They’ve been having issues since the schedule changes at the beginning of the month I think the API isn’t fully updated to account for some of the changes

I prefer matte so meh

They’re also doing flood resiliency work

That’s because of poor engineering, water infiltration would cause longer term and even more expensive damage if it wasn’t fixed

So completely necessary

There’s also flood resiliency work going on, also completely necessary because of climate change and the location of the seaport

The mbta is more accessible than other comparable American transit systems, if you think that’s not the case, I encourage you to take the Orange line and listen to the beeping

I’ll add Somerville did a study when prepping for assembly square that’s briefly referenced in the neighborhood plan for assembly and it found that increased density offsets the cost of new housing, if you’re on a town planning thing maybe you could reach out to the city government for the full methodology and results of that study

http://www.somervillebydesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/ASN_Plan-Update_Final.pdf

it still might not help in the near term because the article / report does say that while overall revenue almost always positive, towns might still experience negative net revenue without state transfers because of how revenue is divided between states and towns

That assertion is unsupported by research: https://www.wbur.org/news/2016/03/15/massachusetts-housing-costs-local-resistance

The total tax revenue generated by new housing more than offsets the marginal cost of providing services in almost every case

you know taxes are a thing. New residents bring in new income

That billion would have already been used up of fares were replaced instead

Good luck getting taxes raised we barely passed the millionaire tax

Bus dwell times mostly, green and buses are most likely to see improvements by allowing all door boarding

yeah sure, but it wouldnt be a bigger improvement if you have to cut 30% to match the new revenue. We could do it if we increased the MBTA sales tax from 1% to 2%, but i highly doubt that would ever happen, and a reduction in service (like to 20-25 minutes between trains) would be a disaster given that trains now are already 15 minutes apart and packed to the gills (or at least the orange line is at sullivan)

well i mean not collecting fares would mean 450 million bigger hole? Also implementing this will improve service by reducing dwell times and overall make transit more attractive

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the alternative of course is to do this, then throw it out right away by passing a 1% sales tax increase for the MBTA, because the contracted money is spent already, it's not like we'll get it back

That’s now how contracting works. The money is spent; we are contractually obligated to spend it, if we don’t we get assessed a penalty for the lost business so they can still be made relatively whole

The sunk cost is a real sunk cost, not in a logical sense, but an economic one

They money is already spent, the cost has been sunk, it’s not like cancelling the project would get the money back and may be even more expensive with termination fees

Also automated fare collection is a good thing in the long run, it allows for faster boarding and all door operation for street level surface routes

The new system would also allow differentiation of fares by income, bringing us in line with most other modern metros

The plan is now to implement it gradually to minimize issues, according to the herald, I think that’s a relatively good thing

The MBTA expects to collect 450M in fares this year, making up about 25% of the budget, this project will last about 20 years given the last fare implementation, so with straight line depreciation that’s still only 10% of expected post pandemic revenue

The unions at other cities like Toronto where the capability has been introduced right against that

New York can run on one perso opposition but the union successfully fought the elimination of the second conductor with a massive strike a while back

that's because all the labor is American and basically everything except the shell is American

door issues? American. Brake issues? American. Axel issues? American. Has a frame broken? well the one Chinese part is fine I guess

It could be more efficient but it isn’t that bad a large portion of the US budget goes into healthcare and r&d

Am you are after all writing this text against military spending against on a thing developed using military r&d, mainly the internet (and likely on a GPS enabled device)

It got us internet so I’m not complaining

Just look at Canada google “Toronto Pearson”

Boston lights is a summer thing

Zoo lights is holiday themed though

And we don’t really have the money to upgrade stuff, when the star is forced to send back tax surpluses because it rises faster than some predetermined maximum amount based on an expected increase in tax revenue we’ll wee out of luck

Nice for those of us who won the housing and work lottery I guess

Wouldn’t matter, the issue is we rely on natural gas because we shut down nuclear and states around us shut down hydro and pipes