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T worker injured by trolley in Allston

An MBTA inspector was injured at the Harvard Avenue stop on the B Line around 7 p.m. A spokesman says:

She was caught in the narrow space between the train and the fence separating the inbound and outbound tracks. It's unclear at this time if she was dragged or pushed (or a combination of the two).

She was taken to the hospital; service; service, just getting back to normal after a driver drove into a trolley, came to a halt.

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Comments

we were recovering from the car-trolley crash???

(Sigh)

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at Harvard Ave is dangerously narrow, given the volume of passengers that come through that station. It's an accident waiting to happen.

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the accident....stopped waiting

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That fence is a supposed 'safety feature' yet here it is causing injury.

Beacon Street doesn't have a fence down the middle, the only reason Comm Ave does is because the MBTA disrespects the city of Boston in a way that Brookline wouldn't put up with.

It's really sad. Comm Ave is over 200 feet wide in this spot. Drivers regularly speed so fast that they run their cars off the road and hit light poles, as Adam reports. The real danger on this street comes from the extremely wide roadway, and the high speed driving it encourages. But nothing gets done to fix that. Meanwhile, the "B" branch has such a slow average speed (6 to 9 mph), but the MBTA and BPW, with their irrational fear of trolleys, pretend like it's a fast moving commuter train, and put up lots of fences and obstacles to people. And as the other commenter noted, the platform space at Harvard Ave (and most every platform) is tiny and restricted, and unsuitable for its purpose.

It's an absurd situation. The Green Line is the dominant mode of transportation along that stretch of Comm Ave, but it and its riders are badly mistreated. And now that idiotic fence has claimed another victim. Wonder if it will inspire them to do anything, anything at all, to make things better.

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are MBTA property, not CIty of Boston. So your comment about the MBTA installing a fence on THEIR property somehow being "disrespectful" to the City of Boston is just plain nonsense.

Second, you seem to be advocating for removing the fence on the basis that it would make it easier for pedestrians to cross the tracks between stations - which is trespassing. Despite what the walking lobby may have told you, pedestrians do not have the absolute right to walk everywhere, especially crossing Green Line tracks wherever they please.

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On one hand, if you did not have it you would likely have drunk or naive college idiots getting creamed by trolleys all the time. On the other hand it caused an issue for the T employee here and the fence is truly an eyesore. I think it is more likely that in Brookline there either is, or perceived to be, less chance of people jaywalking the tracks rather than an aesthetics issue. But damn, that is one ugly fence.

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people have with "eww, it's UGLY"? It's a fence separating train tracks - get over it!

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are MBTA property, not CIty of Boston. So your comment about the MBTA installing a fence on THEIR property somehow being "disrespectful" to the City of Boston is just plain nonsense.

It is quite possible for something the T does on its own property to be disrespectful to the neighborhood. Or something that anyone does on their own property, for that matter. The T chose to install a fence on their property that lies within the city of Boston, but not their property within the town of Brookline.

The reason is that the T doesn't respect the neighborhood of Allston/Brighton enough to care about what the fence does to that neighborhood. There are too few crossings of the fence, and fewer still are compatible with the Americans with Disabilities Act, nor Massachusetts Architectural Access Board regulations.

If you are in a wheelchair and you want to cross from one side of Comm Ave to the other, you are very limited in where you can go. Of course removal of the fence is not enough to fix that, but it's just one part of the way the T and the city have conspired to dump on riders for decades, between tiny, crumbling platforms, insufficient crossings, and inaccessible everything.

(not that Brookline is necessarily better in this regard; I happened to be near Kent Street station earlier today and saw someone have to help a mother get her baby carriage out of a Type 8 that had its floor nearly a foot higher than the corroded platform -- how did they get away with rebuilding the street this way?)

Second, you seem to be advocating for removing the fence on the basis that it would make it easier for pedestrians to cross the tracks between stations - which is trespassing. Despite what the walking lobby may have told you, pedestrians do not have the absolute right to walk everywhere, especially crossing Green Line tracks wherever they please.

Yes, people like you and people at the T don't seem to grasp this essential point: the existence of the trolley is not about driving large vehicles around all day, but to provide mobility for people in order to support the community. The trolley is supposed to be amenity for the community, it's supposed to serve the people who live here. It's not supposed to be some kind of war between the T and the neighborhood, with Balkanized zones marked off by fences.

All around the world, and even right here in Boston, trolleys have been mixing (read that again: MIXING) with people on foot -- since long before my grandparents were born. Trolleys are not big, scary commuter rail trains. They are not supposed to be treated that way. They are supposed to be serving people, not blocking people off from their own neighborhood. They are supposed to integrate with the sidewalks and the various uses adjacent.

The fences don't actually protect people from the real danger of Comm Ave -- speeding cars. In fact, the fences seem to goad drivers into higher speeds by fostering the impression that Comm Ave is some kind of divided highway, rather than a neighborhood street that it really is, with large numbers of people living, walking and biking around.

I don't expect you to understand this because you don't seem to be the kind of person who is much interested in urban affairs, community development, or making places work for people, rather than machines. So I will just post these pictures instead:

IMAGE(http://www.bordeaux-metropole.fr/sites/default/files/IMG/deplacements-tranports/tram_bus_img_4717_590.jpg)

IMAGE(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v446/dolphinairlines/Zurich/3024_13_Bahnhofstrasse_TR.jpg)

IMAGE(https://c3.staticflickr.com/7/6184/6141190944_ebcd4080c2_b.jpg)

IMAGE(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Paris_tramway_T3_p1140675.jpg)

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Yes, and in many places in the world, people know enough to stay out of the way of trolleys that have the right of way, and may even be held responsible if they jaywalk in front of a trolley and get injured.

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That intersection is so large that you can enter it with a green light, and it will turn yellow & red before you reach the other side. Then the pedestrians get the cross light, and you are stuck blocking traffic.

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The Green Line worker was working on a disabled trolley and standing next to the train on the fence/track side (not platform side) of the train. From what has been described about the incident, seems like the problem is not the fence but rather that one of her co-workers either didn't know she was there to begin with or didn't know that she had not yet cleared the train when they started moving the disabled train.

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It's unbelievable that not only does the B line have zero traffic light priority, but the T has also been installing more and more stop signs for the trolley at unsignalized road crossings and the tops of hills. And they have the slowest fare collection system known to man.

Boston College to Kenmore takes 35 minutes to go 4 miles. And that's *after* waiting for the train to show up, and assuming it runs *exactly* on time.

The T, along with the city, should step up and make it a priority to speed up the painfully slow commute for thousands of people on one of the busiest rail lines in the country.

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