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Better for city employees to work than take the T
By jikamens on Mon, 07/13/2009 - 9:18am
To the editor:
Councilor Michael Flaherty’s idea to slash the city’s motor pool by having workers ride the T is a brilliant strategy for doubling the number of employees on the payroll. How else does he expect to maintain the same level of productivity when workers are forced to spend half the day waiting for trains and buses that run infrequently and arrive late, if at all?
Is Flaherty trying to save the city money or earn points with the unions by creating jobs for their members?
Jonathan Kamens
Brighton
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Comments
huh?
How does riding the T decrease one's productivity? It sounds like you are assuming that the workers punch in as they leave their homes. Which wouldn't surprise me if that were indeed in the union contract.
Nah....
Jonathan, I don't buy the logic. Perhaps Flaherty is trying to score political points, but this sounds like a letter trying to put down Flaherty without factual backing.
Please, thousands of workers use public transportation and don't spend "half the day" waiting for a train or the bus.
(Right now I'm not carrying a torch for any of the mayoral candidates...)
Indeed
Indeed, it is this kind of rampant ass-hattery that leads us to preserve current toll and gas-tax structure at any costs while consigning the T to failure since we all know that only poor folks bother with it.
High time to realign priorities in Boston. The city IS NOT a conduit for the unobstructed travel of cars at or above 60mph. Sorry to be the bearer of sad tidings.
Specious logic
There are certainly many, many workers who use the T to get to and from work every day.
They do so on specific routes, with specific start and end points, at specific times, during the hours when T service (supposedly) runs most frequently.
That's not what Flaherty was talking about. He was talking about city employees who have to travel throughout the city throughout the day to do their jobs. If you think that's something that can be done quickly and efficiently on the T, then you apparently live in a different reality from mine.
actually...
...as someone who hasn't owned a car during over 25 years of city living (NYC for over a decade, then Boston), I'd respond that it's sometimes EASIER and FASTER to get from place to place via subway than by car, depending on time of day, traffic patterns, and parking options.
Yup
I live 10 minutes' walk south of the Central Square T stop, yet I can still get to Downtown Crossing faster by taking the Red Line than by driving - and that's if I park in a nearby garage. If I had to look for street parking.. no contest.
Yup-but...
Street parking? Why not just park on the sidewalk like the government employees do?
"sometimes" is not terribly useful
Suppose you are an elevator inspector who works for the city of Boston. You spend all day traveling from building to building inspecting elevators. There's no rhyme or reason to where you need to go; they could be anywhere in the city.
How many inspections are you going to be able to get done in a day if you have to take the T between them?
I'm sure Flaherty is right that there are people using city-owned vehicles who don't need to be. But for him to blithely pronounce that when he's mayor, he's going to cut the fleet of city-owned vehicles in half, is an absurd political stunt.
let's get grounded here
Instead of taking one word from my comment -- "sometimes" -- and twisting an entire response around it, why don't we work towards common sense:
1. Yup, some city workers need a city car during the day.
2. Others don't. Perhaps many others. Maybe even half, as Flaherty suggests.
3. Let's save the hyperbole -- "absurd political stunt" -- for truly absurd political stunts, which we no doubt will see during this mayoral campaign. The year (politically speaking) is young.
That one word is the crux of what people here are getting wrong
Instead of taking one word from my comment -- "sometimes" -- and twisting an entire response around it,
I didn't "twist" anything, and I quoted that one word because that one word is the crux of what people here, including you, are being clueless about.
New York City has a wonderful public transportation system which allows anyone to get from any point A to any point B relatively quickly (and in some cases really quickly) at pretty much any time of day.
Boston doesn't, and never will. We don't have enough tunnels, the ones we have aren't arranged in a grid, adding new ones is inconceivable (another Bib Dig, anyone?), and even if it weren't, we don't have the population density to support such a system.
It simply is not practical for people who have to get around the city during the day to do their jobs to use public transportation to do it.
why don't we work towards common sense:
I'd love to see a qualified mayoral candidate with some common sense. Alas, I don't see any, and that includes the guy currently residing on the fifth floor.
2. Others don't. Perhaps many others. Maybe even half, as Flaherty suggests.
If he can't prove it, and I'm quite certain he can't, then he shouldn't say it. If he says it when he can't prove it, then it is, as I said before, an "absurd political stunt." You apparently know a definition of "hyperbole" with which I am unfamiliar.
proving it
Umm, if you applied the "prove it before you propose it" standard to every policy idea pitched during a political campaign...oh, never mind. As for the candidates themselves, each is qualified and has common sense.
I think this thread is best closed off by placing it in the agree to disagree category.
On political campaigns
Umm, if you applied the "prove it before you propose it" standard to every policy idea pitched during a political campaign...
...then you'd have much more honest political campaigns which give the voters a much better idea of what the candidates would actually do in office and don't treat them like easily manipulable rubes?
