The MBTA Follies continue

Hot on the heels of the MBTA's incredibly piss-poor response to passengers on stranded Red Line trains, who eventually took matters into their own hands and staged their own evacuation, comes a story from WBZ-TV regarding an alert viewer who noticed that some Emergency Exit gates in the Central Square station were visibly locked and chained shut. Rather than contact the T about it, which at this point would have accomplished nothing but a blank stare and no response at all, the wise viewer decided to contact the media about it. So out goes WBZ to investigate and boy howdy they go yup, them gates is locked.

The MBTA's crazy cuckoo clock goes BING BONG BING BONG and out trots Joe Pesaturo, the T's mouthpiece whose job I do not envy and would not wish on my absolute worst enemy, to babble these gems of wisdom:

According to Pesaturo, the exits are remnants from the day of T turnstiles, before the new Charlie Card gates. The new style of gate stays open in an emergency, eliminating the need for the specific Emergency Exits. "We installed ... gates at a lot of our exits that used to be just exits only, so now they're entrance exits," explains MBTA Spokesperson Joe Pesaturo. "In an emergency, the alarm is activated and (the gate) will slide open automatically, allowing people to exit the station freely."

Acknowledging the confusion and concern over having locks on gates marked 'Emergency Exit', Pesaturo told WBZ's Dawn Hasbrouck the gates would now be relabeled. "There's a sign on it that says emergency exit that doesn't look right, so the first thing we're going to do is remove that sign," said Pesaturo.

So lemme get this straight.

1. The MBTA is relying on the Charlie Card gates, which have a 75% chance of working properly during regular conditions, to recognize when some "alarm" is activated and slide open automatically.

2. The MBTA presumes the Charlie Card gates recognize this mythical "HEY AN EMERGENCY IS GOING ON" alarm, whatever the hell that is (just connected to the fire alarm? what?) even during a loss of electricity. I know power outages are so incredibly rare that they never happen during an emergency. I seem to recall an incident earlier this year where the Charlie gates refused to open during a power outage at a station, which concerns me greatly if, indeed, it did happen (and I'm trying hard to find the story on UHUB) it's a serious problem if the T really does mean what it said in the second half of that quote, which...

3. The second half of that quote is so mind-bogglingly inept that I'm grinding my teeth to a fine powder just thinking about it. It's almost a Simpsons joke. "Hey! What's up with these gates with Emergency Exit signs being chained and locked?" "Oh! Ha ha! Silly us! We made a boo-boo. We'll remove those Emergency Exit signs immediately."

I'm no Safety Expert (and neither is anybody at the T, apparently) but I do know that emergency exits not only need to provide quick egress, but they need to WORK. Gates that you open from the outside with crash bars have been proven to WORK. Charlie Card gates have not been proven to WORK, or even WORK RELIABLY. I fear that the gates were never tested properly, or tested enough, or tested with anybody with safety in mind, and for the T to solely rely on them as the means of safely getting people out of a hazardous situation while eschewing mechanical, non-electrical gates that HAVE worked is just horribly, terribly, completely WRONG.

I will mention, as others have already done in the comments below, that the gates are designed with a failsafe and are supposed to automatically open (i.e. the electricity keeps 'em closed) in the event of loss of power. But I just don't trust 'em. I can't trust 'em. Not when the systems were built as they were, with gates that don't function in the winter and payment systems that break down every month when people attempt to purchase their monthly passes.

There's one way for the MBTA to ease my mind and, I suspect, a lot of other regular commuters, and that's to provide proof that the gates will work "as designed" to open themselves up in an emergency, or even just in the event of a loss of power. Where are the testing results? Where is any of this? Far away from us, since the MBTA enjoys its monolithic status and policies of keeping commuters in the dark. Now I'm worried that nothing short of another Cocoanut Grove disaster (which wasn't transit-related, of course, but did involve emergency exits or the lack thereof) will get the MBTA to rethink its safety procedures.

Man! What is going wrong with my beloved city?!

And the hits just keep on coming here at T Radio

(apologies to those who also read b0st0n for what's essentially a repeat)

Circumstances today called for me to curtail my working hours short for the day and so I found myself on the South Station platform around 2:00 pm. Making my way to the end of the northbound platform, as I am wont to do, I heard a woman's voice reading off last night's lottery numbers. It sounded pretty loud and professional DJ-like, and I assumed someone had left a radio on in one of the work rooms next to the platform.

