Free Republic

Hundreds of people armed with shovels met at the Old Bayside Expo at 7 a.m. on Tuesday morning to help dig out the city’s subway. The MBTA put out the call to unions over the weekend, saying that they needed people with shovels to dig out parts of the Red and Orange Lines. Three hundred people showed up and were paid about $30 an hour. […] The MBTA hasn’t been advertising the temporary shovel jobs or tell us how much they're willing to spend. […] The MBTA is also using prison inmates to help clear the tracks. …

Dan Grabauskas has to be one of the luckiest men on the planet. Grabauskas, a Republican who was appointed MBTA general manager by then-Gov. Mitt Romney in 2005, was fired by Deval Patrick, a Democrat, on politically trumped-up charges when Patrick became governor in 2009. That firing paved the way for Patrick to take over the MBTA and eventually hire the snowstorm-challenged Beverly Scott, who resigned last week following the crippling of MBTA rail, subway and bus service.

The head of Boston's transit agency has abruptly quit her $220,000-a-year job after the closure of the area's transport service for more than 24 hours twice in the last fortnight. Beverly Scott, 63, general manager of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, announced her resignation in a letter to the board. She gave little explanation for her reasoning, but said she would work until April 11 to enable a smooth transition. In her resignation letter she said: 'During these past two years-plus, it has been an absolute pleasure and honor to serve with and lead this dedicated team of transit professionals...

MBTA General Manager Beverly Scott jetted off at taxpayer expense nearly every month during her two-plus-year tenure — sometimes several times a month — to conferences and meetings around the country, even as the troubled transit system was collapsing around her, a Herald review shows. A review of Scott’s monthly expense reports provided by the MBTA as part of public records request shows she spent 106 days traveling out of state while at the helm of the T, taking 30 trips in 24 months. During that time, Scott, who announced yesterday she’s stepping down in April, racked up $56,753 in...

BOSTON (CBS) — Beverly Scott is resigning as MBTA general manager, the transportation agency said Wednesday afternoon. The MBTA had suspended rail service Monday night and Tuesday to clear snow from its tracks amid a record-setting period of snowfall in the Boston area. Gov. Charlie Baker and others had criticized the MBTA for its lackluster performance during the extreme snow and cold.

BOSTON — Rebekah Adelstone usually drives to work, which takes 15 minutes. Since record snows have fallen, she has not wanted to risk losing her precious parking spot, so she has taken a bus to the subway. But on Tuesday, after even more snow fell, the subway system was shut down. So she ended up taking two buses to work, and her commute stretched to two hours. Her ordeal was typical of many residents, who soldiered through the more than six feet of snow that has piled up in the last 17 days. With no chance to melt, the snows...

A Chinese government-owned rail company was awarded a $566.6 million Massachusetts state contract on Wednesday to build subway trains for the "T," the nation's oldest subway system, despite concerns from local activists about China's human rights record as well as complaints from competitors that the company's winning bid was unrealistically low. The Massachusetts Department of Transportation's board of directors voted unanimously to approve a contract with CNR MA Corporation to build 284 new subway cars. The new cars are needed to replace the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority's 32-year-old Orange Line trains and the 44-year-old Red Line cars that serve the...

It's not lost on me that I find myself just a stone's throw from Boston Harbor where the greatest of wars -- the fight for freedom and individual rights -- broke out here in 1774. Nowhere, at no time, has there been a more righteous of cause in the history of humankind. Then, as today, an out-of-control government took outrageous and egregious actions against our most basic individual rights -- and in this case, the most precious of all freedoms, the freedom of speech. Today Robert Spencer and I went to court in Boston. David Yerushalmi and Robert Muise represented...

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority said Friday it would restore advertisements criticizing Israel that had been removed after a rash of complaints from the public. The ads, which appeared throughout the transit system, depict four maps that purport to show “the Palestinian loss of land” to Israel between 1946 and 2010. Text alongside the maps says: “4.7 million Palestinians are Classified by the UN as Refugees.”

More than one-third of MBTA employees getting pensions retired before the age of 55 and a thousand-plus left in their 40s, according to a Herald review of a massive database that was finally released yesterday after a series of stories that challenged the T retirement board’s refusal to disclose the payouts. A Herald review of the database showed: • More than half of the 6,300-plus people listed in the database retired before the age of 60, and 35 percent — or 2,240 — left before 55. •   Another 1,129 retirees, or 17 percent of the system, opted out in their 40s....

