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MBTA shuts Savin Hill station due to stairs being a safety menace
By adamg on Fri, 06/23/2023 - 9:16pm
The Dorchester Reporter reports inspections of two staircases Friday led to the T suddenly shutting the Red Line station - but that the T expects repairs to be finished in time to re-open the station on Saturday.
The shutdown comes 20 months after part of a Savin Hill staircase crashed to the ground, narrowly missing a rider.
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Comments
This explains the helicopter
That was hovering over the neighborhood this afternoon. Thank you for sharing!
The T needs to hire Jon Taffner
From Bar Rescue so he can scream "Shut it down." He would then bring in experts and fix the problems within 48 hours.
Just another day of crisis on the Ashmont line
Everyone who uses this station knows the stairways are falling apart, and have been for many years. Not just crumbling concrete, but rusty metal sticking up from stairs ready to impale a foot or trip someone.
It will be interesting to see what they think is so bad that emergency repairs are needed.
Stairs are also crumbling at Fields Corner and Shawmut. There's a large permanent puddle at the bottom of the outbound stairs at Shawmut. It seems that every station has it's own water feature.
Add to that the slow zones, lack of dispatchers causing long delays between trains, and trains that sound like they are going to fall apart each time the driver applies the brakes. And to top it off, the number of drug addicts nodding off on the trains and stations seems to be at an all time high.
Yet somehow "transit oriented development" is still a thing, even though the transit part is totally broken.
You don't need good quality
You don't need good quality transit to justify transit oriented development. Even if there were no stations at all, just the plan to build it in the future, it would help promote increased density, making areas more walkable and making car trips shorter. But of course, we do have some transit, people use it to get around everyday, and that puts us firmly ahead of most of the country. So getting people to move into transit oriented development who would otherwise live somewhere else means more people get to use transit.
How the hell did things get
How the hell did things get so bad in stations that were rebuilt in the last 20 years?
I think
Too much salt. Not enough zinc.
Poor infrastructure and maintenance
In addition to all that, you have drivers blocking streetcars and tracks, and attacking the station infrastructure. They want there to be a Harvard Square underpass, I guess.
But these additional repairs and inspections are not the fault of the MBTA as those staircases are. Clearly whoever has been inspecting these is ineffective whether due to their incompetence or corruption, but more likely like utter lack of support and follow-through by their superiors.
Wrong stairs installed
To save money on the rebuild, they used staircases that were meant for interior applications. The station is not fully enclosed and that's why the rust began almost immediately.