I thought I’d follow up on my previous tweet on the subject, and explain myself a bit better.

I basically take the 78 bus to Harvard and then the Red Line to South Station to get to work every day. Since the 78 bus runs right in front of my house, it seems silly to drive in to Boston unnecessarily. I should, logically, be a poster boy for public transportation.

And yet, public transportation sucks so bad in this city that I just can’t do it any more. The Red Line seems to be broken, stopping for ten minute intervals in between stops on the way back home. This has on multiple occasions caused me to miss the bus home, adding an extra 15-20 minutes to my homeward commute. And that’s when the bus is on time. More often than not, it isn’t. Either it leaves 2 minutes early, causing me to just miss it, or it’s extraordinarily late.

Moreover, for some reason, the 78 route seems to use the oldest and most decrepit busses in the MBTA fleet, busses which break down far too often. If I were a conspiracy theorist I would say this is to punish Mitt Romney by giving the bus route that runs by the Mormon temple the worst busses imaginable. But whatever the reason, the fact remains that there are times that the bus just doesn’t show up, as happened on Friday morning when the 7:33AM bus just didn’t come by. By 7:55AM the 7:50 bus hadn’t arrived either, and so I got in the car and drove in. It took me less than 30 minutes.

Frankly, I’ve had it. It’s nuts to be living in Belmont, commuting to Boston and having it take over an hour to get into work. But this month was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The MBTA seems to have removed one bus from the 78 route, adjusting the schedules accordingly. Now I know we’re all under budget constraints, but it seems to me that they’d be better off shutting down the entire red line for a year or two and fixing it rather than doing what they’re doing. Because with every incremental change they make, with every application of a band-aid here and some duct-tape there, they create a public transportation system that is nominally working but for all practical purposes is useless for getting from point A to point B on time.

So I’m going to be driving in to work from now on. At my level at work, I get to have work pay for my T pass or a parking space at a nearby garage. I’m going to ask the boss to switch me over to the parking space as soon as possible. Maybe someday things will change. Maybe someday they’ll have qualified people running the T instead of political hacks. But until that time, I’ll be driving.

Tags: Dan Grabauskas, MBTA, Public Transportation, T

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 29th, 2009 at 3:43 am and is filed under News & Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.