F-Line to Dudley
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When they replace the cars, yes. No sense in installing ASA computers in the current rolling ruins when they hopefully only have to hang on for 5 more years.
The Orange Line Thread
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When they replace the cars, yes. No sense in installing ASA computers in the current rolling ruins when they hopefully only have to hang on for 5 more years.
Jahvon09
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Yup!
The Orange Line is the only one whose rail cars don't have it yet. I might have mentioned this before, but.....,
I wonder though. Why won't the MBTA start seeking input from their most knowllegable resources - their commuters - as to what they think that the new Red & Orange Line rail cars & the new Green Line Type 9 trolleys should have and should not have?
When you're about to plan, research, design & build new rail cars, or any other product, you would usually go straight to the main source(s) - the employees who will be operating them, and the people who will be riding them
on a daily basis, such as to & from work or other heavy use.
After all, the new rail cars are expected to last for about 30 years or more of non-stop use from sun up to sun down through rain, snow, icey cold and through the most torridly hot days of summer!
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^ Hah! Win.
F-Line to Dudley
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Simpsons did it:
You don't know how long I've wished the Orange Line drunken door chimes played La Cucaracha.
Jahvon09
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I think that you were right when you said that the Orange Line rail cars bear the brunt of critisism! But it's not only THAT.
It's whole SWC section has been in use since May of '87 when it first opned for business. That was over 27 years ago. And it has been neglected during the last 15 years or so!
The Orange Line itself has been the subject of years of abuse & neglect, starting with the Soutwest Corridor portion of it.
The platforms at some of the stations have begun to deteriorate from poor or lack of maintenance, the areas round the escalators on the platform have begum to buckle up, showing their age, along with the poor patch-up jobs given to them.
At the Jackson Square Station, the pigeons practically have the run of the place, own it and use it just as much if not more than the commuters, what with them crapping all on the walls, tracks, lighting and the platform!
The wall on the track area used by Amtrak & the commuter rail have been attacked by grafiti writers, and most of the elevators stink from thugs and bums urinating in them!
This IS the responsibility of the MBTA officials to address these constent ongoing & annoying problems, and as long as things such as these continue, the longer things will get far more worst! :sad:
And there's an elevator that is used to gain access between State Street Staion & Washington Street. It stinks and reeks with urine from drunks and bums who sleep outside during the day and at night!!! I've complained about this mutiple times to the station employees who told me that it gets cleaned up every day, and if this IS the case, and it definitely isn't, then why in the hell does the bloody thing stink so badly?!!!
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F-Line to Dudley
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I think that you were right when you said that the Orange Line rail cars bear the brunt of critisism! But it's not only THAT.
It's whole SWC section has been in use since May of '87 when it first opned for business. That was over 27 years ago. And it has been neglected during the last 15 years or so!
The Orange Line itself has been the subject of years of abuse & neglect, starting with the Soutwest Corridor portion of it.
The platforms at some of the stations have begun to deteriorate from poor or lack of maintenance, the areas round the escalators on the platform have begum to buckle up, showing their age, along with the poor patch-up jobs given to them.
At the Jackson Square Station, the pigeons practically have the run of the place, own it and use it just as much if not more than the commuters, what with them crapping all on the walls, tracks, lighting and the platform!
The wall on the track area used by Amtrak & the commuter rail have been attacked by grafiti writers, and most of the elevators stink from thugs and bums urinating in them!
This IS the responsibility of the MBTA officials to address these constent ongoing & annoying problems, and as long as things like thses continue, the longer things will get far more worst! :sad:
And there's an elevator that is used to gain access between State Street Staion & Washington Street. It stinks and reeks with urine from drunks and bums who sleep outside during the day and at night!!! I've complained about this mutiple times to the station employees who told me that it gets cleaned up every day, and if this IS the case, and it definitely isn't, then why in the hell does the bloody thing stink so badly?!!!
The problem is the T's station maint budget has been tied up for the last dozen years doing ADA retrofits on 8 Green Line subway stations, the last 2 non-accessible Orange stations, Charles MGH and all 4 Ashmont Branch stations on Red, 7 of 8 Mattapan Line stations, and 23 Green Line surface stops. Plus 6-car platform extensions on 11 of 12 Blue Line stations and settling up all the non-Bowdoin ADA retrofits. Plus Boylston getting a restored headhouse and badly-needed waterproofing and lighting fixes. With retrofits varying from platform-only to very extensive to total blow-up/rebuilds where not a single piece of steel and concrete remains from the original station.
