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It's the operators, not the bus supply. The T has bought so many new buses that they had a legit glut going into the last batch of retirements. To the point where they now maintain a 28-bus "winter contingency" fleet of surplus straight-diesels on-standby at Southampton at all times, but...

It's hard to make a service a success when the frequencies (4 RT's total per weekday, only 1 RT outside of peak) suck as much as they do. You can't exactly right-size more flexible post-COVID work hours into a spread of that few slots. To make the lower-capacity/lower-comfort buses work better...

At MBTA track-mile scaling applied to the 1996-99 New Haven-Boston electrification, $30B is THIRTEEN times more. Are you really arguing that we have 13x construction inflation in 26 years for utterly generic railway electrical engineering? 3x, 5x...yeah, I could easily accept that. 7x at...

There sort of is. Railroads being federally regulated means a lot of the state and local permitting overhead for things done on the ROW are inapplicable. They don't really have to do outreach for things like restoring double-track to a double-track railbed, but of course it's bad politics not...

That's just the Phase I audio alert. It's no different from a car's collision avoidance sensors...if you ignore the blinking lights and loud buzzer, you're going to plow into the car in front of you all the same. It's not an adequate measure for preventing the kind of speeding and...

Yes. The 2-bay open-air shed at Mattapan isn't equipped to inspect and service articulated trolleys, so they need something a little bigger and preferably enclosed from the elements. They're probably looking at something more akin to the Lake St. facility at the end of the B Line. That budget...

After the sour Boston 2024 experience vis a vis the IOC, I would think allowing the city to be extorted by another international sports crime syndicate like FIFA would be anathema to voters here. But what do I know...I'm not one of Kraft's campaign advisors, amirite? 🤷‍♂️

The Glob is trying way too hard to make this an issue when it's just not got that high a temperature for a majority of city voters. Everybody's appealing to bunkered-in suburbanites with a fear of things urban, not the actual city electorate who live and work with stuff like bike lanes as a...

No. It seems to be a courtesy totally lost to the sands of time. I see lots of small shops that don't even shovel their sidewalks, and that's lost business.

Not a lot beyond the shells is actually Chinese-manufacture in any of those orders, so you have to go chasing down all the subcomponent manufacturers to see whose tariffs are actually in effect for how much. For the CTA cars, they had something like 2 dozen component manufacturers with close to...

Yeah, so? The CRRC contract has been amended a couple times already for new tariffs. This isn't a new "Omigod!" thing. The T has already been paying for tariff increases on this deal since it was signed 12 years ago, and they'll continue to do so because it's cheaper than nuking the contract...

Before the big renovation, the signage in the station suffixed it underneath as "Scollay Square". That's because that signage was leftover from one of the first Cambridge Seven design motif installations, back when the GC name was only about 5 years old.

Do you know if it was a newer HSP-46 locomotive or an older F40PH-3C rebuild? The HSP's, while having pretty good MTBF reliability, have so much computer brains that they can be a bit of an ordeal to restart when there's a system fault triggering the computer into safe mode.

Battery box. Old-timey passenger cars use axle generators and batteries for their electricity, since they would've been pulled by locomotives (in Cape Cod Central's case, freight locomotives) that don't have modern passenger Head-End Power hookups.

It wasn't ages ago. It was 9 months ago that they last reset the contract. And that was for a Biden tariff adjustment. This isn't a new thing in the slightest.

I think you're giving Lynch way too much credit. He's always been a fairweather rep, ingratiating himself to whatever sentiment is fashionable without having more than skin-deep buy-in to the issues. Right now it's a bear market for federal funding, so he's sandbagging it. He's never sat on...

All of their current North American clients have backed away. SEPTA infamously canceled its commuter rail coach order (there's a couple of nearly-complete cars within photography distance sitting in the Springfield plant's yard). And both L.A. Metro and CTA in Chicago passed on very...

Major electrification of the T is not going to be initiated or completed in a Trump Administration at the rate they're hemming-and-hawing, so...in all practicality no, it's not a factor. It's unlikely that whoever gets elected in 2028 is going to have the semi-automatic aimed as squarely at...

Given that the rest of the world is in-process of electrifying new route miles pretty much 24/7/365 every single year, foreign bidders should be able to make hay with much better prices because of their incumbent scale doing cookie-cutter electrifications with all the usual (non- in real...

So...about $6-7B to electrify the whole system. Still not seeing where the extra $23B comes from in their scare quote.