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Shuttle bus between Haymarket, Bowdoin and State and Bowdoin open all the time when the Government Center T stop shuts down
By adamg on Thu, 12/13/2012 - 7:07am
Matthew provides notes from last evening's meeting on the need for a new Government Center T stop and how officials are planning to move people around when they lose the connection between the Blue and Green lines for two years.
Also see the UHub discussion on the work.
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Comments
how does one get to from B line to the blue line then?
looks like C, D, and E can just continue to Haymarket and take shuttle to State - inconvenient but at least plausible. But B will terminate at Park?? That adds in two legs between the B and blue line, either transferring to another green line and taking the shuttle at Haymarket or taking red to orange to blue.
Why on earth wouldn't they just run a shuttle from Park St? Or just extend B line trains to Haymarket? Luckily I only have to do this once or twice a month but what if this was someone's commute? It'll easily add 20 minutes each way. The other alternative is just walking from Park to State and paying twice because they can't figure out how to implement walking transfers.
Thinking about it
For Airport trips, I'm trying to decide whether it's worthwhile to go Green-Red-Silver. For other Blue Line trips, getting off at Park and walking to State will probably be fastest. If coming from Haymarket, Bowdoin might be worth considering, it's slightly closer. To stay within the system, Park-DTX-State.
It all sucks.
The given reason they are not implementing a shuttle from Park is that the one-way streets and congestion make it too difficult.
Although the city really needs to revisit those ridiculous one-way roads around the Common, I'm not sure why they couldn't consider something like this though, which requires no changes. A figure-eight route from Park St to Beacon St to School St to Washington St and then around back via Tremont St. Probably 10 minute roundtrip time.
D will run beyond Park only
"off-peak" times of day. So during rush hour, D folks looking to go east of Park Street will have to use the already overcrowded E and C trains.
As I stated in my other post (see below), the logical solution is staring MBTA management in the face - Run everything eastbound to Lechmere, and send the westbound trains to new destinations based on the schedule, and not the fact that "Car 36XX originated at Riverside, so it's got to go back to Riverside now."
It's self-regulating in terms of restoring westbound "alphabet order" at proper headways. And bunching of eastbound trains is no longer an issue.
But it's not either a smartphone app or a fancy station remodel, so obviously management has no use for the idea.
Current excuse
"Not enough trains" to do that.
Which seems reasonable.
Were it not for the fact that
the MBTA currently has about 40 servicable streetcars (enough for 20 two-car trains) sitting idle, that would be a reasonable excuse.
The problem is not lack of equipment, it's management's reluctance to staff those trains. But I guess somebody think's it's good "customer service" to provide less and less service to the customers.
Trains have to be maintained
Trains have to be maintained and inspected. The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) states it is common practice for the number of cars in maintenance to be equal to 20% of the number of cars needed to maintain a schedule (an industry standard 20% spare ratio). The MBTA schedules 146 Green Line cars in the rush-hour. When cars out of service for wrecks and major problems are subtracted, they have 178 active Green Line cars. 120% of 146 is 175. That means they have about 3 spare cars above the industry average for maintenance spares. Consdiering that they have just awarded a contract to overhaul the 86 Type 7s built in 1986-87, and eventually 10 of those will be out of service for overhaul when that program is fully up to speed, there will be no spare cars. Where do you come up with your fantasy number of 40 spare Green Line cars?
Then they should plan ahead
Then they should plan ahead and have fewer cars out of service for scheduled maintenance during this period.
The cars are inspeacted based
The cars are inspeacted based on the miles accumulated, the more miles you run, the more often they did to be inspected. They could put off inspections for a few days if they needed to run extra cars for a special event (like extra service on the 4th), but we are talking about running extra service for two years.
And once again
the MBTA shows their utter contempt for those of us who use the Green Line east of Park Street.
The Government Center rebuild would be the perfect opportunity to improve Green Line service by running all trains to Lechmere and then dispatching them out on the next line that needs service at that time, instead of the archane "out and back" method they currently employ.
As for teminating Ds at Park Street, it'll be curious to see if they actually change the platform designations. I suspect not, they'll likely just do the usual "musical trains" routine I see every rush hour.
"Will there be out-of-system
"Will there be out-of-system transfers? The answer: nothing more than is currently supported. They are "unable to reprogram" the AFC system to be more flexible."
So DC could program their 30 year old smart card to handle new things like this....
But in Boston, its impossible to do it with 6 year old technology?
Fire everyone.