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Lots of weekend bustitution for Green, Orange and Red Line riders this fall

WCVB reports the MBTA is planning some major amounts of weekend shutdowns this fall on the Green, Orange and Red Lines to get in some of that desperately needed repair work.

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The D Line already had weekend closures planned for autumn. They've now added B Line and C Line.

So all the downtown Red Line stations will be closed on weekends during Christmas shopping season? This is extremely bad news for retailers, who depend on this season for a large percentage of their annual sales. "Business friendly" governor Baker isn't so business friendly after all.
Traffic should be a bigger clusterfxxx than normal and we all know the shuttle buses will be an even bigger clusterfxxx.


I think that people wandering the streets, looking for buses, might actually be good for downtown businesses, or maybe just the bars...

Why can't the repairs be down after midnight seven days a week when the system shuts down?


They can't set up work until all tracks are clear. They have to finish work and get things back to operating condition, and test them, before starting again. The time in between is the time that actual progress can be made.

For minor repairs, overnight works. For deeper infrastructure work, more undisrupted time is needed.

Happens all the time worldwide.

Waiting for the train to leave Ruggles this weekend was torture. Shuttle buses seem to always be running quickly, but once they drop you off at Ruggles it's f****d up. The worst thing is, there were three MBTA workers chatting and laughing with each other on the platform all that time. First time I saw actually MBTA humans at stations on the Orange Line in a long time. Once in a while one of them would turn around and yell, "THIS TRAIN GOING TO DOWNTOWN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" . You know she's a lifer.

If you go one more stop to Mass Ave you'll see MBTA humans in the station all the time, both the red-shirted "ambassadors" and regular employees in the booths.

And how dare an MBTA human chat and laugh, while waiting for the train to be released by central control! The nerve. It's almost like they're regular people.

Ride a blue bike. They're popping up everywhere.

Not everyone can.

who can ride a bike. Those who can't and need to go anywhere that's not walking distance in the core system is f***ed (literally seeing how crowded those buses get).

In seriousness, this is not a popular decision they made according to Twitter. I guess the dollar Trumps (yes, with a capital T as I'm bashing him in this post too) public safety.

Also, even with the WorstBus service cuts that are happening in September, that's not going to put nearly enough buses in the contingency fleet to be able to handle this load. Not to mention the biggest cuts are on weekdays anyway, when the lines are running (sort of...).

I have posted a serious suggestion on Twitter, and I hope the MBTA Twitter person (people?) sees it, that they at least have open meetings about this, or I will have to go to change.org to make a petition.

That's madness.


It's downright insane to close down all the downtown Orange Line stations.

That's just going to create even more problems.

If they can beef up service on the Green Line's trunk line to rush hour levels and offer free walking transfers between Back Bay and Copley along with reliable ADA accessible bus service to passengers who need it, then this might be manageable.

Because why would we want them to keep the Orange Line downtown in a good state of repair?


why do I get the feeling they won't have adequate plans in place for sufficient alternative service? They're going to need a LOT of buses or other compensatory service to make up for core stations shutting down completely.


Have at least SOME buses that don't need to make every single stop. The idea of every single Orange Line bus substitute having to crawl from Sullivan to BHCC to North Station to etc etc etc, when a few of them could be sent straight to DTX or even Back Bay makes my skin crawl.

Also what a good time to start making up some temp-to-perm bus lanes on roads around the affected areas!


to pilot more bus-only lanes.


This is NOT a time for bus lane lobbying. This is a time to utilize every existing bus operator and every existing highway on the weekends.

The construction along the North Washington St. bridge makes Rutherford, No. Wa and Atlantic Ave complete clusters. I'm sure that the bus service will be timely and no one will sit in traffic.

Use the Big Dig for some good. More surface bus lanes will just be smashed with even MORE traffic. Really bad idea

My guess is that the first week will be messed up, but by week 3 they will have some kind of system down.

The initial complete shutdown proposal? Then the scaled back weekend shutdowns? They were a disaster. This department hasn't learned from the past.

I see the idea's not popular here, either.

That's the golden question. Considering the mountain of MBTA disasters, Highway disasters (Luxury Lanes) and RMV disasters, how does she still have a job? Past MassDOT secretaries have been dismissed for far far less.


Daddy gave a lot of money to Baker.

She's a dumb Pollack. C what I did thar lol?

(Assuming that she has anything to do with this, which is a stretch considering it is Poftak that is in charge of the T) she is getting the T into a good state of repair by fixing the lines in the downtown area.

I seriously don't remember a MassDOT secretary ever being fired, but feel free to give us examples.

They could do that by hiring more of their own track maintainers and doing much more work (multiple crews) in the overnight instead of blitzing a project on a weekend with contractors.

How many ties do MBTA track maintainers replace on a typical night? How many could they replace if staffing sizes were doubled or tripled?

And maybe if they did the same in New York City they wouldn’t be shutting down lines on the weekend, either. As it is, perhaps we should be glad it’s not like it is in DC, where lines are shut entirely for weeks on end to do repairs.

Haha, but as a proud Pole can guarantee you that if a Polish person was running the T it'd be magnitudes better. Hell, probably any non-American would do a fine job. But alas.

I think you may be right. That was merely a pun on her hame, and I doubt she's actually Polish anyway...Apologies to anyone who is and got offended.

...that the Marlon Brando character in A Streetcar Named Desire might have something to say about your pun. Which wasn't exactly a "pun" but I don't know what you call that kind of joke (connecting someone's name to the common meaning of the word).

Pollack is a type of fish. Remove one L to get the slur. There is a difference. Therefore yes, it is a pun.

