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[This Just In]

RANT
Working on the railroad

BY CATHERINE TUMBER

I happen to live on Comm Ave, right on western reaches of the B branch of the Green Line, and I’ve come to love it. Though many prefer living on quiet side streets, I get a cheap thrill from gazing out on the T. The regular, high-industrial whoosh of the trolley cars resembles ocean waves to my ear. The trains lull me to sleep at night, and they open my days with a sense of hopeful possibility, tooling along the green gateway to other lives and other realms.

My idyll came to a screeching halt one recent morning when, piercing through the early-morning dew, came The Voice. The post-apocalyptic Voice: The humans are gone; only desolation and pitiful evidence of their vain ambitions remain. I live a full block from the T stop, but the sound was as loud and alienating as a buzzer alarm clock. And so too was the frenzy of screeching bells given off by these, the new trolley cars that over the next year will gradually replace half the entire Green Line fleet.

It wasn’t until this past week that I actually rode one of the new cars and learned what all the commotion is about. Say you have just left St. Paul and are on your way to BU West. “The next stop is BU West,” announces The Voice in a deafening roar. Okay, okay, you think. As you approach the stop — usually no more than seven seconds later — there it is again: “Entering BU West.” Wow, that’s unbelievable. And just in case you didn’t get the message the first time, or the second, as you arrive it declares (with what I swear is a tone of self-congratulation) “BU West,” flicking a little sand in your face as it turns to meet the next task. Then it comes again, stop after stop after stop after stop. And I haven’t even mentioned the constant reminders to step away from the doors, the repeated announcements of the train’s final destination, and other stuff I’ve blotted from consciousness. Forget reading, thinking, or even spacing out. It must drive the poor drivers insane.

And then there are the door-opening electronic bells. Lord, Lord, they are loud enough from my apartment window, but from within the train, they sound like the violin shrieks in the shower scene in Psycho. And often, with mind-toying arbitrariness, a second movement will go off, shrilling to the syncopated backbeat of the first. I swear, my impulse every time is to notify the driver that someone is being murdered in the back of the train too.

According to MBTA spokesperson Brian Pedro, the new cars started operating on the B Line in early May, and there are now 12 of them on the tracks; the C Line will be next, by the end of the summer, and when the project is complete, 55 of these new cars (out of a hundred total) will be running on all branches of the Green Line, for a cost of $202 million. It’s all for a good reason, he says: to comply with the transportation standards set by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which also accounts for the cars’ new design. (For a favorable review of the new design, written when the MBTA first unveiled a demonstration car, see “Green Envy,” TJI, May 6, 1999, www.bostonphoenix.com/archives/1999/documents/00521754.htm.)

The MBTA is currently evaluating the new cars, and you should know that the sound can be modulated yet remain in compliance with the ADA. (The number of announcements, however, cannot be reduced.) My guess is that there are plenty of people — perhaps most notably the blind, for whom the announcements and bells are primarily intended — who recoil from auditory assaults of this magnitude. If I am right, for the love of Mary please contact Green Line chief Brian Dwyer at bdwyer@mbta.com or (617) 222-3200 and beg him to turn down the volume. Remember, Brookline, you’re next.

Issue Date: June 21 - 28, 2001