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no kidding
Charlie Baker and his sink-it-to-the-bottom-of-the-sea management team weren't honest and forthright about the project, and weren't pressed about details by the local media? The hell you say.
Red Line Too
Poftak has given zero useful info on the red line slow zones that popped up last month without warning. https://transitmatters.org/blog/redline22
I swear if it wasn't for Transitmatters and their data trackers, Charlie Baker's MBTA wouldn't say a word.
Everyone in management needs to be fired when Baker leaves.
Poftak must go
He lied about the whole shutdown. People bought in to the shuttle buses with the idea that in the end things would be better. They aren't. That's a failure.
And yes, I have faith in the objective views of Ray LaHood, and I like Poftak, but Poftak screwed the pooch here.
Don't you think he's gone in 2 months anyway?
I figure Maura Healey will have someone else in mind for the job.
Possibly
But a few thoughts-
First, Healey has been singing Baker's praises, so a large shakeup is not necessarily in the cards.
Second, the job, as political as it is, isn't necessarily a political job. Deval Patrick put Beverly Scott in charge of the T, and she was very much in charge in February of 2015, over a month after Patrick left office. To refresh people's mind, she resigned when the T was overwhelmed by snowstorms. While being prepared for snow isn't guaranteed, Poftak did basically guarantee quicker trains in return for a month's inconvenience. He instead delivered slower trains.
True
I think there was a lot more things wrong with the Orange Line than the MBTA is letting on.
The slow-go junctions were probably so far gone that when the T did the initial repairs, they discovered they need to do far more repairs in that area, but to avoid chaos with kids returning to school, they reopened the OL but kept the slow zones.
This doesn't excuse the T's selling of these repairs. If you're not going to follow through with the promise of faster service, admit it and keep people informed. Otherwise, you're going to get a lot of bad PR from the public.
Two weeks
Didn't the T say the slow zones would not be a problem after 2 weeks for the track repairs to settle?
When a politician says 2 weeks
They are lying.
Poftak is STILL Lying
As Uday Schultz documents in this Tweet, the segment of the line from North Station to Community College that Poftak says will be "improved" to run at 25 MPH by the end of the year was running at 40 MPH 20 years ago. And, some segments used to run at 50 MPH.
Charlie Baker and his hand-picked Pioneer Institute privatizin' pal Poftak have hated public transit for the entirety of their careers. Baker "innovated" a form of financing back in 1990 that borrowed against expected future Federal transportation funding, which is how billions of dollars for Big Dig overruns ended up on the MBTA's ledger!
Baker is literally the bully who grabs your arm and swings your hand up to your face, and then asks, "Why do you keep hitting yourself?"
[This report is useful for those interested in a full dissection of the Pioneer Institute from a left perspective.]
Dispatchers & New Cars
While the slow zones have rightfully gotten a lot of attention, I’m wondering if they’ve announced any timeline on when they might have enough dispatchers to run a weekday schedule again. And if they do someday have sufficient dispatchers, do they have enough new trains to run the weekday schedule? I’ve gotten the impression they no longer want to run the old trains but I know they are still waiting on the rest of the new ones. It makes me wonder what the real timeline might be for a return to some semblance of normal service.
The MBTA has delivered about
The MBTA has delivered about 76 of the new 1400 series cars and has 74 to go, plus they have to rebuild two of the cars that were in an accident when they were delivered. They're keeping some of the operable 01200 series cars, but once all of the other cars are delivered, they will be scrapped.