More shrieks of terror from the T today.  As the ubiquitous Noah Bierman reports:

The MBTA [will] halt all evening and weekend commuter rail service, eliminate six Green Line stops, discontinue lightly used bus routes, and lay off 805 employees if the agency does not get legislative help with its $160 million deficit.

The story's comment thread is just dripping with Boston bile, of course.  My favorite comment so far is from Guzzi1:

This is good, this is needed. We should all support whatever cuts in service are needed to protect the generous salaries, perks and retirement programs of our hardworking public officials. They deserve all they are getting, they deserve much, much more. In fact why don't we stop all service and just utilize our tax payments to fund their lifestyles directly... just think how generous we could be then. The walking will do us good!

This is more or less the tenor of the whole comment thread, and I can't say I disagree.  Reading the proposed cuts, I had mixed emotions.  The idea of eliminating service on evenings and weekends would cripple Boston's already lame nightlife, but the removal of all "customer service agents" from all stations?  The T has customer service agents?  Are those the guys asleep in the old token booths?  I thought they were using those old booths to house the homeless or something.

Let's face it, it's hard to fight for the T.  The organization really does represent the absolute worst a government bureaucracy can aspire to.  With its impotent leadership that does nothing to control costs and then cries poormouth to the legislature every two years.  Its unions represent the worst that unions can become.  Its customer service is uneven, to put it kindly, but often enough it's appalling. Anyone who uses the T regularly has an endless trove of horror stories about late trains, schedule adjustments, bad service, and drunk or drugged-up conductors (not to mention other passengers groping, peeing on or giving birth all over them).

The T needs reform.  Badly.  Agreed.  But it also needs a bail-out.  Like, right now.

Bostonians are a peculiar breed.  When the 86-year Curse of the Bambino was broken, after their initial elation they seemed at a bit of a loss. After generations as "the ultimate underdogs", "the losing, the angst, the self-flagellation," came the angst.   Typical was Mike Andrews' reaction, as reported in the Times.  Andrews, a second-baseman for the Sox in the sixties, whinged: "I don't want to say it's a letdown. But it's certainly something you let become part of your life and it's gone now, and we need to come up with something new.''

Want a true lost cause, Sox Nation?  Why not try the T?