Last week, the MBTA announced a contest: “Be the MBTA General Manager for a Day.” According to UniversalHub.com, the contest rules are to “tell us in 150 words why you want to be the MBTA GM for a day.” Current MBTA General Manager Richard Davey was appointed the position officially in March 2010, and since then all I’ve really seen him do was yell at a fare eraser and shoot a picture of a turkey inside of one of the stations. The contest winner will spend the day with Davey, watching what he actually does.
Now, normally contests like this seem like a fun idea, but with the MBTA, it just seems like the equivalent of having to sit down and watch the John Hughes movie, “Baby’s Day Out.” Seriously, in the movie you watch tons of really horrible, seemingly endless events occur, as the baby runs around New York City nearly avoiding death throughout the film. “Davey’s Day Out” is probably the same, especially after the last two weeks of ridiculous incidents throughout the MBTA system. Let’s just see what I’m talking about.
Okay, it all started Jan. 6, when a Braintree-bound Red Line train was stopped to search for a snake that went loose. No Sam Jackson jokes here, this actually happened, and shut down the entire line temporarily. Almost a week later, the MBTA website went down. Two days later, the Red Line shut down due to a fire at Downtown Crossing, while the Blue Line was terminating at Maverick due to a downed line at Wood Island. Also, adding to that day was a fire at the Chinatown station on the Orange Line, shutting that down. Since then, there have been three more fires on the Orange Line: at North Station, Downtown Crossing, and again at Chinatown.
On Jan. 18, an inbound train at Kenmore arrived at the station with smoke coming from the roof of the vehicle. Green Line E service to Heath Street was shut down due to a trolley crashing into a car past Brigham Circle. Finally, that night the Hynes stop lost power, with the Green Line bypassing the station.
Keep in mind that the announcement for the contest was made in-between all of these incidents.
Who would want to have to watch Davey deal with this pressure? I mean, hasn’t the MBTA been doing this for about 100 years now? You’d think they’d have a plan to stop trains from freezing up from the cold, since we are in the biggest city in New England. Oh yeah, the old plan was to have passenger-less trains running all night in order to keep them going. Guess what? That didn’t work. Tuesday morning, there was a dead train at State, as well as numerous commuter rail delays, a frozen Red Line train, and a frozen train coming inbound from Riverside.
Continuing this mess is John McCarthy, a 61-year-old veteran of the MBTA, working there for 30 years. On Jan. 23, McCarthy crashed his bus into a stopped car in Sommerville. A bottle of Ruble Vodka was found in his coat pocket.
I’ve given the MBTA some slack lately, but then it pulled the single most offensive thing New England has ever seen. A train died shortly after leaving Foxboro on Jan. 16, carrying hundreds of passengers coming from the Patriots-Jets game. Wicked offensive.
So, here’s my reason why I would like to be MBTA General Manager for a day: “I would like to be MBTA General Manager for a day because I really like taking pictures of turkeys and giving the mass public hardly any answers or solutions to problems that should have been solved earlier last century. I would also like to add that I’m a huge fan of trains, especially ones trapped in tunnels. I love feeling trapped and confined in a dark place while being screwed over… Whoa, this is getting to sound like a post on Craigslist.”
