Traffic in Boston is worse than it really has any right to be.
People buy places way the hell out in the suburbs and then manage to
rig it so that work is, if not all the way downtown, then on the other
side of downtown. The roads are all under
construction, and no one carpools.
The Big Dig is an amazing project,
and it seems to have eaten up every bit of transportation-related
money the local and state governments have, so the T tracks go unmaintained. A glance down
the tracks from most station platforms reveals an unevenly bent (maybe
even kinked) pair of rails. When the train gets up to speed one can
feel it rocking back and forth unnervingly. Watching a train enter a
station one is certain that the damned thing is going to lean sideways
enough to scrape the platform, and it usually misses by less than an
inch. Occasionally the train will start to resonate with the bumps in
the tracks, causing passengers at either end of the cars to become thrillingly
weightless.
It is normal for the train to be slower than even driving through
traffic from the same point. The Red Line regularly stops completely
because of congestion on the tracks. There's one merge on
this line, way south of town, yet there's horrible congestion on the
tracks anyway. A lot of it is caused by the riders themselves: people
are slow to get on and off the train. I mean they're really bad at
it. It's customary here to cram into the cars of the train before
letting anyone out. People try to hold the doors as though they're
holding an elevator for a friend and not slowing down a whole
fucking train full of people. At rush hour a Red Line train
typically creeps along at about 15 or 20 mph, despite a top speed of
80. It's crowded, and only through heroic acts of balance are the
standing able to avoid crushing the seated. Most days the train
stands completely still between stations for at least a few minutes.
Between these pauses are fits and starts that are probably designed to
make people lose their balance and crash into one another.
(Bostonians love it when you bump into them. They get even
friendlier.) The sitters and balancers and leaners all packed
together mostly stare straight ahead or scan the crappy free daily
that gets handed out at the station, hoping that the damn thing would
get moving so they could at least sit at their own desks, eight or
more hours of
which rapidly starts to seem like more fun than standing
underground in a concert-style crowd on a funhouse platform in an
aluminum tube.
On the occasional weekend day that it's unavoidable, I can get in
my car, drive it to work, park on the street, walk into the office and
be seated at my desk in just under 14 minutes. During the week, the
drive is close to 45 minutes. The same trip via T is just under 45
minutes. There's no reason that the train couldn't cut the trip down
to 20 or 25; it makes stops, so 14 minutes is a lot to ask. But 45 is
silly. No wonder no one (relatively) rides this thing.
But taking the T is a lot cheaper because I don't have to spend $15
a day on parking, and not driving means that I can concentrate on a
book or on mucking about on my laptop instead of concentrating on not
getting killed by some clown in a seven-foot-tall, four-ton family
truckster who, dammit, is going to listen to his Howard Stern
and cross three lanes of traffic without signalling, nor avoiding
other drivers, nor spilling one drop of Starbucks latte on his
loose-fitting slacks.
Thursdays after work, a number of us typically go grab a couple of
beers at a pool hall near work, but this week we went to a bar that
shall remain nameless a bit further down Broadway in Cambridge. This
new place rocks. The crowd was about evenly split between, on the one
hand, the sort of idiot (like me) whose frequenting of places like
this constitutes what people describe as gentrification (although, to
be fair, I was sweaty and disgusting after having gone for a run);
and, on the other hand, the types of free-thinking Cambridgites
that make the town such a fun place to hang out. I immediately
started questioning my decision to live on the south shore; and I may
have to color my hair something strange, which, again, to be fair, is
something I've been gathering momentum towards for quite some
time.
And if we lived in Cambridge I could walk to work.
