General MBTA Topics (Multi Modal, Budget, MassDOT)

There were two near catastrophic incidents at Logan Airport in the span of 60 days. Because of these close calls, the FAA should shut down the affected control tower and runways until protocols can be reviewed and repaired.
 
We know the T isn’t operating safely (according to standards). We know this in a dozen different ways.

Does driving hurt people? Yes. Should driving be more regulated? Also yes.

^ Both of which are utterly immaterial to the amount of oversight the T needs right now.

If you want to say that both the T and automobiles should be regulated more, I think that’s a perfectly reasonable position.

But saying that the T should be regulated less just because other modes are less regulated than they should be — that makes no sense to me.

And one way or another: this seems like the worst time to call for less regulation at the T.
 
The T should absolutely be regulated less because slow trains push people onto other modes which are demonstrably more dangerous.
 
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king_vibe said:
The T should absolutely be regulated less because slow trains push people onto other modes which are demonstrably more dangerous.
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Different transit modes does matter. If you're saying the MBTA should have the same safety standards as cars, then you're accepting a x20 casualty rate at least. But failures in mass transit mean mass casualty events, not individual tragedies. Accepting that a mass casualty event will occur and accept is what you're literally advocating. Like it or not, people react to mass casualty events differently from repeated individual tragedies. This is not to say the collective deaths of individual tragedies doesn't matter too.

You know the funny thing? I'm not closed to the idea that the MBTA's safety requirements could be too strict. But as in a reasoned and rational approach like pointing out less strict European train standards does not seem to produce worse safety outcomes. It's possible that at least some parts of the MBTA can go full speed and safety outcomes can be exactly the same. Like the Blue Line was on full speed the entire time until recently, it doesn't sound like the track are that substantially worse, is it just luck nothing happened or it actually still "safe enough" even if the tracks still need repairs?

But your basis of your advocacy is just reckless and callous. Arguing "X requirement doesn't produce better safety outcomes so we should drop it" versus "it's okay that safety outcomes are the same as cars" are not the same.


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It is also notable that the FTA actually have pretty weak regulatory powers. FTA can only enforce its mandates by cutting off funding - which apparently is enough to make the MBTA care, but it still still limited teeth. FRA and FAA have far more powers to enforce if they find a violation and wish to exercise it.
 
Just chiming in: I am in Baltimore this week for a conference. Transit here has A LOT of problems, but it was still pretty nice to be able to walk out from baggage claim directly onto the light rail platform and have a one-seat ride to downtown in ~30 min. No circular shuttle bus or other bus that gets stuck in traffic.

The rolling stock feels a little old, but the train was actually very clean, and seemed to speed along at a pretty fast clip (easily 40+ mph). Generally a smooth ride too.

What sucks is the headways (every 30 min, which is atrocious), but it made me resent the slow zones in Boston even more given that once I was on a train here I felt like I made it to my destination quickly.

Also, check out that AWESOME livery!!

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ant8904 said:
Meanwhile this guy is calling regulations onerous because of he believes that the usage rate of rich people on certain modes can be an objective measurement of the real safety standards of other modes.
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He's not completely wrong, just jumping to one class of rich villain for hyperbole. Private jet freedoms aside, we can single out the wealthy C-suites of car companies, suburban homebuilders, commercial freight haulers, and highway constructors as a causal sub-specie. Law-wise, we're still reeling from their post-WW2 flood of lobbyists making auto policy/law more laissez faire while also lobbying to make passenger rail tougher and more expensive to run; Ergo making their sprawl feeding products easier and more acceptable to buy in comparison.
Seatbelts, safety glass, airbags, bumpers... were all fought viciously by industry. Commercial rail carriers wanted to dump the expense of passenger service, but wanted to favor commercial rail standards, so they concocted Amtrak and wrote in onerous standards for passenger vehicles on commercial rail networks and codified their supremacy in law.
It's almost always just how business and government work. And that hurts us all, but does often hurt the poor/environmentally conscious the most.
Big view: We're the problem. We let it happen.
 
BeyondRevenue said:
He's not completely wrong, just jumping to one class of rich villain for hyperbole.
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If he's doing hyperbole for rhetoric, then he can clarify that himself. My reading, and the responses he has made, that he just outright connects a logic that since the rich uses airlines, then it must mean the FAA gives a lower bar to safety. And if so, despite the recent debacles, I have to be skeptical as statistics have shown it's been one of the safest modes and I don't think it's just a coincidence.

