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Remember when the T shut the Orange Line for a month and said they were going to fix all the slow zones?
By adamg on Wed, 01/25/2023 - 4:52pm
Yeah, about that. The T announced today the Orange Line would be shut between Ruggles and North Station because of the ongoing Government Center Garage demolition, but a Globe reporter got curious and asked why Ruggles and the T acknowledged it was also to do more work to eliminate the slow zones that it had earlier said it would eliminate during the shutdown, except it turns out they didn't.
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Magoo sez
Magoo recently did some urban exploration ‘neath the streets of our fair city. Magoo encounters what Magoo calls The Underneath People. The Underneath People were beautiful in spirit and reminiscent of a silly sloth. Magoo is not sure if the Underneath People were human sapiens. In fact Magoo thinks The Underneath People were a mutant race of folk from the Pleiades. Magoo.
Modest Mouse has a song about this
Fuck your acid trip, I need to get home.
Joe Pesaturo
doesn’t have a lot of credibility left
but Charlie Baker took a bow for the success of the shutdown
Surely with his vast experience with all things T-related, he wouldn't be BS-ing on his way out?!?
Track maintenance is an ongoing process
In fact, the worst offense the T makes is ignoring problems with the track. The slow stretch north of Back Bay that was (maybe) resolved in September dated back to 2019.
I’ll say it again and take the hits for saying it. Between 2016 and 2019, the T was very good with fixing the rails. Sure, that meant buses on the weekends, but in a certain city a few hundred miles to out southwest, they close big chunks of lines on weekends all the time. Then they stopped doing that, which lead to a month long shutdown to catch up with everything that was ignored. Weekend bustitution a pain, but if it results in functional track, it’s a price worth paying.
They did a lot of patching, yes
But they were patching patches that were patched before those patches.
Like my dad's old work shirts, there was eventually only threadbare fabric to try to patch up.
1 to 5 is for patching
Weekends are for the real work.
city to the southwest
That city to the southwest also spent a long time in the 1980s and 1990s rebuilding after years of "deferred maintenance," deferred because the city was broke.
Some of those shutdowns are tolerable because there's more redundancy built into the network than here--so, if the A train tunnel under the harbor is shut down, they can send some of those trains through the F tunnel, or vice versa. (Where there isn't redundancy, you get even more screaming, and arguing about what streets to run those replacement shuttle buses on....)
Redundancy has limits
Just ask someone who rides the J train.
The Red Line is….
….just about shutdown anyway given the way the trains crawl into Park and then to Braintree. Never see anyone working on anything and the slow downs frequently shift locations
That's very sad, because the Red Line used to be pretty decent.
That's very sad, because the Red Line used to be pretty decent. Now, it, too has gone downhill.I admit that I have not used the MBTA at all since the pandemic started, because far too many people aren't wearing masks, the MbTA cars get too crowded, especially at rush-hours, and the ventilation on the MBTA is not so good, generally, plus there are too many signal and motor/engine problems.
I remember the month-long shutdown of the Orange Line, and the vehicular traffic, especially during rush-hour, increased tremendously. It was a mess, and I always ended up started out way earlier when I've had to be somewhere at a certain time, and I've been doing that lately, too.
The fact that the MBTA staff has failed so badly in keeping up necessary maintenance and not fixing problems when they first arise and they're small has also contributed to the mess that the MBTA at large is in, and the fact that so many dangerous situations have occurred.
Having said all of the above, here's hoping that Governor Healey will appoint better, more competent staff people to fix the problems on the MBTA, and to re-instate the mask mandates, both on public transportation, including the MBTA, and in indoor places, generally.
The Red Line has been declining for decades
Perhaps you missed the 2009 report that noted that the tunnels north of Harvard were getting to an unsafe state.
Growing up in the 80s, I thought that stopping between Central and Kendall for 20 minutes was normal. Ah, to have that kind of time.
Bikes. Bikes are the future.
50 lbs of material, 4 inches of asphalt once every 20 years and some paint every year.
I’m done with the T, e bike for me.