You can criticize them for spending unwisely on a few of those exercises in monument-building opulence, and criticize them for flagrantly overshooting budget and schedule targets on a lot of them. But that's a rather incredible rate of productivity overturning stops on the system with how dire their financial condition is. All of those retrofits brought the affected stops up to more or less full state of repair. And they're not done. Wollaston, Hynes, and Symphony still need ADA retrofits with full state-of-repair treatment as part of that. And Wollaston is the only one of that group funded and shovel-ready.
You're going to have to temper your expectations a little for the stations that simply need repairs and not ADA. ADA retrofits are a lot pricier and suck up a lot more resources. They've had to pick their battles, and Orange Line SW Corridor, Orange Line Community College to Oak Grove, and Red Line Alewife extension have been the casualties of that. If they can get funding for the final two GL subway stops (with GLX taking care of Lechmere) then they'll finally be over the hump on subway ADA with all Green Line stations Kenmore-inbound, all of the non- street-running E, all of Blue, all of the Ashmont Branch, and all of Mattapan up to more or less full state of station repair.
But that doesn't make the repair list much shorter:
-- Orange: heavy repair/refresh at all 9 SW Corridor stops (opened 1987). Back Bay is the only one that might get some expedited funding for a refresh as part of the commuter rail fumes mitigation.
-- Orange: moderate repair/refresh at all 6 non-Assembly north stops (opened 1975). Oak Grove's getting some long overdue work, but that's it so far.
-- Red: heavy repair/refresh at Porter and Alewife (opened 1984). Porter's got the new elevators and they've been plugging those longstanding leaks, but the accumulated water damage requires a gut-and-rebuild.
-- Red: midlife refresh at all 4 non-Wollaston Braintree Branch stops (NQ, QC opened 1971; QA, Braintree opened 1980). Crumbling Quincy Ctr. garage getting a rebuild now, but the station areas aren't.
-- Red: preventative maintenance Kendall-Harvard, Davis, Broadway-JFK (Harvard, Davis opened 1983-84; Kendall, Central, Broadway, Andrew, JFK renovated 1988).
-- Red/Orange/Green: preventative maintenance at Park St. (both levels), DTX (both levels + Winter St. concourse), Haymarket (Orange level) to structures that haven't been touched by more recent partial renovations (walls, ceilings, lighting, various worn staircases, headhouse structures, etc.)
Throw in 5 of 13 non-compliant D stops still needing ADA, 13 of 18 non-compliant B stops, and 9 of 13 non-compliant C stops that are going to need a slow and steady churn. With the next phase of the Comm Ave. rebuild putting a few more consecutive B stations on time limit for renovations, and GLX running end-to-end from Medford to Riverside putting urgency on getting the last D stops compliant and as many D platforms as possible lengthened for 3-car trains.
And the state of repair of the track, signal, electrical, and vehicle infrastructure on parts of all 4 lines is still several billions in the hole and sinking fast.
It's a lot to swallow with their funding still un-reformed. They don't have many attractive choices but to let the older--but ADA-compliant--Orange stations slip into deferred maintenance while they've settled up ADA compliance and/or platform lengthenings on such an enormous percentage of their prepayment stations. Hopefully with only a couple expensive retrofits to go they can pounce quickly on enough funding to start tackling those otherwise compliant stations that just need basic in-situ repairs and recovery from deferred maint, then survive that experience to stay on top of the others that aren't in horrible shape but will need attention within 10 years or else they likewise slip into deferred maint.
Really? What a boneheaded waste of money. Quincy Ctr garage never should have been built in the first place. That's what Braintree (and newer Quincy Adams) is for.
Typical T. Let everything else go to shit, nothing but palaces for parking garages.
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The garage has been there since the station opened 43 years ago, and houses the bus depot for all South Shore routes. That's a hell of a lot of pointless retroactive blame to be assigning about who coulda/shoulda/woulda done something in the 1960's when that thing was in design. Hell, the design was started before the T even came into existence.
The thing had structural integrity issues with the decks and has been closed for 2 years because of it. They're fixing it because it's a well-utilized garage that generates them revenue, and the structure is fixable without radical replacement. Blowing it the hell up would've required blowing up the station, and Quincy neither wanted that nor would've tolerated that.
