Green Line Extension to Medford & Union Sq

UHub just posted this video.
www.universalhub.com

Extending the Green Line: The video

Here's a detailed drone-based video of the work towards extending the Green Line past Lechmere. If you want to skip stuff about the history of the Green Line and work on the existing sections, skip to 4:50 (and yes, the narrator is not from around here, as you can tell by his pronunciation of...
www.universalhub.com www.universalhub.com
 
BeeLine said:
UHub just posted this video.
www.universalhub.com

Extending the Green Line: The video

Here's a detailed drone-based video of the work towards extending the Green Line past Lechmere. If you want to skip stuff about the history of the Green Line and work on the existing sections, skip to 4:50 (and yes, the narrator is not from around here, as you can tell by his pronunciation of...
www.universalhub.com www.universalhub.com
Click to expand...


That is FANTASTIC!!! I'm about 5 minutes in and keeping rewinding.
Post edit: Definitely will watch 10+ more times - - the drone footage is outstanding and this really wraps up the entire project in one digestible video. I haven't seen anything like it previously (and am surprised about that).
 
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The MBTA is now using the Earthcam cameras as security cameras, so they will not be public.

I don’t know why the T is outsourcing their security cameras to a webcam vendor. That seems like a recipe for a hack.
 
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Few pictures for you guys
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What is the status of the streets in Maxwell's Green (bottom photo from @Javier, above).
They (Maxwells management) seem to manipulate access in a whole lot of ways. Will regular folks be able to walk through?
The station entrance is via a long bridge from Lowell St


It seems (yet again) a pity they couldn't have figured a way to put another entrance landing in Maxwells or opposite it (or both)
 
The interior quad of Maxwell's Green is publicly accessible by vehicle from Lowell St, and on foot from Lowell St and Warwick St (there's a gate there for emergency vehicles). I haven't heard anything about that changing when the Magoun Square station opens.
 
The townhouse condos next to Maxwell’s Green are separate, and they resisted the emergency access landing in their parking area. The emergency access is now via the future condo building on Murdock which is the site of the current construction access to the ROW.
 
RandomWalk said:
I don't know why the T is outsourcing their security cameras to a webcam vendor. That seems like a recipe for a hack.
Click to expand...
Because the MBTA handling that much data internally is also a recipe for a hack, it's thankfully not exactly a high value hack otherwise I'm sure it would've already happened. Politely I have little faith in the T in data security. Their customer technology team seems like a good team but outside that the MBTA is the definition of aging digital infrastructure that is ready to be hacked.

Don't forget that our fare vending machines still run Windows XP.
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1110917482297069569
 
ceo said:
I haven't heard anything about that changing when the Magoun Square station opens.
Click to expand...
Me neither, and I didn't mean to imply that, just talking about how access works, not when.
 
HelloBostonHi said:
Because the MBTA handling that much data internally is also a recipe for a hack, it's thankfully not exactly a high value hack otherwise I'm sure it would've already happened. Politely I have little faith in the T in data security. Their customer technology team seems like a good team but outside that the MBTA is the definition of aging digital infrastructure that is ready to be hacked.

Don't forget that our fare vending machines still run Windows XP.
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1110917482297069569
Click to expand...
That's an anti-insightful read on how network security works. Nothing about XP or Old Software in general is inherently insecure unless you go out and give it network exposure to a non-closed network. On kiosk mode with the Firewall configured correctly fronting a closed network...and devoid of truly stupid oversights like leaving a potentially public-accessible USB port for plugging in a thumb drive...there's virtually no possible attack vectors left. The attack surface is entirely too small. What's more...the old software they run has been so thoroughly bug-tested over 2 decades that it has no available exploits. If it still works, and if it's a single-task kiosk not in immediate need of having its capabilities expanded for new features, IT best practice is to not upgrade what ain't broke. The new versions of Windows are an order-of-magnitude 'talkier' than any/all previous versions on any network connection whatsoever, so that's not a debugging process anyone would willingly invite for the OCD of saying you upgraded to the latest/greatest.

Want proof? There are still tons of public kiosks running Windows NT 4, which is 6 years older than XP. Thousands upon thousands of bank ATM's still running frickin' OS/2 Warp. You can tell whether the ATM you're using is a Warp kiosk by the sequence of distinctive 90's-dated *DING* sound sequence it makes while processing transactions. The BoA ATM nearest to my home was still running Warp until last year. Yes...there's still comprehensive outsource tech support and patching you can subscribe to for such ancient OS's, even though the Microsoft's and IBM's of the world have not maintained them in-house for some time. Not to mention the most mission-critical server-side financial transactions across the Fortune 100 still largely running on 1960's IBM mainframe virtualization on enough lines of 60+ year old COBOL code to circle the earth thousands of times over. The oldest stuff tracks onto the machines doing the literal most sensitive transactions. Because if (1) it's worked all this time, (2) there isn't some new degree of hardware-side obsolescence pushing an upgrade, and (3) the many years of uptime-processed-by-eyes have stopped turning up any new bugs...then it's viewed as very nearly insane to upgrade for upgrade's sake.


Sorry to go all whighlander here with the sidebar explainer, but the "OMIGOD it runs on teh old techs, take yer moneys and run!" hottakes are skin-deep at best, dangerous misinformation at worst. It has absolute zero, nada correspondence with the inherent secureness of the system. And if there is an unpatched security exploit lurking in there, the reason for the exploit existing most likely has extreme-little or nothing to do with what particular OS generation it's running on.
 
