Dear MBTA Powers-That-Be,
I regret to inform you that 2006 was not a banner year for your transportation services. Subway trains were consistently behind schedule or non-existent and the commuter rails were nothing more than oversized ovens on wheels during the summertime and subzero meatlockers the rest of the year.
And I won’t even go into the whole “Charlie Card” debacle.
Since you are raising the cost of my monthly pass by $40, I have a few suggestions on how to spend that extra cash by improving services in the coming year:
1. Forget Charlie. Seriously, let him go. Get with the program—Teleportation is the wave of the future and that’s what I want to see. Choose your destination, enter your credit card, and, presto, instant arrival. Now that’s what I call good customer service!
2. Climate control is a good thing. If I wanted to bake, I’d put my head in an oven, not my entire body in a commuter train. Please, please invest some of the extra money you are now charging us to ride the T into working (this is the key word here) air conditioning and heating units.
3. Ending Green Line service at Government Center is not. Hello? North Station is a MAJOR hub of transportation! Why the hell are you making Government Center the end of the line for any train???
4. “Love that dirty water…” Um, yeah, not so much. Can you please get rid of those mysterious yellow pools of water that keep reappearing in the Symphony Station? I don’t want to know what they are, I just want them gone!
5. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Don’t make an “on-time or your money back” guarantee when you know perfectly well that the majority of the trains are not even close to being on time. You are setting yourself up to be scammed, you have been scammed (out of thousands of dollars that could be put towards actually improving services!), and you know you’ve been scammed. Stop the madness!
6. Popcorn, please! There should be popcorn and ice cream vendors in EVERY station. If you’re going to make us late, the least you can do is keep us well fed.
7. Run more “B” trains during rush hour. More people take the “B” than any other Green Line train. It runs to two large colleges and many other lovely stops along the way. Having one “B” train during the 5:00pm to 6:00pm hour and 10 “D” trains is simply inexcusable.
8. There really is no need to carpet the T. Please bring back the black vinyl seat coverings on the Red and Orange lines. The new gray-rainbow-swirled carpet-like seats are not pretty. At all. Not only do they stain more easily, but you won’t be able to patch them up with black duct tape as you could before when young hooligans inevitably went razor-happy on them .
9. Say what? Don’t bother making announcements on the current PA systems in the stations or on the trains. All we hear is “Waaa, weh, waaa, weh, waaaaa.” Upgrade or bust!
10. Anger management training. Some of your conductors are very pleasant people, others not so much. Screaming over the PA system (which as noted above, we can barely understand anyway) is not effective. Singling people out (“Hey you – yeah you with the black backpack! Stop obstructing the doors! Don’t you look at me like that! Don’t you make me come back there!”) is even less effective. And the scare-tactic of trapping people in the doors and dragging them, though definitely more effective, isn’t quite legal and will only cost you lots of money in lawsuits.
Thank you, MBTA, for listening to me air my grievances and I do hope you will make this New Year happy for all riders of the T and take my advice. Especially the one about teleporting.
Sincerely,
MarcyKate