From now through July 30, Red Line trains north of Park Street have screeched to a halt to make way for what the MBTA is calling “critical” infrastructure updates.
Tens of thousands of people ride the Red Line every day. And unless the portion of those riders with things to do from downtown to the tippy top of Cambridge have a better option, they’ll have to spend their journey on shuttle buses. They would be wise to budget lots of extra time.
Some have made peace with the sacrifices required of commuters under MBTA general manager Phil Eng’s strategy of fixing things on T lines in multiday flurries of work.
“I don’t have another choice,” said Mong Tsai, 55, who was en route to a government job in Downtown Crossing.
He wouldn’t exactly say he’s maintaining a positive attitude about the whole thing. “Neutral,” Tsai said.
Despite a public awareness campaign about the shutdown, many were still caught off guard Tuesday morning. Some sighed at the sight of sandwich boards breaking the news to them at Alewife, and pointed their phones at a QR code that sent them to a T alerts website explaining their options, including the shuttles, free commuter rail trips at Porter, and an express bus from Harvard to South Station.
In his haste, Doug McCalmont, 61, made it all the way to the barricaded Alewife turnstiles before he realized something was amiss.
“I’m running down the stairs and I’m like, ‘What’s this huge fence?’ ” he said.
It didn’t bug him too much, even if it disrupted the startup cofounder’s plans a bit to meet an adviser in Harvard Square.
“I appreciate that [Eng] is willing to grab the bull by the horns and just do what needs to be done,” McCalmont said. “First World problems, right? It’s a period of suffering, but I appreciate how he’s willing to put people through a short period of pain for the ultimate gain.”
Info about the shutdown for commuters on an Alewife bench.David L. Ryan/Globe Staff
T officials had warned commuters to expect to spend “at least 70 minutes“ aboard them.
On Tuesday, results seemed to be varying.
A Globe producer who set off around 7 a.m. from Alewife to Park Street arrived in 80 minutes.
Another Globe staffer — this one — took the same trip at about 9:10 a.m., and didn’t arrive on the sidewalk outside the Park Street station until more than two hours later.
Mike Korocinski, 57, didn’t anticipate any of this when he and his 9-year-old lab-chow mix Blossom set off on what he thought would be a quick jaunt to Davis Square for some errands on a day off.
“Seeing all this traffic reminds me why I usually get to work at 7,” said Korocinski, who said he works in biotech at a company in Watertown, as the shuttle bus idled on Alewife Brook Parkway.
The presence of his amiable rust-colored pup on the bus was a welcome one for Jessica Duserick, 30, who reached over from her seat and scratched the dog on the nose. Korocinski covertly passed her a little round treat, which Blossom licked out of her hand.
“This is my therapy for the delay,” said Duserick, who said she was on a journey to Massachusetts General Hospital, where she works in digital pathology.
The bus took 30 minutes to make it one stop’s distance, to Davis Square.
From there, commuters endured their shuttle rides in a resigned silence, scrolling e-readers and smartphones as Cambridge inched painfully slowly by the windows.
The calm was broken at the stop near Porter station by a commotion in the rear.
One of the seats had come unlatched from the tracks holding it in place and was sliding forward and backward. Four strangers tried working the levers at the seat’s base to secure it, and despite the ker-thunk ker-thunk of their efforts, had no luck. The seat, empty even as the bus became standing-room-only, bumped gently against the knees of the two men sitting behind it as the bus accelerated.
“Not ideal,” said Nicholas Graca, 28, who works in IT, and was trying to lend a hand.
This was not the way Graca had planned to spend his morning.
He had hopped off the commuter rail at Porter, he said, expecting to take the Red Line three stops to his office in Kendall Square. Then he tried to rent a Bluebike, but there were none. Now here he was jiggling a loose seat on a shuttle bus.
“If this improves the Red Line then it should be worth it, I hope,” Graca said.
It was 10:02 a.m.
It was 10:55 a.m. by the time the bus crossed the Longfellow Bridge to Boston.
As the journey ended around 11:15 a.m., Matthew Taylor, 24, stepped off in downtown Boston, on his way to a Starbucks in Back Bay, where he’s a manager. He hadn’t planned to be on the Red Line Tuesday and didn’t know it was shut down.
“It happens,” Taylor said, standing on the sidewalk, even as he wondered if all of this was worth the hassle. “It’s a very old train system, so it does need to get worked on. But there has to be a better way.”
Red Line shuttle buses queued up at the Alewife stop Tuesday.David L. Ryan/Globe Staff
Spencer Buell can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @SpencerBuell.
