route planning

[adularia]

Oogedah. The only way between South Station and North Station makes you walk half a mile to the Orange Line? This would be fine, if I knew anything at all about Boston...

I'm plotting to visit angharads_house, working in as many forms of public transit as possible because I have more parsimony than sense. I am counting the subway, Fung Wah, T, and MBTA surface

Comments

[cow]

I'm reasonably certain I did this once, and it didn't involve walking half a mile. I seem to recall the Blue Line being involved.

This was four or five years ago, though, so my memory is useless.

(Deleted the other half, because I just found out it's not on this end of the world.)

[adularia]

Hmm. MBTA thinks the orange line. Wonder what Hopstop thinks. Wonder what Boston cabbies think. :) I was about to be indignant that there's no shuttle train between the stations, but there's no Penn->Grand Central train either...

[cow]

So I totally failed at remembering colors, but according to the MBTA maps (and confirmed by Google), South Station is right on the Red Line, transfer one stop up to the Orange Line, and the Orange Line stops at North Station.

(I was sleep-deprived from a red-eye flight and excited about meeting an e-friend in person for the first time, so I wasn't paying all that much attention.)

[adularia]

I will also be meeting an e-friend in person for the first time! Popular activity, lately.

[angharads_house]

Taith saff! -- it really is not all that hard to get between the two stations. As I recall the transfer between the two lines, it was just an escalator and not much of a walk. If one is feeling truly mad, one simply stays on the Red Line until one gets to Porter, but that is an outside platform with poor overhead shelter, and at night it would not be my favourite place to wait for a train.

Yeah, and meeting is sort of a meta-triangulation, I suspect: we commonly know a fair number of people at Erdös numbers of 1 or 2.

Sometime I will tell you about the time I lugged a sack of rocks up a hill in Kenmore.... ^_^ (was then possessed of singular madness, which is not my usual state of being by a long shot).

[edited because I cannot consistently spell Kenmore this evening: either the WA one or the NY one]

[heinousbitca]

i don't think the Porter station is that creepy at night and i ride that commuter rail all the damn time.

that said it's usually a lot simpler to leave from South Station...and, uh, Kenmore, NY is spelled differently than our very own Kenmore-By-The-Lake? (as they tried to rename it in the 80s...)

(and then there's kenmore square in boston, too!)

[angharads_house]

ah the well, will chalk it up to a couple of creepy experiences there at Porter, but on the other hand, the kiss-and-ride at Alewife can be strange at night, too.

don't quite yet ride the trains too much (not like my definite overdose on LIRR and the PATH some years ago), but am now getting past the 'this is worth watching out the window' to 'this is a good chance to sleep for an hour'. helps to go end-to-end on the line, anyway.

despite some of the most outbound signs showing a dotted line out to a station at Gardner, that is still only a pipe dream... (like the East Side subway project in Nuyorica, been under construction since before my day).

had completely spaced Kenmore Square, but am damndamn sure that Kenmore NY (near Sherrill and the Oneida Community Mansion House) is spelled the same as Kenmore-supra-Sea-Atoll..... don't ever hire me to paint roadsigns, as I will give everything strange names.

[heinousbitca]

it keeps getting proposed and shot down. tunneling under Boston is an engineering nightmare and i don't even know much about engineering but people who do tell me so. it was proposed back when i was in college and i got to listen to one of my profs go nucking futs that they refuse to finish 391 (long story) but they can put a train under Boston. when i asked him, a polisci prof, which served the common good more, he told me he didn't care about the common good.

i asked him if he was a Republican. i got kicked out of class. i was such a little shit in college.

[angharads_house]

well, there is everything from Precambrian to Tertiary under Boston, including slatches of anthracitic coal-measures under the harbour.

I get paid to think about tunnels and tunneling in my day job, and I thought that the Big Dig was trouble waiting for someone's chequebook, as it turned out to be.

To get under the river with a heavy rail link would be one hell of a lot of tunneling on either side, since Amtrak locomotives cannot cope with the sort of gradients that the T cars can.

Fortunately, not my chequebook!

[dymaxion]

Boston cabbies have no bloody clue.

[heinousbitca]

they're very good at claiming they know nothing and taking the longest possible route to get there.

they're kind of like Seattle cabbies but the sexual harrassment's different in other words.

[dymaxion]

Except that IME, Seattle cabbies will reliably take plastic if you give them no choice, instead of attempting to drive you to the nearest ATM. Also, while I've heard some serious horror stories, Seattle cabbies seem to be slightly better at basic navigational coherency, but I may also just be giving them better directions, actually knowing my way around and all.

[heinousbitca]

you've gotten them to take plastic? huh. i'm not known for being all that vertebrate though, so, um, yeah.

my neighborhood is generally somewhere they won't go, so i have to tell them i'm going to, say, 175th and Bothell Way and then "oh wait stop here" when nearby. social engineering FTW.

i think they're better at basic navigational coherency between, say 50th/Market in the North and the Duwamish in the South. you go past that and it all goes Pete Tong right fast; my second- worst cab experience involved the cabbie getting "lost" in West Seattle and assuming i didn't speak French when he was bragging to his buddy what he was doing. when i called him on it he slammed on the brakes and kicked me out of the cab in the middle of nowhere.

[angharads_house]

shoot, creepiest cabbie I ever had was between Harrison and Newark, a five-dollar ride where I felt actively unsafe with the guy....

fixed zone fare at least avoids the worst of the scenic route generation...