Lots to chew on in this report on the Alewife station closure:
*Repairs will be upward of $1M, but how much are the shuttling ops, and loss of time/productivity of thousands of station patrons having to remap their entire transpo patterns?
*Alewife apparently has 2,471 spaces to store crash-machines. How many people could we house in that space?
*Crash was intentional. Let's name/shame every news outlet that called this an "accident."
*When's Alewife reopening?
As a former resident of the Alewife area, it's also sad to me that this article (and seemingly everyone else) thinks of Alewife only as an end-of-line station that exists solely for Lexington's benefit.
*Thousands* of people live within a short walk of the station now, including residents of the 500+ affordable units at Rindge Towers. One guy paid his $9, and for reasons unknown, used his car to shut down a critical transpo mode for those thousands of people. When do their voices get heard?
@bikepedantic they are planning on doing some work + weekend shuttling at the end of February from Alewife and I really hope they have evaluated if they can move a bit of that work to now to reduce future shutdowns.
@inliuofjoan that would be a nice upside
@inliuofjoan All I know in my soul is that if they treated full closures as service tragedies that disrupted people’s lives as much as they do, MBTA would find a way to cram in some extra work right now.
@bikepedantic 💯