brick1972 t1_irremwz wrote
I did. Here's a very long post about it. I actually left my job in Cambridge partially because I couldn't take this commute anymore even on a hybrid (1-2 days a week in office) schedule.
I worked in Kendall but would get off the train at Charles/MGH then walk across the Longfellow for a nice start to the morning. This will be long.
I would drive to Attleboro and take the train from there which made my experience a lot worse. The MBTA is well known for wanting to do big impressive infrastructure additions instead of basic maintenance. In the case of my commute, that means their desire to do a brandy new train station in South Attleboro instead of just fixing what is there for now. South Attleboro is a lot more convenient than Attleboro. I know look on a map and it's 5-10 extra minutes just plan but it's a high variance 5-10 minutes and if you want to make the train you have to plan on the worst variance. I'm still mad about the MBTA fucking over all of us with this asinine decision. You can probably tell.
If you commute from Providence Station you will have a much better time but longer commute. You will have a better time because you can take Amtrak instead of the commuter rail if you plan, and Amtrak is a much better experience. I couldn't justify using Providence Station because of the time to get there plus the extra time the train takes to get from Providence to Attleboro. The Amtrak though is a bit faster, and a bit more enjoyable, less of a crunch (as it does not stop at all the local stations on the line).
My experience is with the Commuter Rail though so let me tell you. It's fine. It is packed as hell now. If you have trouble with Covid-related (or general) crowding, it can be a problem. If you commute together with your partner, a bit less of a problem as you can take a double seat and avoid randos (enough of whom are assholes to make this a bit of a stressor). You will want to be back for your train home early to get a seat. Seriously, you have to be one of those people standing at South Station waiting for them to announce the track 10 minutes before the train leaves. At least for the rush hour trains. Otherwise more than a little chance you will be standing at least until Sharon, and almost no chance you'll be able to sit together.
The red line is running at something like 70% capacity with all of the MBTA problems. Like a lot of things, on paper (8 minute instead of 6 minutes headways IIRC) sounds like no big deal, but you feel the difference. And the average headway has a lot lot lot of standard deviation. Some days I waited as long as 25 minutes for a red line train. Then it would be overpacked. And of course, have two empty trains behind it. But, you can't always count on that so everyone packs into the first one that arrives.
What this adds up to is that you just have to account for a lot of time. So sure, on a good day, you might have:
Home to Providence : 5 minutes
Wait at Station: 5 minutes
PVD -> South Station: 50 minutes
South Station Walk and Wait: 5 minutes
Red line to MGH: 5 minutes.
That's not too bad. But you will find you don't want to cut it too close to catch the train, so you actually make the first 10 minutes 20 (give yourself 10 minutes to get there and plan on arriving 10 minutes early). Slow days even the express MBTA can take over an hour. Catch the timing wrong and you will be at South Station for 20 minutes. Get a red line train with shitty doors and you will spend 5 minutes at Park St as they constantly open and close (OK this is an exaggeration but god damn it felt this way some days). Now you are looking at an additional 30 minutes for you commute and frankly it sucks but I have a real problem with patience and might not be the best person to talk to about it. Also I'm a stats nerd so I actually tracked my commute times door to door and they were anywhere from 1:20 (good train luck including it being 5 minutes late which allowed me to catch it by a hair in Attleboro and took red line all the way to Kendall instead of morning walk) to 2:45 (missed train at SS due to slow red line from Kendall to South Station, this was not an outlier though it happened three times) Average was about 2 hours with the walk and 1:45 without. Again this is drive from Pawtucket to Attleboro, Express commuter rail (skips a few of the local stops) to SS, red line to MGH, walk to Kendall.
Some days I would drive to Quincy and just take the red line. This was more for if I was doing something in the evening and didn't want to risk missing the last commuter rail at 11). That was great in Covid-era traffic but sucks now. I also tried doing the drive to 128 station mostly because I like to shop at Wegman's but the fact that you can't get there easily from 95 (you have to go through the split or through very busy backroads in Norwood/Canton) makes it too high variance to plan.
[deleted] OP t1_irs0gvb wrote
Wow. Thank you for sharing this. We love statisticians. This seems like a pretty honest account of the experience
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