Orange Line Woes
It has been ages since I blogged. More about that another time. This time, more fun with public transportation. I started a new job recently and have been carpooling in to the new place with my brother, who works for the same incredibly large institution but in a completely different building, division, and maybe even time zone. But he was at home waiting for a nice older couple to deliver him a new sofa. (Surprising, because most of his furniture came from these two brothers up the road, but I digress.)
Today, I was at the mercy of the T. I find myself at Oak Grove, where there are two trains in the station which is never a good sign at rush hour. One train is mostly full, and I hear an announcement that there are severe delays on the Orange Line due to a disabled train downtown. This train will only go as far as North Station, then there'll be shuttle buses. I can work with getting off at North Station so that part, not so much a problem. A minute or so later, the doors close and we're on our way to Malden Center, so I figured that "severe delays" meant five or ten minutes overall.
Then I get to Malden Center... where the platform was wall to wall commuters. Angry, surly commuters who clearly had been waiting far too long for a train, and were not pleased to see our already-mostly-full train pull up. Angry commuters who had long ago decided to ignore the laws of physics and wanted to all get on THIS TRAIN RIGHT NOW. So the usual pushing and shoving and "Can you people move all the way in?!?" starts up, except that of course we all are already all the way in, and pushing any further means we're only moving away from one door to the other door that also has people pushing in, until finally people can't move any further and we're all nose to nose angry surly commuters who, for the most part, still haven't moved.
Time passes.
Five minutes.
Ten minutes.
Another announcement explaining about the disabled train.
Finally, the driver gets on the speaker, explains again about the train, then says "I've been told that there's a Commuter Rail train coming in at 8:54, and that's going to get you to North Station a lot faster than this train will, because we're still waiting for clearance to leave the station."
Predictably, the train and the platform empties and everyone heads over to the Commuter Rail platform. That photo above is the crowd in front of the escalators that are already jammed, trying to get to the already jammed Commuter Rail platform.
Me, I start looking for the next bus to Sullivan Square, thinking I can get the 86 from there and avoid all of this. I hit the bus platform to find people arguing with the bus driver, who a) is vaguely aware of some problem with the train but clearly doesn't know the specifics of the issue, and b) is trying to explain to the aforementioned angry surly commuters that "No, this is not the shuttle bus you heard about on the announcement, it's the 105", and "No, I will am not going directly to Sullivan Square because I have, y'know this actual route I'm required to take, and maybe you should think about the 104 which might get you there faster", and "No, I do not have time to explain this all to you a fourth time because I was supposed to leave five minutes ago in order to keep this particular bus on-time." All dialogue paraphrased.
Having left my house at 8:00am to catch the 8:05 bus from the suburbs, I arrived in Harvard Square at 10:00am. Two hours. On a usual day or when driving in rush hour traffic? 45 minutes to an hour, tops. I have submitted a claim as part of the T's "On Time Service Guarantee"... we'll see if that actually gets me anything. They've improved at least-- last time I tried to use that form, it just plain didn't work. At least this time I was able to submit a claim.
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