Take it up with City of Quincy for not pursuing a visionary car-free downtown or something, but this one isn't on the T's rap sheet. What they're doing is proper state-of-repair. You don't exactly want pieces of the garage falling off onto the station and bus yard below.
Jahvon09
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You're probably right on those things, but my theory is that if they kept up with those maintenance proceedures in the beginning when they were small, and instead of waiting until small problems manifest into a monster, they could've stayed on top of the situations and could've lessened the severity of things getting worst & worst until they've gotten out of hand.
I highly doubt that they will ever recoup the cost of repairing it from the meager "revenue" they get from the parking garage. This is just them doing what they always did cause that's what they always done.
The city of Quincy has it's own shit it needs to get straight, but they should really just be trying to reassemble that deal where they redevelop the area around the station. Wouldn't that be just dandy if the MBTA blows cash on rebuilding the garage right before Quincy decides to just redo the entire station anyway.
The city of Quincy has it's own shit it needs to get straight, but they should really just be trying to reassemble that deal where they redevelop the area around the station. Wouldn't that be just dandy if the MBTA blows cash on rebuilding the garage right before Quincy decides to just redo the entire station anyway.
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Oh come on...that is totally irrelevant. The T cannot make a unilateral decision to remove that garage "for your own good, Quincy". Nothing happens in that kind of community input vacuum, and you know that.
The garage got closed by the structural engineer in 2012 because of advanced structural decay and City of Quincy in 2014 still doesn't have a redev plan. Much less one that can go into design in the timeframe where that structure must be repaired before the structural integrity of the station itself becomes questionable. Assuming they even want the garage gone in some redev plan.
Does the pursuit of a more perfect Downtown Quincy favor giant chunks of the garage raining down and forcing the whole building condemned, the station's imminent closure, disruptions to commuter rail and Red Line service until they underpin, and bus frequencies on the entire South Shore to be cut back because there's no yard to feed it from? I'm sorry...that is extremism. Day-to-day operation has to go on and can't get held hostage by Quincy's indecision. The T formulated a repair plan, funded it, and is enacting it. That is not a travesty. That is them doing their fucking job on state-of-repair, which I believe is the whole point of this discussion.
Take it up with City of Quincy if you think their downtown is too car-centric and they're not initiating a change fast enough. It is not the T's job to tell them what their downtown should look like or let its structurally unsound property housing mission-critical transit facilities linger structurally unsounder to a crisis point out of deference to Quincy figuring its shit out at the drawing board several years longer. That is not on them, and no amount of bitching about the T's other parking expansion misadventures is going to shift the blame onto them for what Quincy Center station coulda/woulda/shoulda needs to be. At least find the right target for your ire. This is bread-and-butter state-of-repair. No more, no less, and definitely no more or less when the other stakeholders are mum.
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You're probably right on those things, but my theory is that if they kept up with those maintenance proceedures in the beginning when they were small, and instead of waiting until small problems manifest into a monster, they could've stayed on top of the situations and could've lessened the severity of things getting worst & worst until they've gotten out of hand.
Well, yes. But without financial reform, where's that money going to come from? They run a lot of things inefficiently, but it's not like they can raid money from excess capital expansion line items on a whim to the station repair budget. Especially when a lot of grants paid for these ADA upgrades. For all their institutional inefficiency, still...nothing is that simplistic. That's not how budgeting works at the executive and legislative level. If they are at such a breathtaking funding shortfall today at keeping things at state-of-repair, removing expansion projects doesn't redistribute the pie all to ops and procurements. It just outright disappears. And if the ops shortfall is so huge that no amount of belt-tightening on internal flab or more focused decision-making makes up all of the difference...there's still a shortfall, still going to be deferred maintenance, and still going to be too few new replacement vehicles being ordered.
Also...we're only talking about physical structures at rapid transit stations. That's a tiny piece of the system's physical plant that includes the rapid transit lines themselves, all things commuter rail, all things bus, all things ferry, all transit vehicles, all transit vehicle maintenance facilities, and all backoffice operations. All of which has to be kept running out of that operations and procurement slice of the pie.
