A Boston Commuter Speaks

I have had to suspend comments from others on this blog because of spammers. It’s too bad jerks have to ruin things for everyone.

I want to thank the select few brilliant math minds at the Math Harvard url and the other socially inept whose only joy in life is to giggle at their computers ALONE because no one will date them. (They’re no higher on the food chain then the kids we can thank who put graffiti on the trains lately.) Try putting your math genius and programming genius toward solving social justice problems.

Thanks to the math.harvard.edu socially inept geniuses, when these guys spam, they infect the computer.

These are the spammer urls. The favorite that visits is: 89.149.205.199

213.164.114.92
89.149.205.199
64.148.131.40
89.149.224.80

Yesterday the Franklin Line #738 in the morning - PEAK time that arrives in boston 8:40 a.m. was packed in like sardines. Okay. So why is it that the trains that arrive at South Station at 6:48 a.m., or 9:25 a.m. get double deckers and we get one level train with crummy old cars and no seats? Does this make sense? Everyone on the train that arrives at 9:25 on that Fairmont train could lie down and sleep there are so many empty seats. And often they don’t collect tickets. But they collect tickets when you’re standing, can’t reach into your briefcase as the conductor tries to squish by. Go figure. Of course if gas prices keep rising, we may all accept stuffed trains as business as usual as they do in Japan!

I was out of the office 3 days this week. So I can only report on Monday 3/24 and today 3/28.

Go ahead, guess…

That’s right. BOTH days late. Close to 15 minutes on each morning rush hour train. A woman next to me who had to attend an important meeting said, “Of all the days, this is not the one for the MBTA to be late.”

I said, “Are you kidding, they are always late.”

She said, “Yeah, but there are a group of people waiting for me to be at a meeting that starts promptly at 9:00 and I won’t make it.”

Like I said, there was a time before the rate hike, where I was in the office every single day at 8:55. NEVER late. Now, a chronic condition.

What I want to know is now that the contract has been signed with the managing agency, what leverage does Governor Deval Patrick have with them? Probably none. And that is a travesty. I will post later about this. In my view, in private business, when people don’t perform or miss benchmarks, they can be held to pay. And I’m not talking the ridiculous price of a ticket which you only get if the train is a half hour late. But more later. Back to work.

Do you have any idea how awful it is for a manager to walk into work late?

The train was 12 minutes late. But if you are a working mom who shuttles kids and has things to the wire and no earlier trains are an option, THIS STINKS.

MBTA, get the 95% back to where it was. And please, if you think 12 minutes late contributes to your increasing on-time performance (previous blog with their graphs), you are wrong.

The DEFINITION OF ON TIME: is the train arrives and departs when the schedule says. Not before and leaves people behind and not after.