Hilarity ensues when the power goes out and the substitute buses are routed to South Station:

... Another thing about the Silver Line is that all of the T employees were yelling at people not to board them when they arrived. This is pretty strange, considering the Airport station is not on its usual route. So apparently the MBTA were re-routing Silver-Line buses with the sole intention of taunting everyone late for work stuck in a huge crowd. ...

To maintain their blood pressure, regular users of the Blue Line's Maverick station should probably avoid the Silver Line's beautiful, little used Courthouse station:

... The Maverick Station in East Boston that has a thousand times more use and serves the local public on a daily basis, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Now it has apparently been put on the back burner as the under funded, poor quality of materials and lack of oversight and caring of our local publicly elected officials should be in the spotlight. ...

A fight at a Silver Line bus stop at Melnea Cass Boulevard and Washington Street around 4:30 p.m. today ended with the stabbing death of one man.

Two people who fled on a bus were arrested: Juan Ramirez, 25, will be charged with murder, and 29-year-old Aida Rodriquez will be charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.

The knife fight came less than a day after two teenagers were stabbed at the Roxbury Crossing T stop (both are expected to live).

Miss von Schtoop, who works in the area, reports traffic was an absolute mess and wonders if the two incidents were related:

... Hopefully it's not just random. I walk in that direction to go to work and one time I did see a very angry man waving a big kitchen knife. I crossed the street and wound up walking the rest of the way home with a neighbor. ...

The T seems to have a directionally impaired sign maker.

MBTA police say violent and theft-related crime in the transit system dropped 10% last year, but that non-violent crime, such as public drunkeness and lewdness, vandalism and mouthing off (a.k.a. "simple assault") went up 12%.

In terms of percentages, the Blue Line was the most peaceful line, barely beating out the Green Line. Surprisingly, commuter rail had almost as many violent incidents per 100,000 riders as the Orange Line, although in both cases, the odds of getting attacked or robbed were still fairly small (0.45 incidents per 100,000 riders on the Orange Line; 0.41 on commuter rail).

Overview and line-by-line statistics.
Violent crime stats by station (you can also see a system map that shows the same info).

The MBTA formally announces its new effort to blast your brain with music and ads while you idly wonder why flames are shooting out from under that Red Line train.

Poll: T-Radio: Yay or nay?

T riders without earbuds or headphones will soon have no choice but to listen to T Radio on the Orange and Green Line platforms at North Station, the Red and Silver Line platforms at South Station and at Airport Station:

Imagine you are the governor of Massachusetts. The head of your mass transit agency comes to you with a plan to spend over a billion dollars on something nobody in the community wants, something that will require you to destroy a huge swath of one of the most famous parks in the world, along with some intact, perfectly useable infrastructure that will cost you $600 Million to replace with a lower-capacity alternative.

Now imagine that you have another plan that will bring reliable, high-quality, high-capacity service to a community that really, desperately wants it.

Gallop Pole reports on a T cop who wanted to know "what kind of outfit that was" when he spotted her taking photos at the Court House Silver Line stop.

The new MBTA photo policy.

But it does include overnight accommodations.

(Find The Full Story Here)

The Convention Authority wants to double the size of the parking garage beneath Boston Common, extending it all the way down to Boylston Street. This will require just about everything in its path to be dug up and removed - including the 50 trees that sit in the cross-hairs of the construction.

The Authority is justifying to expansion by claiming it will help move more people to mass transit by bringing thousands of additional cars downtown to ride the new 1.2 mile, 1 billion dollar plus Phase III of the Silver Line which is still coming "Real soon now". Yet the Silver Line expansion is unlikely to materialize, or fill the need it is designed to if it ever does appear.

The indifference to service quality is driving people away from the T and back to their cars in large numbers, and in light of this, the expansion of the garage under the Common makes a whole lot of sense. Selling it based on the promise of yet another MBTA project that will likely fall short of its goal if it even materializes seems somewhat fitting.