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The MBTA's T, Red Line, in Boston around 1995: At the train approaches the station, people in the station hear an announcement and see it on a lighted sign. It
by burfog 9y ago
The MBTA's T, Red Line, in Boston around 1995: At the train approaches the station, people in the station hear an announcement and see it on a lighted sign. It is something like "Braintree train approaching", letting you know the direction and final destination. Inside the train, they see and hear something like "Approaching Park Street. Next Stop: Downtown Crossing. This is a Braintree train.". When the train stops, there is a similar announcement, again both voice and lighted display, both inside the train and on the station platform. People inside the train can read the brightly-lighted station sign through the windows, and people on the platform can read a brightly-lighted sign on the train itself. Another announcement is made just before the doors close, and another one right after.
The other lines were about as good, with a few oddities like a human announcer on the Green Line.
San Francisco's MUNI, around 2015, two decades later: There is no voice announcement or message display when I board the train underground, either in the station or in the train. Gee, I hope I'm going the right direction. The train pops out of the ground and runs down the eastern side of the city. It stops only when there is a person waiting at the stop or when somebody in the train pulls a cord, there are no station announcements in the train, and the signs on the stations are unlighted and/or hidden. There is simply no way to count stops to determine where you are. You have to truly recognize the city (for me: in the dark, as an out-of-town visitor) or stay focused on a GPS-based map display. I obviously couldn't do the former, and my phone battery was dying so the latter was a problem as well.
So it looks to me like SF in 2015 can't match Boston in 1995.
- wtvanhest 9y agoI could be wrong, but i lived by mgh for 3 years 2011 to 2014. I think they installed those signs while i lived there.
- ThrustVectoring 9y agoThat's the MUNI, which is pretty shit, along with the surface street bus system. Caltrain and BART are solid though. The streetcars are pretty but somehow slower than biking.
- burfog 9y agoCaltrain and BART would properly be compared to MBTA's commuter rail, which runs for dozens of miles out in every direction from Boston. These are things that are longer range and more expensive, with fewer stops along the way. MUNI is what matches up with the MBTA's T.
- joe_the_user 9y agoMBTA's commuter rail is more equivalent to Sonoma County Smart Train or maybe Caltrain. Bart may go the distance of communter rail but it's far faster and more frequent, taking half an hour to cross the bay from Berkeley to 16th street mission - at the best of times with quite frequent service in busy times. I've had horrific experiences with MTBA Commuter Rail canceling several trains on the weekend without announcement, literally waiting 3 hour or more at the station more than once.
- burfog 9y agoBART isn't immune to horror. A few years back, I almost planned to take BART from the airport to a hotel on California Street. I'm lucky I chose to rent a car and stay in a car-friendly hotel in South San Francisco instead, because BART stopped entirely due to a strike. That was 4.5 days, costing the region about $73 million per day. It bewilders me that such a mess is tolerated. That properly calls for emergency replacements (possibly National Guard) and for the strikers to be convicted of criminal mischief endangering public safety.
- nostrademons 9y agoNot really, in actual usage. BART is roughly equivalent to the MBTA's Red Line - it's the workhorse subway system, moves lots of passengers quickly from the highest-density residential areas to the downtown core and then continues on to high-density suburbs. Muni is more like the Green Line - slow, above-ground light rail that services outlying residential areas with some key connections. Caltrain is a commuter rail, but commuter rail in the Bay Area is much different from in the MBTA. For one, it's a straight line down the peninsula; Boston's commuter rail branches out like spokes on a wheel. Two, it hits all of the major suburban downtowns, which are themselves much higher density than the Boston suburbs (Sunnyvale has more people than Cambridge, for example, despite being 40-50 miles from SF). Three, because of this it's always packed and runs much more frequently than MBTA commuter rails. I used to live along the Fitchburg Commuter Rail, which gets about 10,000 passengers/day. Caltrain gets 60,000. Muni is generally considered worthless for daily commuting in the Bay Area, while most of the Boston MBTA stations are considered desirable neighborhoods. By contrast, the MBTA commuter rail is generally considered useless (everyone I know who lived in a town serviced by it would just drive, and usually work along the 128 or 495 belts instead of in the city itself), but Caltrain is considered a very practical means of commuting if you happen to live near one of the peninsula downtowns and work in SoMA, and the reason crummy housing stock in the Mission rents for $3500/month is because you can get to all the cool places either by BART or by BART -> Caltrain transfers.