If I'm going to wonder if the MBTA is dealing with too stringent regulations, I think a much better metric would be the safety standards of functional metro systems in other nations/continents like Japan or Europe. Granted, I have to I don't know how or what data to measure that, but that make more sense to me if we're examining that question rather than try to push the two close calls at Logan must mean the FAA gives more lax standards than the FTA.
 
737900er said:
This, combined with the 2-month Sumner shutdown this summer, is a massive middle finger to the people of East Boston. I'm actually kind of surprised they aren't doing any weekend shutdowns before July -- especially on the handful of weekends the Sumner has no planned work.
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To be fair, this tweet is a little off what's actually planned - 8 days (split into 4-day spans) of 7pm shutdowns will start this weekend and I believe the following weekend. All other work is during normal night-work hours. The early shutdowns take care of substantial slow-zones between Aquarium and Bowdoin which will be lifted by the end of May. The rest of the line (as of now) will be taken care of during normal night working hours. They're working with MassDOT. I'm not sure why the reporting is off on these shutdowns. The board presentation was rather clear, to me..

Just a hunch, I have a feeling labor availability is a limiting factor here on why things aren't being done quicker...
 
stefal said:
To be fair, this tweet is a little off what's actually planned - 8 days (split into 4-day spans) of 7pm shutdowns will start this weekend and I believe the following weekend. All other work is during normal night-work hours.
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Correction: The 7pm shutdowns (Apr 24-27, May 1-4) actually take place from Mondays to Thursdays. And more early closures may be required during the summer.
 
I think that she's doing a far better job than Charlie Baker did. He has babied the MBTA, making excuse after excuse, after excuse for them! Which is probably why Steve Poftak was a loser. :mad:
 
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Jahvon09 said:
I think that she's doing a far better job than Charlie Baker did. He has babied the MBTA, making excuse after excuse for them! Which is probably why Steve Poftak was a loser. :mad:
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More like he tried to cost cut an already failing organization that needed more support not less and tried to privatize anything he could get away with
 
king_vibe said:
Yes! Intrusive safety requirements are reserved for modes of transportation that poor people could feasibly use because rich people do not allow themselves to be overregulated.

There have been a half dozen near Tenerife-style disasters in American airports in the past few months, and I haven't seen the FAA shut down a single runway or control tower. There have been two near mass-casualty incidents at Logan in the past 60 days and the flights are still moving. The rich would never stand for anything else.
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I think your first sentence is largely to emphasize the larger point, which is that we do not take transportation safety seriously in this country with the exception of passenger rail. Agreed, but your suggestion for lowering standards is reckless. We can certainly asses whether some regulations are unnecessary as @BeyondRevenue suggests above, but I can't support the generic idea of less safety regulations. The real imperative is to increase safety regulations for other modes.
 
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The OL is about as bad as is was just after the shutdown. GPS confirmed 5 MPH the whole way Assembly- Community SB. Honest question; for the OL specifically, was the quality of the trackwork poor, or are the speed restrictions due to the paperwork issue? I don’t know how else 40 MPH track could only be safe enough to travel at 5 MPH 6 months later unless the acceptable geometry standards changed.

Also, I still haven’t found a reason why the CR isn’t also plagued with 5 and 10 MPH slow zones. Is the maintenance quality/ time window on RT that much worse, or does mainline rail have higher tolerance to track conditions due to wheel profile or something? There are a ton of sketchy sections of Conway Scenic/ Ex-PanAm mainline that visually look much worse that at least had 10 MPH speeds.

Given the focus on making “MA competitive again,” I have no idea how the T isn’t the #1 issue on the hill right now.
 
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ant8904 said:
Different transit modes does matter. If you're saying the MBTA should have the same safety standards as cars, then you're accepting a x20 casualty rate at least. But failures in mass transit mean mass casualty events, not individual tragedies. Accepting that a mass casualty event will occur and accept is what you're literally advocating. Like it or not, people react to mass casualty events differently from repeated individual tragedies. This is not to say the collective deaths of individual tragedies doesn't matter too.
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The thing for me is that there is so much more we could and should be doing on the roadway side that we aren’t. Multi-car pileups are a commonality on highways while an MBTA incident resulting in more than an individual fatality basically doesn’t happen. Not to trivialize the MBTA fatalities because they are all preventable and an entirely unnecessary loss of human life. We can’t keep chocking up increasing road fatalities to “people are unpredictable” when there’s things we could actively do to make them predictable. It continues the cycle of not holding roads, which are a form of mass transportation, to the same relative level of safety scrutiny and regulation as all our other mass transit.

