(no subject)
Good news! By this evening my commute no longer involved standing in traffic for 45 minutes waiting for a bus that wasn't full, while it's 5F out.
Bad news: that was my morning commute.
The MBTA brought in buses, oh yes! Peter Pan, Dattco, Pioneer Valley Transit Authority, all the buses you could want. But mismanaged so badly, in part I suspect because they expected the Ashmont line to be fixed sooner (no point in investing the organizational energy) but also just -- it can't be done. The stations on the line run more or less directly down Dot Ave., and that's where all the traffic goes too. You can't put 30 buses on Dot Ave. and expect them to get anywhere before kingdom come. And all the buses were running line-oriented, i.e. they went station to station; rather than cluster-oriented, in which case you could fill up a whole bus at Ashmont and send it via Gallivan Blvd. to the switch-point, do the same via Morrissey from Field's Corner, etc. and relieve the traffic as well as the sorrow of watching 15 buses go by before one comes along that isn't crowded. And also, you know, there were no staff directing things, no signage, and the announcements were not made in a timely manner, and so on.
But whatever, I'm not on the Braintree line, which is going to be like this for the next month. They opened the Ashmont line back up, and it's crowded and slow, and the drivers are So Cranky at stupid people who stand with their backpacks hanging out the open doors. But I'm currently feeling pretty lucky. (Actually, my line might be the only one currently running start to finish without service breakages!)
I have moved mostly over to Dreamwidth. Please comment there if you can.
Bad news: that was my morning commute.
The MBTA brought in buses, oh yes! Peter Pan, Dattco, Pioneer Valley Transit Authority, all the buses you could want. But mismanaged so badly, in part I suspect because they expected the Ashmont line to be fixed sooner (no point in investing the organizational energy) but also just -- it can't be done. The stations on the line run more or less directly down Dot Ave., and that's where all the traffic goes too. You can't put 30 buses on Dot Ave. and expect them to get anywhere before kingdom come. And all the buses were running line-oriented, i.e. they went station to station; rather than cluster-oriented, in which case you could fill up a whole bus at Ashmont and send it via Gallivan Blvd. to the switch-point, do the same via Morrissey from Field's Corner, etc. and relieve the traffic as well as the sorrow of watching 15 buses go by before one comes along that isn't crowded. And also, you know, there were no staff directing things, no signage, and the announcements were not made in a timely manner, and so on.
But whatever, I'm not on the Braintree line, which is going to be like this for the next month. They opened the Ashmont line back up, and it's crowded and slow, and the drivers are So Cranky at stupid people who stand with their backpacks hanging out the open doors. But I'm currently feeling pretty lucky. (Actually, my line might be the only one currently running start to finish without service breakages!)
I have moved mostly over to Dreamwidth. Please comment there if you can.