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Another man falls on Red Line tracks, but he gets back on the platform by himself
By adamg on Wed, 08/10/2016 - 11:11am
Shortly before 10:30 a.m. on the inbound platform at Shawmut.
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Comments
He got
knocked down, but he got up again. (sorry. I couldn't resist)
People falling onto T tracks
It seems like quite a lot of people are falling off the Red line and other T station platforms. What the heck? I can imagine some reasons it happens - not paying attention, getting shoved, not being in ones right mind - but I wonder if something can be done to make it harder to happen. Probably not. It just seems like a lot lately.
Getting Shoved?
I hope not. Last night I was at the Blarney Stone in Fields Corner when hundreds of protesters marched up Dorchester Ave screaming about the Transit Police. My question is what does Ferguson have to do with the MBTA?
No, he wasn't shoved
He got off a train, stumbled around and fell.
Wall-O-Glass
Some larger system have a separate wall blocking the tracks with doors which open along side the train so that getting to the tracks is impossible.
If used in Boston it might save lives or injuries but it would be extremely expensive to install and requires the operators to stop in exactly the same spot. And knowing the T, it would be yet another thing to frequently break and cause problems.
Complication on the Red Line
The two different types of trains have doors in different locations.
There are only a handful of
There are only a handful of subway lines in the world with platform screen doors (PSDs). This is because they're expensive to maintain (how well do you think a glass wall would hold up on a T platform? Do you think the T would actually pay someone to clean it?) and only really possible on automated systems where the trains are all identical and stop in exactly the same place every time. They've (to my knowledge anyway) never been applied to a legacy system like the T.
As Adam pointed out, the different generations of Red Line cars are different - so different that not only are the doors in different places, but the cars have a different number of doors on them! This is also why no red line stations have gotten the tape arrows on the platform yet.
And try standing in the same exact spot on a T platform every morning for a week. I guarantee you will be at a different spot relative to the doors every morning. T trains are still manually driven by operators, and it's actually quite difficult to stop at the exact same spot on the platform consistently - even within a couple inches of it.
These problems are why so few systems have PSDs. And the ones that do have them usually do it for a completely different reason than safety - climate control. For example, Dubai has them so that the elevated stations can have air conditioned platforms
Pokemon Go?
Pokemon Go?
Nope
No games were involved, so you can save that righteous wrath about Kids These Days for another time.