MARTIN L

Author: Martin L

  • It’s the end of the year!

    Well no, it’s December 8th as I write this, but 2026 is almost around the corner. This however, is terrifying for a number of reasons:

    1. I am getting older. My stamina is weaker, sometimes I get back pain? No one told me getting older sucked 🙁
    2. I am still pretty young. My aunt and uncle thought I was like two years younger because I still get acne, so is life really that bad?
    3. I am still not living life that much. FOMO? I’ve heard of her and I still have it while simultaneously doing nothing. I stayed at home all day doing stuff and I think cooking and cleaning took up four hours of that. Kinda crazy!

    Overall, 2025 was not a great year for me, but 2026 will be amazing! I can’t say for sure but I will work on that. I also didn’t even go fall hiking this fall, kind of a flop if you ask me.

    This December, I hope to finish my series: MBTA thoughts before I forget them all, but I appreciate you for reading my words on text. If the sentences seem pretty rambly, it’s because I don’t read my paragraphs back and fix sentence structures.

  • series: MBTA – My experience on Commuter Rail

    This is Part 2 of series: MBTA, a collection of ideas on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.

    A “T” logo at Porter Station.

    When I visit new cities, I typically make it a point to visit a bunch of different transportation modes. Luckily for me, Boston is home to a plethora of transportation modes – from the famous T, there’s also buses, ferries, and the elusive Commuter Rail.

    For most tourists, there’s very little reason to ride Commuter Rail, especially since it’s evidently catered towards commuters, and not tourists. Nonetheless, I had the opportunity to ride Commuter Rail during my trip, as Apple Maps told me it would be slightly faster than taking the Red Line into Boston.

    My Experience

    Station

    Porter Station Commuter Rail Platform.

    Porter Station is a busy train hub for Porter Square residents, with local shopping and Lesley University nearby. It’s also home to the longest set of escalators on the T, which takes a solid two minutes to ride up to surface level. Although the Red Line station is grandiose in a brutalist-80’s type of way, the commuter rail station is a sad shack in comparison. Located below Massachusetts Avenue, the platform is your typical American commuter rail station, consisting of a couple of benches and a small shelter on the platform. The accessibility area was located right at the station entrance, which I really did like. There was also a direct connection to the Red Line station, which is great for transfers.

    Train Ride

    Digital Signage at MBTA Porter Station

    I took the Fitchburg Line, train #421 from Porter to North Station (1 stop). Mid-day, the train runs hourly from some Boston suburb to North Station, although I’d have to assume frequencies improve during rush hour. The train is scheduled to take 14 minutes to North Station, which is faster than the 30 minutes it would have taken to take the T.

    The fare system in Boston is wack, but in this case, my seven day pass covered the trip. Did you know that you can’t use CharlieCards (the Boston version of OMNY) on commuter rail? Once Charlie (the second-generation system) rolls out this should be possible, but it’s also the year 2025, and you could take regional trains using similar transit cards for the past 30 years now. You can validate your ticket using a CharlieTicket (a paper version of a CharlieCard that somehow has more capabilities despite being disposable) or mTicket.

    Inside the train carriage

    The train ride was pretty monotonous, but when the train pulled up, only the accessible door at the front opened for passengers? It was kinda strange since the trainset was five coaches long, but not a big deal. The northbound train came five minutes earlier, and all the passengers scattered around the platform had to run to the accessibility coach to get on board. I noticed that the doors were a manual set, very strange in 2025, but not unheard of (see Paris Metro).

    I’m not a train foamer, but the coach set used was a super old car, with a 3/2 seating configuration. The third seat looked like it was tacked on. I’m not going to lie, it was a bit strange, but the coach was pretty clean overall, albeit extremely dated. No bugs though, so what can you do. The train took the scheduled amount of time and was pretty monotonous.

    North Station

    When we got to North Station, we had to wait for the conductor to manually open the doors (still very strange to me). North Station is your standard terminal, with long platforms to the large waiting hall indoors. I like North Station because it’s connected to the Green and Orange lines, as well as TD Garden (I don’t care too much about hockey), but it’s great for concertgoers. The MBTA has also installed fare gates at North Station, which means commuters need to tag off at the gate. I like this a lot, because it increases fare compliance without the need to install gates at all of the stations.

    Final Thoughts

    Overall, I enjoyed my time on MBTA Commuter Rail, although the rolling stock is pretty bad. I would say it has really good bones, but I’m concerned if the MBTA could ever transition into a true regional-style rail system like the Paris RER. Commuter Rail ridership had the strongest recovery out of all the MBTA modes, so there’s plenty of potential for Greater Boston to rebuild its historic transit network.

    A Charlie reader on a MBTA Green Line train.

    It does have one major problem I hate, which is the fare ticketing system. The Commuter Rail does not support CharlieCard, and will also not support the next generation of fare payment, Charlie+. It baffles me that the networks are not integrated – seems like such a large oversight that doesn’t seem to have any particular reasoning. I understand it was originally supposed to support Charlie+, so I’m hoping that later rollouts will support Charlie+.

    Please watch out for Part 3 of series: MBTA, a collection of ideas on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.

  • Three reasons why you need to make Buffalo your next stop on a All-America trip

    This post has no affiliation with the following organizations: The Corporation for Travel Promotion d.b.a Brand USA, New York State Department of Economic Development (ILOVENY), Erie County Economic Development (Visit Buffalo!), City of Buffalo.

    The locals

    Buffalo is the “City of Good Neighbors”. It’s also the “Nickel City”, but I digress. The people in Buffalo are generally very good and welcoming, and there’s a surprisingly amount of diversity in the metro area. It’s a really great city if you want a place that fosters a sense of community.

