T tells Orange Line riders: Don't be a whiner, those switch delays are minor

They include updates on transit lines and delays as part of the traffic reports. Not all updates and delays, but the significant ones.

Of course, to do that in Boston would mean losing the obnoxious multiple sponsorships - i.e. The (insert big car manufacturer dealers retailers) traffic report brought to you by (insert different car dealer). Now let's go to the (insert car insurance company) helicopter - that takes up most of the report time.

And the last thing the media wants is to actually be required to spend most of their time reporting actual news.

Which means they cover neither.

On those occasions I don't head off to work in the morning, I turn on channel 25 to check out the news, weather (the important one) and, yes, traffic. Finding out that at 8:30 cars are slogging down I-93 from Andover to Boston at 15 miles an hour is an eyeopener to me. Crashes routinely either close sections of roadway or reduce the number of lanes from 4 to 1. TV and radio are good with that, but, yes, unless the delays are actually catastrophic (i.e. my Orange Line commute this morning involved a full-ish train, but I got to work basically on time) they don't mention anything.

If you want to point fingers, point them at TV and radio. The Globe (and Herald) does look at the big picture at the T, but these little things are a bit beneath them. I would imagine that this incident will appear in the same column as the rollover on Route 128 this morning (note, I am just guessing there was a crash on the road.)

SLIGHT EDIT- I did miss the word "site" in this post, so I was commenting on print. I don't visit the Globe's website since the decline and fall of boston.com

The logic goes back to radio traffic reports - virtually all drivers have radios in their cars, while transit riders generally do not carry around radios. My theory is that this practice carried over into other media forms like the Internet without being significantly changed because inertia.

they're not fixed properly. The fact that they cause significant, unnecessary delays and cause public transit users to be late for work, appointments, indicates that this is a bigger problem than the T staffpeople think.

are because Wellington is not only a station, but the storage depot for the trains. Switching trains into this facility at the tail end of AM rush hour, and out of the facility prior to the start of PM rush hour, is a necessity. Not to mention when a train becomes disabled and is sent "back to the barn".