I know that you're going to think I'm a bit sad, but I've been recording the train arrival times at Park Street on my way home from work for the last couple of months, for the benefit of those awful bigheads on the b0st0n community (and please remind me to edit this bit out before I cross-post this there). Basically, the Green Line is split off into four sections designated by letter, and everyone thinks that their train is always the last to arrive. So I've been putting this together to see what really happens - as you'll be able to see, my travel time back from work is fairly arbitrary, so hopefully this will give a decent impression of train times across the evening. My train is the C-line.

Date									Arrived	Left At	Waiting
26 Sept 2007	B	D	E	C					19:00	19:08	00:08
x:fmla="=A2+1">27 Sept 2007	D	B	D	D	E	C			18:45	18:58	00:13
x:fmla="=A3+1">28 Sept 2007	C								19:11	19:12	00:01
01 October 2007	B	D	B	C					18:56	19:03	00:07
x:fmla="=A5+1">02 October 2007	D	C							18:52	18:55	00:03
04 October 2007	D	B	C						19:20	19:26	00:06
x:fmla="=A7+1">05 October 2007
06 October 2007	B	D	C						19:07	19:13	00:06
09 October 2007	C								18:55	18:56	00:01
x:fmla="=A10+1">10 October 2007	E	B	C						19:10	19:13	00:03
11 October 2007	B	D	C						19:22	19:26	00:04
12 October 2007
15 October 2007	B	E	C						19:03	19:05	00:02
16 October 2007	C								18:59	19:12	00:13
17 October 2007	E	C							19:15	19:18	00:03
18 October 2007	B	D	E	C					19:25	19:31	00:06
19 October 2007	B	D	E	B	C				19:36	19:42	00:06
22 October 2007	C								19:06	19:07	00:01
23 October 2007	D	E	D	B	C				18:53	18:58	00:05
24 October 2007	C								19:08	19:11	00:03
25 October 2007	D	D	B	C					19:20	19:26	00:06
26 October 2007	D	B	E	C					20:04	20:12	00:08
29 October 2007	B	C							19:20	19:24	00:04
31 October 2007	D	C							17:24	17:28	00:04
01 November 2007	B	E	D	C					19:26	19:32	00:06
02 November 2007	D	C							19:22	19:27	00:05
05 November 2007	C								21:18	21:21	00:03
06 November 2007	B	D	B	C					19:11	19:18	00:07
07 November 2007	C								19:05	19:05	00:00
08 November 2007	C								18:49	18:50	00:01
09 November 2007	B	C							19:33	19:40	00:07
10 November 2007	B	C							19:36	19:38	00:02
13 November 2007
14 November 2007	B	D	B	B	E	D	D	C	18:49	19:00	00:11
15 November 2007	D	B	C						18:15	18:20	00:05
27 November 2007	C								18:37	18:39	00:02
28 November 2007	D	C							19:19	19:22	00:03
29 November 2007	E	B	D	B	C				19:15	19:22	00:07
30 November 2007	C								19:02	19:03	00:01
03 December 2007	C								20:13	20:13	00:00
04 December 2007	E	B	C						19:58	20:06	00:08
05 December 2007	B	E	C						19:01	19:04	00:03
06 December 2007	D	B	E	C					19:18	19:21	00:03

I apologize for the utter abominability of the table HTML, but Excel spits it out like that and it's rather difficult to go through and correct. Basically, from this lot, several things are apparent...

1. The rotation of trains is actually remarkably fair - 32 times out of 40, none of the other trains arrived twice while I was waiting.


2. Similarly, C arrived first 11 times out of 40. That seems fair enough to me.


3. Everyone thinks the B train arrives more than the others, and this seems to be right (it arrived first 14 times out of 40) - this is logical because that line has a stop every four inches and it takes hours to get to the other end. It's not a huge difference, though - both C and D are close behind with 11 first arrivals each.


4. The E-train passengers are the ones who should be annoyed, as their train arrived first only four times so far, and has never arrived twice while I've been waiting.


5. The longest I've ever been waiting was 13 minutes, during the times when the train is stuffed with people in red shirts going to watch the baseball, and the average wait for me is just under five minutes.

So in conclusion, we've really nothing to complain about. Apart from those three mysterious gaps you see in the table - those are the times when the red line train failed completely and I never got to Park Street at all. (Once because of a small fire in a bin, the second time because of a "police investigation" at Kendall, and the third time because I just couldn't stand it any more.)







But we've now reached winter again, and I'm anticipating the T having as many problems with a millimetre-thick layer of snow on the line and some slight dampness as they did last year. I'll make sure to keep this going and see if there's as much of a difference as I think. Of course, they try to reassure us that everything is all right in their adverts (this one from a billboard a couple of years ago).

It could be just me, but I don't think that they noticed the tone that I get from that advert - doesn't it seem that the model is actually trying to hold back laughter at looking at the claim that the T's winter schedule is in any way reliable? Additionally, the train is on the right hand line, which means that it's actually leaving rather than arriving (something all too common in the mornings when five trains limp past in the wrong direction for you before the first one you saw comes back). The rather large chasm between this and what actually happens was enough to convince people that the MBTA were in fact living in an alternate reali-T.