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Posting slowdown
Sorry I haven't posted in a while. I've been pretty busy, and there has been a lot to deal with.
One thing that's kind of interesting is that the T has finally - wait, I need to explain first. If you don't read my Charlie On the Commuter Rail blog (and why should you, if you don't ride the T?) you might need a little set-up.
Basically ridership skyrocketed on the commuter rail over the past month or so. Some time during that month, the T cut the train down from six single-level coaches to five. The situation got so bad that people were being jammed into the vestibules of the trains: the areas between coaches, where passengers are NOT supposed to ride. Apparently they're crumple zones.
This was happening every day, and on average there were 12-14 people jammed into the vestibules alone. The aisles in the coaches were likewise jammed. I estimated that there were approximately 200 standees per train, every day.
Since standees are by far more likely to be seriously injured or killed in the event of an accident, a lot of us standees were pretty outraged.
I've mentioned all this this here before, of course.
Anyway, I wrote to the Governor and got a response within 24 hours - and it was a fairly responsive response, too. They made no promises, though, so I decided that I'd continue pushing the issue until something was actually done. So last Friday I brought my camera to take some decent-quality video of the overcrowding situation.
I got a shock when the train pulled up: it was five coaches, all right, but four of them were double-level coaches! I figured it was a fluke, so I brought the camera again on Monday, Sure enough, there were four double-level coaches again. I was even able to get a seat after the Dedham stop, which is much earlier than usual.
I got an email from the MBCR that day. They told me that the train had been "returned" to it's proper capacity. This puzzled me, since it had never BEEN a double-coach train in my experience, and it had never had that capacity. But nonetheless, the Franklin #715 train has continued in the same configuration all week: four double-level coaches and one single-level coach. On Tuesday I actually got a seat when I got on at Ruggles. Nobody rode in the vestibules, and only a few people were standing.
I'm sure that my agitating played only a small role at most in getting an adequate amount of seating put on that run. Odds are that the real reason for the change was that the conductors hadn't been able to collect a penny in fares for weeks. But it's nice to think that my work might have helped make a difference, and made a lot of people a bit safer and more comfortable.
One thing that's kind of interesting is that the T has finally - wait, I need to explain first. If you don't read my Charlie On the Commuter Rail blog (and why should you, if you don't ride the T?) you might need a little set-up.
Basically ridership skyrocketed on the commuter rail over the past month or so. Some time during that month, the T cut the train down from six single-level coaches to five. The situation got so bad that people were being jammed into the vestibules of the trains: the areas between coaches, where passengers are NOT supposed to ride. Apparently they're crumple zones.
This was happening every day, and on average there were 12-14 people jammed into the vestibules alone. The aisles in the coaches were likewise jammed. I estimated that there were approximately 200 standees per train, every day.
Since standees are by far more likely to be seriously injured or killed in the event of an accident, a lot of us standees were pretty outraged.
I've mentioned all this this here before, of course.
Anyway, I wrote to the Governor and got a response within 24 hours - and it was a fairly responsive response, too. They made no promises, though, so I decided that I'd continue pushing the issue until something was actually done. So last Friday I brought my camera to take some decent-quality video of the overcrowding situation.
I got a shock when the train pulled up: it was five coaches, all right, but four of them were double-level coaches! I figured it was a fluke, so I brought the camera again on Monday, Sure enough, there were four double-level coaches again. I was even able to get a seat after the Dedham stop, which is much earlier than usual.
I got an email from the MBCR that day. They told me that the train had been "returned" to it's proper capacity. This puzzled me, since it had never BEEN a double-coach train in my experience, and it had never had that capacity. But nonetheless, the Franklin #715 train has continued in the same configuration all week: four double-level coaches and one single-level coach. On Tuesday I actually got a seat when I got on at Ruggles. Nobody rode in the vestibules, and only a few people were standing.
I'm sure that my agitating played only a small role at most in getting an adequate amount of seating put on that run. Odds are that the real reason for the change was that the conductors hadn't been able to collect a penny in fares for weeks. But it's nice to think that my work might have helped make a difference, and made a lot of people a bit safer and more comfortable.
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I've spent the last week commuting into London: about a 40 minute journey to Kings Cross, then 20 minutes across the city. Yes, of course the areas between carriages on the trains are full of standing people. Obviously they're sitting in the luggage racks. This is normal. When you can't fall over due to the squash, that's getting unpleasant. The Tube is worse, of course: there, in rush hour, you often can't get on the train at all, even with a guard pushing. So I used the bus to cross London, once in: again, obviously I'm standing for most of the 20-minute journey, but at least I can breath and see daylight.
Got back to Kings Cross tonight to find police removing lots of "close the area" tape. I assume we'd had a bomb scare or something. I wasn't sufficiently interested to find out what: trains were running again, and thanks to a bit of second-guessing the timetable and platform allocation, I managed to get a seat. Yes, this is normal.
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Like I say, this is regarded as normal. It's when things get worse than that that we start to complain.
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Even if you only played a small roll, at least it seems the eeeevil MBCR is listening, at least for the time being :-)
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