I’m genuinely glad to see that new MBTA CEO/General Manager Beverly Scott is breaking MBTA tradition and actually telling the truth about the organization’s utter inability to handle winter weather. Perhaps, with the MBTA now openly stating that it cannot stay open in winter weather and with its CEO last week directing would-be passengers to avoid it, our legislature will now actually discuss the question of how we fund the investment needed to return the MBTA to sustainable operation — even during run-of-the-mill winter weather like this.
For the first time since I’ve lived in Boston (I moved here in 1974), nearly fifty Red Line customers were trapped for over two hours on a stranded Red Line train this morning. The first obligation of the MBTA is to assure the safety of riders. The MBTA failed to meet that obligation for these passengers.
I also note another interesting tidbit in the MBTA “winter” page linked above — the entry for “Normal Rush Hour Service Frequency” for the Red Line contains “Every 9 minutes”. Excuse me? That has been every SIX minutes for years. Is this another unannounced reduction of service?
One monkey that does belong on Governor Baker’s back is the absurd burdening of the MBTA with Big-Dig debt. That marvelous “out of the box” (in this case insane) idea was Charlie Baker’s. It’s time to call him out on it, and undo the provision.
The MBTA is DEAD. In my view, we need to admit this and start the process of replacing it RIGHT NOW. The first step is to belatedly resurrect former Governor Patrick’s 2012 proposal to raise taxes on the wealthy and restore a sustainable financial footing to the MBTA.
I saw it in my news feed a few hours ago. They had to borrow some snow removal gear from New York City. The traverse along tracks must have been epic.
With luck the system will croak and need infusions of budget well before 2017 making the supposed benefit of system upgrade that is presumed to accompany the Olympics moot.
What was A&F Secretary Baker’s record on the MBTA capital budget?
The hare-brained scheme to burden the MBTA with Big Dig debt was the brainchild of Charlie Baker. It was discussed at length here, but on the old server. Perhaps some of our glitterati can find and post the links to the old discussions.
I was in Seattle for much of it but the local lore has it that Baker did some kind of MBA shell game to massage some nubers.
The rolling stock looks like something you’d expect to find in Belarus.
Boston… it’s the new Minsk!
The Metro in Minsk is relatively new and puts ours to shame. Today it is cold in Minsk with lots of snow on the ground; and no problems with bus or train transport. I have a good friend who lives there and who keeps me up to date.))))
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minsk_Metro
The subway system there has some advantages over ours.
That’s still good to know. With luck we’ll catch up some day.
because Finneran and the total miscreant Rep. Joe Wagner (DINO- Chicopee) pushed the ‘forward funding” program. As has been noted around here, the legislative Democrats have plenty of diesel on their hands too.
Does anybody have access to the roll call votes in both chambers for that abomination?
Is why we have the mbta that we have today. Take away the two things, and the mbta would have something like 25% of its budget freed up.
You talk about the Dig debt being put onto the MBTA.
I thought it was put onto the Mass PIKE. The Pike has its own bonding authority so it could issue bonds without recourse to the legislature and the state bond cap. It can pledge tolls unto infinity as collateral, and has done so (which is why the drive to end the tolls is futile – and like 3% of sales tax revenue is already pledged away to bonds making the sales tax hike really just topping off the tank instead of an actual increase in revenue).
The debt is on the former Pike – which is now part of the MassDOT bonding authority and the $20 billion shadow budget that you all laughed at Carla Howell for exposing. But how is this MBTA debt? Did the MBTA and Pike share a bonding authority even though they were separate agencies? Or WERE they?
This is after all New England. The MBTA needs to get to the point where not only does it not shut down as if Boston were a Deep South city with little snow experience, but the capacity needs to EXPAND so that people who would otherwise use roads can also be accommodated under these circumstances.
As opposed to shutting down completely tonight at 7pm….
…to retrofit technology on the tracks similar to heated driveways to keep snow from accumulating in the first place.
Between 1974, when I moved here, and the recent (2 years ago?) announcement that the snow plan of the MBTA is to shut down, the agency managed to routinely handle winter weather.
This paralysis is recent, and is a result of underfunding. Pure and simple.
The problem is, everyone agrees that more money is needed and most of us here agree on where to look for it. But the other side of the aisle has other ideas.
From our friends at the Pioneer Institute
Pensions!
Salaries!
Perks!
Pacheco law!
Calm down now Tom, here is a more neutral link with some interesting thoughts from former Gov. Dukakis.
The connivance of right wing ideologues is meager alongside the complexity of living and working arrangements beyond the center margin structure of the system.
I love the system and use it extensively. I live in Inman Square and it’s a 10 minute walk to Central. It has allowed me to make content covering more than 100 miles of trail from Duxbury to Sudbury with more on the North Shore.