BELMONT, Mass. — A woman and her two children, ages 7 and 10, narrowly escaped serious injury when a train smashed into their minivan after a GPS device led the driver onto MBTA train tracks Tuesday night. The woman was driving southbound on Brighton Street shortly before 9 p.m. when the GPS device directed her to make a right turn which placed her vehicle directly onto railroad tracks. Apparently the woman was unable to drive off the tracks, forcing her to flee the vehicle with her children. Shortly thereafter, an MBTA Fitchburg bound commuter rail train carrying 70 passengers slammed...

A former T bus supervisor drove T vehicles for five years with a suspended driver’s license — a clear violation of the authority’s rules — the Herald has learned. Kevin Graney, 60, was allowed to retire in March from his $86,000-a-year job, one month after the MBTA suspended the 20-year veteran because he lacked a valid driver’s license, the T said. Former co-workers told the
Herald that among Graney’s job 
responsibilities was disciplining and term­inating bus drivers when they lost their licenses for more than 100 days.

BOSTON — A 44-year-old woman has become the latest person to walk off the platform of an MBTA station. The incident happened at Andrew Station on the Red line. According to T officials, the woman did not make contact with the third rail when she landed in the pit. There was no train in the area.

MBTA Transit Police have arrested a man and two women for allegedly beating and kicking a mentally disabled man on the Downtown Crossing Station Orange Line platform early Monday, officials said Tuesday. Authorities said Carlito Rezende, of Dorchester, a 40-year-old man with schizoaffective disorder who has a restricted ability to communicate with people, injected himself into a conversation he overheard, telling a group of people not to use the word “hate.”

A 29-year veteran transit cop is facing disciplinary action for dozing on the job while posted at a substation serving the Mattapan high speed line and Blue Hill Avenue buses, according to MBTA police. Transit Police staff discovered a picture of the sleeping officer posted on Twitter last night around 9:40 p.m. and immediately dispatched a supervisor to the station located on River Street in Mattapan, said Deputy Transit Police Chief Joseph O’Connor. “When the supervisor got there minutes later he found the officer alert and attending to his duties,” O’Connor said. “The officer, who regularly staffed the front desk...

For nearly a decade, traffic has been zipping through Boston’s Big Dig tunnels, the nation’s costliest highway project that has also left a gaping financial hole in the state’s transportation budget that isn’t likely to be filled anytime soon. "Big Dig debt" has lately become one of the most frequently used—if not fully understood—terms in Massachusetts government. It was at the forefront of a tumultuous public debate over the MBTA’s finances that ultimately produced an average 23 percent fare hike and modest service cuts, but no permanent solutions for the chronically underfunded transit system. Next year, it could spark a...

Squatting on steps to protest MBTA vote Occupy Boston is back — but without the tents this time — in a threatened 10-day sit-in on the State House steps to protest looming MBTA fare hikes. An offshoot of the group that camped in Dewey Square for 71 days last year until cops broomed them said there will be no canvas this time, just people squatting out in the weather, in the shadow of the Golden Dome. But the cold granite steps already have a name: “Camp Charlie.” “It’s really a 10-day -occupation,” Occupy Boston spokesperson Gunner Smith said about the...

BOSTON — As Transportation Secretary Richard Davey sees it, commuters faced with sharp increases in the cost of rail, bus and subway rides, as well as the elimination of bus routes, ferry service, weekend commuter rail and weekend E Line subway access, have settled on a theme. “The chorus I’m hearing is, 'I would rather pay more but not cut the service,’” Davey said Thursday at the State House. That message was echoed by lawmakers who said their constituents and colleagues had largely indicated that riders would rather be slapped with the first fare hike in five years than with...

The MBTA dispatcher who added some unauthorized holiday cheer to Park Street Station by programming the message boards to display the lyrics to “Deck the Halls” will likely receive the T’s most modest form of discipline when he returns to work this afternoon. “While I appreciate what they were trying to do, we’ll just remind the employee that in the future we’ll expect that he’ll resist the temptation to use the signs in that way,” state Secretary of Transportation Richard A. Davey said in an interview this morning. The unnamed employee has become a hero on Twitter since the Globe...

It looked like the gentlest MIT prank of all time: The lyrics to “Deck the Halls,” dancing across the digital message board at Park Street Station, to the delight of Red Line riders on Christmas night. It was not an outside hack, though, but an inside job. An MBTA dispatcher working the holiday shift injected a bit of unauthorized whimsy into the normally staid LED signs at Park Street. He programmed them to scroll the lyrics to the carol four times in five minutes Sunday night, before, mirage-like, they resumed their ordinary display of date, time, and the T logo....