"This is so-and-so for T Radio," the woman said in an annoying yet chirpy voice. "See you on the train! Cha-ching! Cha-ching!"

Wait. What? It's coming from the platform speakers?

Next thing I heard is a polished DJ voice -- the kind of disembodied voice you hear in the movie theaters telling you what insipid and forgettable R&B/pop song you just heard over the auditorium PA system before the previews begin. He also introduced himself from T Radio, and proceeded to read the same "Safety is our Number One concern at the T" announcement that the recorded voice of Dan Graubaskas has been reading for months now. Immediately afterwards, the voice launched into an ad for the Mass. Lottery, urging us all to make sure to try the new scratch-off game or whatever. At this point the volume of the announcement kept changing, from "sounds like it's behind that door" audible to REALLY FREAKING LOUD. Then it went silent altogether, making me wonder if I'd hallucinated the entire thing.

T Radio? Surely the T isn't thinking of running a constant stream of chatter and music on the platforms. Surely this is just a test and they'll recognize their folly and drop it. Surely nobody has Written To The Top complaining about the silence and lack of wallpaper media while waiting for their trains. And surely nobody asked us whether or not we wanted to hear Buster Poindexter's "Hot Hot Hot", which eventually started playing over the speakers.

No, I'm not feeling hot hot hot. I'm still not feeling hot hot hot. I won't be feeling hot hot hot. Stop saying hot hot hot!

The proceedings weren't even interrupted by the automated voice announcing the train arrivals. They're on separate channels, apparently, so the two voices merged and we could HOT HOT HOT! barely hear the fact that HOT HOT HOT! the next train to HOT HOT Alewife HOT! was now arriving HOT HOT HOT!

The volume went up and down again a few times, then turned off completely just as the train was entering the station. They're testing this today, apparently. I'd be curious to know if it's going on during afternoon rush, too.

Ladies and gentlemen, in the wake of shoddy customer service, no information on delays, mishaps or otherwise, stranding passengers in trains so that they are forced to make their own evacuations and incredibly stupid decisions involving chained emergency exit gates ("No problem, we'll just remove the emergency exit signs"), the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority has decided the best way to spend its money is on a system-wide radio network, forcing a captive --and paying-- audience to listen to loud, annoying music and ads for the Lottery. Billboards are one thing; they're visual, you can turn away and not look. Overhead music? Plug your ears, bucko, you ain't escaping this one.

This isn't the first time the T's experimented with mass media; back in the early 90s there were the television sets hung from the ceilings in Park Street and Downtown Crossing, among others. Remember them? They silently displayed the weather, ads, sports scores, that kind of thing, and each one had a little camera mounted on the bottom to monitor exactly how many people were watching it. Not enough were, apparently, and the TVs were removed after a few years. It's kind of hard to judge how many people are actively listening to your T Radio unless you want to count the number of people holding their ears during rush hour.

But what really really really pisses me off about this is the fact that we already have music in some of the T stations. They're called buskers. You seriously cannot tell me the T wishes to put the buskers out of business by blasting this stuff over all platforms and then telling us to buy scratch tickets. You can't do that. I don't believe it. I simply won't believe it.

This morning a guitarist in Davis was playing a reasonably nice guitar version of Your Song. He was picking the piano bits on the guitar, and doing a good job of it. Sure, Elton John isn't always my cup of tea, but the guitarist made the music his and that personal touch made it sound nice. I don't mind listening to that on the platform, and hey, a dollar or two in his guitar case helps him make his livelihood doing what he loves to do.

I am not, however, about to spend money on a monthly pass just to be a captive audience for Lottery commercials and Buster F'n Poindexter telling me all about how it's HOT HOT HOT.

I am seriously hoping this is just a test program, a pilot program, some kind of "hey let's see the reaction." If that's the case, then let the reaction be swift and let it be vituperative and angry. Trust me, you don't want this crap to listen to while you wait in frustration for a train that never comes.

Drop the T Radio, you goons, drop the loud ads and the "cha-ching! cha-ching!" lottery announcements and the music I avoid by not listening to Magic 106.7, and let the buskers do their thing.