Tag: subway

Boston proposal: Make every college students pay for night transit service

Boston is one of the most transit-complete cities in the country, but it has a giant hole: no night service. While only a few cities offer 24/7 train service, most, at minimum, have a network of night buses to pick up the slack. Others, like DC and LA, adjust their hours so weekend service runs as late as 3am on their rail lines. Boston does neither. When the clock strikes 1am, on every day of the week, the trains and buses stop rolling, until they resume shortly before 6am the following day.

There have been many excuses given as to why this is the case. “Maintenance” is a favorite, especially when officials can point to New York and say “we don’t have four tracks.” Fair enough….except that PATH, which does run 24/7, is also limited to two tracks. Chicago as well. Never mind that fact that at 2am on Sunday morning, when the streets are suddenly filled with people being kicked out of bars, not a soul is working on maintenance. Like most organizations, maintenance activities which run at night tend to be on weeknights. Click to read more!

LA gets late night rail transit

This announcement surprised me, but it’s great to see. When I was in LA earlier this year for a concert, I was able to enjoy a new policy that had recently been implemented (trains every ten minutes until midnight) but had to worry about not missing the last train.

That’s no longer the case. LA obviously has a whole lot of nightlife, and while buses that run 24 hours have been available, there’s an extra comfort in knowing the subway is there for you too.

From the official Metro blog:

All Metro Rail lines will run until 2 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights. That includes the Red/Purple Line subway, the Blue Line, Expo Line, Green Line and Gold Line. Click to read more!

Results of corporate experiment in bike racks

A month ago I decided that instead of rolling my eyes at the lack of bike racks at some businesses in the Fresno area, I would be a little bit more pro-active and send out customer-complaint feedback.

I decided to only do this with corporations, because of two reasons.

1) They have more flexibility in making “changes” to their property than some mom-and-pop store leasing space in a strip mall
and
2) They supposedly have established departments and standards on how to respond to customer issues.

So why send out online feedback instead of talking to the local manager? Same reasons as above. A manager has almost no authority to approve the extravagant $250 expenditure that would be the installation of a bike rack. And also it was to gauge how the corporation as a whole handles requests by customers, and not just the local reaction. Click to read more!