| The conductor collecting his ticket caught the mistake and put him on an Orange line train back to North Station, where he was able to catch the next train two hours later. So the story ended happily.
Nevertheless, my son's experience is emblematic of just how bad our public transportation system is.
1. At both North and South stations, track numbers apparently change for every train every day, and are not posted until the train is ready for boarding. This practice is wrong, and is the immediate reason for the failure Saturday morning.
Each train should arrive at the same track each day. This allows frequent riders to know what to expect and minimizes the risk of mistakes such as Saturday's. The schedules for commuter train arrivals and departures is fixed and has been for months. The task of switching a particular train to a particular track at a particular time, given that the schedules do not change, is surely within the grasp of current software.
2. Whatever announcements are made on the platform are completely unintelligible. I don't know if the change to the track number of Saturday morning's 11:30a Newburyport train was announced or not -- the only thing audible on the platform is "Bluh blub blub bluh blub no smoking blu blub lublbu blug suspicious packages blub lub lub lub fuf lub sluf." Somehow train stations in Washington DC, Chicago, New York, Vienna, Munich, Salzburg, Innsbruck, and London manage to emit announcements -- in several languages -- that (1) contain useful information and (2) are easily understood.
3. Signs, either hard-copy or electronic, that announce the destination and departure time of each train ready for boarding, should be posted at (a) the doorway leading to the platform, (b) intervals along the platform, (c) the first open doorway of the waiting train, and (d) in the corridor of the waiting train, opposite the open door. If nothing else, at a minimum, a placard inside the car, visible from the open door, should state the ultimate destination of the train.
This is not a modern, revolutionary insight derived from cutting-edge operations research -- this practice is as old as passenger trains themselves.
4. A conductor or other T employee should be at every open door when the train is ready to depart. Every one. I don't know whether the MBTA waived that requirement somewhere along the way, whether supervisors have stopped enforcing it, or whether the crew on Saturday's train simply had other things on their minds (such as their morning cigarette). What I do know was that at the 1:30p North Station departure of the Newburyport train, there were at least two open doors with no attendant anywhere nearby as the train started rolling. I watched a straggler jump through a doorway into the moving train.
No whistle, no "All Aboard", no heads sticking out of cars looking for hand-signals. None, for the entire length of the train. This was a tragedy waiting to happen, and I suspect it is repeated every day for every departure.
Families do put strollers, with babies strapped in, onto cars at stations with raised platforms. Parents do put the strollers in first, expecting to then herd the 3-4 young children (often toddlers) afterwards, and finally step in afterwards. This is what families do on trains.
They do not expect the train to start rolling after the baby is on board and before they are. They do not expect to have to choose between leaving the older children on the platform and leaving the stroller unattended on a moving train next to an open door.
An attendant needs to be at each open door when the train departs. Each attendant should signal from each open door that his or her door is clear before the engineer sounds the whistle and then starts the train.
Again, this is basic stuff.
5. On our Green line trip to and from downtown, the driver knocked down passengers while starting twice. Two different trains, two different drivers, two different passengers. One leaving Coolidge Corner, inbound, one leaving Park Street, outbound. One a nearly empty car, one a nearly full car (there was a Yankee's game on Saturday). I've been riding the Green Line for nearly 35 years, sometimes daily, and never before have I seen two knock-downs on the same day like this. These were during starts, not stops. The drivers are either not being trained properly or they are not following their training -- each driver jumped the train out of each stop like a jackrabbit.
The MBTA, including the commuter rail, is utterly failing in its most basic mission, which is to safely, affordably, and efficiently move people from one place to another.
While our government does its usual slow-dance on Beacon Hill, gracefully emitting leaks of a gas tax here, slots there, sales tax everywhere -- the ship of state continues to sink.
It's true that my son didn't die and didn't lose an arm under the train; he actually rather enjoyed the extra slice of North End pizza, I imagine. But is this really the standard by which we now want to measure public transportation in Massachusetts?
Our transportation system has collapsed and I see nobody doing anything about it. |
