the T.
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Ah, the T. How could I have gone so long
without bitching about the T?
First off, let me just say the T is great. Great if you have lots of time to kill, no particular destination, and don’t mind employees who range from bored beyond belief to just plain rude. According to a recent Boston magazine article, the T receives an average of 86 complaints per day…and that’s just the people who are ticked off enough to bother to put in the call. The train is one thing…if you only need to go from one stop to another that happens to be on the same line, maybe the T will actually be useful, as long as it’s not rush hour. If you need to change trains, though, well…too bad. (And of course, if you want to go to the airport, you probably have to change trains.) I do find that a good way to kill time waiting between trains is to think back to my random processes class in grad school and try to compute the expectation value of my arrival time. Unfortunately, when this many random processes are stacked up in series, the overall variance becomes prohibitively large. But then there are the buses. Be prepared to be patient. Sometimes they are late. Sometimes they don’t show up at all. Sometimes they show but don’t bother to stop (this one especially in snow storms, just to spite you…dress warmly). If you manage to get on the bus, make sure you pay attention – the stops will be pretty much indecipherable. Sometimes they will stop when you ask, sometimes not. And exact change only? Really? They like to spin it with the usual historic slant that they’re so fond of in Boston… you know, nation’s oldest public transit system and all. Especially the Green Line, with its charming and historic old trolley cars. (This might also explain the fact that the token machines don't accept twenties.) What they don’t tell you is they never bothered to buy any new equipment…it might as well all be the original stuff they started with in the 19th century. (To be fair, the Green Line did purchase some new trains recently…but they turned out to be so unreliable that they stopped using them and went back to the old ones. Progress?) Green Line renovations…finally done, six months late. To their credit, the MBTA set up a shuttle service to cover in the interim, but I swear they must have intentionally gone out of their way to recruit their most obnoxious employees to man them. I was embarrassed more that once in front of visitors by the rudeness, incompetence, and obvious contempt that T employees have for tourists. For a city that prides itself on its history, you would think maybe they’d have the sense to make it a little easier on visitors. Public transportation should be reliable, punctual, clean, easy to use, convenient, and cheap. The T succeeds only on the last of these, and even there just barely. And now that they’re abandoning the simplicity of tokens for variable-fare Charlie Cards, we’ll have a system that is both confusing and which gives us the opportunity to store a bunch of cash on a little ticket that can be easily thrown out with the trash. Visitors to Boston always ask what T stands for. One word: Tedious. |