But it is dim to see the world through my preference prism. There are people in Woburn commuting to Lynnfield for work and so on, probably many more than go from the burbs to Boston and the T doesn’t exist for them.
And it never will exist.
We can’t very well dun them to cover it even though it would be tempting. I’m betting they’ll run it into the ground and then figure out what to do.
… if ever, been on an MBTA bus that was empty of all save me and the driver, and never on a subway train or even a subway platform. Never. There is always somebody on the T.
I suppose, for any system, there exists corner cases (like commuting between Woburn and Lynnfield) in which some are left out. But, if they are left out, yet the T remains unused, that would be one thing… but the T is actually used excessively.
So, it’s likely that A) the T has moved living patterns more than living patterns have moved the T and, therefore, 2) people in Woburn commuting to Lynnfield have expressly chosen to do so in full knowledge that they will not be well served by the T. They may not have faced that choice willilngly, but corner cases are, well, corner cases and if they helped, in any way, to define the general case, they would not be corner cases…
And, just for the record, the trip planner at MBTA.com lists travel time from Woburn, into the city of Boston and out again, to Lynnfield at 55 minutes for about $11. That’s slightly more expensive than a daily commuter rail (one-way) from Leominster to Porter Sq ($10:50). But it’s a whole 8 minutes quicker than the quickest Express from Leominster. So it’s do-able. Maybe not enjoyable, but do-able. I bet some people do it, or some trip like it… however much it might look like the corner case from the outside.
Woburn is two towns away from Lynnfield. They are separated by Reading, where I grew up. You really aren’t too alert to this stuff.
In the course of my trail stuff I have to figure out where actual town boundaries are so I can properly label the video clips. You can’t seem to evince a sense of a basic local place orientation beyond the well worn pathways of immediate experience.
I also commonly calculate walking time as I typically do 7 miles when I am covering a trail section. You could basically walk to Lynnfield from Woburn in a bit over an hour or pedal a bicycle in less for free.
…Regardless of the direction(s) travelled, for a large portion of commuters in the CommonWealth a one hour commute is neither uncommon or surprising. And the price isn’t much different either, as I noted.
Being a fixed series of lines, the T offers a wide variety of crazy possibilities. That you think them ‘idiotic’ doesn’t mean they don’t get done.
the MBTA almost works for working people. The low wage/minimum wage workers who live in East Boston and Revere and work in the hospitality industries have a hard time getting home from Cambridge and Somerville restaurants/hotels after work at night before the system goes dark.
Their family members who are direct care providers who need to be at work in the suburbs early in the morning or late at night need to make the 90 minute commute before the system is operational (Blue Line to Green Line to red Line to bus). The same holds true for custodial workers in the Rte128 office parks.
Yup, as long as you don’t give a fuck about low wage workers who work the graveyard shifts, the MBTA hub and spoke system is fantabulous.
Dukakis’ former Secretary of Transportation Fred Salvucci was known for telling people that the Red Line-Blue Line connection is not about getting the Harvard and MIT boys to Logan for their vacations, it is about getting working people who live north of the city core to jobs where they have a chance of earning a living.
…have very little shame, don’t you? I guess you have no idea how transparently foolish you look, spite-rating everything I write and twisting
the pretzel ends of your logic to disagree with me, or invoking the ‘low wage workers’ to somehow gain some perceived advantage over me or make the accusation that I “don’t give a fuck” about ‘low wage workers’.
I have no way of contacting you directly, else I would not have written this so publicly, but I feel compelled to tell you that you crossed a line. I’m sorry if I pushed you, but in the end you are responsible for your actions.
The result of this isn’t going to redound to you: I’ll not pushback nor seek payback in any way so you can continue or not, as you wish. I’m just sad about it is all and I’m not inclined to treat with you for some time.
I’m not your enemy.
We are all more than a bit grumpy with all this snow.
You might try a little harder not to take such personal offense everyone uses the rhetorical phrasing “you”. It is perfectly normal to use phrases like “as long as you don’t care about…” to encompass a large group of people who feel a certain way. Yes, its hyperbole, but you are not required to always take it as a personal insult.
And if he makes himself “transparently foolish” by “spite-rating” you, then why would that not apply to you when you “spite-rate” others?
There are times, especially in May at the height of Atlantic Flyway migration when I am in the system when it opens at 5am and it is a who’s who of all the people who cover the low paid tasks that enhance our lives.
The same holds true for the under appreciated buses. The 70 run from Waltham to Central is nearly always full as are the runs from Lynn to Wonderland or from Forest Hills to Walpole.
Commuter rail is probably the least busy in off hours but even then there is activity.
And it is correlated to housing affordability. The affordable zones are shaped like a bow tie, One end runs with a narrow apex at JP and a broad base out toward Walpole and Norwood while the other northern one has its tip at East Boston and its broad base at Lynn/Salem.
