I love the metrowest. I love the metrowest in the way one loves their home, or their family. I love the MetroWest Regional Transit Authority too, but in the way one loves a longtime friend who really doesn't have his shit
together, and gets on your nerves more often than not. They make a good effort at being a real bus service. I've used it. It works (sorta). It's free! They even have this "Catch-Connect" thing where you can use an app to call a van
over to where you are, and it'll drive you to where you need to be, within certain areas. This is also free. It has, certainly, gotten me where I needed to go. But they just have SO many problems.
The first problem is the buses themselves. They're not real city-buses. They're not even school buses. They're some utility vehicle chassis with almost-buses bolted onto them. They have 4 rows with 2 seats, a central aisle,
and 2 more seats. 16 seats in total, and also a wheelchair elevator/securement area in the back, which sometimes people can stand in if all the seats are full. The wheelchair elevator rattles. It rattles constantly. Every single
pebble in the road kicks off an incredibly loud rattle from it. No road is smooth enough for it to not rattle. The windows also rattle, sometimes a concerning amount. If you rested your head on one of the windows, you'd jostle
yourself to death. Or at least give yourself a nasty welt. The whole bus, really, rattles incessantly and loudly. You get the impression that you'd be impressed with the vehicle you're in if you were to see how much it cost
to make. But you don't know how much it cost to make (and neither do I) so instead you feel embarrassed. It feels like you're in a prison bus. Like whoever owns the vehicle you're in was out to spend the least money possible while
not technically being cruel to you. If you reason that the people at the MWRTA are probably nice people, the buses tell you very plainly that the MWRTA has almost no budget.
Oh yeah, and they get incredibly stuffy in the winter. If someone on your bus just plain smells bad, you'll know.
I think what's going on is that the whole of the MWRTA is seen as some sort of welfare program, for the untouchables who can't afford a car or are incapable of doing so (yuck!). It would be taboo, I guess, for them to have too
much money, since the target demographic is people who might be seen as tax burdens, or something, and if they get too nice a ride the suburbanites'll get mad. Or something like that.
Then there's the bus stops. Some stops have bus shelters, most (I think) don't. Most have at least a sign saying that the bus is supposed to stop there, but some don't even have that. I'm still not sure where "framingham
center" really is. Some of the stops are a trick. If you need to get to the McAuliffe branch library, there's a nice bus shelter right there that the bus will always stop at, but only on Route 2. Route 3 is a mirror of route 2, and
does Not have a nice bus shelter at the McAuliffe branch library. There's a sign on the other side of the street next to a fire station, with no bench, shade, or shelter from rain. Also, the bus sometimes doesn't stop there.
The bus drivers don't like to stop there unless someone's already there waving at them (as in, unless they have to). The road isn't built for it; there's not really a shoulder or dedicated lane for the bus, and there's always
traffic going by, so the bus has to merge into traffic while the traffic is weaving around the bus. I always get off at the next stop, which is a lot calmer and so not-far up the street it makes you wonder why the other stop is even
there at all.
The number of buses is its own issue. Almost every route has just 2 buses servicing it a day. On the weekends, just 1. The result is that bus frequency is usually about 1 bus per hour, and sometimes 1 every 90 minutes on longer
routes. It's a lot worse on weekends, of course. If you have to take more than one bus to get somewhere, you might spend more time waiting for the next bus than you spend actually moving. God forbid your bus is late, and you
just miss your connection. You'll probably end up planning out a simple trip a day in advance, trying to weave together a route where you don't have to spend 2 hours waiting. It feels like you've cheated the system when you
actually get somewhere in a reasonable time. A lot of simple problems with the MWRTA would be fixed if they just had more drivers and more buses. If the next bus were 15 minutes away, instead of 90, it wouldn't be a big deal to miss
one, and you wouldn't have to plan a route ahead of time, you could just go.
Speaking of missing buses, that low capacity I mentioned can be a problem here. Now and then, like 20 teenagers will all get onto the same bus at once, or there'll just be a streak of bad luck, and more people will get on at every
stop, and the bus goes overcapacity. When the bus gets to the next stop, and someone's waiting there, the driver has to tell them they can't get on, and they have to wait for the next bus. There goes an hour.
They're making improvements, but it's too little, too slow. They've acquired some new, actual city-buses, but only 2 of them and only on a single route. There are plans to acquire 10 more, but there's more than 10
routes, so clearly not every route is even getting a new bus. They are redesigning the route network with public comments, but I'm not sure if there are any plans for improving the stops, or making dedicated bus lanes. As
someone who has zero insight into how these things operate, and likes talking out of his ass, I think the MWRTA needs to quit its whole "scrappy little underdog" thing, put on its big-boy pants and demand a real budget from the
state, or washington, or whoever it is that gives them a budget. Every other region of the state has a transit authority with real buses, and real stops. Tell them: We're worth a damn too! Give us something nice! We need a hundred
goddamn city buses and a hundred goddamn drivers and a hundred goddamn mechanics and training programs and competitive salaries and dedicated busways and connections to everything else, and we need it all yesterday!
send me a billion dollars and I'll fix up the mwrta myself