Because people like Michael Mulhern and Beverly Scott set a low bar to ooze over?

The shutdown schedule varies by line, but weekend closures of this magnitude in October through December may cripple the city.

What about Sox, Celts, and B's games? Holiday shopping? Tens of thousands of students who arrive in September? The influx of fall tourists? Weekend concert goers and restaurant patrons? Workers that support all of these activities? All will be negatively impacted.

And no, shuttle buses will not be a solution, as those of us familiar with T shuttle bus service are painfully aware. Shuttle bus service for all the stations from Broadway to Kendall? Hardy har har har.


Because our mass transit system has almost no redundancy, there will never be a good time to do this. It will be terrible, but then it will be done, and maybe we can actually start to move forward a little bit on transit.

They won't be playing in October this year.

But the impending demise of the Boston 9 was probably what allowed this work to be "accelerated."

So Baker's "plan" to ease congestion around Boston is to
- raise T fares
- keep gas tax and tolls the same
- shut down large stretches of 3 of the subway lines down
- delay subway expansion that would add capacity
- And add lots of parking to the airport and seaport.

But he DID commission another report which 6 years into his reign told him the same as previous reports.

I can see why his fanboys at the Globe are so giddy about him.


to his Cayman Islands account anyway. Exactly the same as Drumpf.

WCVB is also reporting that the new Orange Line trains will go into service this week.

Great so we finally get new trains, but they are going to close them so we have to ride a bus.



Probably never a good time to do this, but I question the wisdom of doing this in the fall when population increases by about 20% when students -- heavy users of public transportation -- return.

Also, seems like every time the idea of 24-hour MBTA service resurfaces, they tell us they need the overnight hours for maintenance and repairs. If this were true, why would they need to shut down for entire weekends. Might they be, I dunno, lying about why we can't have 24-hour service like real world-class cities? Just a hunch.


Right?? Literally when would be the time to be aggressive about off-hours work if not to avoid shutting down the entire downtown core of two different lines?

If repair had been front and center years ago, then we could have avoided a shutdown. Remember Luis Ramirez? He sat on his butt and allowed things to fester. Who hired that moron? Oh yeah.


Labor costs, equipment rental, and material deliveries.

Daytime shift on a weekend is still cheaper than mobilizing a ton of workers and all the stuff they need to do their work midnight to 5am.

For minor repairs, the 6 hour overnight window is OK.

But for more major work, it's not. Major work has setup and cleanup. The longer the downtime, the more hours of actual work can be done.

My hope is that the MBTA is really working Fri_pm straight through to Mon_am. 3 shifts a day, get as much work done as possible during those closed hours. And look, it's not just about the key project -- fix up the other stuff at the same time. Station stairs and fare gates, flooring, painting, switch work, cleaning debris, whatever.


And in the case of the Orange Line, they started doing work at the start of August, so there's that.

As for the impact on the college students, I would say that they in no measure increase T usage by 20%. The high school kids, on the other hand, have an impact on ridership, but their schools are closed on week-ends.

As far as the typical "24 hour" gripe goes, you do know that in a lot of "world-class" cities, they don't have that kind of rail service. Heck, in the US there is only one system, a portion of another, and a very small part of a third. Yes, they do repairs in that 4 hour window. They have the week-end closures for the major things, like they do in, um, other cities.

Some jobs just can't be done in 8 hours when you have to also include the time needed to transport materials (like new rails) down into the tunnel, unload, etc... (per the article).


Will really hurt DTX Christmas shopping. Retailers must be furious.

Is this snarky comment or not? I can't tell...

On the bright side Wollaston Station in Quincy is reopening this month. Construction is still happening on that part of the Red Line though so weekend bustitutions are still extremely foreseeable, but they won't be running shuttle buses seven days a week from start to end of service anymore. (And they probably would try to avoid having shuttle buses in both places simultaneously.)

Please Baker dont use the charter buses you have used on the green line bustition, greyhound style buses that make boarding glacial and next to impossible for people carrying things and the elderly/disabled. No places to stand.


or they don't give a F.

I'm guessing it might be cheaper to use the Yankee buses vs MBTA buses with drivers collecting O.T. or double-time.

Contracted buses don't count for this. Of course, he ain't gonna do it.

why none of the D's in the race for governor last year didn't campaign on this. "I will ride the T to work every day. Neither rain nor snow not sleet nor hail..." Most of the jobs in this state are in Boston or the metro area, and most of the people working at those jobs take public transit to get there. If you let the T languish and die, you are literally killing the golden goose.

This is a state that has progressive leadership, and voters willing to vote for progressive leaders. Instead we somehow ended up with Jay "Mom come pick me up, I'm scared" Gonzalez campaigning against the worst thing that's ever happened to the MBTA.

...is a regular rider of the T. Of course, only those who actually live in Boston (and not places like Cambridge, Brookline or Malden) can vote for her.

EDIT: Whimsical leyboard made the cardinal sin of misspelling Cambridge, I had to correct it.

SECOND EDIT: First edit started with "EDITY". I think I need to slow down my typing speed...

Oh Lord...THIRD EDIT: Second edit had "with" mispelled. And no, thanks to Youtube's BS ad policy, I will NEVER use Grammarly.

"If you let the T languish and die, you are literally killing the golden goose."

And you are literally figuratively killing the English language.

I'm typing too fast and my keyboard is wireless. So watch it with your baseless assumptions, ok?

That crime is down on the Green, Orange and Red Line on weekends do to the fact the stations are closed.

T Management to the sheeple of Boston: The beatings will continue until morale improves.