Cattle Call
The masters of customer service at the MBTA have come up with the perfect way to serve long-time rush hour commuters and keep new riders coming back — take out all the seats on red line trains during rush hour and make everybody stand!
General Manager Dan Grabauskas was reportedly watching The History Channel over the Thanksgiving Holiday when he came upon what he described as "an inspirational World War Two documentary" that gave him the idea.
"I can't remember what the documentary was about exactly," Grabauskas told reporters yesterday, "but they were really packing them into those cattle cars. And I thought to myself, well, gee, we could do that!"
The plan calls for all but four seats in the middle two cars on the busy North-South line to be removed, transforming them into "high capacity cars" which can accommodate a whopping 27 more passengers each.
When asked what those wanting or needing a seat would do, a sympathetic "state employee" quoted in the Herald said: "“Obviously people who want to sit down will have to find another car.”
Obviously.
Grabauskas is also said to be mulling a "tiered service" option with a seating surcharge to help address the T's crushing debt, in addition to across-the-board fare hikes for 2010. But he says he's open to suggestions.
"Another neat thing I saw in this documentary," Grabauskas recalls, "was how they took all these people in these high capacity cars to these great little facilities where everybody came together and worked for the war effort. For free! I was thinking, gee, if our passengers could just come together like that we could eliminate that debt in no time!"
An MBTA spokesman confirmed that sites in Alewife and Ashmont were being explored for "Work-n-Ride facilities".
Grabauskas is clearly taking every opportunity he can find to get the board, or the governor, to ask for his resignation so he can sit at home and collect the remainder of the payments he's owed under his contract. He's not interested in running the T anymore, I think he's made that pretty obvious.
The real shame of it is that there is an opening, with gas prices and all the new riders who have been attracted to the T as an alternative to driving, to get more people invested in the success of the system. And, unfortunately, that opening is going to go away as gas prices come back down, and the poor, decrepit T will hobble along for another decade or so, while pieces of it fall by the side of the tracks and people wonder what happened to the seats on the Red Line.
If anyone at the T really gave a rat's ass about the riders, they would have the Silver Line take a right on Kneeland Street and connect with the other half of the line at South Station. They say they can't do it because there is no place to turn the bus around. Apparently they think the street grid is tighter there than Temple and Washington Streets, which the GD bus can barely make it through, and where it leaves riders with a connection to the rest of the T nowhere in sight. Honestly, you cannot make this stuff up.
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I agree with Toby on this one. This guy wants fired.
Anyone care to guess that this clueless bureacratic hack was watching "Schindler's List"?
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The MBTA is not the first agency to do this. Chicago retrofitted some cars in September to help meet their increased demand as well.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-cta-train-seats-websep13,0,5360488.story?track=rss
I feel bad for Grabauskas. Every time he tries to something new, people jump at him. We're not going to get more Red Line cars anytime soon, so the only way to increase capacity is to make what we have more efficient. Makes sense to me.
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Charlie -- just like fare increases which have not put a dent in the debt, this approach is a very small drop in a very big bucket. In fact, like much of what the MBTA does, it'll end up being counter-productive. The MBTA wants to increase capacity by 26 riders per cattle car, and they will lose at least 26 riders per cattle car by using this method of doing it.
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Another solution might be to coat riders in Crisco. Makes for both packing in more bodies while easing the task of exiting.
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