There are no easy answers here or reshuffling of the deck that's going to get you what you want. If the Governor and Legislature won't equip the T with the resources and ability to stay on top of day-to-day ops...they're not going to stay on top of day-to-day ops and slow decay will be the state of affairs. You're splitting hairs thinking "Well, if they did X a little bit more efficiently they'd be able to take care of my single complaint about the state of Y." Well, yeah...but then what about Z's state-of-repair? Or A's, B's, or C's?
Deferred maintenance is a structural problem of underfunded public services. If you don't solve the structural problem first, many things are going to be in a state of deferred maintenance all at once. The fixes somewhere are offset by escalating decay elsewhere, and the very business of running the whole ship means making hard and very unattractive choices of where deferred maint is going to hurt them least so they can address the areas where it's hurting them most. That may not line up directly with your station or your route to work. Arguing it should is pretty pointless, because then somebody else gets stuck with the decay.
This doesn't get any better until the Legislature's entire means of funding them gets reformed. Until then it's hoping they can put up the best fight they can at a losing battle.
Jahvon09
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I always thought that there was money set aside from the Federal Gov't or DOT for things like upkeep, maintenance and repairs, as well as for things like
rebuilding Gov't Center Station.
True, they can't just act like a magician and pull the dough out of a hat. But it IS true that they've let stuff go for so long, that it has finally caught up to them and now it is kicking them in the butt!
They don't have to remove it. They can do enough to keep things from falling down while Quincy decides what it wants the final state to be.
Look, that's exactly what DOT did to us here in Allston with all the aging Pike infrastructure. There's a big hole in the sidewalk on Cambridge Street. Four years ago they slapped a metal plate on it, put up a big fence, and set up a weird jersey-barrier sidewalk thingy. And left it that way, since 2010. They're awfully eager to just leave shitty shit in place when it's a sidewalk. God forbid a parking garage remain closed for 4 years.
Then last year they were insisting on wasting $10m repairing the damn thing even though the big Interchange project is obviously going to need to blow it up. And in the past two months they've reversed again and decided to hell with it, they're not going to fix the overpass after all, because why waste $10m.
The T is going out of their way to repair a parking garage that's not needed and may wind up being demolished in the next 5-10 years anyway. That's ridiculous. Especially when there's so much more than needs fixing, for real, and for long term.
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They ARE doing enough to keep it from falling down. What part of "closed due to flunked structural inspection" is so hard to understand here? Either structurally reinforce the damn thing, or it falls down whether it's full of cars or empty forevermore. They were doing duct tape and metal plate type patch jobs...again and again, year after year. And that no longer was sufficient to keep the thing from flunking inspection. Your Cambridge St. example is not comparable at all. When deferred maint gets this bad that there is no longer a "juuuuuuuuuuuust enough to keep it from falling down" trick left to play, anything you do to fix it is going to be expensive. That's the whole point of this deferred maint discussion.
It is not their fault that City of Quincy does not know what the hell it wants to do with its downtown. The T can't wait for them to figure that out, nor can it unilaterally go over their heads and tell them what they will or will not have for a garage. The T has a responsibility to maintain their preexisting structures to state-of-repair, and state-of-repair is not "let it decay so far gone they have to replace it with something new and way more expensive, but at least it's MY way more expensive something!". Your beef is with Quincy's downtown planners, their indecisiveness, and apparently their lack of zeal for banishing cars from downtown. No amount of false equivalences to other MassDOT projects is going to make in-situ repairs to a particular structure you don't personally care for the T's fault. They're doing their job here. Go get mad at Quincy in the downtown Quincy redev thread over the fact that it's a garage and not something else.
statler
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Just had my first stop at Assembly. At least a dozen T employees but didn't see a single passenger board or exit. They all seemed honestly excited and kept looking up and down the train to see if anyone was exiting the train.
I don't mean that as a slam. It's still really early and I wasn't expecting a large crowd or passengers, but it was kinda funny.
I don't mean that as a slam. It's still really early and I wasn't expecting a large crowd or passengers, but it was kinda funny.
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As expected by railnuts, the station opened before the ribbon cutting, but I'd expect most passengers at that hour would have to be in the tiny intersection of railnuts who work at Assembly....sure, I'd expect there to be a non-working railnut who made a special trip, but that's probably a dozen in the whole metro area.
I'd expect lots of passholders to check it out on the way home tonight.
In this, it is like busking (playing music)....nobody has time for it on their way to work. Pro buskers know only to work the evening rush.