Feels like I've been through a washing machine
I have decided that every time I have to take a taxi because the MBTA fails to get me to an important appointment on time, such as occurred this morning when not only the bus that I got up at shaking sick sleepless o'clock to catch but its successor according to the live online schedule totally failed to show, I am going to send a letter with the amount to Charlie Baker. Because he may have infinite cash to burn on private transportation, but I don't. That's why I buy a monthly T pass. Which this month cost a hell of a lot more than last month. And so far has seen a hell of a lot less use.
Is there already a website for this purpose? To submit to our governor the costs of having to use the public transit which he has so conspicuously and catastrophically neglected? Taxi fares. Uber fares. Lyft fares. Gas money. Parking. Missed appointment fees. Lost wages. Extra childcare. It costs when the T doesn't work. It costs me more than I can afford. Today it was $20 for a taxi and I still made only the last fifteen minutes of my therapist's apppointment, so much for self-care.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch regularly has to catch equally out-of-our-budget taxis in order to get to work on time, rather obviating the point of his paychecks. I wind up walking into Davis half the time. There was a 72 bus on fire in Cambridge this afternoon. And I should like to make Charlie Baker feel it. I'd get arrested if I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and stuffed him on the Red Line at Braintree at rush hour and stuck a mike in his face for comments when he stumbled off at Alewife, so what are my options for legal obnoxiousness? A hashtag only works if he checks his own Twitter account. Postcards to pile up in his snail mail? Formal invoices billing him for costs incurred? I don't have the energy to create or maintain any kind of infrastructure or even nudge an idea toward virality, but I am sick unto revolution of buses and trains that arrive late or never and meanwhile keep grinding insufficient yet insupportable operating costs out of the commuters who can spare it least. World-class city, my cat's hind foot.
Is there already a website for this purpose? To submit to our governor the costs of having to use the public transit which he has so conspicuously and catastrophically neglected? Taxi fares. Uber fares. Lyft fares. Gas money. Parking. Missed appointment fees. Lost wages. Extra childcare. It costs when the T doesn't work. It costs me more than I can afford. Today it was $20 for a taxi and I still made only the last fifteen minutes of my therapist's apppointment, so much for self-care.
spatch regularly has to catch equally out-of-our-budget taxis in order to get to work on time, rather obviating the point of his paychecks. I wind up walking into Davis half the time. There was a 72 bus on fire in Cambridge this afternoon. And I should like to make Charlie Baker feel it. I'd get arrested if I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and stuffed him on the Red Line at Braintree at rush hour and stuck a mike in his face for comments when he stumbled off at Alewife, so what are my options for legal obnoxiousness? A hashtag only works if he checks his own Twitter account. Postcards to pile up in his snail mail? Formal invoices billing him for costs incurred? I don't have the energy to create or maintain any kind of infrastructure or even nudge an idea toward virality, but I am sick unto revolution of buses and trains that arrive late or never and meanwhile keep grinding insufficient yet insupportable operating costs out of the commuters who can spare it least. World-class city, my cat's hind foot.
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The T is also enraging people, which is frankly a lot of disturbing: https://twitter.com/SaItytaro/status/1148415081903992835
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Emperor Poopfoot IV of Commodiana rides again. Through the Cloaca Maxima.
The T is also enraging people, which is frankly a lot of disturbing
That is not a good reading on the urban barometer. I hadn't seen.
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OK that did make me smile.
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Buuuuut Microsoft and Google have set up their own vans (which nevertheless use publicly funded roads and even PUBLIC BUS STOPS, without paying) and then expect credit because those employees aren't all driving to work. While the public transit system for people who don't work for giant IT firms falls completely apart. There are people who can't afford to live in Seattle anymore, so they live what would be half an hour away by car, but they can't afford cars so they take a 2 hour bus ride both ways. If the bus shows up.
Anyway yeah, SYMPATHIES AND SOLIDARITY.
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Boston is edging perilously close to that kind of supernova and I do not want to see it.
Anyway yeah, SYMPATHIES AND SOLIDARITY.
THANK YOU.
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Yeah, San Francisco is apparently the paradigm here, and it's just becoming totally unlivable in a number of senses. Seattle is RIGHT BEHIND it in terms of highest rents and highest number of homeless people, which just honestly makes me feel sick.
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It's a very bad paradigm.
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Case in point:
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jul/01/san-francisco-big-tech-workers-industry
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Even if it's just me, with the frequency with which I get let down by the MBTA, it should still be annoying.
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May I ask, or should I just come back in a couple of months?
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That would be amazing.
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You'd have to find a way to bug ALL the relevant authorities, though: I mean, the problem is not so much that the MBTA is badly managed, or even (as I understand it, anyway) that Boston doesn't want to pay for it; it's that the REST of the Commonwealth doesn't want the bill.
Which I'd call understandable, if it weren't for the fact that Metro Boston generates a disproportionate amount of the state's tax revenue.
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But yeah, it's the same issue in New York; Albany has been starving the MTA infrastructure for decades and now the NYC subway system is (this is a technical term) extremely fucked.
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I'm sorry your public transport is so screwed: you don't need the hassle, and Boston does not need more cars.
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Part of the problem is that this has been going for months and months with no more record than me complaining over text message or e-mail or occasionally, when it was especially egregious, here on DW. I don't have a complete record. But I am going to try to keep one going forward.
But maybe send a monthly account, rather than the postcards (lighter on your postage costs, harder to dismiss as a one-ff).
I was thinking a lot of postcards would be their own record by volume, but it's true that requires the governor's office to keep the postcards rather than tossing them singularly as they come in.
I'm sorry your public transport is so screwed: you don't need the hassle, and Boston does not need more cars.
Thank you. It really doesn't.
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I plan to! Annoyance is political, too.