Yes, you’d be wrong to assume that. “Charlie on the MTA” was written as a campaign song and has since become a staple drinking song in many bars, especially in the Boston area.
I’m twenty-eight, man. 
I’ve had a crash course this month in the new fare and card system, thanks to the benefits company I deal with through my employer. The shiny new Charlie Card they sent me in late December, supposedly loaded with the January pass I’d paid for out of payroll deduction, was not only not loaded with the pass but was completely unreadable and is a worthless scrap of crap. I learned this only when I boarded the first bus of the year on my way to work. (Nor did I have the $1.50 cash to pay my fare, but the driver took pity on me, thank Og.) After days of phone calls I finally got someone to admit that they should send me a new pass. More days of waiting and I finally got one on the 11th. That’s 6.5 days of me having to pay my own way even though I’d already paid for a pass. Fuckers.
And can you still bring a guest on with your pass on Sundays? Or did they take that little ray of sunshine away as well?
parents folkies? LOL…i remember one my dad’s friends used to play Charlie on the MBTA at our Thanksgivings.
So they really did name the card after the song?
I always wondered why she didn’t just toss the extra money through the window instead of passing him a sandwich. Great song, though.
No, but my father would say, “I raised you properly” in this sort of context.
Heard the Kingston Trio perform it live once. Game four of the ALCS in 2004, they did the Star-Spangled Banner and then they did MTA.
I’ve heard that at the time the song was composed, Scollay Square was the red light district. (Which makes the fact that they built that abomination of a City Hall there really, really funny.) Presumably she was having a good time without him.
It’s those little bits of local knowledge which will make my enjoyment of the song all the greater, the next time I play it.
Yup. As a matter of fact, the Kingston Trio performed the song at the press conference at which the governor announced the new card.
I personally hadn’t heard that Scollay Square was the Red Light District (but I’m not anything close to a Boston history expert), but it was definitely a poor neighborhood full of tenements and low-income residents. They tore it down and built city hall plaza/Government Center in the name of progress.
People under thirty may also have heard the Dropkick Murphys’ rollicking cover of the song, which is what gets stuck in my head.
No complaints from me about the Charlie card, but my company pays for it, and has paid for my T passes for years, and I ride the red line, so I’m basically spoiled rotten.
The local joke I’ve heard about the Scollay Sq/Government Center transformation was that they just swapped one lot of whores for another lot.
4.00 per round trip is just ridiculous. And that’s, of course, if you’re one of those people who likes to go between two locations in a day and not get off anywhere else. Ever. If you’re interested in getting on and off at-- God forbid-- multiple stops, you could rack up a small fortune. Frankly, it pisses me off that if I go two stops, get off, and then get back on fifteen minutes later, it will cost me twice as much as if I hadn’t gotten off at all. At least before you could play the system by making inbound a direct trip and getting off multiple times outbound.
What’s the gripe with the new gates? From the pictures, they look pretty much identical to London’s, which manage to accomodate huge numbers of passengers with few problems.
They are a little slower to respond than the London gates, IIRC, especially when exiting. Plus people don’t yet seem to realize that you need not wait for the gate to close before feeding in your ticket to enter. That will come with tim.
I think the main complaint, though, is that sometimes they just don’t open. Feed in your ticket or wave it at the sensor, the screen shows that it likes your pass but the gate doesn’t open.
Who are you, who is so wise in the ways of subways?
There are some who call me Tim.
They’re *ridiculously * slow, whether you know enough to put your card in before it closes or not. This is exacerbated by the fact that they’re much wider than the turnstiles, which allows for fewer of them per station. They fuck up traffic flow to a faretheewell.
And yeah, sometimes they just don’t open at all, even though your pass is valid. And sometimes, even funner, they close on you as you’re going through, smacking your shoulder surprisingly hard and knocking your coffee out of your hand.
They suck.
Ugh - that’s totally uncalled for. I’ll put up with a lot, but if they mess with my coffee…! :mad:
I heard that the MBTA adopted the new system 9gates, Chrley pass, etc.) in order to cut their labor costs-but that the Union forced them to keep the tollbooth clerks on the payroll! Another example of the chronic mismanagement of this sytem-going back 80+ years! Basically, the management is powerless-the union 9backed up by state politicians) dictates everything.
Actually, if the “tollbooth clerks” are still on the payroll, I’m guessing it’s as some sort of “customer service” position. Which is fine, because no one in their right mind wants a completely unmanned MBTA station, and I’m guessing that "fare collectors/customer service reps are cheaper to have at each station than MBTA police. Don’t let me distract you from your patented “9Unions 9Are 9Evil” rant though.
There are many things wrong with the MBTA, and the union may in fact be one of them, but I somehow doubt that if the union went away, the MBTA’s management would suddenly and magically be competent.
There was a discussion about the turnstiles in November on the Usenet group ne.transportation. Sean Sullivan said this:With this insight, I realized a common thread - the AFC gates failed to open when I was carrying shopping bags! Apparently when I’m putting a card through the AFC, the position of a dangling shopping bag is just right to interfere with the system.
So now I carefully stand behind the plane of the AFC gate’s front panel, put the card through, keep standing there while reaching over to collect my card. The gate has opened every time.I can’t vouch for his observations, as I rarely enter a turnstile with shopping bags, but he could be correct. I can only hope that the machines can be changed to make this clumsy procedure unnecessary.