Yeah, you're right, that would be awful.
As for the candidates themselves, each is qualified and has common sense.
Wow, you sure are right that we're going to have to agree to disagree about that!
I'm not sure about Flaherty's experience, but it's laughable to claim that Sam Yoon has enough experience to be mayor!
T + bike will be faster in
T + bike will be faster in the city of boston than a car every single time. Except maybe monday at 3:20am.
No way
I bet my scooter beats any other option you come up with 95% of the time.
Not!
One of many counterexamples I could come up with...
I got called up for jury duty at the West Roxbury Courthouse near the Arnold Arboretum.
It's 51 minutes by T from my house in Brighton Center, if you believe the MBTA Trip Planner and there are no delays or skipped buses / trains / whatever.
It's 19 minutes by car if you believe Google Maps. Double it for rush hour and it's still 25% shorter.
he said "T plus Bike"
You can cut off some of that trip by "bridging" one line to another.
Bike plus T pass is a great option for not having to go down town.
Bike plus T...minus T
Once you concede to using a bike instead of the T for part of the trip, I'm willing to bet you can simply ignore the T completely and have gotten there faster by bike in the first place.
It's a loaded proposition.
Not really, no
I've ridden my bike from Somerville to Lowell, and I've also ridden it from Somerville to Winchester and taken the train the rest of the way. The first may be more fun but the second is much faster.
Yawn
Yay, Ron. Sure, a TRAIN will beat a bike. A bike will beat the bus...and sadly, the subway. City workers aren't being told to take the commuter rail to do their jobs mid-day. Don't be dense.
Toss Up
It takes me 35-45 minutes to get to Davis Square on the red line.
It takes 45 minutes to bike to Tufts.
20 minute headway to bike to the commuter rail, 15 minute trip, ten minutes home. (versus 50-60 minute bike ride home)
You have to take it case by case
When I bike to work from Roslindale, it certainly takes longer than when I take the commuter rail. But more often than not, it beats the combination of bus and orange line. As for the car, everything beats it during rush hour. Well, I suppose walking would take longer.
Walking vs the T
I have walked from Washington St to BU Central faster than the Green B Line on more than one occasion.
Good point
The B-Line must be treated as a separate and distinct transit category. That aside, generally the greater the distance, the more effective each mode of transit is from walking to biking to 'T to car. Downtown, for example, it's often faster to walk if you are only looking at a couple of stops on the subway.
The B line
This is good enough to make me wish we had signatures here.
What is wrong with having
What is wrong with having employees arriving at work on time by T instead of city-owned car?
No one is saying everyone has to use the T during the work day --- but when it comes to coming and going to work, why not?
I'm a city employee and I do....and thousands of others do too.
Only friends of Tom Menino can go back and forth in a city owned car...
im no fan of Flaherty, but
im no fan of Flaherty, but if Menino's people are going to say they can't use the T to get around Boston, why doesn't Menino use his considerable leverage to push for better MBTA service in Boston (as Somervilles mayor has successfully done) instead of fighting (E line) or letting opportunities pass (Washington St light rail, subway service directly to the airport terminals)?
Menino may think the public transportation gets in the way of his chauffeured truck. However, since many of us rely on it to get us to work, he should spend more time advocating for us instead of saying his employees are too uppity to use it.
Dude, I take the T too
I take the T to work every day. My family and I take the T on a regular basis. I think the T sucks, and I would love to see it improved in all sorts of ways, as the plethora of complaints I've sent to the T and posted on my blog will attest.
None of this changes the fact that suggesting that cutting the city's fleet of vehicles in half by telling employees to just take the T instead is an asinine idea.
To T or not To T...
...that is the
questionfalse choice.It was recently proposed that the city move to a fleet management and car-sharing solution, FastFleet instituted by ZipCar based right here in Boston/Cambridge. It has worked extremely well for DC and could work equally as well here. Where did this option go from the table? Why would Flaherty be opposed to car sharing instead of saying "I'll make them use the T"?
Probably a simple answer
Like that arch-rival Sam Yoon thought of the idea first.
Ok
I knew we'd discussed it before because a candidate brought it up. So, Flaherty's not allowed to agree with Yoon's good idea, instead opting for the dumbest other alternative to "distinguish" himself?
Politics are awesome.
Its always good to cut costs...
But you want some good, hard working, honest, smart people in these jobs too. A car isn't always needed, but many of these city jobs are 50-75% of the pay you might get in the private sector for the same work. Now if a car might be used in the job anyway, why not give the worker one and save on salaries that they might get in the private sector?
Like someone said before, some people need cars and some people dont need cars.
Eating your own dogfood
I think it would be excellent idea for more government employees to experience the problems with the T first-hand. Perhaps I'm being optimistic, but these workers might be more willing to make changes if it directly affects them.
This is a common practice in some industries.