OK with you not approving the insane, incoherent, sexist ramblings of anonymous posters. Or, if you worry that you're going to be called out for "censorship" by people who have no idea what the word means, what if you were to just add an option server-side to put their quotes inside a speech bubble emanating from a giant rooster.
Artist's rendition
LOL
just LOL! (nice pic)
While we are on the same side
While we are on the same side that calling for her head is dumb. In no indication I seen so far that sexism (or racism, there's been posts throwing that too) has played in this either. Davey got the same crap treatment and plenty would have and had said things like "big boy pants" with the same level of derision whom I would have question them on their reasoning as I had above.
Don't make me get into manage two different arguments at the same time (or if Tim never responds, spend the rest of this thread completely diverting from the topic to talk about sexism).
Duly noted.
I hereby withdraw my accusations of sexism, though I stand by my "insane and incoherent" statement.
I guess you missed...
...the "cute black lady" comment.
Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it isn't there.
And Abe says...
"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."
attributed to Abraham Lincoln
A-park-alypse
Word is that there's nowhere at all to park downtown. So many people drove to avoid the T that if you got into the city after 9:30, you were out of luck. People circling for hours now and coming up empty.
I suppose one could drive to a parking garage ...
and take the T in from there.
(Yes, I know, that doesn't help.)
Worked for me
I drove to Alewife and took the Red Line to DTX. THAT part of the Red Line was working, but very very crowded.
That works until the Alewife
That works until the Alewife garage fills up.
(They *could* run just the underground parts of the subway even during the biggest blizzards, unless they need to park trains underground or something. But instead they chose to shut down all rail.)
That's not surprising. If
That's not surprising. If there were "enough places to park" then there wouldn't be any downtown left. It would all be bulldozed and paved over.
Like, you know, Oklahoma City, or Hartford.
That's why the T is so important. We can't replace it with driving. Not only are highways unable to handle the flow, but there's simply nowhere to park all those cars. It just don't work in a city like Boston.
One question
When will the transit riot at the Statehouse be taking place?
.
This is olde school Sons of Liberty time to ask for redress from our government.
You have it backwards
Americans are supposed to stand up against government spending and taking our rights away, not to demand that the government do a better job providing a critical service.
Don't you listen to talk radio and watch them truth news networks?
I would love to be there.
I would love to be there myself, but I'm guessing everyone who is mad about transit and cares about this issue is, like me, playing crazy catchup on work they've missed this week due to these snow days and crazy commutes.
Plus, getting to the State House would actually entail getting on the T to get there in the first place, sooooo... we'd all be incredibly late. It's a catch 22.
Today's transportation
Today's transportation meeting was open for public comment. According to the Globe, the 20 or so people were mostly media people.
What new equipment or repairs
What new equipment or repairs would have prevented these problems?
The Blue Line trains are new. The Green Line Type 8s are reasonably new. But those lines had problems just like the others.
Red and orange. Do your
Red and orange. Do your research. It's been covered extensively in the Globe the last couple weeks.
Also, AC motors, which other cities converted to a long time ago. The age of the car doesn't necessarily matter when you're running it with a DC motor.
Switches.
Switches.
All AC trains (instead of
All AC trains (instead of many on orange and red that are DC). This is why the blue line trains were working (though the switches are old and thats what gave out there). Chicago recently finished changing over to AC. Its not hard to find other systems in the world that get lots of snow and cold (more than us) but keep operating. And just to go ahead to the yearly summer delays, there are also systems that get the same or more heat than us, but keep operating. There are not, however, systems that run well with continued lack of investment. In the 80s we used to laugh at the USSRs infrastructure and how it was poorly built and falling apart due to lack of investment and quality. Now its the rest of the world laughing at the US.
God I would love to be a fly
God I would love to be a fly on the wall in Scott's office right now. or Baker's.
Commuter rail was a mess
7:30 from Reading (the only train from Reading on the "Winter Limited Service Schedule") didn't leave Reading until about 8:35. Green Line was suprisingly normal - not may people on the platform and a mostly empty E train arrived shortly after I got into North Station subway.