General MBTA Topics (Multi Modal, Budget, MassDOT)

Now that I live in the burbs, I'm a frequent Commuter Rail rider and a very occasional subway rider. I was meeting friends in the city on Monday, so I rode from Alewife to Park Street on the Red Line. The ride clocked in at just over 31 minutes from the time the train departed. Pretty much the entire ride was a slow zone, with the fastest parts between Central and Charles/MGH feeling like 50% of normal speed. The 17 minute wait for an E train at Park Street was nice surprise, but fortunately I was just going to Prudential so hopping on the arriving B train plus walking was an acceptable substitute.

As a former car-free city resident and general transit aficionado, it was a tremendously disappointing (I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed) experience. Many of the complaints I'd heard from people about the state of things I'd chalked up to hyperbole, but it really is a sad state of affairs.
 
Part III
(This one might be a little off topic for this thread but relates to the MBTA and MassDOT)
Statewide Transit

While Boston itself is seeing major tribulations, the state itself is experiencing relative strides in non-car transportation. The most recent good news being the approval of $108mil federal dollars for WOR-SPG rail corridor improvements, but there have been many smaller positives in the background.

First I want to debunk the idea that “90% of people in the state drive to work due to the state of public transportation.” That’s far from the truth. Statewide only 68% of commuters do so regularly by driving alone. This is followed by public transit as the second highest modeshare at 9.5%. Also important to note is a recent MassDOT survey found that over half of respondents would like to be able to bike to work if it was safe to do so. People are very willing to ditch the drive if they can do so safely and reliably, and nearly a million do every day statewide even with the current state of things.

To facilitate safe and reliable alternative transportation to driving, the state recently added cycling provision guidelines to all new state roadway construction and reconstruction. This is already going into effect on projects in Newton, Agawam, and Boston, where state route construction projects are bringing separated and protected bike infrastructure to streets and roads. On top of this, a new attitude is being taken towards the RTAs with annual funding nearly doubling for the next fiscal year. Multiple RTAs are already taking advantage of this planning extended service hours and introducing new Sunday service. MeVa in particular got ahead of the curve increasing wages, hiring new staff, reducing headways, improving bus stops, and now are extending service hours. The PVTA on the other hand is leading the state in reducing transit emissions with BEB infrastructure that has actually been working decently so far (this is not an endorsement of BEBs), not to mention the success of the Hartford Line though that’s more a CT thing.

Back in the East, Fall River is all in on removing SR79 hopefully paving the way for the same to be considered for Route 18 in New Bedford. The two cities are also going to see SCR start the new year off connected them with Boston in a way other than the ever-congested I-93. With the new rail connections comes new pedestrian and bike infrastructure that will benefit people of these cities. The same is being seen in cities and towns served by the T and those not. Politicians and the wider public are starting to come around to safer transportation for all not just those in cars.

Boston isn’t the whole state. While it’s been struggling after mismanagement the rest of the state is changing for the better when it comes to transportation. Things are looking up.

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Can you believe it?!!! The GLX is now all of a sudden plagued by those damn slow zones because the tracks were put down too narrow, making them breeding ground for possible derailments!!!! The line was just opened last year!! What the hell is going on?!!!! How in the Sam Hill does this even happen?!!!!!!!! I'll tell you why; Cheap labor & penny-pinching!!!!!!!! :mad: :eek:

 
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I’d love for the T to release exact numbers on how far out of spec the rails are and what their tolerances are but I’m sure they won’t. Is the concern excess wear on train wheel flanges? I don’t think derailment is an issue with how they’ve run fine for months now and there are no sharp curves.
 
fatnoah said:
Now that I live in the burbs, I'm a frequent Commuter Rail rider and a very occasional subway rider. I was meeting friends in the city on Monday, so I rode from Alewife to Park Street on the Red Line. The ride clocked in at just over 31 minutes from the time the train departed. Pretty much the entire ride was a slow zone, with the fastest parts between Central and Charles/MGH feeling like 50% of normal speed. The 17 minute wait for an E train at Park Street was nice surprise, but fortunately I was just going to Prudential so hopping on the arriving B train plus walking was an acceptable substitute.