They're still using Windows XP?!! Boy!! Microsoft had stopped supporting that OS eons ago!!!! :(
 
ceo said:
That's the first time I've seen a tractor-trailer rig with Hy-Rail gear.
Click to expand...
The difficulty of getting a hi-rail vehicle onto the tracks is proportional (maybe exponentially) to the length of the vehicle. Even if the truck pad is long enough for the truck to get fully on the tracks without backup moves, it surely took a great deal of skill to get it positioned accurately enough.
 
Boston.com reports:
MBTA finds that the Green Line Extension will disproportionately benefit richer, whiter riders
"I think it's fair to say the demographics of the neighborhoods encompassing GLX have changed."
(story)

I mean, yes? Sad but true.

From 1990 (CLF settlement with the outgoing Dukakis Admin) to 2021 is half a lifetime, and coincides with young wage earners moving back to the core rather than drive-til-you-qualify cheap housing at the sprawl frontier.

If you want to help the environmental justice communities that remain in Somerville Medford, it is more like:
1) Extend to Route 16
2) Bus Lanes on Mystic Ave (which are in the works)

But let's also give the State credit for delivering the SLX to Everett Chelsea so fast that the demographics did not have time to change--identifying the communities and delivering.

But it also shows that empowering cities to do this for themselves (bus lanes) would have probably been a better consent decree back in 1990 *if* they could have acted with true foresight.
 
Arlington said:
Boston.com reports:
MBTA finds that the Green Line Extension will disproportionately benefit richer, whiter riders
"I think it's fair to say the demographics of the neighborhoods encompassing GLX have changed."
(story)

I mean, yes? Sad but true.

From 1990 (CLF settlement with the outgoing Dukakis Admin) to 2021 is half a lifetime, and coincides with young wage earners moving back to the core rather than drive-til-you-qualify cheap housing at the sprawl frontier.

If you want to help the environmental justice communities that remain in Somerville Medford, it is more like:
1) Extend to Route 16
2) Bus Lanes on Mystic Ave (which are in the works)

But let's also give the State credit for delivering the SLX to Everett Chelsea so fast that the demographics did not have time to change--identifying the communities and delivering.

But it also shows that empowering cities to do this for themselves (bus lanes) would have probably been a better consent decree back in 1990 *if* they could have acted with true foresight.
Click to expand...

Uhh...this is news? We've been warned all along that this is going to double rents in formerly (but not for many years now) affordable East Somerville, Winter Hill, and other adjacents. That doesn't seem like a transit problem at all. It seems like a housing stock/rent control problem that's bigger than City of Somerville itself and not being treated area-wide with any degree of systematic urgency and is having all token half-measures willfully undercut from every angle.. Maybe do something about that instead of taking ultra-creative interpretations of Title VI legalese to conclude: "But the transit's just too good! Why can't we make it worse, you know, for 'equitability'. Because surely the solution could never be to build more of it to other justice communities." Just a heat-seeking missile's worth of argumentative fallacy and changing the subject.

I get that Title VI post-analysis reportage is a thing that must legally be done...but, can we as a region not be so obtusely daft about it?
 
Jahvon09 said:
They're still using Windows XP?!! Boy!! Microsoft had stopped supporting that OS eons ago!!!! :(
Click to expand...
Did you read a single word of the previous post? That's not a problem. Way older shit than XP is still propping up the global economy and is-not/never-was a problem. You can get active tech support from XP kiosks even though it's End-of-Life as a Microsoft product.. Microsoft has outsourced it to third-party companies who have been blessed with exclusive access to the XP source code for issuing any past- End of Life patches Microsoft doesn't do anymore. IBM has had the same arrangement with OS/2 for over 15 years now; their third-party outsource has even been allowed to fork the source code and produce outright new versions of Warp with new features for this still apparently profitable ATM kiosk niche 3 decades later. You just get the tech support from those other companies and not IBM/Microsoft; it's still fully comprehensive.

If the FVM's work with bulletproof-enough uptime (they do!)...and the system has no current need to add new features (for ongoing AFC 1.0 maintenance: that's a solid no!)...and any replacement hardware you buy can still run the old software unmodified (it all can!): there's no need to upgrade to say you upgraded it. Running an old OS is not a bad thing; it's not a "rustbucket" FVM. It is most definitely not an "insecure" one because of simplistic "old things are old" sentiment; that's not how IT security works at all, and is arguably trafficking in misinfo tactics to try to scare people by claiming otherwise. AFC 2.0 is going to attempt to do a kajillion more and different things per machine than AFC 1.0 ever did, and thus needs a more modern kiosk OS to host it on. But if we ever see the day where we can stop cutting Cubic massive cost-overrun cheques for implementing the @#$% thing, and it actually works...I hope to hell it's allowed to stick around awhile and not fall victim to "old things are old" insanity. The global finance industry has long proven that you don't need bleeding-edge for bleeding-edge's sake when the incumbent platform is just OK as-is.
 
I mean its pretty telling where the citys priorities are when somerville gets the shiny new glx when the area already has red close by, orange not too far away, and lechmere had green access already but the indigo line dmu plan to the "poorer" neighborhoods gets scrapped and never heard of again.

Plus theres not even a fake proposal to extend some type of rail to dudley sq, nope you get shitty buses and not even a pretend extension after that.
 
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