Steve Reads

I was showing my man Adam Gerard around Boston this weekend, so I had to come embarrassingly face-to-face again with how dysfunctional it is. I laugh a lot of the time at how poorly the city runs, but talking with Adam this weekend I realized that I don’t often explain what that’s about. So let me clarify: I really really wish the city worked better. Laughing at it is the only way I can cope with it. Two examples of pretty common Boston incomprehensibilities:

1. Positioning T employees or police officers at crucial intersections because of construction. But it’s not construction itself that’s the problem: it’s that the construction has been done in such a way that signs are invisible, or because walkways have been laid out illogically. The employees are necessary because other parts of the process aren’t working. For a real live example of this happening right now in your very neighborhood, go to Harvard Square and try to get from the T to the Harvard Coop.

2. More rules that only make sense if you’re a Bostonian and can fill in the context that the rules themselves do not provide. I took the T to North Station today to grab the train to Exeter, and momentarily sighed when the conductor said that, because of track work, the orange line’s last stop would be Haymarket. There would be shuttle-bus service between Haymarket and Oak Grove. A later announcement said that the shuttle bus would hit Community College, Sullivan Square, and the rest. It took me a few seconds to realize what was missing: North Station. How could the bus miss such an important stop? Turns out that Haymarket was “the last stop,” and yet the train was actually continuing on to North Station. And indeed, the T conductor mentioned these two contradictory statements back to back a few seconds later. At best he made a number of people like me confused and anxious that we’d miss our trains. At worst, people got off at Haymarket and assumed that the bus would take them to North Station. I’m not sure, but I think the bus might actually skip North Station.

Then there are the littler things. When you get on at most T stations nowadays, they beep approvingly when you use a valid card to get through the turnstiles; they give a more menacing beep if your card fails to work. The beeps are loud enough that everyone in the station can hear them. We don’t need to know how many people got through or didn’t; they could quiet the beeps down. At their worst, as happened yesterday, the menacing beep continues … and continues … and continues … until a valid card goes through. Yesterday this continued for a good minute.

Or the T radio “experiment” that failed so miserably … which the T is planning to replace with television.

Or the failed attempts to replace human announcers with prerecorded voices. In some ways this is my favorite. On many red line trains, there’s a nice voice telling you “The next stop is … Charles/MGH.” But then, for whatever reason, those voices sometimes get the next stop wrong; maybe the GPS gets flipped around. So then a train conductor with a thick Boston accent comes on and says incomprehensibly — if you’re not from the area — that in fact the next stop is Kendall/MIT or whatever. They end up needing their announcers to speak anyway. Meanwhile if you’re a tourist on the train, you’re turning to the people next to you to ask, with some anxiety, which stop is in fact next. I can only imagine the levers that need to be wiggled and buttons that need to be pushed at the front of the car to fix the GPS when it breaks.

Or the buskers. How much do I have to pay them not to sing?

In T stations, rather than on the cars, they’ve replaced human voices with automated ones for certain messages. I’m not sure, but I have a very plausible story about how these work and why they were deployed. First off, I should note that they sound like the robot from “Fitter Happier”; everything is a little strange, like when the voice says “shuttle BUS serv…iss.” I assume they feed the machine a text version of whatever message they want, such as the one announcing shuttle-bus service between Haymarket and Oak Grove. But I’m sure they have to hand-train the machine how to pronounce certain words: “MBTA” is pronounced “emm-bee-tee-ay,” not “emb-tuh.” I’d love to see the numbers on how much work they had to put into that system, rather than just hiring the same guy who does the voices for the red line. Someone up there is looking for technological fixes when the answer might involve making better use of humans.

I don’t think the MBTA’s employees realize just how important a functioning mass-transit system is to this city (or any city that deserves the title). At least some people get the importance of reducing commute time. I don’t know that T employees do. I don’t know that they realize, either, that every time the T gets a little worse, more people decide to bail on it and take cars to work instead. Every time the T is a joy to ride, on the other hand, a few more people decide to move close to a T stop. When they do, the neighborhoods around them become a little nicer: people are choosing to live there, rather than sticking around because they have no other options. The neighborhood becomes a community of choice rather than a community of desperation. Concentration is the lifeblood of a city. Every time I see my T not working, I get angry and sad that someone has decided — deliberately or otherwise — to kill my city by a thousand cuts.

I’ve said before that I think cheap burritos and reliable mass transit are two of the main indicators of a city’s quality. We’ve got the first one covered (as Adam, to my great joy, confirmed this weekend), but the second needs an awful lot of work.

Lots of people are frustrated. Is the T listening?