Today, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker announced the MBTA would be shutting down the Orange Line for 30 days starting on August 19th.
The story broke last night a little over a week after Boston Mayor Michelle Wu had publicly stated the agency needed a "larger scale shutdown" to replace old track and modernize the signal system.
The MBTA (originally known as the MTA as in "Charlie on the MTA") is the oldest public transit system in the United States and its age is showing. Back in June, the U.S. Federal Transit Agency put the MBTA under public scrutiny due a long series of accidents accompanied by poorly trained and overworked employees. The most significant change until today's announcement has been the replacement of rush hour service has been by a weekend schedule making for overcrowded trains.
Yet safety issues only accelerated most dramatically by the fire which took place on the Orange Line on July 21st after departing from Wellington Station. Passengers escaped from the train and one woman jumped into the Mystic River and swam to shore.
Just a couple of days ago, passengers escaped a Worcester bound Commuter Rail train which lost power by forcing open the doors and escaping with the aid of residents in Boston's Brighton neighborhood. If that wasn't enough there have also been several instances of runaway trains including one near Braintree station on the Red Line last week.
For more than 10 years, I lived in Jamaica Plain and had to take the Orange Line. Needless to say, I am thankful I am not living in Jamaica Plain now although I had been planning to take in the JP Porchfest which is scheduled for August 20th - the day after the closure begins.
Now that I live in Cambridge, I take the Red Line to work which is the busiest line on the MBTA and I cannot help but think a shutdown is in its future too. Currently, the Red Line has been shutdown in the evenings from 8:45 p.m. to start of service between Braintree and JFK/UMass through tomorrow and again next week Monday through Thursday evenings. Yet somehow I don't think that will be enough.
If the Red Line is shutdown for a month, let alone a week there will be utter chaos. Two weekends ago, the Red Line was shutdown between Alewife and Kendall/MIT. Under normal circumstances, I would have walked to the Kendall/MIT station, but it was 95 degrees plus outside. So I took a shuttle bus from Porter Square to Kendall/MIT and it took 45 minutes to make three stops. I can scarcely imagine how long it would take during morning and evening rush hours. It will be a disaster, but then again there might not be any other choice.
Even if the MBTA addresses the tracks and the signal issue then there are the trains themselves. While there is a new fleet of Red and Orange Line cars they recently had to be taken out of service due to battery failure.
Then there are the stations themselves. Last September, 9 people were hospitalized when the escalator at Back Bay station on the Orange Line malfunctioned. I shudder to think how bad that would have been had it happened on the escalators at Porter Square on the Red Line which is 115 feet or the equivalent of a 12 story building. There is always one escalator out of service and last night all three of them were out of service so I had to climb that 115 feet by foot and this doesn't include a second smaller escalator which was also out of service. Needless to say, I am not 27-years old anymore.
If any agency is in need of President Biden's infrastructure bill it is the MBTA. At the state level, Governor Baker is soon expected to sign an $11 billion infrastructure bill much of which is aimed at the MBTA. But it will take years and years for such investments to bear fruit assuming the MBTA uses the infrastructure money as intended.
Among the many reasons I wanted to return to Boston was because of its extensive public transit system. But the MBTA is literally at a crossroads and passengers will probably be stuck there for the foreseeable future.
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