COVID-19 Impacts on Logan, MBTA, and Boston travel and tourism

falcon42 said:
Is Massport exempt to the construction ban? Still several workers at the Hyatt project in Seaport this AM. You could see many inside doing work as well. All other sites in seaport have a few stragglers but not much activity.
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The state hasn't halted construction, so any state project (MBTA, Massport, etc.) can continue.
 
falcon42 said:
Is Massport exempt to the construction ban? Still several workers at the Hyatt project in Seaport this AM. You could see many inside doing work as well. All other sites in seaport have a few stragglers but not much activity.
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Falcon -- Massport is a State entity operating inside various cities and towns and commonly following voluntarily the local regs
However -- the Governor has explicitly said that outside of the jurisdictions of Boston and recently Cambridge -- the show must go on

The only complicating factor is that the Governor asked construction companies to donate N-95 masks to Hospitals and other COVID-19 facilities where the workers come into direct contact with potentially infectious patients.

So -- my guess is that Logan Forward will continue to move forward where the individual projects don't need a bunch of people wearing masks

Just reviewed the Logan Forward website
list of individual projects looks similar to last week with timelines detailing things scheduled to happen during the last week+ in March

Only direct references to COVID-19 involve things like reduced schedules for Logan Express, More Hand Sanitizers and more thorough cleaning of Restrooms and adding International signs for Hand washing! :geek:
 
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BA suspending all US service except:

Boston: 1 daily, 777-200
Chicago: 1 daily, 777-200
Los Angeles: 1 daily, 747
New York(JFK): 2 daily 747 and 777-200
San Francisco: 1 daily, 747
Seattle: 1 daily, 777-300
Washington(IAD): 1 daily, A350-1000

British Airways April 2020 Long-Haul Changes as of 0730GMT 22MAR20

British Airways in the last few days filed service long-haul operation adjustment for April 2020. Latest adjustment as of 0730GMT 22MAR20 as follows. Note selected long-haul service has been gradually...
www.routesonline.com www.routesonline.com
 
Amtrak suspending all Acela service. I believe all Keystone service is suspended. As the White House advised this evening that anyone who left NYC in the last 14 days should self-quarantine, there will now minuscule demand for trains to/from NYC.
 
stellarfun said:
Amtrak suspending all Acela service. I believe all Keystone service is suspended. As the White House advised this evening that anyone who left NYC in the last 14 days should self-quarantine, there will now minuscule demand for trains to/from NYC.
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It is a great time to finish track work at Penn Station.
 
stellarfun said:
Amtrak suspending all Acela service. I believe all Keystone service is suspended. As the White House advised this evening that anyone who left NYC in the last 14 days should self-quarantine, there will now minuscule demand for trains to/from NYC.
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Pennsylvanian was already axed last week, so the Keystones falling is not a surprise. State-sponsored route, so the PennDOT signoff was probably bigger driver for that one than Amtrak's.


The Acela shutdown I already explained the other day smells suspiciously like a bit more than quarrantining is at foot given conspicuous timing with latest equipment reliability woes. At least testing of the 3 completed Aveila pilot sets is still continuing apace.
 
Emirates Airlines has suspended all flights. We were supposed to fly to Singapore this coming Saturday. I've been fighting with Emirates and AIG Insurance for weeks to get a refund. So far, only credit for the ticket is offered. Apparently a global pandemic isn't covered in the 14-page insurance document that I purchased.

Emirates Update
 
So, at this point I'm curious as to what international is still flying out of Logan and without a near-term announcement of imminent cancellations.

Browsing some of the announcements and the Logan flight statuses, it looks like what's left is:

Aer Lingus - Dublin

Air Canada - Montreal + Toronto 3x daily.

British Airways (previously mentioned) - 1x daily LHR

Icelandair - Reykjavik.

JAL - 3x RT/week - Narita.

TAP - Air Portugal - 2x RT/week - Lisbon (Officially suspended 4/1-5/4+)

LATAM - Sao Paulo (Removed from schedule)

Qatar - Doha

Anyone have anything else to add?

(Edited 3/29)
 
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Java King said:
Emirates Airlines has suspended all flights. We were supposed to fly to Singapore this coming Saturday. I've been fighting with Emirates and AIG Insurance for weeks to get a refund. So far, only credit for the ticket is offered. Apparently a global pandemic isn't covered in the 14-page insurance document that I purchased.

Emirates Update
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FWIW, I was supposed to fly Delta BOS->AMS last night and had paid for comfort+ on the outbound leg.

I held off cancelling the flight, as I knew I'd get my fares banked, but the upgrade cost was non-refundable. Waited until a couple of days before to checkup on the flight status and sure enough, the directs were cancelled and had us connecting via DTW.

A day later, the DTW-AMS leg was cancelled, so I called Delta, fearing that I'd be on hold for hours. Withing five minutes, I got the number for the refund line. Called the refund line and within minutes I was live with a CSA would told me that not only was I entitled to a full refund, but the upgrades would be refunded as well.

Needless to say, I was pleasantly shocked. Very happy how this ended up.
 
North Shore said:
FWIW, I was supposed to fly Delta BOS->AMS last night and had paid for comfort+ on the outbound leg.

I held off cancelling the flight, as I knew I'd get my fares banked, but the upgrade cost was non-refundable. Waited until a couple of days before to checkup on the flight status and sure enough, the directs were cancelled and had us connecting via DTW.

