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MBTA Web site going commercial

The MBTA has started selling ad space on its Web site, with the first ad scheduled to start tomorrow. The T hopes to make "hundreds of thousands" from online ads.

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Like it isn't slow and cumbersome enough as is.

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Do you mean the MBTA.com website? I find it the opposite of slow and cumbersome. I've had opportunity to use a few transit authority websites and the MBTA's is the best of them. It's the easiest to navigate and most useful and informative of the ones I've seen.

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Maybe those "hundreds of thousands" will make a dent in the dismal reliability that the T's cars have been displaying lately.

You know it's bad when there's a big banner at the top of the T's site warning about significant Red Line delays and bussing between Harvard and Alewife.

Does the T publish stats about its cars' reliability, for example, how often they break down? Or I wonder if anyone's written a script which monitors the T's web site (or uses its API) to track exactly how often there have been disabled trains of late.

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Hundreds of thousands of dollars of income to spend on marketing to bring in an additional hundreds of thousands of dollars....none of which are allocated to help maintain the crumbling subway system.

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Thanks for the scorecard link.

While "Mean Miles Between Failures" is a useful metric for T maintenance folk, a more useful stat for T passengers would be the number of times a train on a given line broke down in a given month and caused service delays. For example, "In July 2011, there were 45 instances of disabled Red Line trains that went out of service."

The historical charts on the scorecard so show a general downward trend in the reliability of the cars from last summer to this summer. It also shows that the Green Line cars are remarkably less reliable than the other lines' cars, going about five times fewer miles between breakdowns.

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Seeing as, at the time of this writing, the red line is apparently stuck underground and people are being evacuated due to heat stroke.

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If we weren't so hot, and we weren't so overheated, we should all be rioting in the streets.

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Fire chief at Porter Sq just said "it's quite comfortable down there" on WHDH.

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If by comfortable you mean dark, stuffy, and cut off from the rest of the world. I was on the stuck train: http://twitpic.com/5p49mw.

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On the platforms, waiting for the buses, not so much.

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...but this seemed timely. Maybe the T is part of this experiment...

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I was wondering if Adam and some of the regular commenters were stuck on the train, as I was expecting to see a flashing lights-type post at the top of the homepage.

This situation is one of my nightmares, and frankly, it's the reason that I always carry food, water and a flashlight when on the T and also why I generally avoid it nowadays (to all those who made fun of me for carrying those provisions - well?). The condition of the system has become so bad that I am not entirely comfortable riding it anymore.

On a related note, Boston.com is reporting that the time from the beginning of the problem to the completion of the evacuation was greater than 2 hours. I know that things have to be done to maximize safety, but seriously, 2 hours is totally unacceptable. I am a relatively young guy in good shape and health, and even I would not be in very good condition without food and particularly water after 2+ hours in those conditions.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this is that it demonstrates that the T would have a very, very difficult time in the event of some kind of catastrophe such as a large fire, or some kind of attack. So bad, in fact, that I'm sorry I even brought it up.

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