So I’m pretty sure you don’t even have to be from this area to understand that we have gotten something like 68-70 inches of snow in the last few weeks. It has been about 13 degrees Farenheit so none of it is melting, and nobody seems to know what to do about it.
The city has shut down completely for 3 or 4 days, and the train, the MBTA, has shut down service entirely on two occasions so far. Even when it is running it is not running at anything like normal speed or capacity. Because apparently the public transit system in Boston, which is located in New England, where we get a season called winter, is not prepared to deal with large amounts of snow.
Now I know the MBTA is in disarray and the trains and tracks are outdated and need a lot of work, so I’m not saying they should be able to magically fix everything in five minutes. But clearly something needs to change. And since I have lived here since 1998 I have never seen so many problems with the transit system due to snow. Incidentally, have you seen this video of what trains in Canada do when it snows? Because it is epic:
This is how Canada handles snow with their trains.
So last week my normally 30-40 minute commute from East Boston to Back Bay took over 3 hours on Tuesday. Then Wednesday, two hours. Thursday an hour and a half. Basically, the T announced several times that it would not be running normally anytime soon, and we could all just suck it or, alternatively, find an “alternate means” of travel. Like maybe the gridlocked snow-covered roads? Or legs? Since I live on the other side of Boston Harbor from downtown, maybe I should start swimming to work. At least it would be a good workout before I died of hypothermia about 2 minutes into the journey.
Guess what happened yesterday? Oh, the General Manager of the MBTA quit. Now I know she was taking a lot of blame for a pile of garbage that she inherited, so I actually kind of hope she looked around, said, “You know what? Eff all y’all, I’m out.” and walked out the door.
Basically the city is an epic travel nightmare and it’s only going to get worse because we’re supposed to get another approximately 17 inches of snow this weekend. Honestly, I just say shut it down till April. That should be safe. By then probably most of the snow will have melted and maybe they will have gotten enough trains and buses working properly to actually service the 1.3 million people that use it every day.
Meanwhile, please enjoy things like the best tweets about last Tuesday’s epic T fail, and this true life story about a broken train being pushed by another train, which then broke. And here’s another country that handles snow better than Boston – Norway.
But wait, to show that I still have love for you Boston, I do need to share that the Boston Yeti exists, and he goes around shoveling people out.
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Send the Yeti to save me. It’s been twelve days since my road was passable.
Send it out here. We have absolutely zero snow in the valley, and almost no snowpack up on the hill… Which means this summer will be a parched, dehydrated hellscape.
They keep forecasting “significant” snow here and all we keep getting is dustings.I do not think that order means what they think it does.
We won the Super Bowl. Stop complaining. I don’t care if you all die. Well, that might be a LITTLE harsh.