Just heard that the Red Line forced everyone off at Park Street — Lord knows what’s happening now.
This is what they say on the MBTA website: “Red Line experiencing minor delays at this time, due to an earlier disabled train at Alewife Station. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Look, I’m sure Dan Grabauskas is a good guy doing the best he can, but T service has not gotten better since he’s been on the job — neither in big ways or in small. We got “lucky” (if you think global warming is lucky) this winter, avoiding any major snowstorms of the type that make service intolerable and riders nutty in Jan-Feb ’05; but this summer seems to have been an absolute washout.
Folks in charge need to understand that when people don’t show up to work or job interviews, that costs money and opportunity. A commuter train schedule should be a promise, not a gamble. 10 minutes late is not “on time.” Our mature transportation infrastructure — including and especially trains — is what makes it reasonable and even convenient to live in an extremely old-fashioned area that was settled and mapped out for 17th-century lifestyles and economies.
The trains need to be resilient to cope with weather challenges that the Boston area has faced since time immemorial. It’s Boston: It snows. It’s Boston: It gets hot in the summer. Is it too much to ask for the trains to run properly under such eminently normal conditions? It’s a beautiful sunny 80 degrees now — what’s the excuse today?
(As long as I’m ranting, I’d also like to point out that the change/token machines in Harvard Station are always out of order. Pathetic — there’s no possible excuse for that. And the Charlie Card system already seems like a flop — Does it really have to eat your card and then regurgitate it? What is wrong with a swipe system? Do those moving doors need to be so slow? etc. etc. etc.)
Public transit affects the economy, mood, and quality of life in this area like few other things. Is anyone listening to Universal Hub and Bad Transit, who have done well at documenting the problems? Does the governor give a damn, between showboating on the Big Dig on local TV and showboating on the Big Dig in Iowa? Where’s the leadership? Where’s the grand plan of reform? Where’s Magic Marker Mitt today?
Mitt thinks the T is for poor people and liberals. Now if you’ll excuse him, he has some Fundamentalists in South Carolina to butter up.
I’ve used the regurgitate system in New York’s subway and Chicago’s El, and it did seem slower than the swipe. Of course, the way to compensate is to have more portals for the riders to pass through–it never made sense to me how few swipe portals Davis Square’s T stop had.
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Any BMG readers work in transportation and understand why the switch away from swipe systems?
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I have a sneaking suspicion that the T is going to need a big infusion of cash to get itself up to par–which would be acceptable if someone competent and trustworthy ran it.
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Who appointed Grabauskas?
avoids the T most days and walks all over Boston, from North Station to his work near Park Plaza.
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Good for weight loss, good for stress, both the kind that accumlates during the work day and the extra special stress the T generates.
I was waiting for a train in Davis Square this morning, when we heard repeated announcements about a disabled train at Alewife that was holding things up. Eventually, a T worker came down and announced that the T had no idea when service would be restored, at which point in time hundreds of commuters left the station. Naturally, a train came by 2 minutes later.
(nice post charley)
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….have the best subways? DC? SF?
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can’t we just steal their leaders, just as notre dame and cleveland hired away charlie weis and romeo crenel?
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or is it an issue where you can’t fire staff who no-show or who loaf, because of silly contract provisions?
Clean cars, spacious cars, clean and well built stations, varying fares based on distance (more fair), LED panels letting you know how many minutes until the next train, quiet cars, well cooled cars, proximity cards for non-swipe swipes.
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But then again, its a young system (30 years in 2006) and its very well funded. 55% of the budget comes from fares, and the other 45% comes from DC, VA, MD, county governments, etc.
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I’ve riden subways/surface light rail/tram in Boston, NYC, Montreal, Atlanta, DC, SF, Newark, Chicago, Rome, Cairo, Vienna, London, Dublin, Prague, Budapest, Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Toronto, and Philly. Whenever I’m in a city with rail, I always try to take a few rides.
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Out of all of those, I think DC’s METRO offers the best combination of quality, price, city coverage, and speed.
“farebox return” in DC is not that great, I think you’ve got your percentages switched. Also, it is a great system, but hardly “new”. To err, if our system has been assembled and renovated on slightly staggered schedules, DC’s was built all at once, meaning it will have to be rebuilt all at once.
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Great post, Charley (and on your namesake, no less.) The Charlie Card roll out could be improved, certainly, but it is a step in the right direction (toward the 20th Century, as it were.)
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For guidance: look to the Chicago Transit Authority, considered to be one of the best managed in the nation. Dan Grabauskas has quite the task in front of him. It is on Romney, however, if he values public transportation, to do the same as he did with Turnpike Authority and use his bully pulpit to make public transportation a priority. To date, he has not.
Up to ’99. Effective, but not glamorous; prone to the same problems the T’s having now, only not quite so pervasive.
accounts for over 57% (pdf) according to this document.
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As for it being built all at once, that is mostly true (they’ve just recently finished some extensions). That doesn’t mean it will have to be rebuilt all at once though. There’s no reason why they can’t rebuild a tentacle at a time, especially if they maintain the same car standards so that they keep interoperability.
The T is cheap compared to every other system I’ve ever been on.
“Cheap” depends on what you’re doing. By way of reference, in NYC if you get on the system you pay $2. That seems expensive, right?
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However, for that $2 you can transfer from train to bus or bus to train. You can also go for a very significant distance very quickly, with service to a very significant geographic area (size of the area, I would never say NYC is more significant than Boston!)
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On the T, the fare is comparatively cheap: currently $1.25. But that is only for a subway ride. Now you need to get onto the bus, that’s another $.90. You’re now up to $2.15.
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HOWEVER, with the new fare rates (coming soon to a station near you) there will be a whole new menu of how much you get charged. You’ll be able to transfer for a variety of different rates depending on the service you were just on, whether you’re paying with a Charlie Ticket or a Charlie Card, etc.
