General MBTA Topics (Multi Modal, Budget, MassDOT)

To post more MBTA news that have recently developed but I don't see any post here.

First, it seems more repurcussion of the Orange Line Train Fire debacle has pulled in the lawyers that we've see on a bunch of billboards - including on the Orange Line at some point.

www.cbsnews.com

Injury law firm says 'multiple' riders have retained them after Orange Line fire

Injury law firm Morgan & Morgan says "multiple" people have retained them following last week's fire on the Orange Line.
www.cbsnews.com www.cbsnews.com

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Meanwhile the plans to shut down the MBTA northern side between Oak Grove and Wellington for weekdays and all the way to North Station for Weekends has been postponed

www.nbcboston.com

MBTA Abruptly Delays Plans for Orange Line Fixes in August

Two days before crews were set to start a month of maintenance on the Orange Line that would have temporarily closed subway stations, the MBTA indefinitely delayed the project to allow officials to consider additional work they might add into the mix. The MBTA had been planning to suspend trains...
www.nbcboston.com www.nbcboston.com

Allegedly the reason is they want to "revisit the original plan and broaden its scope to weigh other repairs and maintenance that would be easier to complete with trains offline".

I hope that means the reason why they delayed it is because they know the FTA will give a whole bunch of more mandates so it's probably better off holding off to perform those mandates combined with the original plans.

Though on the other hand, if the shutdown is the same amount of downtime, it also implies their original plan has not planned with making full use of the time but if they are aware they could now cram more repairs within the same window once they know the exact FTA specifics.
 
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millerm277 said:
If operations is as incompetent/incapable/crippled from staff shortages as it appears to be, I feel like that's not an issue that can be solved by capital projects, which is what all the rapid transit transformation stuff is?
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In theory, the capital projects should provide some relief. Like the Orange Line fire wouldn't have happened if the New Orange Line Trains already arrived. Also events like like repeated runaway Red Line trains.

Of course, without a competent/capable/able Operations, the best case is we'll just delay the pain by a few years and some dysfunctionality like not enough dispatchers arguably means there's enough pain that any relief won't be felt regardless any good the capital projects may eventually create.
 
ant8904 said:
To post more MBTA news that have recently developed but I don't see any post here.

First, it seems more repurcussion of the Orange Line Train Fire debacle has pulled in the lawyers that we've see on a bunch of billboards - including on the Orange Line at some point.

www.cbsnews.com

Injury law firm says 'multiple' riders have retained them after Orange Line fire

Injury law firm Morgan & Morgan says "multiple" people have retained them following last week's fire on the Orange Line.
www.cbsnews.com www.cbsnews.com

----

Meanwhile the plans to shut down the MBTA northern side between Oak Grove and Wellington for weekdays and all the way to North Station for Weekends has been postponed

www.nbcboston.com

MBTA Abruptly Delays Plans for Orange Line Fixes in August

Two days before crews were set to start a month of maintenance on the Orange Line that would have temporarily closed subway stations, the MBTA indefinitely delayed the project to allow officials to consider additional work they might add into the mix. The MBTA had been planning to suspend trains...
www.nbcboston.com www.nbcboston.com

Allegedly the reason is they want to "revisit the original plan and broaden its scope to weigh other repairs and maintenance that would be easier to complete with trains offline".

I hope that means the reason why they delayed it is because they know the FTA will give a whole bunch of more mandates so it's probably better off holding off to perform those mandates combined with the original plans.

Though on the other hand, if the shutdown is the same amount of downtime, it also implies their original plan has not planned with making full use of the time but if they are aware they could now cram more repairs within the same window once they know the exact FTA specifics.
Click to expand...
Of course the bad news is this means they miss the August lull in transit usage for the repairs, and now will execute a full shutdown at some peak need for service.
 
Shuttles persist on the Braintree branch until about 6am as overnight work was not completed in time for service, residual delays ongoing.

Normally a little thing I wouldn’t bother mentioning but it really does feel like there’s just a mounting lack of give of a shit
 
Wow. There were 27 months of lower ridership than we have now. The MBTA continuously claimed to be making use of that time for major repairs.

On June 16, the Orange Line carried over 90,000 riders for the first time since 3/12/20. This is so absurdly pathetic. I’ve always been an MBTA apologist, but this organization needs a stripping down by the FTA and to completely clean house.
 
bigeman312 said:
Wow. There were 27 months of lower ridership than we have now. The MBTA continuously claimed to be making use of that time for major repairs.

On June 16, the Orange Line carried over 90,000 riders for the first time since 3/12/20. This is so absurdly pathetic. I’ve always been an MBTA apologist, but this organization needs a stripping down by the FTA and to completely clean house.
Click to expand...

I think it's more indicative of the fact that the MBTA will do stuff if there's actual enforcement in place, and not so much incompetent workers.

There are some employees that are being spread around on socials with how much overtime they made last year, etc. Those cases deserve as much investigation as possible (and thankfully the State is very transparent about salaries/overtime pay), and some frequent compliance oversight wouldn't hurt, but to suggest clearing house on a 6,000+ person agency is another level.
 
stefal said:
I think it's more indicative of the fact that the MBTA will do stuff if there's actual enforcement in place, and not so much incompetent workers.