A day later, the DTW-AMS leg was cancelled, so I called Delta, fearing that I'd be on hold for hours. Withing five minutes, I got the number for the refund line. Called the refund line and within minutes I was live with a CSA would told me that not only was I entitled to a full refund, but the upgrades would be refunded as well.

Needless to say, I was pleasantly shocked. Very happy how this ended up.
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My girlfriend had a similar experience with Delta yesterday as well. Also pleasantly surprised! I'm scheduled to fly Delta BOS-LHR in early May. I'm less and less optimistic that it'll happen, but I'm holding off on canceling for those exact reasons.
 
From the San Francisco Chronicle
United Airlines broadcast [March 27] [a] dire message about its flight schedules from top management, stating: "We are currently planning to make even deeper cuts in May and June. And, based on how doctors expect the virus to spread and how economists expect the global economy to react, we expect demand to remain suppressed for months after that, possibly into next year."

To get a sense of how drastic the reduction in passenger demand is becoming, look no further than the Transportation Security Administration’s daily count of airport screenings. On Wednesday, TSA agents screened 239,234 individuals; the same day a year ago, that number was 2,273,811. That’s a decline of 90 percent.
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www.sfgate.com

Routes: SFO shuts terminal; China bans flights & US domestic cuts proliferate

Now that U.S. and foreign airlines have pared down their international schedules to...
www.sfgate.com www.sfgate.com
 
From the airplane nerds:

Delta is cutting Boston from 140+ flights to barely over 40 in April. Aside from core hubs and NYC, the only destinations with more than 1 flight a day are RDU, CVG and BNA. I'm not sure how much more they can cut unless they just exit out of more of these markets completely.
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I wonder how this is going to reset these markets: the flights with lots of competition will be relatively wide open for entry, demand will (likely, eventually) be there. Wonder if smaller carriers will beef up on the more popular flights on the expected rebound in several months.
 
stefal said:
I wonder how this is going to reset these markets: the flights with lots of competition will be relatively wide open for entry, demand will (likely, eventually) be there. Wonder if smaller carriers will beef up on the more popular flights on the expected rebound in several months.
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I think most of the carriers are too desperate to conserve cash to consider beefing up any service before demand is actually there, and while the bailouts avoid near-term bankruptcy, they don't avoid the need to cut their costs as much as possible.

As it is, it sounds like they may be considering consolidating routes across carriers to further cut the number of flights: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/29/con...us-cities-could-help-stem-airline-losses.html
 
I spoke with a GLX worker briefly - from what I got it seems some work is slowed and not all crews are coming in. There is still active work being done on the Lechmere station steel.

I imagine they are slowing non-critical path work but I'm not aware of any official communications to the end.
 
etik said:
I spoke with a GLX worker briefly - from what I got it seems some work is slowed and not all crews are coming in. There is still active work being done on the Lechmere station steel.

I imagine they are slowing non-critical path work but I'm not aware of any official communications to the end.
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Hard to tell. You're dealing with such a large and varied supply chain for what the track gangs are doing on the ground that pace of work isn't going to be day-to-day/week-to-week consistent to begin with. If they've got pinched availability of a certain type of truck or equipment, work might taper off a few days on the ground then pick back up in a burst. If the cement trucks are backed up from the source because of labor shortages and that is what they're waiting on this week, work might taper off on the ground then re-burst a few days later. And that's on a fairly normal ebb and flow. Even with them still working full speed ahead it's not unreasonable to expect that something stemming from COVID-19 is making its way through the chain and racking up some minor delays, simply because this global disruption is so big it's impossible for any job to be completely 100% unaffected. That ebb and flow of activity can be expected to get more exaggerated over coming days and weeks because there's no way every single one of their suppliers is operating at full actual capacity, even the ones who are trying to run at full expected capacity.

But absent the Gov. extending the work shutdown to DOT crews nothing has fundamentally changed, as that's still a full-working sector of the economy. The project is still going, and there's always something small they can turn attention to if they're waiting for a supplier.

I've actually noticed a sharp INCREASE in traffic cones sprouting up on highways during daytime hours in the last week, here and in CT where I was for 4 days over a long weekend. Granted in a not-freakish winter this right now would be normal ground-thaw season where road construction wakes up from its seasonal pause with an exaggerated burst of new activity, but it seems like they're taking advantage of the lack of traffic (and also lack of potholes to patch this year!) to jump-start normal night work lane closures several hours early at dusk. The electronic signs on the Pike west of 495 warn of upcoming milling work, and it looks like they're packing as much guardrail and bridge abutment work as they can possibly get while lanes are more or less free for the taking 7:00pm-6:00am. Even from an anecdotal sampling it looks like a significantly larger slate of those types of small shovel-ready busywork projects being staged simultaneously than usual. Those are usually the type of rolling lane closures that would lock I-84 solid late on a Sunday night way out in the sticks of CT's Quiet Corner or make me have to detour on US 20 between Sturbridge and Auburn because the 84-to-290 slog is backed up over an hour...but now you can do full speed limit East Hartford-Weston with miles and miles of coned-off left lane. So they are coning off lanes...earlier in evening...multiple times every dozen miles and seemingly packing it all in at once. I don't know where they're getting the crews for these extra shifts, but MassHighway's probably got some other longer-term projects that are slowly petering out from supplier slowdowns so available hands must be getting reassigned to these basic upkeep tasks in the interim.
 
Well, they're certainly making progress in certain areas, concrete work and steel fabrication included.

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Source.
 
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