“Train #407 to Wachusett will be here in 2 minutes” was the platform display message that the group of Concord Academy students colloquially known as “train kids” were greeted with on the morning of Tuesday, January 27th. Two minutes passed with no sign of the train, and then another twenty-five before the train finally appeared without warning. Many Greater Boston Area commuters — including over eighty Concord Academy students — faced these disruptive postponements throughout the week of January 26th-30th. The shocking inability to report accurate train times was compounded by the failure of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) to announce that the Fitchburg Line would be regularly experiencing serious delays until Thursday, January 29.
The most ridiculous part of the entire “MBTA week of hell” was the relative lack of snow compared to past years. While the total snowfall of the storm on the days of January 25th and 26th totaled approximately two feet, which is a lot compared to recent years, in the winter of 2015, the Greater Boston Area received about two feet of snow every week. So where does the MBTA’s newfound fear of winter come from? It turns out that the MBTA has scaled back its snow-clearing force in recent years following a stretch of mild winters. Typically, I would support increased operational efficiency in a company that is currently hemorrhaging half-a-billion dollars annually. But when that “efficiency” renders the Commuter Rail unreliable for an entire work week, the cost-cutting goes too far. The MBTA needs to invest more into making its services consistently dependable during the winter because what happened during the “MBTA week of hell” was absurdly inconvenient for almost all MBTA customers. The most fixable of all of these problems is that of the misreported train arrival times. Inaccurate platform displays, or worse, displays that just go dark, make the already unreliable service of the winter MBTA virtually unusable. If this simple problem were fixed, commuters would be able to effectively utilize the trains even when there are significant delays.