Search results

"Free Fare Day" made me realize how truly stupid and bothersome the Commuter Rail's fare-collection system is. For the majority of CR riders, who use a monthly pass, a daily feature of your commute is having a conductor request that you withdraw your wallet/pass to be physically checked, at some...

Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos This reminds me of an experience I had on the Fitchburg Line last year. A younger woman, probably around 20 years old, fell asleep or wasn't paying attention and missed her stop. The conductor told her she'd need to get off at the next stop. The girl...

I don't think ridership has really fully recovered from the system shutdown, but leading up to the issues this winter, people at Littleton/495 were parking on the grass and on the medians -- literally anywhere you could cram a vehicle. "As much parking as necessary" is a tricky concept, but the...

Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos How in god's name did they get this fixed in time for the evening commute? What's involved in repairing something like that? I was quite stunned at how quickly they were able to restore normal service.

This advice extends to just about every online comments section.

Construction was supposed to begin this past fall on the big new dedicated WiFi network for the commuter rail, being funded by $50m of someone else's money. Does anyone have any idea if it, you know, did? http://www.mbta.com/about_the_mbta/news_events/?id=6442452651 This project was anonounced...

Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos They're printed on the same plastic stock as normal CharlieCards.

Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos I received one of the new plastic commuter rail CharlieCards for January and am looking forward to trying it out. I loved it back in September when the T's ticketing vendor screwed up all those passes and I got to use a CharlieCard again for the month...

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011 Then we build the "requisite" apartments. Everyone could have a three-bedroom condo in Camberville if we built them all to be a hundred stories high. And there's no actual reason not to do this except, as Arlington puts it in his/her (excellent)...

Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos It's worth noting that the T contract is worth about $300m USD per year in revenue to Keolis, and fines are capped at $12m, around 4%. $434k is a relatively paltry sum in context, especially (I think) when the fines are related to timeliness.

Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos I'm a Fitchburg Line commuter, and performance in October was so horrific that I began to seriously wonder whether rumors of a silent employee mutiny were true. It's great to see the issues getting some press.

"The Point" officially opened for business on Saturday, though said business is confined solely to Market Basket at this point. I happened to drive by on Saturday afternoon and it was absolutely swarmed with people. http://www.lowellsun.com/news/ci_26902287/littleton-joins-market-basket-family

I'm glad to see the solid discussion here, and very much agree -- of course -- that the MBTA either doesn't understand matters of parking supply/demand or simply doesn't care. I think there's reason to believe that, at least in the short term, demand at this lot is relatively price elastic...

The new parking lot at Littleton/495 ($4 per day) was operating at about capacity in its first year, but already this year it's become comically overcrowded. Show up at 9am on a weekday and you'll find people parked on the throughway between lots, on top of curbs, on the grass, besides the...

My Fitchburg train is constantly screwed up as well. Specialties include express trains announcing the names of all the stops and the destination of the train being flip-flopped (outbound trains have North Station as the destination, trains pulling into North Station will say "Now arriving at...

This is indeed indisputably remarkable.

Because instead of operating at a thin, profitable margin, they operate at a big venture-funded loss?

Re: Nashua Street Residences | MBTA North Station Garage | West End I feel nauseous just looking at that photograph.

New schedule is up here: http://www.mbta.com/uploadedfiles/Documents/Schedules_and_Maps/Upcoming_Schedules/Commuter_Rail/Fitchburg.pdf Nobody's going to be shedding any tears over the new turnaround but in my opinion this is a substantial schedule change. Instead of a 10 minute window between...

Rumors are flying around a number of places, including RR.net, that the afternoon and evening train schedules are changing as soon as August 4th, meaning many riders would have less than a week's notice. Possibly includes the flipping of the turnaround from South Acton to Littleton.