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Jim Aloisi rides the bus from Mattapan to Ruggles

Takes the 28 this morning to see just how much marvier life for riders will be when it transmogrifies into the 28X Super Bus, which I know because Alex Owens is live-twittering the ride:

... Aloisi and Chang-Diaz getting breakfast @ Brother's...

Ed. question: Is there any station in all of T-land with a better name than Ruggles? I'd rank it even higher than Wonderland.

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Comments

In college I spent much time listening to and writing about the music of Carl Ruggles. When I moved to Boston, it reminded me of a book I read once, in which Ruggles (the composer) was said to have claimed lineage to the Bostonian Ruggles for whom Ruggles Street is named. According to the book, Ruggles (the composer) was full of it, as he often was.

Not much of a point there, I know. All I'm saying is, if you think Ruggles is a great name for a T stop, it's an even better name for a composer.

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Ruggles was a great composer who composed only a small body of work because he endlessly reworked his compositions.

The piano work, "Evocations: Four Chants", is rhapsodic, dreamy, and dramatic, all rolled into one. I performed it many times in my younger days...

Wouldn't it have been cool to eat pizza at Ruggles on Ruggles while listening to Ruggles?

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I think Ruggles may have been the composer. Can't say I liked this music much.

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Under the new ideas for corporate sponsorship, Warner Brothers has just paid for the rights to rename the station Muggles and fill it with Harry Potter paraphernalia along with a special door between the tracks that takes you to a "Platform 9¾" playground. Expect more delays on the Orange Line...

You don't even WANT to know what Tim Burton and Disney have planned for Wonderland next year...

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Haven't posted this in awhile, it was due.

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I loved the lunch specials at Ruggles Pizza. It was cheddar cheese on top... mmmm....

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I remember those cheddar cheese pizzas 20+ years ago at the Harvard Square location.

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... early colonist John Ruggles, whose farm was located in present day Jamaica Plain, and who is a distant relation of novelist Thomas Ruggles Pynchon.

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Gee. It's really hard to know where to start with this great idea.

The benefits of so-called Bust Rapid Transit is that it has the flexibility of a bus and approaches the capacity and transit times of light rail.

But, but. But, it's not so flexible that we don't have to rip up the recently installed median and trees for most of the length of Blue Hill from Warren to Woodrow and the concrete-only median from Morton to Mattapan Square.

And what do we get for the loss of our new median and trees? A bus. No mention of a carefully designed system of express buses and local buses. Just a bus. With fewer stops.

So the bus (it's just a bus) gets to fly like a 21st century dream from Mattapan to Grove Hall, where it then has to contend with the necked down Warren Street from there to Townsend St. And then, adding an easy rush-hour twenty minutes to the trip, it has to get off of Warren Street and into Dudley Station and then out of Dudley Station to Malcolm X Blvd to Columbus to Melnea Cass to Ruggles.

Why this alignment? Because it's got to go to the currently useless Dudley Station. Going to Dudley Station is necessary so that the ThirdWorldTransit™ barons (from the suburbs, all of them) can claim to have 'connected' one Bust Rapid Transit line (the sweet, segmented Silverline) to another, let's call it the Mattapan Flyer.

If this ridiculous sop thrown to these neighborhoods was actually intended to be a Mattapan-Ruggles link, it would go from Mattapan.....to Ruggles! Via Seaver and Columbus. Ruggles is the de facto transit center, not Dudley. Of course, Jackson Square would be the natural terminus. But, we only focus on Ruggles, because we can't seen to be neglecting Dudley Station.

But, we are already neglecting Dudley Station. Dudley will remain a gaping hole in the transit map until replacement service is restored to the Washington Street alignment—Forest Hills to Egleston, to Dudley, to Mass Ave, to Chinatown.

This ridiculous dodge, this 28X, is a ham-handed attempt to divert attention from Washington Street replacement service, by cobbling together a 'network' of Bus Rapid Transit.

So, Dorchester & Roxbury, put that in your Bus Rapid Transit tail-pipe and smoke it.

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Ruggles was the name of a famous railroad manager and a famous doctor. The name was fairly common a century ago. I think the street for which the station is named, is after the railroad manager.

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