Next Stop is Not Wellesley Heights

Before we start we need to say two things: don't try this yourself and it's good that he's doing alright. Fifteen year old Jake Todaro jumped off a moving commuter train yesterday outside of Natick when the train began the express route to Back Bay Station. To the experienced rider of the MBTA Commuter Rail the system may seem perfectly navigable and phrases like "running express" may be synonymous with running without any stops – to the optimist it may just mean they're going to go faster between each stop. Poor Todaro wasn't quite sure what was going on and panicked when he discovered the train he was on was going to go much further than he wanted to go. According to the Boston Globe there's a bit of a he said, she said debate about what the MBTA conductors actually communicated to Todaro when he embarked on his journey. Maybe they were unclear in their communications, maybe he didn't understand what they were saying, didn't quite grasp the implications, or maybe he just ignored it with a teenage arrogance. There isn't much reason to speculate. His encounter with gravel while traveling at 25 or 30 miles per hour has left him a bruised and stitched man, and perhaps a bit wiser. The best line in the Globe article comes at the end: "Asked if he would do it again, Todaro replied: 'Are you serious?'"

When you search Flickr for MBTA you get a lot of things. One of those things is the photo here from mooogmonster showing the MBTA's grasp of sentence structure through signage. Another of mooogmonster's photos is more irrelevant to this story but still typical T so we'll just link to it.