What happened to the Fitchburg train? At this point, who can explain?

Because its significantly cheaper. Those of us who depend on the T would like it to be better, but often can't afford the alternative.

Taxicabs and Uber both charge a base fare + a time-varying fare and/or a distance-varying fare. I believe that for Uber it switches between time or distance based on your current speed at some threshold (11 mph maybe?).

Luckily for transport geeks like myself, we don't have to guess. The Uber app offers a neat little fare estimator. So if I plug in North Station and Fitchburg it quotes me "$64 to $86" for the UberX trip, with no surge. So in our hypothetical car-pooling scenario, that would be $16 to $21.50 per person. Clearly still not cheaper than the commuter rail, but not "9x more expensive" either.

I find it interesting, in these multimodal days, to compare costs like this and see where various alternatives shake out. For example, if you plug Waltham into the same app, then you get a quote of $15 to $20 overall or $3.75 to $5 per car-pool participant. That's cheaper than the Zone 2 fare of $6.25. In general, it seems that doing this car-pool thing could be equal or cheaper than riding the commuter rail at up to about Zone 1 or 2, and not too far off at Zone 3. The steep MBTA fare increases of the last five years have really made a difference.

But, as Ari and others have said, all of this analysis flies out the window at peak times. First of all, if a trainload of people all tried to summon cars to North Station, then there would be a huge shortage of drivers. Either that would be expressed as surge pricing for Uber, or lack of availability in the case of taxicabs or other services like Sidecar.

Second, even assuming you somehow sorted this out and got all those people into their own car-pools, you'd be adding several hundred cars to the already-busy roads and highways. In effect, the traffic congestion caused by everyone spreading out into separate vehicles would cause everyone's costs to go up because of the extra time spent sitting in traffic.

The MBTA is supposed to be able to offer a reliable, dedicated-way, reasonably-priced option that avoids all these problems. That it sometimes fails isn't a reason for everyone to suddenly try to arrange some sort of car-share, car-pool, train-replacement scheme, because that doesn't scale. It is, however, a good reason to fix the MBTA.

But the car-pooling, car-sharing idea does have merit at other times, I think, and should be considered if you have some friends with you. Depends on the specifics of the trip. I'm also interested to see how the ad-hoc car-pooling ideas pan out, the ones that some of the companies like Lyft are testing right now.

I would add to this discussion that, regardless of any "Big Dig Baker" stuff, even if the Governor-elect decided tomorrow that he was going to double the T's budget on "day one" it would not matter. As we have discussed here many times before, the Legislature created the funding problem, and the Legislature must fix it.

Further, and more to the point directly above concerning communities outside of T service, Swirly's very good friend Mr. Rosenberg of Amherst is about to become Senate president, and that may not be a very good thing for the T and its riders.

Now, could Baker signal that he wants to begin to fix the T by fixing the funding issue (e.g., he could commit to not veto a bill to get more money to the T)? Probably (although it would be a difficult political pivot given his opposition to the inflation-indexed gas tax), but the inevitable trade off would be that the Boston Carmen's Union, amongst others, would have to take a big hit, and I think that we can comfortably say that that would be DOA in the Legislature.

Without the T programming them separately from the interior signs, essentially, yes. The only time they will display the destination at a stop is at the terminals.