You’ve (maybe, hopefully) voted before, and you may have come across specific questions on your ballot asking whether you want a certain policy to pass. There are tons of examples of big-deal ballot questions from places like Massachusetts and California, states where many Tufts students come from.
I want to take today to continue last week’s trend of positivity and talk about one of my favorite developments in car-free living: cargo bikes!
Ramadan is a time of spiritual renewal and reflection, a time for Muslims to take part in a celebration of community, spiritual growth and personal development. The monthlong holiday involves fasting not only from food and drink during the day but also from general bad habits or attitudes that individuals might wish to change.
I often feel that this column complains too much. What can I say, there are a lot of problems with the T! But in an attempt to not get bogged down in negativity and nitpicking this week, it is worth stopping sometimes to appreciate what riders in our system have to be grateful for. Thankfully, the America’s Best Bus Stop competition over at the wonderful publication Streetsblog has given us a perfect opportunity to do just that.
We’re lucky enough to be offered discounted T passes through the university, so if you want to have unrestricted access to the T for a semester, I’d encourage you to check that out. However, you might want to make sure you ride the T enough to justify the price tag.
Last week had a lot of transit news, and a lot of it was pretty good even! Notably, we got the first branch of the Green Line Extension, and the MBTA released their brand spankin’ new five-year capital investment plan. The plan itself showed promise, even though it frustratingly still has no real concrete plan for converting the commuter rail into an electrified regional rail network.
If you read the Boston Globe, you might have come across this article on Monday about what the T could have been. The crux of it centers on a map published by the paper in April 1947 showcasing planners’ proposals for an expansion of Boston’s T network. Looking at it now, knowing that so little of this has actually come to be, is a little bit heartbreaking.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is having worldwide consequences.
The MBTA blessed us last week with more data on the initial fare-free pilot for the Route 28 bus. The information is outlined in several media outlets, so I will not recount all of it here, but there are a few big takeaways. The first things worth mentioning are the pilot’s successes, because it had some quite notable ones. WBUR reported that the elimination of fares on the Route 28 bus increased ridership by 22%. This number is, furthermore, controlling for increases in ridership following the large initial drop off due to the pandemic, so it is quite impressive. A modest amount of riders — about 5% of those on the bus because it was free — would have driven otherwise. The pilot also helped make bus service fasteras lines to pay fares disappeared and riders could board the bus from either the front or back doors.
If you were in the area last summer, you might remember hearing about a Green Line collision in Allston that injured nearly 30 people in July. Things didn’t stop there — in early September, Boston UniversityprofessorDavid Jones fell through rusted stairs near JFK/UMass and died. Later that month, an escalator reversed direction at Back Bay station, causing people to fall over each other like dominoes, injuring nine.
