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Lard-assed Bostonians or bad MBTA service?

Block by Block is a new blog that looks to be highly bookmarkable by those of you with an interest in urban planning.

But I have to take issue with the first post (which I would have done there, but the author is only accepting comments from people with Blogspot accounts, and I'm too lazy to retrieve my password there). Basically, the author expresses his frustration with his upstairs neighbor, who refuses to walk anywhere, even to a gorgeous park or cool Mexican joint just five minutes away:

... He said, "I'm not a New Yorker. I drive." Which was confirmed when he and his roommate said they drove two blocks to eat the night earlier. TWO BLOCKS. This little tidbit of information pissed me off. And here's why.

If you want to drive everywhere...LIVE IN THE FUCKING SUBURBS. ...

OK, buddy, as a former New Yorker myself, first thing I have to say is: Get a grip.

Then, spend some time analyzing MBTA service patterns before blaming lard-assed Bostonians for global warming. Yeah, driving two blocks is nuts, but you'll quickly discover there are fairly sizable parts of Boston where you actually do need a car to get around; perhaps your neighbor was originally from one of them.

I live in Boston and yet the nearest stores and restaurants are a mile away (uphill both ways and no, I'm not trying to be funny; outside of the landfill parts of town, Boston's fairly hilly). There's an MBTA bus route with a stop around the corner from us, but it only runs once an hour and stops altogether at 7:15 p.m., except on Saturday, when the last bus is 4:50 p.m., and except on Sunday, when it doesn't run at all. That's hardly an incentive to take the T.

Now duplicate our experience by all the neighborhoods in other parts of Roslindale, West Roxbury, Hyde Park, Dorchester and even Brighton that are poorly served, if at all, by the MBTA.

Before you start denouncing us as lazy dolts, try blaming a bizarro-world MBTA that, for the past 30 years, has single-mindedly pushed expensive suburban commuter-rail projects at the expense of badly needed inner-city mass-transit systems (for that matter, has pushed expensive suburb-to-downtown projects while ignoring three decades of "Edge City" development along the 128 and 495 rings), leaving us with absurdities like the Silver Line. And even when the T does announce plans for new in-town rapid transit, it does so by enlarging a commuter-rail line (from Fairmount) rather than, oh, turning it into a proper subway or light-rail system (like the long-gone MTA once did with the Riverside line, back in the day).

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Comments

I'm a former NYer, but believe that sometimes a car is necessary.

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....and even *I* think driving somewhere that's only 2 blocks away is totally nuts.

That said, while my love of walking is well-documented, Adam, you make some very good points about how inconvenient it can be depending on the circumstances.

As for NYC, I notice that plenty of my friends there take cabs frequently - they do not walk 'everywhere'.

~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jen Stewart

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