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The good news
The MBTA will announce that crime is at an all time low. The bad news is that the main reason crime is down is that the majority of stations are crime free because they are closed down.
Great way to avoid trains
Great way to avoid trains breaking down or catching on fire, too.
Blue Line
I’ll take off my resident hat here, and will gladly take the tradeoff in the big picture.
But what moron at the MBTA said “hey, you know when would be a great time to replace a critical stretch of the train line that serves the airport and a major beach with subpar shuttle service? Every weekend in summer!” And what larger moron signed off on it?
I guess to be fair, nobody’s ever accused the MBTA of having competent leadership. /shrug
Livid Eastie resident on
Livid Eastie resident on summer vacation (teacher life) checking in.
I guess I'm not supposed to:
a. visit my friends
b. go to the beach
c. go anywhere inbound
For every weekend this summer AND in the spring?
I think it's already insulting that we're also going to be cut off from the city because of the Green Line closures. Most of my friends live on the C or the E, so how will we ever find a common ground?
There will be shuttle buses.
There will be shuttle buses. I live along the C Branch, and while I wouldn't look forward to shuttle bus substitution during a weekday rush hour, the weekend service was not that bad, and FREE to boot.
And eventually, there will be new, better track, which will enable higher frequency, more reliable service. Should they NOT accelerate the work, and instead keep letting maintenance fall further and further behind? This is actually the kind of gutsy decision MBTA leadership should have made a long time ago.
There’s a VERY big difference
between running shuttles up and down Beacon, and between Eastie and Downtown. Especially on weekends in the summer.
It’s not the work, it’s the timing.
Four questions every reporter should ask Baker until they get As
1. Why does Pollack still have a job? 2. Why didn't the shutdowns start in 2015? 3. Why is PTC being reinstalled on the commuter lines? 4. What did you discuss with Elaine Chao last month?
I agree
With questions 1,2 and 4. If I knew what PTC is I might agree with question 3.
Probably talking about
Probably talking about Positive Train Control.
Federally mandated safety system. Every RR in the country is under a deadline to have it completely installed and working. I don't understand the "reinstall" part
The first Positive Train Control projects under Baker failed.
They're trying again. Baker is using these blanket T closures to fix faulty work done by his administration AFTER 2015 while attending to problems before 2015. In other words. The Baker administration isn't being honest with the public.
Fixing a maintenance backlog
Fixing a maintenance backlog that existed since before Dukakis was in office and meeting federal mandates because of improved safety regulations (Positive Train Control, other signals) or NTSB decrees (lots of rail/switches/trackbed/lighting/drains/tunnel safety features well past their sell by date) following collisions/derailments on the system makes this word mandatory. Shutting everything down gets it done in a year in a painful bandaid ripping off manner versus suffering through years of work.
If you want the MBTA fixed and working like it should this is the price we pay. There's no way to fix the things that need to be fixed without pain. Either take your lumps all at once and get it over with or suffer through years of paper cuts.
Add a 5th question...
5. Will you actually ride the T other than for poltical advertisements?
Thank Goodness...
Thank goodness for Uber and Lyft. Am I right?!?
I think you misspelled
I think you misspelled "shuttle buses" and "my bike"
Weekdays Too
The C and E lines will each be shut down for an entire month this summer.
Shutdowns meant to fix shoddy work since 2015 + forgotten sites
They're not only fixing stuff from 1977 but from 2017 too. Poftak and Gonneville rang the alarm bells. Pollack assured Baker everything was going well. It wasn't. Poftak and Gonneville are now leading the show
Can’t they fix this stuff
Can’t they fix this stuff when no one is using it instead of summer when we are all using it?
well
Technically there are fewer commuters in the summer.
But the goal of this is to rip the band-aid off and get the work done quickly rather than (say) night and weekend closures for a year.
From what I've read, the
From what I've read, the maintenance window during a normal night is too short to get any meaningful work done. They have like 4-5 hours between nightly shutdown and the next morning's startup, but with the amount of setup and teardown to get to work, they would only have like 2-3 hours each night to actually do work. So they shut the system down for extended periods to get work done.