Gov. Healey today announced a plan to spend an extra $8 billion over the next ten years on transportation projects, including a large increase in the MBTA's annual budget and nearly $1.4 billion for capital projects that would include new subway and commuter-rail cars, spending on "station accessibility and resilience, track improvements and power system resiliency" and bolstering ferry service. Read more.
Photo by Turlach MacDonagh.
The MBTA is putting up brightly colored signs that sort of look like radically simplified QR codes as part of a pilot to try to help the visually impaired better get around the system with the help of a phone app that can read the signs. Read more.
Shiny and new tracks don't do much good when a shiny new train just dies and then won't be budged, as happened this morning at Chinatown, where one of the new Orange Line trains despaired of life and just died and then T workers ran into problems removing the carcass. The T is now telling riders to take the Green Line downtown instead - or if they're further out, hop on commuter rail at Oak Grove, Malden Center, Forest Hills, Ruggles or Back Bay.
Boston firefighters responded to the Stony Brook Orange Line station around midnight after smoke began filling the station from a fire on the outbound tracks. Read more.
In a defeat for Milton and other communities aghast at the idea of the teeming masses moving in, the Supreme Judicial Court today ruled a state regulation that requires towns served by the MBTA to add at least one zone that theoretically could support more housing is entirely constitutional - and that the state can even sue towns that resist. Read more.
Around 7:20 p.m., the MBTA sent out word that Red Line riders could expect delays of up to 15 minutes - even including the dreaded standing by at stations - due to Yet More Problems with signals, this time between Quincy Center and Wollaston.
Our own Cybah recently snapped some shots underneath the 51-story office/condo building nearing completion above the tracks of South Station. Read more.
Neal Gaffey asks:
Does anyone know why the Union Square T station smells like chocolate? It is delightful.
Imagine if they extended the Riverside Line to the suburbs of Elmira, NY.
Besides being located in the town of Horseheads, NY, which is worth a detour just to say you've been to Horseheads, NY, the village of Elmira Heights is also home to the US factory for Spanish train maker CAF, where the MBTA's next-gen, Type 10 Green Line trolleys will be built - 100 or so of them, 40 feet longer than the current trolleys and with multiple bendi-spots and all handicap accessible doors. Read more.
State officials, MBTA workers celebrate the end of T slow zones (photo by governor's office).
State officials this morning officially celebrated the removal of the last official slow zone on the MBTA, on the Green Line specifically - after more than 20 years of subway slow zones. Not all riders were able to join in the celebrations, though, because they were outside shivering in the cold waiting for a Red Line shuttle bus due to a cracked rail near Wollaston. Read more.
Photo by Transit PD.
For the third time in two weeks, somebody in a Toyota wound up ensnared on Green Line tracks, this time at the end of the B Line at Boston College. Read more.
Signs at the Tufts Medical Center Orange Line stop still direct people to Don Bosco Technical High School, some 26 years after the school closed and got turned into a DoubleTree hotel. Read more.
It's a nightmare getting home on commuter-rail trains out of South Station because of an Amtrak train that took out one of the overhead power lines near Back Bay. Or as the T puts it:
Framingham/Worcester, Needham, Franklin/Foxboro Line & Providence/Stoughton Line passengers are experiencing severe delays in both directions due to a downed catenary wire & earlier disabled Amtrak train. All trains must operate on one track at Back Bay.
Roving UHub photographer Joyce Falk Onyango had to stop when the Santa-crossing lights came on on Washington Street at the Forest Hills T stop yesterday.
Patrick Snyder captured this evening's sunset over the Charles from an outbound Red Line train on the Longfellow Bridge.
Photo by Transit PD.
Transit Police report arresting a 27-year-old woman they say drove her Camry inbound on the Green Line tracks at Coolidge Corner around 2:30 a.m., then tried to book it down the tracks at "a high rate of speed," only she didn't get very far before the car went off the rails and officers were able to book her on a charge of OUI.
MBTA workers have fixed whatever was wrong with the Red Line tracks just north of Savin Hill and so the "speed restrictions" number for the line is once again at 0.
Red Line trains can only go 10 m.p.h. on part of the Ashmont branch. Map by MBTA.
A new slow zone emerged on the Red Line this weekend, just one week after MBTA officials had declared the line free of speed restrictions for the first time in two decades. Read more.
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