You'll get whatever we want you to get
And now it seems the T has just had its fourth derailment of the year. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch said in awe, surveying the alerts on the MBTA website, "Everything below Broadway is kaput."
Governor Charlie Baker declined to address the cause of the derailment and instead deferred to an ongoing T investigation of the cause. But the Republican, who's long pushed back against calls to infuse the system with more cash, argued the agency is still doing the "overdue" work to update its aging equipment and infrastructure, some of which is decades old.
"We want to make sure we get it right," Baker said after an unrelated event in Springfield. "I wish we could install it all tomorrow. We can't. But I believe we're heading in the right direction on that stuff."
Somehow I don't think fast/cheap/good/pick two is the problem we are actually having here. In the Helleresque meantime, a reporter was almost late to the press conference about the derailment because of the derailment.
Train derailments are not supposed to be common. We shouldn't have even two within four days of each other. There have already been injuries. I don't want to have wait for a repeat of the Summer Street Bridge disaster before our governor actually takes this collapsing system seriously (and doesn't privatize it, for God's sake, puts money into it like a state is supposed to do with its public works). "There was nothing with the system, there was nothing wrong with the train, there was nothing wrong with the signals or the switches." Oh, not my dude, that is literally how you get Chernobyl. I so wanted an ethical artichoke.
spatch said in awe, surveying the alerts on the MBTA website, "Everything below Broadway is kaput." Governor Charlie Baker declined to address the cause of the derailment and instead deferred to an ongoing T investigation of the cause. But the Republican, who's long pushed back against calls to infuse the system with more cash, argued the agency is still doing the "overdue" work to update its aging equipment and infrastructure, some of which is decades old.
"We want to make sure we get it right," Baker said after an unrelated event in Springfield. "I wish we could install it all tomorrow. We can't. But I believe we're heading in the right direction on that stuff."
Somehow I don't think fast/cheap/good/pick two is the problem we are actually having here. In the Helleresque meantime, a reporter was almost late to the press conference about the derailment because of the derailment.
Train derailments are not supposed to be common. We shouldn't have even two within four days of each other. There have already been injuries. I don't want to have wait for a repeat of the Summer Street Bridge disaster before our governor actually takes this collapsing system seriously (and doesn't privatize it, for God's sake, puts money into it like a state is supposed to do with its public works). "There was nothing with the system, there was nothing wrong with the train, there was nothing wrong with the signals or the switches." Oh, not my dude, that is literally how you get Chernobyl. I so wanted an ethical artichoke.
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I was lucky today - I had to wait for an extra 40 minutes for a bus to Alewife, but once I got there, getting downtown, around, and back went fine. Of course I didn't go farther than Park Street on the Red line...
Did you notice that the schedule is changing on the 89 (and many other buses) with the next update on the 23rd? More complicated for some of us, there is going to be work on the Harvard Station busway for six months.
https://www.mbta.com/projects/harvard-station-busway-improvements
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It is traditionally an integral part of being a train!
Parts of the MBTA are older than I am. I don't mean the tracks or the tunnels. I mean the cars. I don't even know about all the mechanical moving parts. But it can't be an ideal situation.
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I'm not thrilled about it! (I really don't want anyone to die.)
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I hadn't even heard about two of the derailments.
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We were not on the train! We were not even massively inconvenienced like everyone else who trustingly tried to ride the Red Line today, because we only had to take buses. But I don't want this trend to continue.
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It is true that it would not all start working tomorrow. But more money in the system plus more people working to fix it would make it work faster and right now a lot of it's not working very well at all.
I'm glad you were not totally given the runaround by the T.
Did you notice that the schedule is changing on the 89 (and many other buses) with the next update on the 23rd? More complicated for some of us, there is going to be work on the Harvard Station busway for six months.
I have seen both of these facts! And I take the 77 frequently, so the latter is relevant to me.
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"Why worry about something that's never going to happen?"
"Oh, that's brilliant. They should put that on our money."
(I don't know if you've seen the last episode yet.)
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I have, and it's part of what I was thinking of.
(I hope to review it, but I am going through a sleepless patch and have a stupid backlog of things I wanted to write about first; who knows.)
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One would hope, especially the people working to fix it part. It's just hard to believe that the money would be spent sensibly. The elevator on the inbound side of Central Station has been out of order for months and months. The work-around has been to tell people who need to elevator (announced to every car, on every trip) to stay on until Kendall, and then take the specially designated shuttle van (presumably set up for wheelchairs) back to Central. I'd think that hiring elevator repair people for an intensive short period (overnight? quadruple overtime? whatever it takes) would ultimately be a better use of the money we're paying the shuttle drivers over the long time period. Just one example.
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Agreed. My mother heard Baker on the radio explaining that there just weren't enough people in the system to implement the repairs and renovations any faster than they were already happening and our mutual response was to yell "THEN HIRE THEM, DEAR CHARLIE, DEAR CHARLIE, DEAR CHARLIE."
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Thank you!