On free-fare day, lawyer announces class-action suit against MBTA, Keolis for winter woes

A real life Saul Goodman! Here in our
very own state of MA!

You have to love a lawyer who doesn't have a fixed address, just a PO Box, and works only with a cell phone.

Or, he's a lawyer at a professional firm called Richardson & Cumbo, LLP, based at 225 Franklin Street, Boston, MA 02110, which looks like a pretty high-rent building, and they have both a phone and a FAX number you can reach them at. Of course I took the time to look at the website, rather than just throw around off-the-cuff smears about lawyer stereotypes. The PO Box might be something they set up exclusively for this case to help sort mail.

This kind of class action suit only benefits the lawyers and hurts an already struggling MBTA. After the lawyers get their cut, you'll be lucky if you get back the cost of your commuter rail pass for those months.

Wow, you're so well informed.. *sarcasm*
"Wrong target" - ironic subject line, huh?

I think the entire point is that most of those trains were cancelled for nearly all of March.

Safety during storms? OK. But the commuter rail ran a reduced schedule for ALL of March. March saw only 10 inches of snow total, and nearly all of that was prior to March 6th. You mean to tell me that 20% of trains not running THREE WEEKS after the snow has stopped falling is because of safety concerns?

I was waiting for this strawman argument to get posted.

The T shutting down on the 2-3 days that Boston got hit by blizzards is not what is being sued over, and could not rightly result in a lawsuit. Inclement weather that causes short-term and reasonable disruption clearly falls under the "act of God"/"force majeure" concept and isn't something you can hold a company responsible for.

The T is being held responsible for the collapse in service that spanned practically two months, which is an example of rank negligence on the part of the people who run the T. A transit system becoming nonfunctional for nearly two months as a result of a snowstorm is not normal and not something that can be called an "act of God." Any transit system run properly would have been functional again 1-2 days after each storm, yet the T wasn't. And the T's response is an insulting 15% refund to pass-holders.

If a hurricane damages your apartment building, you can't blame the landlord - "act of God." But if your landlord has been keeping the building in a rotting state of disrepair for a decade, knows the thing is close to collapsing, has been warned it's close to collapsing, and then a storm knocks the building flat, your landlord is entirely responsible. His negligence caused the disaster, not the weather.

I'd have just called the T's behavior "negligence" but "unjust enrichment" is probably one of the most apropos bits of legalese I've ever heard to describe the February/March debacle and the T's response to it.

§ D (pp.10-11) of the complaint explains the rationale of the lawsuit. Not the weather, but the T's negligence.

Yep. They could switch to a discount system where if you pre-pay for say 40+ rides in advance you get a discount that's equivalent to what they currently charge for a monthly zone pass -- but in the new system you're charged per-ride. So it'd be like a Super-CharlieCard. And by the same token, if you don't use it, you're not being charged. Then, since the money on the card doesn't expire at the end of a month, it can't be claimed that the T owed you a "month of reliable service" or whatever in exchange for your purchase.

I haven't used them in years, but the Boston Express bus used to have a 10-ride pass that worked this way. You would buy it at a steep discount (over a round-trip ticket) and it would be good for 10 rides. The "idea" was that 10 rides was for one full week of use by commuters, but if you skipped a day, you didn't lose those two rides; your card was now good an extra day into next week. When I started using them I was buying them on Mondays of course, but by the end of my use of that bus I was buying them on like a Thursday or Friday.

Posts like yours are what make people who legitimately complain about the T look bad.

The wages that most of the MBTA workers make are commensurate with their work. It's something in the $18-25 range for the equipment operators. Driving a train isn't rocket science, but it is skilled labor. Additionally, even though union T workers are difficult-to-impossible to fire for most kinds of workplace misbehavior, they can and will be let go on-the-spot for safety violations. For example, the T has had a policy for a couple years now that even carrying a cell phone while operating a bus/train is an instant firing. That kind of stringent standard earns people higher pay, and rightly so.

Where the T has problems with their workers is in the fringe benefits and other perks the unions have coerced from the MBTA. The T workers are allowed to take off far more time than is typical, and as recent stories have alleged, they seem to be massively abusing medical/sick time laws like the FMLA to get away with it. The pension/retirement system used to allow T employees to work less than 25 years and then retire on full pension, so you have people in their 40s retired from the T and collecting pensions for another 30 years. The T has reformed the retirement rules for new hires, but they can't retrospectively change what was offered to employees previously, so this problem will be around, albeit shrinking, for years to come. The T also has issues with their maintenance shifts, where the T workers only get to do meaningful track work for 1-3 hours per night, but the union rules say a shift is fully paid as a full shift, so they get paid for 8 hours of "work" even if they worked 2.

If the T had their people working a full schedule and working full shifts you'd see amazing improvement in the T. And the $18-25/hr salaries would be just right for such work.

Where the T has even bigger problems are in the executive-level (union-exempt) positions. This is where you find the political patronage, the six-figure salaries for chair-warmer jobs, the 100% no-shows, and stuff like that.