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Surviving summer Sumner shutdown
By adamg on Wed, 07/03/2024 - 11:37am
WBUR has the details on how to get between East Boston and downtown during the summer repair shutdown of the Sumner Tunnel, which starts Friday.
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Comments
Did MassDOT ever pay the T
Did MassDOT ever pay the T for the free service last year?
MBTA is part of MassDOT
MBTA is part of MassDOT as of 2009.
There may be some support funds transferred through an internal agreement as part of the tunnel rehab budget, but it would be like your left hand tipping your right hand for making dinner.
It's all government money but
It's all government money but the MBTA operates on its own separate budget and that budget has been strained in recent years (well, recent decades.)
Sumnertime
Summer time
and the Sumner ain't easy.
Magoo sez
Eileen Dover is going to be upset. Magoo.
The blue line has no slow
The blue line has no slow zones and will be free so any drivers complaining about this have only themselves to blame.
Who do vacationers arriving at Logan get to blame?
Not a great welcome to Boston trying to wrangle your kids and lug your bags to your hotel via the T. Cabs and Uber/Lyft will also suffer.
Huh?
Their own failure to plan?
I've never had any problem using transit to get kids and bags to a hotel. We used to use the T to get home if we landed when it was running.
Most cities, including the Boston area, have off-airport rentals that you can get when done seeing the city. Did this in Vancouver with two young kids in tow - transit to hotel for 3 nights, then picked up a car off airport and then explored some more. Kids were a bit older when we spent a week in Dublin while I was working, then grabbed a car and completed our trip a week later from Shannon.
Many of our visitors are from Europe, and others know how to pack and plan appropriately for non-car family travel ... including reading up on travel options before they leave home.
Just because you can doesn't mean everyone can
Single parents with multiple young kids, people with disabilities, people staying places that aren't on the T, etc. Not to mention people whose planes arrive late after the T has closed (has happened to me more than once) or who have to be at the airport too early to take the T.
The comment didn't mention people with disabilities
Only tourists who didn't think it through.
I have travelled solo with multiple small kids and used transit - you? Packing light is how this is done.
There are a lot of places in this world where you can't expect easy access to cars and traffic-free passage from airports. Boston is one of thousands of those.
I get the "coming in too late", so I used to schedule flights to arrive in time. I do know that it doesn't always work, but those after midnight arrivals are after the traffic of the day has abated. Similarly, if you are coming in too early to take the T, this won't affect you much at all. I dropped a neighbor off last summer at 4:30am for a 6am flight (a decade's long mutual arrangement) during that tunnel closure and it made little difference - 15 to 20 minutes each way.
The question is…
Will Google Maps account for the closure and ensuing detours?
Asking for a friend…
to my recollection
all the major map apps accounted for the shutdown last year
Ask MassDOT
If they notified Google and their Maps division. That's how road closures get put into Google Maps.