Thursday, June 26, 2008

What's Going on with the T?

A special thanks to Fitchburg Train Rider for notifying us about the latest bad news regarding the MBTA.

For the third time this week, the T just hit a stat that no entity that serves the public wants to hit. A person was struck and killed by an Orange Line train near Sullivan Station in Charlestown this morning. As a result of this tragedy, The Boston Herald reports that the MBTA is busing commuters between North Station and Oak Grove in Melrose until the accident scene can be cleared.

This has been an awful week for the T.

The fatalities are pretty horrific. Couple that with some just plain p*ss poor (sorry - there is no other appropriate word choice I can thing of) service issues of late and you know you don't want to be working in a T office right now. Seriously, the service issues need to be addressed. Some of our readers have some good suggestions for how they would try to avoid some of the service issues.

Our sympathy is with the accident victims and the crews who have to deal with the aftermath. Not pleasant at all.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dude, there was one canceled train the other day. Otherwise, how many times has the train been more than 10 minutes late in the past four months on the Worcester? I think it hardly qualifies for "p*ss poor", but maybe you were just born yesterday.

It's not perfect, but I don't hear you advocating for raising taxes or higher fares to help.

Train Rider said...

Although there may have only been one canceled train on the Worcester/Framingham line, it has been rampant across the entire system this week. A lot of my colleagues take the commuter rail and I can say that based on their feedback, there have been canceled trains on the Canton, Franklin, Middleborough and Providence lines this week.

I would like to see the money used towards improving service, as opposed to rolling out WiFi to people who may even be interested in it or subsidizing a commuter line from the South Shore that wasn't even wanted in the first place.

And by the way, I don't advocate higher taxes because that would likely go to pay down the MBTA debt and not improve service, so yes, I'm against that.

Anonymous said...

Train Rider -

Great response. I agree with everything you have to say. You do a nice job with this blog - at least you get the issues out in front.

Thanks!

Anonymous said...

Yes, there are delays all the time. That's what you get for not investing in public transportation. There's also track work going on pretty much all of those lines you mention and people can easily see that.

I find it funny that you don't advocate for more funding for the T (be it by taxes or fees). How do you think things are going to get better? Fairies?

You're a complainer. We all get it. Unless you have some sort of constructive criticism, you're wasting your time.

Anonymous said...

I agree with the first poster. You're quick to complain about the slightest thing. I wish my train (Stoughton) was 100% on time, but it's not. It's also a lot better than it was back last year during the silent strike or whatever, so I give them credit. They had an issue and it was (seemingly) fixed.

There's a lot of places with crappy public transportation and Boston is not unique in that sense. Maybe this whole blog thing is just a thing to vent, that's fine. If you're out to improve things you have to do more than just complain about it. Otherwise, you're just going to be ignored.