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In general, cost including transfer will be $1.70 assuming most people will choose to use the new Charlie Card.
Londoners complain about the Tube, but I thought it was great, especially compared to what we have here. Expensive though.
I always get the feeling that the reason T service is allowed to be so terrible is that the people that could change the situation don’t tend to rely on the T on a day-to-day basis. I could be totally wrong about that, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen MY state rep on the T, hoofing it into work. Or the governor for that matter.
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I’m always amused that everytime Mayor Mumbles has a bumpy ride to work, construction everywhere gets shut down until someone fixes the problem. But until the Mayor is put out, nothing gets done, like its all about him.
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Well, maybe the people should demand their reps who live in urban areas actually use the T system. THEN we’ll see what gets fixed.
Representative Tony Verga from Gloucester is a regular commuter on the train line.
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I don’t think I’ve ever seen my State Senator on the train.
Mike Dukakis always took the T. Still does, except when he walks.
Dukakis was the guest speaker at a Plymouth County Democratic League meeting a few years back, which was held in Marshfield. The chair of the League actually had to pick him up at the Commuter Rail station in Weymouth, and then someone had to drop him off at a Red Line station after the meeting. The man’s consistent, I’ll give him that.
I know Marie Parente of Milford takes the Franklin line from Forge Pack to the legislature. (though she probably, like me the summer I commuted from my parents house to Boston, lives closer to Southboro or Ashland stations but knows you don’t want to rely on getting a commuter rail ride to the Framingham to Worcester section of that track, unless Tim Murray fixes it)
I loved that when I took the train into Boston from Franklin, there was always ago dressed as Ben Franklin taking the train in to work.
I grew up in Boston proper, went to college here, and now live here. Over my life here, I’ve taken commuter rail, bus and subway regularly throughout. I have never seen the T worse than it is now.
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The bus I take is supposed to come every six minutes in the morning, and every 8 minutes in the evening. For the first year or so of my taking it, it came fairly reliably on time. Two years later I, more often than not, wait 15-20 minutes for it in the morning, and up to 30 minutes in the evening.
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I honestly don’t care if it comes every 2 minutes, or every 45 minutes. I just want to be able to rely on its getting there when it’s supposed to get there. That way, I can get to work/interview/fun when I’m supposed to so that I won’t lose my job/lose my interview/lose my friends.
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Do people agree on how bad the T is right now? Does this have to do with leadership, patronage, the legislature’s Forward Funding plan, all of these together, or something else entirely?
A big part of the problem is the forward funding scheme the legislature passed/initiated in 2001. The idea was to make sure the T lived within a budget. That budget would be created by giving the T a portion of all sales tax receipts or a guaranteed minimum.
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Problem is, at the time the bill passed the economy was going gangbusters. For several years its been flat – hence the T doesn’t have enough money.
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HOWEVER, that is not a legitimate excuse for all the problems. There is also a big problem with oversight, where money is spent, and a general sense of “this is how we’ve always done it.”
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You wait for a train… and wait… and wait. The train arrives (as did Orange Line last night at State Street), the doors close… the doors open… the doors close… you wait for five minutes with nobody announcing anything. That’s not a question of funding, that’s a question of customer service.
A few thoughts from a lifetime T rider: (1) No high-level political support for transit since Frank Sargent stopped highway expansion and Mike Dukakis rode the Green Line every day to the State House; (2) unions have more power than management and are a major obstacle to improving operating performance (things got better for awhile in the 1980s after passage of the MBTA “management rights act” but ironically the Duke was tougher on the unions than the last four republican governors); (3) it is debt service obligations that are killing the T more than operating costs(including the burdens of recent transit expansion); (4) we seem to spend plenty of money on operations compared to other systems and just don’t manage it well; (5) in the Tip O’Neill era the system was kept alive by large capital projects that paid a big chunk of the T’s overhead (Red Line to Alewife, Orange Line to Malden, Orange Line southwest corridor to Forest Hills). there are no cash cows anymore. (6) I bet that less than 10% of MBTA senior management (including Dan Grabauskas) ride the system on a daily basis. As a result there’s a culture of clueless indifference among many T employees and lots of low-cost, no-cost customer improvements never take place.
Is the MBTA more poorly run than other state agencies? I doubt it, it just shows up more. Certainly the number of management hacks whose only purpose is to provide a staff member to enhance an upper echelon position is no worse than MWRA, DOR, Massport, ITD.
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And the unions? The same union rules apply to all the state agencies. The politicians provided those rules that make it virtually impossible to terminate any state employee without allowing him to collect a big settlement later on.
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Maybe the attitude toward the MBTA should change. Instead of grousing about the inept agency, look to it as and adventure in travel. You never know where you will end up or how you will get there.
Communting from Cambridge to work in Boston in the 80s and early 90s…I remember so many “disabled trains” coming into Park street, all the passengers taken off, and the train sent along empty to Alewife. The platform would be mobbed and getting on the next train, or even the one after, involved physical combat…the “disabled train” was virtually a daily occurance. About that time, there was a campaign to stop calling people “handicapped” and substitute the word “disabled,” and I remember Edward Kennedy Jr. proclaiming that “Disabled doesn’t mean Un-Able.” I thought to myself–yeah, tell that to the MBTA!
Deval is making a sweeping committment to give more funding to the MBTA, improved service, better trains, service in more suburban area, and a new type of urban and suburban planning that centers residential zones around transportation. He also left open the possibility that he might support privitization if the T is either too expensive for the government to operate or if a private company could do a better job, but he would only consider it after a lengthly review and still considers it a public right.
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I mostly agree with him on that for the most part though Ill have more on privitization later.