The MBTA’s chief operating officer, Sean M. McCarthy, said today he had no regrets about the T’s two-day shutdown during the weekend blizzard.
McCarthy said the storm inflicted almost no long-term infrastructural damage to MBTA’s aging and mechanically plagued system. Keeping the T closed from 3:30 p.m. Friday to 2 p.m. Sunday helped protect the T’s stock from the elements, allowing for the system to get back up and running after the storm without having to repair buses and trains damaged from the snow.
Comments
What Sean McCarthy said makes total sense. The T's equipment is fragile enough without subjecting it to unnecessary stress and damage. We just got hit with a pretty devastating storm and I'm amazed at how many people expect our roadways and transit to be back to normal within a day or two. The whining over the Governor's ban on driving is equally perplexing. Nature always has a way of showing everyone who's really in charge of things. Grow up.
You are not God. Your opinion is just that. It's not lowered from heaven on golden chains. Telling people who have another opinion to "grow up," to characterize them as "whining," makes you egocentric and arrogant, with opinions that are not worth considering.
Sean McCarthy should be demoted at the very least. The T is vital transportation for thousands of people who don't have alternatives. At the very least, buses should have been in service as soon as the ban on travel was lifted, and that ban should have been lifted earlier than it was. For many people the T is a necessary utility nearly as important as electric power and phone service.
Especially for those without electric power, the ability to take a bus to a location where restaurants were open would have been invaluable to many. People need to be able to depend on the T to be there when its needed.
As soon as the weather is no longer dangerous, and people are able to get out and about, the T should be there for them. If it can't be, then we need new management... or maybe we need the old management that handled bad weather better. We had 35 years with no system-wide shutdowns; then we had 3 shutdowns in less than a year. That's proof of bad management in my book.
I was very lucky to travel on the T early Monday morning and I rode everything but the bus. I appreciate the warnings about delays, but I didn't experience any issues or did I hear anything from co-workers who depend on the T for transportation. My only problems with the system are minor: I can never understand the announcements over the PA system on most trains. There needs to be better communication of alerts on the MBTA web page.