As a former car-free city resident and general transit aficionado, it was a tremendously disappointing (I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed) experience. Many of the complaints I'd heard from people about the state of things I'd chalked up to hyperbole, but it really is a sad state of affairs.
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Slow zones today are significantly much worse on the northern side of the Red Line today, than it was in March, April 2023. This is from Davis Station to Park St.

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https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/09...on-track-which-t-says-has-always-been-narrow/

The T basically saying the tracks "[have] always been narrow".... uhh, yikes. This means they knew and didn't bother to tell the public until pressed by the media. AGAIN.

MBTA spokesperson Joe Pesaturo, for his part, emphasized “the Green Line extension was constructed and opened under the previous administration,” and said the width between the rails on the tracks of the branch to Union Square, opened in March 2022, and Medford, opened in December, “has always been narrow.”

Only in the last three months, however, has the width between the rails become narrower in certain areas to the point that it is dangerous for trains to go full speed, he said.
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Also, the way they are saying this so nonchalantly - all you'd need is to rewrite the headline as "Transit Agency Admits They Knew Tracks Were Built Improperly Forcing Trains To Go Walking Speed, Said 'Yeah, It's Fine'" and you'd think you were reading an article straight out of The Onion if you didn't know any better. We can blame deferred maintenance for a lot of the issues, and I think it's fair to wonder if the previous administration wanted to get this open before they were gone for reputation reasons, but these tracks are only a few years old and the Medford tracks only had regularly scheduled trains for 11 months (including the simulated service period).

Say what you will about Gov. Baker, but I also get the sense that GLX Constructors f**ked up BADLY. (Pesaturo noted in his quote that GLX Constructors would be "responsible for addressing the defects".)
Rail width can narrow over time, said Pasi Lautala, the director of the rail transportation program at Michigan Tech Transportation Institute, but narrowing can be caused by rotting track parts that takes decades, and it’s usually an isolated incident, not widespread.

“You should not see those kinds of problems if everything was designed and built properly,” he said. “This sounds like something happened systematically when it was built that created this issue.”
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nbcoram said:
11 months (including the simulated service period).)
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To my understanding, only 10 months and a bit have passed since early-mid November 2022 when the simulated testing began on the Medford Branch.
 
Btw, fixing a problem like this should take an about hour for a well trained crew.
 
The anti-government robo trolls are hard at work. Pretend to be pro-transit, pro-environment; in reality, following the script to sow seeds of rage, distrust, and doubt of public sector. Probably paid by the auto industry, oil industry, Russia, or all of the above.
 
Yeah it requires a Russian troll farm to point out that the MBTA is a failed organization which, through incompetence and corruption, has lost the mandate of reliably transporting human beings.

There is nowhere else in the world where mass transit is permitted to run at three miles per hour. This would not be acceptable at a children’s ride in an amusement park. The work that needs to be done consists of shifting the tie plate a touch and could be done today.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
You posted a definitive statement about lazing work crews without evidence, days after claiming insider knowledge about how very very lazy the system's work crews were habitually being. Then you were asked a set of specific probing questions about how much work was realistic for a work shift, since you are a self-described expert in that. Now you're deflecting some more.
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TBF it's not like the T (and T workers especially) deserve the benefit of the doubt at this point. I don't know you fix things (if you're Eng or Healey or whoever) if the T workers won't do their job.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Such purely speculative commentary is not remotely the same as saying you know with certainty how long it should take and that they're self-evidently doing it wrong/not doing it, then refusing to say how long it should realistically take when asked.
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They build the tracks the same way they do 200+ years ago, right? How hard could it be?
 
F-Line, sorry this upsets you so much. The situation is dire and you don’t seem to get it.
 
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