T Time
They're switching from tokens to Charlie tickets at T stations across the city. In the old system, you pop in a token and walk through a turnstile. In the new system, you put your card in this card-reader/sucker thing and a pair of plastic doors whoooooosh open.
Except for when they don't. Sometimes they make this loud, angry, disapproving sound, for really no good reason at all. It's like you're Veruca Salt being rendered a bad egg. When I was riding the T home yesterday I watched as the new system loudly disapproved of a small female. Perhaps she forgot to floss, or didn't match her belt to her shoes. Who knows. She threw her hands up, shrieked, and scurried, head-down, to the train, shamed.
posted by McPolack at 8:56 PM
2 Comments:
I have a love-hate relationship with Boston. The T falls squarely in the hate column. Slow, loud, hot/cold, dirty and disease-ridden. One year I lost 60 pounds by bypassing the T altogether for a year and taking my bike everywhere instead. I got hit by cars twice. It was still preferable to the water torture experience of the T. Oh yeah, and I didn't catch the flu that year either. I am so not surprised at the utter disaster of the Charlie card transition!
5:01 AM, September 22, 2006
This sounds kind of like the PATH card system in the NJ PATH, which is a dinky little subway that goes out to Newark and up to Herald Square in NYC. You pop your card in a slot, it comes shooting out the top, and then you walk through the turnstile. I find this much easier then swiping the Metro cards in the NYC subway. Plus it cuts down on litter, as when your card is empty of rides the PATH turnstile eats it, unlike the Metro cards which you find littered all over the place. It's sad to see the demise of the subway token though...
9:50 AM, September 23, 2006
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