Somewhere near the end, as Jonas and Kadish were discussing
the MBTA, to which both the governor and his chief of staff have devoted
incredible amounts of time and energy, Jonas said something that had my head nodding
like a bobble head doll’s.
“I ride the Red
Line. One day this week there was a
signal problem at Harvard. I start at
the far other end at Ashmont and we were delayed because of it,” Jonas related.
“And the doors in one of the cars were not working, so people on the platform
had to keep scurrying to another one. It
(the T) still has the feeling sometimes of being held together by bailing wire
and bubble gum.”
Indeed.
I ride MBTA buses and subway cars every work day -- and almost
every day’s an adventure. My commute
yesterday morning is a case in point.
The 7:40 a.m. bus I was supposed to catch in the Melrose
Highlands was eight minutes late. No one
shovels out bus stops after snow storms, so I had to wait in the snow-narrowed
street, Dunkin’-guzzling, cell-phone-talking motorists be damned. Upon boarding, I shuffled to my usual spot, a
sideways-facing bench at the back. I
like the extra leg room there. Then I
put my face in a magazine.
More than half-way to Oak Grove station, I noticed something
different, something I’d never seen before on that bus at that hour: there were
only two other passengers besides myself.
Scanning the road ahead, I saw the why.
My bus was directly behind the 7:25 a.m. bus. The system wasn’t working as it should; lots
of people were going to be late for work.
When our buses-in-tandem got to Oak Grove, there was a big tie-up
on the access road, Banks Place. This
happens after heavy snowfalls because the T has set up paid parking spaces on
one whole side of Banks Place. It’s impossible to clear all the snow that falls
during big storms out of those spaces. Banks Place grows much narrower. With
traffic moving in both directions, everybody has to slow down to avoid scraping
fenders with oncoming vehicles. Usually, the trip down Banks Place takes maybe
30 seconds; yesterday morning, it took five minutes.
Heading to the platform where the trains pull in, I read on
the overhead message board that one train was boarding
(about to leave) and the next would depart in 10 minutes. Ten minutes between trains
guarantees you’ll be packed into a car like bullets in a magazine. The T could use one train every three minutes
in the rush hours.
I did my best imitation of running to catch the boarding train. There was only one
open seat remaining, between two guys built like the defensive linemen on the
Everett High football team. I couldn’t
squeeze my shoulders between the two and had to perch on the edge of the seat,
holding my briefcase on my knees. But I
was one of the lucky ones. I wasn’t
standing up and I wasn’t squeezed shoulder to shoulder, face to face with
strangers. Somebody’s 18-inch-wide
backpack wasn’t pressed into my spine the whole way to Boston.
The first stop after Oak Grove is Malden Center. Its platform is always crowded in the
morning. Within 10 seconds of the doors
opening, almost every inch of “my” car was occupied. One may assume the same was true of every
other car, meaning there would be a lot of disappointed, angry T patrons at the
next three stops, Wellington, Assembly and Sullivan Square. Not until the train rolled into Community
College and the Bunker Hill students disembarked would some standing room open up.
SO, if you were waiting yesterday morning, circa 8:30, at
two very busy stops (Wellington and Sullivan Square) and one medium-busy stop
(Assembly) on the Orange Line, you had almost zero chance of getting on a
train.
“There’s huge investment that’s needed, and so every day we
look at performance of all the lines, and it’s not reliable enough yet,” Steve
Kadish said in response to Michael Jonas’s “bailing wire and bubble gum” observation, before
adding some nuance.
“Let me take that back,” he said. “The reliability of the Blue Line, the
general reliability of the Orange Line, the general reliability of the Red Line
– pretty solid when you see the daily stats.
It comes very close to hitting 75 percent on-time performance.”
Kadish is correct.
The Baker administration has definitely made the T run better than it
did in the disastrous winter of 2014-15.
That has been no small feat. As a
T rider, I am very glad that Governor Fix-It, (or, as I call him, Our Eagle
Scout Governor), decided to “take ownership” of our Godforsaken mass transit
system.
The T will not, cannot become the system metro Boston needs,
and that “bailing wire and bubble gum feeling” will not vanish, until we get really
serious about that “huge investment” Kadish mentioned.
Read the entire Jonas-Kadish
interview by going to: http://commonwealthmagazine.org/politics/governor-fix-its-fix-it-man/
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