Photo of the scene outside of Downtown Crossing by Rob Vassegh.
We arrived at the New England Medical Center Orange Line stop during the chaos and were met by a friendly T employee who helpfully suggested that we go to Back Bay station to take the Orange Line south. A couple of tourists—or at least newcomers—were headed to North Station, and the T employee told them how to get to Boylston Street station, blocks away, to take the Green Line. There were no shuttle buses anywhere, and, if we had been tourists instead of us, we have no idea how we would have gotten to Back Bay Station.
But our tale is merely one of slight inconvenience. Consider the story of Bostonist reader AnthonyE, whose simple commute turned into a two-hour-long nightmare:
I was heading home to Ashmont at about 6:45ish starting at Brookline Village on the Green. Around 7 when the train pulled up to Park Street they announced that there was an incident and the trains were down. So, okay that's fine, lets just go out and wait for the shuttle.
It was pure chaos outside. Nobody was really upset about the train going down, they were more upset about how chaotic it was. There were was no order at all, no T employees guiding anyone. A bus would pull up and people jumped on. People looked around and grumbled and nobody knew what to do. Two men approached me for help which I of course could not. One of them was blind and the other was someone helping him out. The guy asked if i could help the blind guy so he could go home and that was fine because we were both going to JFK. So after an hour of standing around, they FINALLY got someone to organize it. I approached the T employee and asked him to help me get my new blind friend onto a bus, he yelled at me saying that he needs to see him first to help him, and when i trying to bring him to my friend he pretty much ran off...so now i was hopeless again. They finally announced that if you were going to JFK to stand here and for Harvard go there. Nobody could here the announcement so i yelled in a loud clear voice the instructions. Others thanked me for actually yelling it and not just saying it.
Finally after another 45 minutes i got my friend and I onto a bus. Someone stood up so he could which i was very thankful for. Also everyone in my area of the bus were very nice. We talked and made jokes the whole ride.
The whole experience took about 2 hours maybe more. It wasn't that bad really. I met some really nice people, and that blind guy was hilarious. My only issue with the whole thing was how ridiculously the T set the shuttles up. There were no T employees for the first hour, and when they were they didn't really know what to do (no offense to them at all). Also no bus driver actually knew where they were driving to until the second they left and etc. Just like the person above me said, there was no plan, that is my only complaint.
And what did incoming secretary of transportation Jeffrey Mullan have to say about all of this? "When you have two incidents happening within minutes of each other, it makes it a daunting task. We did the best we could.’’
Confidential to the T: Bostonians think that you could maybe do a little better.
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