Tales From the T

While just about every normal person, and every single one of my friends had President's Day off, I had the good fortune of having to go into the office today. However, I did have the misfortune of having to take the Red Line to work today with the T's weekend diversion between Broadway and Ashmont still in place.

I don't want to bitch too much about the T service (that's too easy), but I will gripe a bit. The one thing I don't understand is why does the T insist on running only 4 car trains when they have diversions in place? Just because today was President's Day, doesn't mean the passenger count falls through the floor. Why not run 6-car trains? The train I took home from Kendall was packed to the gills. There was no reason for that to happen. Add 2 more cars to the train and there would have been plenty of room. Every time I've taken the Red Line on one of their diversion or bus bridge weekends they've run 4-car trains and they've always been packed even more than a normal rush hour train. I know that, other regular riders know that, and so do the operators, conductors, and dispatchers.

I'll accept that there's a good reason for running shorter trains. I'm pretty sure that the T stores the trains on the stub tracks that continue beyond Alewife station. Maybe they're too small to store 6-car trains. Or, if that's not the case, I'll accept that they run shorter trains so they're easier to crossover to the opposite track at the short end of the diversion. HOWEVER - if you're going to run shorter trains, run MORE OF THEM. The headways between the trains were longer than typical Saturday service, and there were more passengers today than on a typical Saturday.

The thing that really annoys me the most, is that train overcrowding today was such a foreseeable problem, and the solution was so incredibly simple. I just don't understand why the folks over at the T managed to let this happen.

In fact, that's probably my biggest gripe ever with the T - so many of the problems with the T are not intractable. They're all solvable - and the solutions are incredibly simple!

Ah. Now I feel better. Time for a beer.