Riders come up short in MBTA bus marathon

Yawu Miller

Using last week’s winning Boston Marathon time of two hours, seven minutes, four teams of MBTA riders took their race to the buses last week to see which one could ride the farthest.

It wasn’t the bus riders who were put to the test, however. The T Riders Union, a Roxbury-based advocacy organization, was testing the MBTA’s schedules for some of its busiest routes.

In an outcome that would come as little surprise to any seasoned MBTA rider, 97 percent of the buses used in the T Riders marathon were late. And that during a school vacation week, when traffic was unencumbered by traffic from school buses.

“I don’t think they had much of an excuse,” said Penn Loh, executive director of Alternatives for Community and Environment, the organization which runs the T Riders Union.

“It was right after rush hour,” added Bob Terrell, the executive director of the Washington Street Corridor Coalition. “But it was as bad as usual. All the buses were running at least three to five minutes behind schedule.”

Terrell said his team waited 15 to 20 minutes for the 21 bus at Ashmont Station, a wait that the MBTA schedule says should take just four minutes. But Terrell’s team was doomed, depending on the notoriously late and over-crowded 23 bus for a leg of his trip.

A team of riders from Chelsea won the marathon, covering more ground on their trip into Boston than any of the other teams. But given the lateness of all the routes, none of the teams did as well as the rapid transit that state Sen. Jarrett Barrios takes to work every day.

“It is not fair that when I go into the State House on the Red Line, I get in in 12 minutes, but when you ride in from Chelsea, it takes 40 minutes,” he told the bus riders, as they gathered to check their results.

“We all pay taxes. We all have the expectation that we should be able to get to work on mass transit.”

That is exactly the point the bus riders sought to drive home as they rallied outside the State House, according to Loh.

“There are 200,000 riders who depend on buses,” he said. “Their service is being neglected and they, as riders, are being ignored. They’re mostly from low-income communities of color. We’re here to say that bus riders deserve better service.

“The T says they give equal attention to bus service. But ask any bus rider and it’s a different story. They have a lower-quality, slower ride.”

MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo said the agency has made a considerable commitment to its bus infrastructure.

“The MBTA has invested $500 million in bus operations in the last five years,” he said.

That investment has included 760 new buses and a state-of-the-art control center that enables dispatchers to track the progress of buses, according to Pesaturo. The number of dropped trips — bus trips that were cancelled due to mechanical problems or absent drivers — has dropped from 360 trips in one day in December of 2004 to just 34 per day in December 2005. There are 15,300 bus trips per day in the MBTA system.

But the investments in the MBTA’s bus system have been dwarfed by investments in commuter rail projects and upgrades to rail projects in higher income communities. The South Boston transitway, which brings riders from South Station to the South Boston waterfront area, cost the MBTA $600 million.

More recently, the MBTA has embarked on a $597 million new Greenbush commuter rail line serving the South Shore.

The bus marathon earned the T Riders Union press coverage and perhaps for at least one day MBTA officials seemed focused on getting the buses in and out of the Dudley Station bus terminal, where a half dozen inspectors were gathered. Despite advance warning, however, the buses used by the marathon teams were uniformly off schedule.

In the long run, T Riders Union Director Khalida Smalls says there has to be more rider advocacy.

“They know we’re here, but they’re not listening to us,” she commented. “Whenever we put up with a level of services that’s this low, that becomes the culture at the T. We have to change the riders’ attitude about what’s possible at the T. If you don’t complain, you’re giving them an excuse not to do anything.”