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Sunday Happenings
If the amount of T alerts entering our inbox is any indication, the new T Alert system appears to be working just fine. In fact, it proves what we already knew--that the green line is a sluggish nightmare thanks to disabled trains.
An alert appears when a 15-20 delay happens. But one commenter, boston_sean, left us a note that the T Alert system needs a little work when it comes to the commuter rail:
I just got one for the Stoughton line (train 978 is a disabled train and has been cancelled...).Funny thing though - this morning I took the 10:40 out of Stoughton, and while it left the station on time, it arrived at South Station 40 mins late due to a "power outage affecting the signals" and the whole time I'm sitting on it I was wondering where the hell my text message was. Never did get one...
To paraphrase Ron Popeil, but wait, boston_sean says there's more!
Last night [Thursday] my 6:30 train was not only 30 minutes late leaving the station, but due to an incoming train we sat for 10 minutes at Canton Center... there was no text message for last night's fiasco either.
So, Bostonist puts it to you--are you happy with how the T alert system is working? Are some lines working better than others? Are all those notifications about the tortoise-esque Green Line helping you?
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I'll give you another reason the alerts aren't helpful (at least the text message ones): you can't specify a narrow enough time period to receive them. The only period relevant to most morning commutes would be the option "AM Peak 5:00 AM - 9:30 AM", but if people leave for work around, say, 8:00-8:30am, why would they want text messages waking them up at 5:00am, 6:00am, etc.? Would it really be that hard to let people specify a time? Something like that really would have helped me this morning when my regular bus was 20 minutes late due to a breakdown of an earlier bus--I'd rather get one message about the 8:20 bus than five messages about the five buses affected before it.