New Red and Orange Line Cars

Arenacale said:
$800 seems cheap, really. A smart artist could hack one up and then make it into art of some sort. Sculptures, framed pieces, whatever. People would buy it.

That or grab one and you have the most unique obstacle for a monster truck show ever.
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Or flip and scrap it for a profit (if transportation can be worked out).
 
They need to try to find other ways to get more revenue, instead of ripping off the taxpayers. Everything concerning fare increases seems to fall on the little people!!

Enough of this crap!! :mad:
 
Jahvon09 said:
They need to try to find other ways to get more revenue, instead of ripping off the taxpayers. Everything concerning fare increases seems to fall on the little people!!

Enough of this crap!! :mad:
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Drivers pay less and less in gas tax every year. They only people who pay more are MBTA users. Drivers come no where close to paying their fair share in this country.
 
Kinopio said:
Drivers pay less and less in gas tax every year. They only people who pay more are MBTA users. Drivers come no where close to paying their fair share in this country.
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Suggestion: be more charitable to the majority that drive, and they might not be as antagonistic when in the ballot box and maybe we wouldn’t have such a hard time getting needed infrastructure projects done in a more timely fashion.
 
DominusNovus said:
Suggestion: be more charitable to the majority that drive, and they might not be as antagonistic when in the ballot box and maybe we wouldn’t have such a hard time getting needed infrastructure projects done in a more timely fashion.
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LOL

Thats straight from "people voted for Trump because you were mean to them"
 
Jahvon09 said:
Want to buy a used car? You only need $800! Plus a crane to move it.

The T is selling its old Red & Orange line cars to make way for the new ones to come in the storage yards.

Who would want to buy any of those nasty rotted out eaten up things?!! What would they do with them other than make a house out of them? Not me!! :eek:


https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2...-need-crane/njDUJxYD6R8AhQvW7JEKmL/story.html
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That is such a nothing article. Every retired vehicle goes through a regular advertised procurement bid for scrap disposal. Qualified vendors get rated based on capability for removing the vehicles in a specified timeframe, and bid prices do reflect cost of salvaged materials at time of bidding...less cleanup costs for stripping out and safely disposing any hazardous materials, and less labor costs for removal. They don't know today what the scrap prices are going to be because it's at least a year if not longer before the bid will even be advertised. Who knows...it may be a bit more than $800 by then if the international tariff war makes the market for recycled aluminum go extremely volatile. And no regular Joe Schmoe can just show up at Wellington with a wad of bills and a flatbed truck and somehow end up with their very own Orange Line car because as a regulation procurement bid only qualified bidders who meet all vendor requirements are allowed to do business at all with the Procurement Dept. Un-vetted vendors are too much a risk for any state agency, so as consequence even the agency's trash disposal has to follow regulations to the letter.

They just got rid of 350+ retired NABI low-floor buses and RTS high-floor buses using standard scrap procurements. That's how it'll be done with the Orange and Red cars. Far too early to be advertising any of those bids yet, and it hasn't been decided yet if it's going to be sliced into multiple individual advertisements or one great big contract broken into separate scheduled dispersals. The Blue Line 0600's didn't start getting removed for scrap until deliveries of the Siemens 0700's were well onto the backside of the order, because the new cars had to pass certain warranty milestones before it was considered safe to start fully decommissioning removed-from-service old cars. In the event of some horrible problem being discovered on the new cars the stored old cars still needed to be kept ready-to-run so they could be scrambled back into service within days if not hours in case the whole fleet of new cars had to be pulled for modification. The 7-year debacle that was the Type 8's teething period on the Green Line proved all the value of hanging onto all operable Boeing LRV's; bunches of Boeings had to be rushed out of operable storage and back into revenue service multiple times due to the Breda fleet being grounded for some new major problem. They didn't start scrapping non-dead units until 2005-07, after the Breda contract settlement ended the war on whether the 8's were going to be truly declared a service-ready fleet. While it's extremely unlikely CRRC is going to meet the same fate on far, far more generic-design HRT cars...the T waits for damn good reason before turning the scrappers loose.