I can’t really make a complete stance on how I feel about the harshness of the speed restrictions without knowing exactly how the tracks are “unsafe.” But I feel the frustration of @king_vibe as an everyday transit user myself that gets their daily commute destroyed by maybe a track 7mm out of spec while roadways can fall apart yet we give the OK for tens of thousands of vehicles to continue to use them normally. And they’re obviously not saying to loosen MBTA safety restrictions to roadway levels because that would mean almost no safety restrictions. The Blue Line for example was running impeccably reliably for the months leading up to the slowdowns despite being on the same tracks.
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If they were able to run the thousands to tens of thousands of trips across those rails for months without incident, it leaves me skeptical as to the necessity of the severity of the slow zones. Though I do understand that all it takes is one incident to result in a major catastrophe. I feel as though the trains have proven the current tracks to be fine at least above 10mph maybe still below full speeds.

Edit: The Ts major safety issues haven’t even been track related for the most part, they’ve been rolling stock, signal, and operator related. The derailments themselves were largely from operator error collisions or defects in trains themselves.
 
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Highwayguy said:
Also, I still haven’t found a reason why the CR isn’t also plagued with 5 and 10 MPH slow zones. Is the maintenance quality/ time window on RT that much worse, or does mainline rail have higher tolerance to track conditions due to wheel profile or something? There are a ton of sketchy sections of Conway Scenic/ Ex-PanAm mainline that visually look much worse that at least had 10 MPH speeds.
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I don't know the answer to this, though it's worth noting that the CR is under a different regulatory regime than the RT system (FRA versus FTA).
 
Highwayguy said:
The OL is about as bad as is was just after the shutdown. GPS confirmed 5 MPH the whole way Assembly- Community SB. Honest question; for the OL specifically, was the quality of the trackwork poor, or are the speed restrictions due to the paperwork issue? I don’t know how else 40 MPH track could only be safe enough to travel at 5 MPH 6 months later unless the acceptable geometry standards changed.

Also, I still haven’t found a reason why the CR isn’t also plagued with 5 and 10 MPH slow zones. Is the maintenance quality/ time window on RT that much worse, or does mainline rail have higher tolerance to track conditions due to wheel profile or something? There are a ton of sketchy sections of Conway Scenic/ Ex-PanAm mainline that visually look much worse that at least had 10 MPH speeds.

Given the focus on making “MA competitive again,” I have no idea how the T isn’t the #1 issue on the hill right now.
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I think that the whole thing in a nutshell is that they knew that they were getting new railcars for the Red & Orange Lines, & what they did was stupid. They were trying to operate the new railcars on old, decades-old tracks, & so, the new trains couldn't use them without derailing & causing so many other problems, & they were trying to get by with using the decrepit rails without replacing them. Bad move!! Now they developed another excuse that no one has probably even heard of before. Slow zones which eventually spread worst than the covid-19 pandemic throughout the whole subway system!! Has anyone noticed that there hasn't been any fare increases in a while? That's probably because the system is so screwed up that commuters would more than likely balk up & complain left & right about the lousy service that we've been getting!! Hah!! :eek: :eek:
 
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Brattle Loop said:
I don't know the answer to this, though it's worth noting that the CR is under a different regulatory regime than the RT system (FRA versus FTA).
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If the FTA standards are unnecessarily more stringent than FRA (l assumed it was the other way around), then @KingVibe may be onto something… Then again, Im not aware of any other RT systems (legacy or otherwise) that has ever normalized sub 10 MPH operation.
 
Highwayguy said:
If the FTA standards are more stringent than FRA (l assumed it was the other way around), then @KingVibe may be onto something… Then again, Im not aware of any other RT systems (legacy or otherwise) that has ever normalized sub 10 MPH operation.
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I don't know if FTA standards are necessarily more stringent, so much as the FRA's least-stringent track classification has a 10 mph max speed restriction but also forbids passenger trains of any kind (for a while I think the Grand Junction fell into that dubious category at least in parts, dunno if that's still the case). So, I'd say plenty of Pan Am and ex-Pan Am trackage is probably actually cruddier than the MBTA's RT (or CR) track, but since there's no pax service it doesn't really matter. (Moreover, I know Amtrak's geometry car gets borrowed to go over the CR lines a couple times a year, so I wouldn't entirely be surprised if the FRA-overseen side had done better at the upkeep and paperwork, so it might not even be the standards so much as the compliance with them.)
 
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