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'They're Bold and Fresh': The Millennials Disrupting Boston's Transit System
Hat tip, "Lackawanna484" at Trainorders:
Passenger Trains > Boston: Doing your own city's transit audit
Date: 10/29/18 12:02
Boston: Doing your own city's transit audit
Author: Lackawanna484
Politico has an article about how a small cadre of millenials evaluated a long standing nightly tie up in Boston's bus, streetcar, and rail network. After spending three months trying to discredit the screen shots, the MBTA acknowledged they were right, and tweaked their operating plan by a single step. Which loosened up the entire network.
SPECULATION - my guess is the original rule was implemented years ago when the "last train of the night" may have been several trains. Over the years, that dwindled to a single train, but continued to "hold" everything else. The other crews were on the clock so they could be agnostic about the rule.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/10/25/what-works-boston-transit-221839
Date: 10/29/18 12:02
Boston: Doing your own city's transit audit
Author: Lackawanna484
Politico has an article about how a small cadre of millenials evaluated a long standing nightly tie up in Boston's bus, streetcar, and rail network. After spending three months trying to discredit the screen shots, the MBTA acknowledged they were right, and tweaked their operating plan by a single step. Which loosened up the entire network.
SPECULATION - my guess is the original rule was implemented years ago when the "last train of the night" may have been several trains. Over the years, that dwindled to a single train, but continued to "hold" everything else. The other crews were on the clock so they could be agnostic about the rule.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/10/25/what-works-boston-transit-221839
WHAT WORKS NEXT
‘They’re Bold and Fresh’: The Millennials Disrupting Boston’s Transit System
Armed with data and outside-the-box ideas, TransitMatters is redefining citizen engagement.
By ERICK TRICKEY October 25, 2018
BOSTON — One Sunday night two years ago, Marc Ebuña and Ari Ofsevit stayed up past 1 a.m. to watch the city’s transit system grind to a pointless halt. ... Sitting in their respective apartments, they were monitoring a website that tracks Boston’s rapid-transit trains in real time. “I live-tweeted the late-night ballet, the last-trains ballet,” Ebuña says. Except what they were seeing was more of a citywide muscle spasm than an elegant dance. ... The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority barely acknowledged this nightly jam, and wasn’t doing anything about it. So Ebuña and Ofsevit, who had plenty of the personal experience waiting on trains during these puzzling delays, enlisted two fellow members of their advocacy group TransitMatters and did their own audit.
On that September night in 2016, Ebuña and Ofsevit could see the last trains on the Red, Orange and Blue lines, and the westbound Green Line streetcars, as they reached downtown transfer stations and stopped. The only trains still moving were two lonely streetcars on the Green Line’s E branch. Nothing could move until these two stragglers reached Park Street. Across Boston, Ebuña and Ofsevit knew, 56 buses, many carrying tired shift workers, were idling outside stations, awaiting the trains’ arrival before they fanned out with their last passengers. For a quarter-hour, the Green E trains had held up the entire system.
Ebuña took screenshots and fired off a tweetstorm that night. Ofsevit blogged about the 1 a.m. bottleneck the next afternoon. Another member scraped daily data off a transit website that tracks MBTA trains. The numbers showed that the last Green E train caused about 75 percent of the delays in the transit system’s nightly shutdowns. James Aloisi, TransitMatters’ token baby boomer and a former state secretary of transportation, announced the group’s findings in a magazine op-ed headlined, “Shutdown process costly for the T.”
Three months later, after initially trying to discredit the article, MBTA officials acknowledged that the last Green E train of the night carried, on average, one person. One person! Sensibly, officials announced that the other trains would no longer wait for the laggard streetcars. TransitMatters had saved the MBTA, or the “T,” as it’s known by everyone in Boston, most of the $500,000 it was spending per year on the late shutdowns. They’d also shortened the early morning journeys of countless fellow passengers. “It took a little bit of internal calculation for them to realize: ‘No, wait a second, these guys are right!’” says Ebuña.
Ari Ofsevit, a transportation policy wonk, explains the big issues with Boston's mass transit system, including deferred investment and the lack of a defined vision for the future.
....
Erick Trickey is a writer in Boston.
‘They’re Bold and Fresh’: The Millennials Disrupting Boston’s Transit System
Armed with data and outside-the-box ideas, TransitMatters is redefining citizen engagement.
By ERICK TRICKEY October 25, 2018
BOSTON — One Sunday night two years ago, Marc Ebuña and Ari Ofsevit stayed up past 1 a.m. to watch the city’s transit system grind to a pointless halt. ... Sitting in their respective apartments, they were monitoring a website that tracks Boston’s rapid-transit trains in real time. “I live-tweeted the late-night ballet, the last-trains ballet,” Ebuña says. Except what they were seeing was more of a citywide muscle spasm than an elegant dance. ... The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority barely acknowledged this nightly jam, and wasn’t doing anything about it. So Ebuña and Ofsevit, who had plenty of the personal experience waiting on trains during these puzzling delays, enlisted two fellow members of their advocacy group TransitMatters and did their own audit.
On that September night in 2016, Ebuña and Ofsevit could see the last trains on the Red, Orange and Blue lines, and the westbound Green Line streetcars, as they reached downtown transfer stations and stopped. The only trains still moving were two lonely streetcars on the Green Line’s E branch. Nothing could move until these two stragglers reached Park Street. Across Boston, Ebuña and Ofsevit knew, 56 buses, many carrying tired shift workers, were idling outside stations, awaiting the trains’ arrival before they fanned out with their last passengers. For a quarter-hour, the Green E trains had held up the entire system.
Ebuña took screenshots and fired off a tweetstorm that night. Ofsevit blogged about the 1 a.m. bottleneck the next afternoon. Another member scraped daily data off a transit website that tracks MBTA trains. The numbers showed that the last Green E train caused about 75 percent of the delays in the transit system’s nightly shutdowns. James Aloisi, TransitMatters’ token baby boomer and a former state secretary of transportation, announced the group’s findings in a magazine op-ed headlined, “Shutdown process costly for the T.”
Three months later, after initially trying to discredit the article, MBTA officials acknowledged that the last Green E train of the night carried, on average, one person. One person! Sensibly, officials announced that the other trains would no longer wait for the laggard streetcars. TransitMatters had saved the MBTA, or the “T,” as it’s known by everyone in Boston, most of the $500,000 it was spending per year on the late shutdowns. They’d also shortened the early morning journeys of countless fellow passengers. “It took a little bit of internal calculation for them to realize: ‘No, wait a second, these guys are right!’” says Ebuña.
Ari Ofsevit, a transportation policy wonk, explains the big issues with Boston's mass transit system, including deferred investment and the lack of a defined vision for the future.
....
Erick Trickey is a writer in Boston.
TransitMatters
The Amateur Planner