local friends

[cellio]

(Tuesday afternoon will come later.)

Tuesday night we had planned a group outing to a local beit midrash (a monthly gathering that happened to be this week), but we learned that in the summer they scale way back and it was just going to be a discussion (with no guest or prominent speaker) of the weekly parsha. I can do that at home and I'd been invited to a group dinner before that came up and I'd declined, so I decided to un-decline and go do that.

chaiya was celebrating her birthday with a restaurant outing, so I ventured into the T and found my way there. Also there were hakamadare (of course), msmemory, and a bunch of other LJ-handled people previously unknown to me. Also someone who looked familiar; he used to be in the SCA ("way back") so I've probably seen him at Pennsic or something. It was really nice to be able to catch up with the people I knew, and it was fun to meet the ones I didn't. The food at Christopher's was very good.

We were going to follow that with ice cream, where we might (or might not) have met jducoeur and/or goldsquare, but that ended up not happening. I also tried and failed to connect with siderea earlier, but last-minute arrangements are like that.

chaiya gave me some more of her home-made soap. The last soap I got from her was (and is; I still have some) really pleasant stuff, lightly scented but not overwhelming and annoying the way many scented things are. It's also nice on the hands. I'm glad to have more. She and hakamadare were kind enough to give me a ride back to Newton; since the trip there had been an hour and a half, I was certainly glad of that. (I think I hit some bad timing on trains.)

Some comments on the MBTA ("T") from an outsider:

It's really nice that, once you're in the system, you can move fairly easily from train to train as needed, all underground away from weather, and that trains come often enough that you mostly don't have to care. With Pittsburgh buses, by contrast, when you have to make connections (and if you're going cross-town you probably have to), you're going to be waiting outside and might wait for 30 minutes or more, depending on where you want to go. Schedules are less reliable because buses share the roads with other traffic; the tracks are exclusive to the T.

When I first got onto the T at Logan, I thought the regular announcements and signboards for both destination and next stop were good ideas. After about ten minutes of that, I began to think that the announcements must be pretty annoying to people trying to read or sleep during their commutes. I guess people learn to tune it out, and occasionally miss their stops by doing so. There are signboards in every car that I found readable from anywhere in the car, which is a pleasant change for me. With Pittsburgh buses, if you get a display with the name of the next stop at all (and that's not certain), it's up front and I, at least, can't read it from too far back.

The trains I rode tonight were full of litter but not filth. I had to stand for a good chunk of it even though it was after 6:30.

The signage in the stations is generally good but lacks redundancy. When I was transfering from the green line to the red line, the directions I had (which came from MBTA's web site) said to get onto the red line "outbound". The two tracks were labelled by destination (Alewife and something else), but an outsider doesn't necessarily know which is where. So I had to check the maps (which, fortunately, are not hard to find), but a simple augmentation of the signs would have meant I wouldn't have to. Or, failing that, some agreement between signs and the directions on the web site. :-)

I'm not sure, but from looking at the maps I suspect that the average T commute is longer (in time) than the average bus commute back home. The T will be a more comfortable ride, but the sheer investment in time would give me pause if I were contemplating living here.

I know there are also buses here (I used those last time I was here), and they're less frequent and less comfortable than the T. If you have to augment your T commute with buses, I imagine it gets a lot worse.

Comments

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

When I first got onto the T at Logan, I thought the regular announcements and signboards for both destination and next stop were good ideas. After about ten minutes of that, I began to think that the announcements must be pretty annoying to people trying to read or sleep during their commutes. I guess people learn to tune it out, and occasionally miss their stops by doing so.

We definitely tune it out, unless there's something weird about them (a few of the recorded voices have peculiar speech patterns). Also, if you take the T regularly, you internalize how many stops your route is, and what the lighting and decor is like at your destination (oh, no, it's too dark, this is Boylston not Park Station), so you can detect your stop with just your peripheral vision without taking your nose out of your book.