Dealing with Winter MBTA Schedule
Here's my notes for dealing with today's Service Recovery Schedule:
Today I ventured out to catch the 8:45am (P514) MBTA Commuter rail train from Framingham to Boston. I avoided taking the train yesterday because I kept getting text messages about delays from earlier trains. I figured the delays would trickle down to later trains, and I was right. I heard from several commuters, via Twitter, that they had a bad commute since one of the trains that arrived at the Framingham station was completely full and about 100 people were not able to get on.
The first thing I noticed when I arrived at the train station was a large number of available parking spaces in the public MBTA commuter lot. On any given Wednesday, the parking lot would be almost full. I was able to count at least 20 spots available. This to me indicated that a lot of people have giving up on the commuter rail. Commuters may have decided to drive into the city or work from home. Based on traffic reports from WBZ, it seems that a lot of commuters have decided to drive into the city.
The P514 train kept getting delayed and after waiting for 20 minutes I decided to bail out. About 40% of those that were waiting also decided to leave. Many of us didn't made sense to wait for an hour for the train and then have to endure the slow train ride into the city. Oh, and we were thinking - What would the evening commute be like?
Incidentally - The plow job at the Framingham Commuter rail lot was was done poorly as there are a lot of spaces that people can't park in because of the size of the snow piles. Laz Parking crew should double check how the lots are plowed and make adjustments to maximize the number of parking spots. After all, the more people that park in the lot, the more money they make.
Let's see what happen's tomorrow.