There are some employees that are being spread around on socials with how much overtime they made last year, etc. Those cases deserve as much investigation as possible (and thankfully the State is very transparent about salaries/overtime pay), and some frequent compliance oversight wouldn't hurt, but to suggest clearing house on a 6,000+ person agency is another level.
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I never intended to suggest that, but I see now how my comment could be interpreted that way. I mean clean house of “leadership,” and reorganize the organization. I didn’t intend to implicate your average employee for organizational issues. My apologies.
 
A 30-day shutdown. The justification is to make a massive dent in the deferred maintenance backlog with the lynchpin to be completing the tasklist of the FTA mandates.

There's two contradictory interpretations of this:

The more generous interpretation is this is "real" rip-the-band-aid. For real, real. Super serious real. The ideal outcome should be a massive payoff - some by the direct action of maintenance work that repair enough track that it ends the slow zones, some by luck of the timing in the deployment of another new trainset within the 30 days and graduation of new dispatchers. All to combine together is a grand reopening where the new dispatchers means return-to-semi-normal headways, get on a new orange line train so it will feel clean and rides reliably, and the fixed tracks means the you'll actually manage to commute from start to end smoothly.

The much dimmer interpretation is this is the next step to the endgame I fearfully mentioned, somehow we spend 30 days or maybe even longer on full bustitution. The shut down will end after one additional 2-week delay and thus 6 weeks. But somehow it will not just feel like nothing has improved, but also when measured by user experience metric. They will post on Twitter that they replace X-number of ties and Y-feet of tracks. Maybe they will even announce the end of several slow zones. But inexplicable long stations holds and slow speeds remains despite the track work combined with all the non-track issues meaning the same reduced headways, breakdowns, and maybe even another fire. The real "accomplishment" is normalizing month long shutdowns but yet the backlog remains and rider experience continues to worsen.

Of course, there can be other interpretation, It just my speculative fears looks even more real. I want to believe "okay, this is rock bottom and the turnaround beings here" but each development continues to ride along the sequence of the darkest timeline. And the Orange Line full shutdown might be necessary, but also looks very fitting as the next step of the darkest timeline.
 
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Reporting has mentioned green line being a part of this as well, I just confirmed with BTD that the Green line will be shut down between Government Center and North Station as part of this.

Edit: LOTS of bus lanes coming. Possibility of pushing for some of them to be permanent post shut down.
 
Not to mention this is absolutely shafting the people who rely on the T for their ride to work/school etc. Im worried that along with the already lower post covid ridership numbers that weve seen, many of these ppl are finally going to say screw it and permanently find an alternate means of travel. So after this 30 day pause, now how long is it going to take to get back to pre pandemic numbers? Lower ridership is always used as a way to try to divert funds toward other things, and this really is the moment where we need to be tripling down on our public transit and investing in it for the future to not only get ridership back to pre pandemic levels, but way beyond it going forward.

Weve already started to see creeping downgrades to the system like planning to remove the overhead wires for the buses in watertown to be replaced with unproven, expensive battery electric buses. On top of that the grand plan to electrify the commuter rail and turn it into regional rail is similarly now being chipped away at to where theyre now also trying to go back on stringing up catenary and instead go with battery electric trains. These things show that theyre not serious no matter how many times they pinky promise theyre for real this time. Ridiculous.
 
KCasiglio said:
Reporting has mentioned green line being a part of this as well, I just confirmed with BTD that the Green line will be shut down between Government Center and North Station as part of this.
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I hadn't seen that anywhere. Doesn't exactly make a lot of sense (unless they're just preemptively avoiding more calamities from the cursed Government Center Garage), but then again when have considerations of sensibility really ever entered into the discussion when it comes to the T :rolleyes:
 
Brattle Loop said:
I hadn't seen that anywhere. Doesn't exactly make a lot of sense (unless they're just preemptively avoiding more calamities from the cursed Government Center Garage), but then again when have considerations of sensibility really ever entered into the discussion when it comes to the T :rolleyes:
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I first saw it reported in streetsblog, which referenced this unscheduled board meeting for tomorrow - I confirmed this with a high ranking BTD official who said that is EXACTLY why they're doing it. The MBTA does not want any demolition over their tunnels during active service, and so figured if they're shutting down the orange anyway to go ahead and shut down this part of the green too.
 
KCasiglio said:
I first saw it reported in streetsblog, which referenced this unscheduled board meeting for tomorrow - I confirmed this with a high ranking BTD official who said that is EXACTLY why they're doing it. The MBTA does not want any demolition over their tunnels during active service, and so figured if they're shutting down the orange anyway to go ahead and shut down this part of the green too.
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On the one hand, sensible logic given that the demolition has already caused significant problems, on the other, it just compounds the problem that much further. (Tangentially related, if Keolis tries activating those faregates after a bunch of late GL/OL shuttles have already made the passengers mad, I wouldn't think that'd be received favorably.)
 
KCasiglio said:
Reporting has mentioned green line being a part of this as well, I just confirmed with BTD that the Green line will be shut down between Government Center and North Station as part of this.
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Great so can’t even use the commuter rail as an alternative and this will make traffic even more apocalyptic now that everyone on a northside CR line will be encouraged to drive. The T only had two years to do this when no one was riding; instead it will overlap with the start of fall semester for the colleges and (at least part time) mandated return to offices.

At minimum, headways should be returned to normal on the other lines now that the operations center doesn’t have to monitor an entire line, right, right?

(Spoiler, they wont.)

I used to be a Baker defender RE: the T; short term pain to fix a system that had been disinvested in for 30 years with payoffs that would take longer than an election cycle. Now l miss Beverly Scott.
 
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