Thanks to Universal Hub for covering the squishing beat so I don’t have to. They inform me that today’s squishing was brought to you by the Needham line. Two pedestrians were walking on the tracks and one only is escaped alone to tell us what the frak they were doing walking on train tracks.
Lest anyone forget, in the eternal battle of man against train, the train wins.
Rare is the Green Line collision in which I am not somehow involved, but I managed to miss the fatal rear-ending on the D line today. There’s not much left of those trains, and considering how they just roasted a B train two weeks ago, it looks like the MBTA is going to have to send away to Breda for more rolling stock soon.
[Update:] The visiting Feds Eye Possible Cell Phone Use In MBTA Crash. They’re also eyeing some Smoking Cell Phones. Cell phone use was my favorite theory, though I also considered the rumors of recent signal problems on the D line. As I noted back when I got rear-ended on the Green line, rear-ending is always the rear-ender’s fault, even underground in the dark, never mind aboveground in broad daylight on a half-mile of straightaway while allegedly using a cell phone.
Also, Switchback has before-and-after pictures of car 3667, which looks like a Kinki Sharyo (Type 7). (CharlieBlog confirms that 3667 was a Type 7 I, and that the rear-ended car, 3703, was a newer Type 7 II, also totalled–with pictures.) I’m impressed that NETransit already lists both cars as wrecked.
Imagine if any of the cars had been a cheap, more squishable, more derailable Breda…
I figured I’d be like the Boston media and report the flaming B train as late as possible. The train jumped the tracks and knocked down some power lines on the last outbound run Tuesday night (technically, very early Wednesday morning).
Service on my lines was unaffected, but rumor has it that the E-line was disrupted, probably because there was no way to get trains from the trainyards around Cleveland Circle onto the B-line, and whatever trains were running from downtown to Washington Street Wednesday morning had to have come from somewhere.
In other late-breaking news, the Giant G3 Cube on Boylston opened tonight. I was thinking of going, but I chose dinner instead.
I spotted this feel-good non-squishing T story at Universal Hub: an MBTA employee saved a man from the all-squishing Red Line by stopping the trains and helping to retrieve him from the tracks. According to a BostonNOW blogger, one of the rescuers barely missed the third rail.
This BostonNOW blog entry mentioning America’s windiest third-world city inspired me to blog again about our slushy winter wonderland. Even though it’s still technically fall, I had to break out the Severe Weather Hat today to survive the windchill downtown and in the ‘burbs. But the true pleasure of the commute was the black ice, which I battled without my snow boots because they’re still soaked from the 6 inch deep “wintry mix” flooding every intersection in Boston on Sunday.
Winter in Boston is an Ayn Rand novel, complete with political speeches.
Update: I take it back. The worst part of the commute was not the black ice (most of which is on the roads I have to walk on in the ‘burbs where they don’t believe in clearing sidewalks). The worst part of the commute was when I got to the bus stop tonight and it wasn’t there. Yes, readers, we are here in the fine city of ‘Burb, where we’ve secretly replaced Jemima’s usual bus stop with a two-foot high mound of ice. Let’s see if anyone gets squished by an eighteen-wheeler!
You see, in the fine city of ‘Burb, they not only don’t shovel the sidewalks; they also plow all the snow onto them. If there’s a breakdown lane they usually fill that up halfway, too. There is no breakdown lane in front of the inbound bus stop, though there is one outbound so I wasn’t faced with the new MBTA sport of dodge-the-eighteen-wheeler this morning, only tonight. Last night I got a ride to civilization (that is, to a subway station) and never saw the ice mountain coming.
As I approached the bus stop this evening, I saw another commuter perched precariously on the street side of the sheer wall of ice. I thought the person was just especially eager to get the bus and was watching the three-lane road like a hawk for salvation from the ‘burbs. Little did I imagine that she had climbed up there to dodge an eighteen-wheeler, and that that hunk of ice was the bus stop.
When I reached the stop I was faced with the same conundrum: do I stand here in the outside lane of this three-lane major artery of ‘Burb, 50 feet from the onramp to a major highway until something squishes me, or do I take up mountain climbing? Well, I haven’t survived two years of dodging traffic on onramps in ‘Burb by standing still so they can squish me, so I climbed up onto the mound of ice (not as easy as it sounds) and sat there until the bus came. It was, of course, late.
In fact, we never caught the scheduled express bus from ‘Burb. Instead an angel of a bus driver who was out of service stopped for us anyway and brought us back to civilization. Thus I lived to commute another day.
This is not my first winter in ‘Burb, so I asked myself, Self, why has there always been a bus stop here before, and why today, of all fine fall days, has the bus stop been replaced by ice? I came up with an answer: The bus to the ‘burbs doesn’t run on weekends, so no one was there after Sunday’s storm to stomp down the snow and recreate the little path to the street that brave commuters forged on Thursday afternoon. Yet I doubt the City of ‘Burb will bring in a jackhammer to clear the bus stop, and as for the MBTA, they don’t think it’s their problem, so watch this space. Winter, when it finally arrives, is going to be interesting.
My attitude yesterday was, “It’s just a little snow.”
My first mistake was going to work at all. I should have turned around after the Green Line collision at Bolyston, when they tossed us all off the train at Kenmore and promised shuttle busses. By chance I was near the back door of the first shuttle bus to show up when the crowd mobbed it, and I got on.
Of course, running the downtown Green Line stops above ground at rush hour is doomed to take forever, even pre-snow. So I missed not only my bus to the ‘burbs, but my emergency back-up bus to the adjacent ‘burb. Then there was an incident I don’t have time to go into involving an Orange Line train going out of service and a bus that may or may not have been the next bus to the ‘burbs. I ended up on a later bus to the adjacent ‘burb. By the time I got to work, a few warning flakes were in the air and the early rats were already fleeing the sinking ship.
