Yes. They’re gonna have to bite the bullet and do it and it’s gonna suck so bad.

I'm so grateful for Transit Matters. It's hard for the T to gaslight us with "no issues" when there's clear data showing the increased journey time. The headways are also infuriating, the amount of times I get to DTX and the next Alewife trains are in 13 and 15 minutes at rush hour is infuriating.

The MBTA posted an announcement about a full red line shutdown a couple months ago and quickly deleted it. It's obvious it's coming and the PR has already been written. Just a matter of when.

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MBTA upper management, MassDOT, and state executive leadership are the only ones that believe their own claims since they don't ride their own system 🙄

My deepest sympathies to whoever they find to run the T next. I can't even imagine the stack of shit that awaits the next person to take the helm there.

My hunch is that they want to wait for the spring so that snow isn’t something to work around and it will be light out longer for track work south of JFK

It is the new normal. And it's only going to get worse.

I think they're trying to nurse it through to the summer. One of the criticisms of the orange line shutdown was that it happened after schools and colleges were back in session, causing a bigger disruption than if they had done it during the summer months.

My real hope, albeit unlikely, is they're trying to figure out how to shut down portions of the line rather than a total shutdown.

The slow zones need to be fixed but it really feels like a temporary fix. Slow zones are already popping back up on the Orange Line. It wasn’t even 3 months after the shutdown and now it’s running a whole 2+ minutes slower due to slow zones

I was expecting it during December, my assumption is that they're planning to do it when students are out, but there's no way they can wait that long

Wait until warmer weather and open up protected bike paths along the entire route (in addition to the usual shuttling).

A full Red Line shutdown isn't going to happen. Finding enough buses for the Orange shutdown was a challenge, and Red would require even more. The way the Red Line is built also makes it much easier to shut down in chunks. They could shutdown Ashmont and run Braintree at double capacity, then switch to Braintree work and run Ashmont at double, then segmented work on the combined section, followed by a long weekend shutdown of Columbia Junction.

Red is a much more tourist focused line. I suppose they could do it in late May and early June.

It's the busiest line, period. There's no way to shut it down without causing problems for a whole bunch of people, both tourists and locals. Unfortunately, we seem to be at a point where the T is unable to dig their way out of this hole using only weekend or overnight shutdowns.

At least if you can figure out a viable way to shut it down in chunks you can minimize the pain at any given time.

Why can't they do partial shutdowns?

First, shutdown everything south of South Station. Then, shutdown everything north of Park St. Finally, finish the Park St to South Station work over a few weekend shutdowns.

There have been many times when I just walk to Kendall instead of waiting for a red line. It doesn’t really save me time but at least I get some exercise

On the ashmont branch of the red line this also checks out. Whatever your wait times are north of the jfk split, you can double them south of the split. When you’re only going a couple miles it often takes the same amount of time to just walk.

I lived off the Ashmont branch for 5 years. I don't envy you!

Knowing the T there's no chance they'll double capacity if they do this. Probably halve it.

I wonder what could have been accomplished over the winter holiday break for students. Even if they just did a partial shutdown of the line in that time.

cries in bus dependency and normalized 20min delays

God, I would love this.

They definitely are slower than they've ever been. Took me an hour to get from Downtown Crossing to Quincy Center where I said 'fuck it', got off, and caught the commuter rail since I was going to miss it in Braintree.

I even got a video of the red line just sitting there for over a minute, doing absolutely nothing. I was feeling sick that day too. I was not in any mood for those shenanigans.

I'm very thankful that we finally bought a car this weekend (although in theory if the green line extension is doing ok, I might be able to take that to work).

They could even run single track in sections so they can work on one track while trains run on the adjacent one. This is how the NYC subway is able to do all their maintenance while keeping the system running 24/7.

Even though Savin Hill is my station I will walk the extra half mile or so to JFK/UMass because I'm much more likely to get a northbound train in less than 15 minutes.