by F-line to Dudley via Park
octr202 wrote:Based on 15-odd years occasional weekend Red Line experience (on the Alewife end), another consideration is that frankly they can use the six-car trains for a good chunk of Saturdays, if not even some times on Sundays. Don't know what the south end looks like, but the north end of the RL is pretty busy seven days a week. And when it's not packed to the gills, it's nice for folks to enjoy some of their trips at less than sardine-can conditions.This too. There are weekend ridership surges now where there didn't used to be. And not always stuff with an obvious point of origin, like a Sox matinee. Sometime's it's just inexplicably crowded for a whole Saturday afternoon, students being students, or some event so hyper-local it evades detection. So who at the T has to decide what event calendar in the city qualifies as "6-car worthy", and who has to be on-call at Cabot or Wellington to scramble some 6-car sets into service when they hit a few hours of random crowding they were caught unprepared for? Just having those contingencies set up costs money and requires too much guesswork they're likely to whiff on from time to time. So why bother when it's that fine a line to massage the cost/efficiency? Keep It Simple Stupid™, by keeping the train lengths consistent, and nobody has to play any guessing games about sudden influxes of people in a city that's known to get sudden influxes of people during non-commute hours.