I shook my head at the foolish rats. Why not wait until after 4, when the snow was supposed to slow down? That’s what I did, and the bus to civilization spent only one hour on I-93 before bailing out of the run. The driver threw us all off the bus at the Sullivan Square T stop, meaning back to the Orange Line for me. But the trains were running fine and from then on my commute was of its usual duration.
Other people spent four or eight hours in their cars. The governor blames the rats for leaving work early, the rats blame the governor for telling them to leave early. I don’t think this situation was covered by the French Toast Alert System, but we’re having another storm Saturday night and here’s the alert level:
So, it’s been a week now that the turnstiles (but see below) at Government Center have refused my FrankenCharlieTicket-Pass Outer Express Bus Pass. At first I was worried that Charlie had had an intimate encounter with the magnetic clasp on my cute little backpack, but when I got on the subway at Kenmore suddenly FrankenCharlie was working again. And of course it still works on the Outer Express Bus (which is somewhere between $2.30 and $3.30 more expensive than a subway ride, so the Outer Express Bus pass is supposed to cover a mere subway fare). Then I thought maybe it was a sting operation, like that pfennigs-on-the-MBTA stakeout back in the days of the token. But it’s gone on too long for any of that.
By “turnstiles” I mean “new plastic gates that replaced the old metal turnstiles”. I had hoped that the weekend would suffice to fix the so-called turnstiles at a major transfer point, but no. What was I thinking? That the MBTA was going to fix a problem? My only excuse is that NaNoWriMo has left me sleep-deprived. Of course, the turnstiles were still broken, and I was getting pretty annoyed.
It’s annoying enough that I have to use a FrankenCharlieTicket-Pass at all, when an Outer Express Bus Pass was supposed to be able to be put onto a real RFID CharlieCard this past summer. True Charlification has been postponed until sometime next year, which is to say, indefinitely. (Note in the article that the MBTA has not even thought about the Charlie Vending in the ‘Burbs issue, which goes to show that they were lying about the Summer 2007 thing all along.) You don’t want me to explain why the Charlie medium of my Outer Express Bus Pass is intimately linked—if you’ll pardon the pun—to the issue of Charlie vending machines at commuter rail stops in the suburbs.
So instead I’m forced to buy FrankenCharlieTicket-Passes and stick them into the little slots on turnstiles and bus fare collection boxes, while all the cool kids just wave their CharlieCards in the general direction of the RFID reader and move on. Sometimes your fingers get sucked in along with the CharlieTicket on the turnstiles, and it hurts. It’s also annoying that every driver and carman has his own personal opinion of whether it’s worth waiting seven times longer for the fare box to slurp up your CharlieTicket and spit it back out again, and the ones who are pro-slurp look at you like a fare evader ($129/month is hardly evasion) just because you’ve been trained to flash your CharlieTicket by the anti-slurp ones.
FrankenCharlie also means I can’t use a CharlieMitten. And don’t get me started on the annoying pointless unnamed bus connection announcements at almost every subway stop. (Who knew busses stopped at Arlington?)
The point being, I was annoyed when the turnstile refused my pass today. So I asked the T worker whose job it is to stand at the turnstiles at Government Center and apply his magic SuperCharlieCard to the RFID reader whenever someone comes by with an Outer Express Bus Pass (and who knows what other passes are being rejected) what was going on. He said it was the software.
So I have a suggestion for the MBTA. Why don’t you get a copy of the software on the turnstiles at Kenmore and put it on the turnstiles at Government Center, eh? It’s a subway station. They all charge the same amount now, as far as I know (where “the same amount” means “either $1.70 or $2.00, depending on your Charlie medium, modulo any discounts for special classes of rider”). And here’s an even better suggestion: stop running a major transit system on WindowsXP.
It’s official: you can now swing a cat in Brookline without hitting a Dunkin Donuts. I walked into the Dunkin Donuts in Washington Square at 10:30 this morning for a donut, only to find it was my last one. Signs said they were closing permanently at 7:00pm today, and rumor had it the issue was the lease.
Now I’m going to have to figure out where they hid the Krispy Kreme’s in Star Market after the renovations.
Switchback suggests that someone has put a hex on the T, based on a bunch of late-August squishings and September getting off to a good start with two accidents on the Green line and one bus crash.
I’d say the squishings are typical for the season—this is your last chance to get out there and walk on the tracks in shirtsleeves (bonus points if there’s a third rail), and Massholes of both the pedestrian and vehicular persuasion are always getting in the way of the trolley. Eventually the survivors learn to keep off the tracks.
Think of the T as a Darwinian counterbalance to mandatory health insurance in Massachusetts.
Another steamy August, another sales tax holiday weekend in Massachusetts. Shop early, shop often, but beware the fine print:
The following do not qualify for the sales tax holiday exemption and remain subject to tax: all motor vehicles, motorboats, meals, telecommunications services, gas, steam, electricity, tobacco products and any single item whose price is in excess of $2,500. The Act charges the Commissioner of Revenue with issuing instructions or forms and rules and regulations necessary to carry out the purposes of the Act.
The exemption applies to sales of tangible personal property bought for personal use only. Purchases by corporations or other businesses and purchases by individuals for business use remain taxable. Purchases exempt from the sales tax under G. L. c. 64H are also exempt from use tax under G.L. c. 64I. Therefore, eligible items of tangible personal property purchased on the Massachusetts sales tax holiday from out-of-state retailers for use in Massachusetts are exempt from the Massachusetts use tax.