The typical commute involves getting to the other zones of affluence where the work is and the transportation system is often sketchy there.
Does anyone have a handle on how many individual citizens will be affected by this? Mussolini made a lot of political hay by claiming to make the trains run on time (although this was not reality) , but if I were Governor Baker, I’d look at this opportunity as a sure fire way to a second term and a iron clad legacy. The only problem is his base……so maybe that second term would not be in the bag.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadio_Olimpico
Sounds good, you just don’t want to end up like Il Duce…
eom
This is the main rail plowing unit. http://goo.gl/iW3AsN
Here’s something similar at work http://youtu.be/Msz-mbiZBGE
This 2013 story offers confirmation that the policy of shutting down during storms is new.
From this piece:
Railroads (including the MBTA) have had snowplows for as long as there have been railroads — the MBTA apparently can no longer afford them. Railroads have been doing things like heating switch points and frogs with gas heaters for centuries.
The technology to operate a railroad in the winter is not new. The decision of the MBTA to not invest in that technology is what’s new.
I don’t know if they’re in place and operating today, but the North Station passenger yards used to be full of these, not that many years ago.
I wonder what kind of thawing system is in use at that vast yard between North Station and the big blue work shop?
Have you ever been at Readville in Hyde Park for morning rush hour. The layers of rail lines are stunning and there is almost a choreography to the whole thing?
And there is a rare one of a kind sorting yard for CSX adjacent t it all that is called a Gravity Yard. It is one of my favorite places for railroad photography.
A few years ago, the North Station yards (the yard you asked about, by the cement plant) looked like the lower picture. I suspect they were natural gas, rather than propane, but I’m not sure.
In any case, in North Station, each frog (where the two rails cross) and point (where the thinner steel selects the route) was heated with a blue flame, all winter.
The now-abandoned yards in Alston were once the largest trailer-train facility in the region, and those were a “hump”, or gravity, yard. My first Boston apartment, on the 9th floor, overlooked those yards. They were a source of constant attention.
Without doing a pedantic gotcha game, a gravity yard is when the entire plane of the sorting zone has a tilt rather than one hump.
It was more of a euro preference. Supposedly, the only one is Readville. I took a pretty good set of shots of the wall which is in Wolcott Square.
Here’s the article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_yard
When CSX left the Allston yard, it was abandoned for a while before Mass Dot secured it and I was able to roam it extensively as rail fans are the most sociable of the various Americans I encounter at Google Plus.
It is some of my most popular content as well as being great material visually.
I want to go back to Readville when spring begins just because there is so much to photograph.
I’m plenty mad too, but what is the purpose of that?
Do you really mean to suggest that a better manager could solve this deeply rooted, years-in-the-making crisis?
(Unflattering photo too. Oops, hey, you got it from the T web site, point taken.)
And I too appreciate her candor on the T’s limitations.
It would be crazy to blame her for the T’s implosion in the current circumstance. I don’t know if she’s a good manager or not. But she hasn’t been at it for that long — at least not nearly as long as the legislature has *not* been at it. The story of neglect is epochal at this point.
I think Ms. Scott is the hero here. She’s unwilling to lie, and she’s unwilling to pretend that things are different than they are. That’s a huge improvement over her predecessor.
This not Beverly Scott’s problem, this is OUR problem. It is especially up to we Democrats, who allegedly control the legislature. I note that we also controlled the legislature when the “forward funding” fiasco was imposed.
The MBTA has been spiraling into collapse for years. It will cost money to change, and that money must come from TAXES. Finally, as I observed elsewhere, it costs even more money to NOT fix it.
I guess I’m punchy from too much shoveling. Still comes off a bit sarcastic to me though.
I don’t know whether many are familiar with the New Urbanists or James Howard Kunstler, but greater Boston has avidly been turning cool old farm towns into the Geography of Nowhere since the 50s and making a lot of money doing so. http://youtu.be/Q1ZeXnmDZMQ
The compelling mythos of a living arrangement fitted to cars is profoundly embedded here. Outside of the city, a pedestrian is a kind of pariah and an afterthought at best. It is part of the comedy of my trail work. I’m essentially hiking in suburbia and periodically emerge from some extended open space property into tract home land. I’ve come to see traffic as like metal flow and crossing a busy road like Route 1 in Walpole as like a traverse of rapids.
That is what public transit constituents are up against, a deck stacked for cars.We can’t really unwind car nation, we can only present options where there is likely critical mass for their use.
Today is going to be a bad day for home bound elderly and disabled people ….
Boston City Councilor @titojackson is driving around Boston giving rides. Way to pitch in! #BOSnow #mbta #bospoli
Very often, just for the sake of providing a visual amidst the text, papers will include a photo of someone featured prominently in the article.