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New MBTA announcement already making riders wish they were somewhere else
By adamg on Sun, 03/20/2016 - 11:54am
The T is running new announcements on the Green Line, at least at above-ground stops: "Pay your fare! It's only fair!"
As Boston Dog kvetches:
Oh my God. The "Pay your Fare!" announcements on the Green Line got obnoxious after three stops.
Pict Liberation Army adds:
Particularly when its playing over drivers flagging people past farebox.
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Comments
Just start pulling BU fare-dodgers off the Green Line
And arrest them, and report them to BU.
The word will get around.
And the rest of us will not be offended and annoyed, but be entertained.
Doesn't sound very efficient
It would be far more effective to insist that BU charge an MBTA fee that allows students to do this.
Hmm... Naaah...
I'd much rather watch asshole, scofflaw bros getting yanked off Type 8's.
Bonus points if the Kenmore official got to preside over some fare evasion show-trials!
mostly above ground only
I made 3 green line trips yesterday, 2 on the B one on the E. The announcements occurred at each above ground stop and, I think at Kemore inbound. So you get to hear the msg roughly every 30-40 seconds, and at about 3X the volume of the stop announcements. I have to think this particular PSA won't survive rider feedback after tomorrow's rush hour.
Fare Jumpers Know What They're Doing
Automated announcements won't change their behavior, but will only serve as an additional insult to people who do pay their fares to ride the Ⓣ — an annoying reminder that others cheat the system.
It's as bad as when a Ⓣ announcement claims to apologize for passenger inconvenience, when everyone knows they couldn't care less.
Dukakis will be wishing he
Dukakis will be wishing he drove the tank to work tomorrow.
Training us to ignore PA announcements
There's tons of literature on this -- it's analogous to "alarm fatigue" among ccu nurses. Constant zero-information-value announcements coming from the PA system accomplish nothing other than training us all to tune out anything coming from the PA system.
Or you could put card readers by the back doors
and capture some of the lost fares that way.
But that would make sense, so we can't have that.
This.
Plenty of other cities with far less honest folk than Boston have card readers at the back doors. This way, at least the honest folk will be able to tap their card when the conductor opens all doors and starts waving people in without tapping.
Years ago, a friend of mine had a Long Chat with an MBTA employee about poor weekend service on the E line. He asked the T employee why they were only running single car trains every 15 minutes, despite the fact that the trains were overfull and it was slowing the whole line down with significant delays. The T employee said that, because the trains were too full, they stopped collecting fares, so there was no *record* of the high ridership, and therefore, the MBTA was not able to add more trains and might in fact *remove* some trains due to *low* ridership. When my friend asked why they didn't collect fares for the record and the money, the T employee said that was too slow!
As someone who lived on the B line for a long time, a lot of the back door "fare jumpers" are monthly pass holders. Their ride should be measured for ridership stats, but they've already paid. Or they're people who, when told to "Board all doors!" followed directions and then were unable to make their way forward in a crush-loaded train.
The whole system would benefit from card readers on the back doors: more rides would be registered on the whole, even if some people still managed to sneak in.
Which confirms what we all know
Namely that the people in charge of decisionmaking at the T don't know what the hell they're doing and probably have never ridden public transit in their lives other than for photo ops and prestaged inspection tours.
I feel bad for the cops
Today the headlines read, 'PAY YOUR FARE! IT'S ONLY FARE'
Tomorrow the headlines read 'TRANSIT COP BEAT FARE JUMPER'
Next week the headlines read 'TRANSIT COP INDICTED FOR BEATING FARE JUMPER'
Please complain to the T
Please complain to the T about this: http://www.mbta.com/customer_support/feedback/ or @MBTA on Twitter.
A few years ago they decided to pipe annoying music and ads into stations (it was called T Radio). People complained, and the T listened and cancelled the program.