That anecdote about the dude who ended up with old Green Line cars failed to mention the Globe's actual prior reporting on that story: he bought the trolleys direct from the scrap dealer years AFTER they had already exited MBTA hands and MBTA property. The T doesn't have any control over where their refuse ends up after the scrappers fulfill their full contractual obligations to remove the vehicles and formally take the baton on all liability for what happens after that. In the case of those derelict PCC trolleys the vehicles weren't cut up and ended up malingering in the scrapper's possession for years before that guy made his bid.



Seashore Trolley Museum will of course be getting its customary allotment of donated working cars from the OL 01200 and RL 01500/01600/01700 and 01800 fleets. Other museums may well be in the mix too, though typically interest is a lot lower for heavy-rail cars than it is for streetcars. And USDOT may take a few as crash test dummies for the big federal testing facility in Pueblo, CO like they did with the Blue 0600's.
 
Kinopio said:
Drivers pay less and less in gas tax every year. They only people who pay more are MBTA users. Drivers come no where close to paying their fair share in this country.
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Gas tax isn't going down and it recently went up, sales tax on cars, auto excise tax, auto registration fees, etc. Folks who drive on the Mass Pike are paying for 93. MBTA fares don't come close to covering the costs of the service.
 
TallIsGood said:
Gas tax isn't going down and it recently went up, sales tax on cars, auto excise tax, auto registration fees, etc. Folks who drive on the Mass Pike are paying for 93. MBTA fares don't come close to covering the costs of the service.
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Gas tax goes down in real terms each year we don't raise it, and we've only raised the gas tax a whopping $.03 (7%) since the early 90s.

And gas taxes, tolls, etc don't come close to funding roads.

Aside from gas taxes and individuals’ expenditures for their own driving, U.S. households bear on average an additional burden of more than $1,100 per year in taxes and other costs imposed by driving.
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whittle said:
Gas tax goes down in real terms each year we don't raise it, and we've only raised the gas tax a whopping $.03 (7%) since the early 90s.

And gas taxes, tolls, etc don't come close to funding roads.
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So now we are talking inflation adjusted revenues vs. actual revenue which would be a function of volume times tax rate. Remember not all gas taxes are used for roads either. Finally, roads are not only cars, public transit busses, but trucks for shipping, walking, biking, etc.

The toll revenue for the Mass Pike well exceeds the cost of maintaining the Mass Pike.
 
Motorists are also responsible for externalities and costs that aren't even being priced in here, such as: air pollution, public health degradation, climate change, and all that military adventurism to secure fossil fuels (oops, I mean to spread democracy).

Then there are the costs to society of collisions, drunk driving, etc., which include the loss of productive members of the economy when they get smashed head-on by someone who didn't get enough sleep.

The toll revenue of the Mass Pike does not cover the total externalities and costs that society chooses to pretend don't exist. Using the atmosphere as an open sewer might seem like it's free, but it isn't.
 
lol it's 2018 and we're being told to be more sympathetic to motorists. As a motorist, no.

I don't know if the leap to Trump is the most apropos, but here is a similarity: using a system which was built with your express purposes in mind, which favors you to such a degree that you can't even imagine things being another way, and making the assessment that it isn't doing enough for you.

When we have a carbon tax that properly covers all effects of all that driving, we can talk.
 
cadetcarl said:
lol it's 2018 and we're being told to be more sympathetic to motorists. As a motorist, no.

I don't know if the leap to Trump is the most apropos, but here is a similarity: using a system which was built with your express purposes in mind, which favors you to such a degree that you can't even imagine things being another way, and making the assessment that it isn't doing enough for you.

When we have a carbon tax that properly covers all effects of all that driving, we can talk.
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And we won’t have a carbon tax for the foreseeable future.

All I’m saying is that mass transit activists need to pitch inprovements as a way to help motorists, not as the end upside after we finally stick it to all those car drivers. Making the voters the bad guy just doesn’t work, no matter the initiative.

Don’t pitch a carbon tax across the board. Pitch tolling 93 to pay for NSRL and/or Red-Blue, on the grounds that either project will decrease congestion on 93 (as will tolling 93 in and of itself). Yes, tolls on 93 would be unpopular, but if everyone that takes it sees that the revenues aregoing directly towards ways to improve their commute, they’ll be less strident in their opposition. And, of course, everyone in MetroWest will just shrug and say ‘welcome to the club.’
 
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