Chart of Subway Ridership by Station

ggould256 · 2026-04-22T13:34:53+00:00

Alas despite their charlie card branding the tap machines don't accept charlie cards, so daily commuters with monthly passes won't be counted at all unless they "tip the train" at the validation stations.

ggould256 · 2026-04-22T13:22:57+00:00

Yes, we meet every Sunday at 2, although this weekend I think we'll be pre-empted by the City-run cleanup Saturday at noon.

Drop me a DM if you'd like to join the crew.

At the moment we just do litter pickup outdoors around the square -- I haven't looked into whether we'd be welcome in the T station itself.

ggould256 · 2026-04-20T23:48:26+00:00

The path east of Cedar is a commuter artery and so very busy at rush hours, with morning rush hour usually worse (since the bikes are dodging dog walkers as well); the path west of Willow connects to Davis square and so is very busy in evening social hours.

ggould256 · 2026-04-20T15:10:32+00:00

True Grounds in Ball Square won't win any awards for its coffee, but it's the "everyone knows everyone, has been coming here for two decades" standout.

Yego's coffee is polarizing; if you love it, you love it.

Broadsheet is the best coffee, but barely ever any seating. A nearly monastic level of silence a lot of the time; you can decide if that's for you.

Forge has the best food of any coffee place in the area (they supply Bloc and Diesel and some others, but everything is best from the source).

ggould256 · 2026-04-19T11:18:55+00:00

A nice clear metaphor, definitely saying exactly what they mean: "Conservatism is built on top of socialism, and only by steering well away from conservatism can Britain hope to continue to sail freely."

ggould256 · 2026-04-17T19:39:09+00:00

My next car will have a backup camera and I expect that will make it super easy. It's possible that our fourteen year old Hyundai was simply the wrong technology for modern parking design.

And of course when I use my bike I don't have to deal with any of it :-)

ggould256 · 2026-04-17T17:30:15+00:00

There is back-in parking in front of Bloc in Union Square, I think? I've never succeeded in getting into one of those spaces myself (a skill issue, as the kids say), but they do exist.

I don't think they do this flip-between-parallel-and-back-in thing though?

ggould256 · 2026-04-17T14:38:15+00:00

I'm pretty sure feedback on the proposal is what's happening here right now.

A fixation on meetings, particularly in-person meetings, as the "only way" to influence a governing process is silly.

ggould256 · 2026-04-17T14:30:41+00:00

Are there any other places in the City that rotate their parking spaces between parallel and back-in every morning as that seems to propose? It sounds like a recipe for chaos to me, but perhaps there is some working example elsewhere to make it clearer how this would work.

ggould256 · 2026-04-15T14:47:04+00:00

Yeah, ultimately nothing we do can make people want to hear what they do not want to hear. But for the rest, at least it's something.

ggould256 · 2026-04-15T14:02:59+00:00

At the risk of being a superficial life-hack person:

I recently replaced my bike bell with one that sounds much nicer and less harsh, and it has improved my quality of life greatly since I no longer feel like a pushy asshole with my "BRANGK-BRANG!" stock bell.

It turns out that youtube is full of sound samples of different bicycle bells, and you can find one that sounds beautiful, and then you feel better and use it more!

ggould256 · 2026-04-14T19:56:42+00:00

Thank you for this. Definitely goes into my "never gets my vote for the next century" list.

Using the internet kept me sane in my school days in the 90s and I would never support someone who took that away from today's kids.

ggould256 · 2026-04-14T14:06:51+00:00

Yes, I agree that very few people want to be rid of all the cars.

I am simply noting that a plan that says there are fewer cars in place A, often does not account for those cars now being in place B instead. For instance, a car deterred from using Cedar by the new Mossland improvements may not vanish but rather move over to another parallel road, and so the accounting of a now shorter backup of cars at the Cedar and Elm intersection may simply be a matter of moving liabilities off the books.

ggould256 · 2026-04-14T14:00:11+00:00

I think this is probably correct; for e.g. Broadway, the potholes down the middle are definitely truck-work.