    A city with a community

    One of the main draws of Buffalo is the fact that it’s still a city, with big city amenities. You still have your apartments, your walkable neighborhoods, your Apple Store. It even has its own subway. What it lacks however, is the big-city traffic you’ll find in most major cities. While it has that hustle and bustle, it doesn’t make you feel like you’re stuck in it.

    Proximity to Nature

    Buffalo is surprisingly a city very close to nature. You have Niagara Falls just 20 minutes away, but also a huge network of state parks in the region. South of Buffalo, you have access to rolling hills and mountains of the Appalachians. Lake Erie hugs the city, and there’s plenty of access points in the area, including the Outer Harbor, a lakefront retreat in the middle of Buffalo’s abandoned industrial past.

  • It’s okay to like Benson Boone.

    In a world full of weenies, I’m a Benson Booner. I love Benson Boone because he can do backflips and he lives life. IDK why y’all are hating when you don’t even have the arm strength or flexibility to do a back flip. Get back to me when you come up with a incredible ability to sing as a soprano.

    That being said, I’m not saying his discography isn’t bad. There’s some hidden gems, but most of his songs are bad. This doesn’t mean that HE should be disliked because he has done some amazing covers.

    At the end of the day, I am telling everyone to stop hating people because their discography sucks. Have a great day!

  • series: MBTA – Struggles of the Silver Line

    As a transit aficionado, my Roman Empire is the MBTA Silver Line. The Silver Line is a BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) that the MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority) tries to parade as a rapid transit line, despite the fact that it has five separate routes and runs almost half of it’s routing in mixed traffic. It even has dedicated space on the Subway map, and prominently features in signage at South Station, the MBTA’s busiest transit hub.

    Last week, I got the chance to finally fly into Boston’s Logan Airport, which meant I got the pleasure of taking the Silver Line into the city. The SL1 connects the airport to South Station for free, which was great for someone like me who forgot to bring their old CharlieCard from 2022.

    My Experience

    SL1 services all airport terminals, so it was easy to exit the baggage hall and straight to the Silver Line stop. Loved that! The Silver Line is supposed to come every 10 minutes at the time I wanted to take it, and although tracking said a bus would be coming in around 3 minutes it did end up taking 10. The boarding experience was smooth, all door boarding (because you don’t need to pay), and a lot of seating was taken out for luggage racks. Ridership was also pretty decent, the bus filled up by the time we got to the last terminal station.

    The bus then drives out of the airport and through the Ted Williams Tunnel, linking East Boston to the main city. The strangest part of the trip begins here: the bus takes the exit to Seaport District, Boston’s super strange gentrified yuppie neighborhood (please watch out for my note on whatever Seaport is), and proceeds to stop outside the World Trade Center Station. Pretty normal as of now, but it continues to drive a couple blocks eastward until it reaches a tunnel portal.

    Past the tunnel portal, the bus dips down into traffic at a speed I can only describe as treacherous. Despite having a completely enclosed pathway, the bus runs at what seems like a snail’s pace. Also, the bus stops AGAIN at World Trade Center, but this time underground? The bus then continues crawling through the Seaport District, making another brief stop at Courthouse before ending it’s trip at South Station. Overall, the trip took around 40 minutes, which was around 10 minutes longer than I was expecting. The connection with the Red Line was great though – just a set of stairs downwards to the subway.

    What I liked

    The Silver Line is ultimately still public transit infrastructure, and although it may be the world’s slowest underground busway, plenty of people still use it. Three lines run along this underground portion, and with pretty decent frequencies, you can expect a bus to show up every two minutes. The permeance of the infrastructure means that development in the area has sprung around the stops, although as of now it’s mostly just shops you’d find in any major luxury mall and offices.

    I also got to ride the Silver Line down to East Berkeley Street, which was just a regular bus, but it was a decently frequent bus! The Silver Line does have good frequencies on paper, which does make it a decently reliable link for riders. The fact that it’s just a bus also gives it more flexibility on future expansions, which are desperately needed in a city like Boston, where the population has grown by hundreds and thousands since the Silver Line opened with very few infrastructure projects to show for it.

    What i Disliked

    The Silver Line is a weird branding exercise for two completely separate bus line GROUPS: The Waterfront Lines (SL1 to 3) serve South Station to the Airport, Design Center, and Chelsea, while the Washington Street Lines (SL 4 and 5) were built to replace an old interurban railway line from Downtown to Nubian. The strangest part is that the two line groupings don’t really connect. They were supposed to connect as an extension of the transit tunnel from South Station down to South End, but with that project cancelled, the bus line exists in limbo. It makes no real sense to group all of these lines as “Silver Line” when they don’t even really operate as a proper line.

    Other than the existing criticisms of the line (it’s not really BRT!), the Silver Line seems to face a lot of surprising infrastructure creep: stations in the Seaport are built as colossal palaces of transit with very little ridership to show for it. The stations are much larger than pretty much every single MBTA subway station, despite there being very little need for a bus station designed for 100,000+ people. No real idea why they decided to build palaces instead of spending that money on building that downtown connection that is desperately needed for the Silver Line to be a proper bus service.

    On my way back to Logan Airport, I decided to take the Blue Line to the Airport instead, which somehow proved to be a much faster journey despite requiring a bus transfer. The Silver Line is not competitive coming from Downtown Boston since it still requires a fare, but it’s slower and requires a transfer for most users.

    What to do?

    Overall, the Silver Line is a great start to BRT, but it’s an inadequate service for the residents and visitors of Boston alike. Twenty plus years later, I’m not sure if it’s been able to keep up with the region’s growth. Despite it’s subway-like branding, it fails to meet up to the standards of rapid transit, and needs to be upgraded to better serve the marginalized and gentrified communities along it’s corridor.

    Learn more about the Silver Line at mbta.com.