credit where due to @cityofsomerville.bsky.social & @mayorjakewilson.bsky.social the sidewalk in front of the Eversource building at Willow & Community Path still hadn’t been cleared as of this afternoon. One 311 report & it was done within the hour

Inauspicious start for the Wilson admin that the least cleared sidewalks I walked today were … owned by the City of Somerville

Wow, Healey solved the cost of living crisis

Not sure I’ve ever seen New England getting this much electricity from oil. My emissions today w/ heat pumps are probably higher than if I had kept gas

You can get money for the MBTA or you can pay Cambridge a 25% tax on new home construction but you can’t do both

Good opportunity for stop consolidation on the MBTA 77 bus—took a trip this morning with stops every 1/6th mile, could easily get rid of 30-50% of these

the NWS has a campaign called “turn around don’t drown” because the majority of flood related deaths are due to … people driving their cars into flood waters

Not even the 6th biggest thing in this story, but if someone in a car approached me and used a “derogatory term” to refer to someone they were looking for I cannot for the life of me imagine giving them any useful information.

Two trips to Davis today, two vehicles parked in the bus stop in front of H Mart, despite automated enforcement. I suspect Somerville’s “grace period” that allows for legal parking in the bus stop isn’t helping

Mass signature requirements for ballot questions are far lower than CA—you only need 3% of midterm voters, vs 5/8% in CA. With turnout in 2022 at only 50%, you only need signatures from ~1.5% of registered voters to get something on the ballot This problem is going to get worse

jealous that NYC is building bus lanes (as opposed to Boston, which is removing them)

Absurd for CTDOT to be running 30 min headways on MNRR this weekend with this kind of crowding

🌟 Use our New Train Tracker to track down the holiday Orange & Green Line trains! traintracker.transitmatters.org

jesus christ the PATH makes the Boylston curve sound like a charming melody. you all live like this?

I looked back at the #MBTA meeting calendar for 2025, and what I saw is not indicative of a healthy board of directors. #mapoli

So why is the T only running 3 of 8 of their new trainsets?

Good article, but notable that it doesn’t mention the biggest difference in Mass v Federal accessibility reqs. It’s that Federal ones kick in for buildings with 4+ units, and Mass ones kick in at 3+ units www.bostonglobe.com/2025/12/14/o...

I wonder how many of these are boilers and are more difficult to convert w/ a (from what I can tell) thin or non existent air to water heat pump market in the US

hey @cityofsomerville.bsky.social why is there a huge pile of leaves and dirt blocking the accessible curb cut at the Davis Sq busway?

me, a MBTA Green Line rider, watching the Canadians brag about their tram that goes through intersections at 15mph

7 different insane things in this article about how hard it is to open a business in Boston but needing a license for a TV in your restaurant takes the cake

This is a … generous ... interpretation of how the MBTA is doing. Why is there no comparison to pre-COVID for subway service? Or mention of the Green Line? etc.

It feels like Mass has really fallen behind the ball on AV implementation. This is the latest I can find (www.mass.gov/info-details...), an EO from 9 years ago, some regulations and only 1 company doing testing?

This was one of the original inspirations for the @transitmatters.bsky.social slow zone tracker (dashboard.transitmatters.org/system/slowz...) so it’s always surprising to me that it hasn’t prompted more action in Chicago given the map has looked like this for a long time

This should be the vision for post-McGrath in Somerville, not endless unusable “green” buffer spaces

People seem down on the MBTA communities act but here is a good example of it working—Braintree has a by-right project to build 752 units because of it, 10x as many units as they’ve built in the past 5 years combined hollingsworthpond.com

nice little aurora

this is a fascinating act of self-sabotage that is hard to explain and harder to comprehend

Surprised the MTA is running 8 min weekday off-peak headways—the T has generally boosted those to ~6 min (longer on Blue, I think)

I say this as someone who already cast his vote for Jake but being against a citywide upzoning plan while proposing a different, vague upzoning plan that contains few if any specifics is not exactly an inspiring closing message

Good graphic showing just how weak/narrow the downtown Boston rezoning ended up being. Plus we did some downzoning on top of Gov Center/State St! What a waste

same as it ever was?

the #MBTA hit a new post-Covid high for subway gated entries on 9/16 at 354k entries. ~68% of entries compared to a similar Sep 2019 week. powered by top 10 days (post-Covid) on Red & Orange Line

the free bus pilot was great at bringing ridership back when first implemented. but over the years the growth hasn’t continued and even fell on some routes in the past year or so

The T promised a big service increase for the 77 bus that it looks to me like they had no intention of delivering on

This is correct. The T is 25% cheaper (in real terms) since the last fare increase. $20m (~4.5% increase) is about a quarter of the projected FY26 deficit. Having fare revenue grow with costs going forward is reasonable

Why do the MTA R211 cars still have windows that you can open?

the City of Boston is suffocating public transit with their unwillingness to cede street space to buses and inability to enforce the bus lanes that do exist

Only took 50 years but the cars have been kicked out of the outer loop of Terminal B and buses reign supreme! @universalhub.com

lots of claims about the effectiveness of the Boylston St bus lane that Boston is planning to remove, but no actual analysis. turns out when you look at the data, the bus lane is working pretty well! transitmatters.org/blog/media-s...

this is a mistake

Apply to be the next Executive Director of TransitMatters: transitmatters.org/careers-1/20...

this is an unfortunate number to publish because Mass could build this many homes in the next decade and it would do very little, if anything, to rein in housing costs. the real number is probably ~3x higher www.bostonglobe.com/2025/02/06/b...

Some of the worst people in the housing discourse are the ones who insist you shouldn’t build tall buildings in downtowns www.bostonglobe.com/2025/01/29/o...

So where did the MBTA find an extra $300m? (not to mention that using that money for FY26 just kicks the can to FY27…) commonwealthbeacon.org/transportati...

Where is NYC congestion relief pricing already working? as of noon today, trips through the Holland Tunnel are about twice as fast as normal trip times via www.congestion-pricing-tracker.com

With $1.3b in one-time fair share funds available to the Commonwealth, we should use this opportunity to use $650m to fully fund the MBTA Red-Blue Connector www.bostonglobe.com/2025/01/05/m...

I know the MBTA has declared victory over speed restrictions, but are they really going to stop updating the dashboard? www.mbta.com/performance-...

while the T increased Red Line trips for the winter, they ended up decreasing the scheduled service hours—suggesting they could have increased service more if they had kept service hours constant

The last shutdown on the #MBTA Green Line was like many of the other Green Line shutdowns, with no impact to trip times over the affected area