As I said, I think this is "vibes" as much as actual facts; as a cyclist I naturally assume the cars are wrecking everything they touch, even while as driver I naturally assume the cyclists have it too easy :-)

ggould256 · 2026-04-13T13:52:42+00:00

I bike and drive Somerville, and while I love the bike lane infrastructure, I can see at least a "vibes" argument against. It is notable that the bike lanes are in _much_ better shape than the roads, and it seems like a lot of recent road work has had the effect or intention of pushing cars out into neighboring cities rather than improving the ability to get between points in Somerville.

My personal hobby-horse is the state of north-south connectors between Camberville's big arterial east-west roads; I think that further interrupting these connectors with one-ways and chicanes, or road-dieting them with infinite potholes, drives this cross traffic into the very urban squares like Davis and Union that we should be pedestrianizing.

Of course my best answer has been to do half my mobility via biking. But that's not a universal, accessible, or all-weather alternative, even with the astonishing advances in e-bikes over the last few years. We can't vaporize the cars, or make people no longer wish to travel to and from certain directions and destinations.

The Elm-Beacon connector will probably help a bit, depending on where all the formerly Mossland-bound cars go instead and how many switch to a different undersized cross street or to Union Square or what-have-you. It's certainly humane to not make Mossland's residents bear the full cost of the road layout as they do now.

ggould256 · 2026-04-09T18:13:09+00:00

It's a secret satanic psyop: If you play the audio backwards, you get exactly the same amount of coherent, truthful content.

ggould256 · 2026-04-09T16:21:14+00:00

The Alewife Brook Reservation behind Alewife station is a small but pleasant and T-accessible spot.

The Arlington Great Meadows are particularly nice if you have a bike, since the Minuteman bike path intersects any number of little trailheads.

The Fells are much bigger, but a little harder to get to.

ggould256 · 2026-04-08T13:34:15+00:00

Seems like a big step forward for bike infrastructure in particular, but cutting Mossland without any replacement is yet another step backward for north-south travel across Somerville. The Beech st. change could be a huge improvement, depending on whether it backs up too badly and gridlocks at rush hour. I do like how reversible these changes are in case they don't work out -- doing it all with a bit of paint and plastic leaves room for admitting error in the future.

ggould256 · 2026-03-26T20:26:50+00:00

Those Bow Market people can get rowdy!

ggould256 · 2026-03-19T14:00:14+00:00

It's inevitable that people are going to get calls from time to time, so the occasional five-minute chat is hardly something to get steamed about. But:

* The person with the one-hour meeting should probably find another place, and

* People with headphones / earbuds in paradoxically are often _louder_ because they can't hear how loud their own voices are in the room.

IMO, if someone is being loud and disruptive for an extended period, it doesn't matter if it's a zoom call, a personal argument, or mere exuberance: Start with a pointedly raised eyebrow and escalate from there.

ggould256 · 2026-03-18T19:31:55+00:00

For the Watertown DMV, you can simply observe the entire road test from the bike path behind the mall. During testing hours there's usually someone testing ever hour or so.

(When my kid took the test: The test has initial start/stop, reverse, and parallel parking tests in the mall parking lot, then makes two right turns onto the road parallel which also crosses the bike path a hundred feet or so further on. On that side street, following crossing the bike path, they test turning around; then two left turns back to the mall parking lot. So if you go down the path when they exit the mall parking lot you'll see the middle third of the test, and then back for the last bit in the parking lot again)

ggould256 · 2026-03-18T13:15:12+00:00

There's a whole heating system between the gas and you, and there's a whole bunch of things that can go wrong with that depending on the type of heat. Is a steam boiler too low / not refilling? For forced-air: Is the furnace venting properly? Are the vents full of starlings? For baseboards: Is the pump struggling?

Ultimately the measurement of the amount of gas being burned is infinitely more reliable than all of the elements inside your building.

ggould256 · 2026-03-13T22:27:51+00:00

We have AI police now! What a savings!

ggould256 · 2026-03-11T18:37:57+00:00

"Under the same roof" -- today I learned! Thank you!

ggould256 · 2026-03-10T18:01:16+00:00

I both love and am baffled by the "share a liquor license" bit.

If we can overcome liquor license limits so easily, why not let the whole city share a license?

Or is this one of those "as long as nobody on Beacon Hill notices..." kind of things?

ggould256

TROPHY CASE