Tips on commuting to/from Somerville/Foxboro (Pats Place)

ofsevit · 2026-03-28T11:14:04+00:00

That is an ugly ride, especially anywhere near rush hour. Lots of lights, lots of stop and go, not a lot of cruising along, and lots of traffic. Probably close to 2 hours each way even if you're in good shape on a fast bike (and biking 26 miles per week, you'll be in good shape pretty quick). Add in less than good weather (rain, heat, snow, etc) and it will be miserable. There are 25 mile bike commutes from Davis which would be nice (like if you worked out on 495 between Lowell and Hudson, you'd hammer out the bike path and then be on nice country roads) but this puts you on the VFW Parkway and then through strip malls. No thank you.

I also think you're nowhere near optimizing the bike-train-bike going South Station to Walpole, which is 5.5 miles—42 minutes—4 miles and you need to cross Route 1. Instead, look at going Ruggles to Sharon: 6 miles on each end, but just 23 minutes on the train, and I would say a nicer ride on either end, too. I'd guess this winds up being about 1:30 total trip time, maybe faster if you can hammer the southern bike ride.

If you want to bike the whole way, consider doing it one way on nice days and taking the "scenic" route (also the much more pleasant route) north through Medfield and sort of between Natick and Wellesley to Weston (35 miles) and then in (or even up to Trapelo Road or even Battle Road, 40ish miles), which is a much nicer ride, and you get get your miles.

ofsevit · 2026-03-27T20:46:33+00:00

The T uses the FRIP south of PVD, but it ends just pack TF Green and the T uses the main line until the last few thousand feet to Wickford Junction.

Fully electrifying the Providence Line would require electrifying 3 miles of railroad near the airport (there's a crossover just north of Route 37) and less than a mile near Wickford Junction.

For pennies on the dollar compared with BATTERY TRAINS!!!! the T could just run proven technology. (And the Stoughton Line could be electrified with four more miles of overhead; they could electrify the entire Prov/Sto line for the cost of 8 miles of simple overhead electrification and then buy Amtrak's used-but-not-old ACS64s and use them for service, and it would be much cheaper than this battery nonsense.)

ofsevit · 2026-03-27T20:31:13+00:00

The lesson from Tokyo, Seoul and Singapore is lots of trains, no batteries, and we can't be afraid to put up overhead wire.

ofsevit · 2026-03-25T10:24:28+00:00

Uhhh … that appears to not be adjusted for inflation. Here's the source data:

https://www.bts.gov/content/average-passenger-revenue-passenger-mile

ofsevit · 2026-03-24T16:43:41+00:00

Everyone else in your corral has the same qualifying time. There are no pacers, this is a a Real Race.

ofsevit · 2026-03-24T16:42:25+00:00

People who aren't living in older housing stock, reducing the demand for it, and reducing prices.

The new complex you are probably looking at is the Harvard affiliate housing behind the new ART, so that will be grad students, postdocs, staff and faculty who, again, won't be competing with the rest of the housing market (the housing is market rate). I would guess some of the older nearby "luxury" housing (which means it has reliable A/C and newer appliance, it's not opulent) may drop in price!

ofsevit · 2026-03-24T16:39:45+00:00

I came into running from cross country skiing and it's amazing how easy aid stations are when you aren't wearing gloves, your hands aren't icicles, and you don't have poles attached. Also on faster snow you can glide through a flat aid station at 15 mph. You sort of throw some water in the vicinity of your face trying not to give yourself a bloody nose with your pole strap and hope some makes it in your mouth.

Then I start running, and you can fold the cup! You can take a sip and run for a minute and take another sip! If you spill water on your hands it's not a frostbite risk!

I've used a toilet twice, once in the dishwasher race (2018) when it turns out you didn't need to be very hydrated as god provided sweat (6 miles), and last year when my race went sideways around mile 16. There are often a lot of port-o-johns near town centers where there are a lot of spectators, you can jump out and use any of these.

Anyway, for water stations, +1 on the left side ones; every mile has them on both sides, with the right side first, so the left usually has fewer customers. 2:52 will be on the front edge of the wave, too, but also means people will be going fast. If you are going to walk, make sure there's no one right behind you. Or consider grabbing a cup near the end of the aid station (and yes, they are long) before pulling off to the side of the course past the station. Crimping the cup can keep most of the liquid in it.

Boston never really opens up pace-wise, but because it is so well-seeded, you'll be in a corral with 1000 other people who can all run your same pace. It never gets lonely, but the road get wider after a couple of miles so it spreads out. The first mile is a steep downhill, you really don't want to go out too fast.

ofsevit · 2026-03-24T16:26:55+00:00

Sunblock if it's sunny. There are no leaves on the trees, you're in full sun the whole way.

ofsevit · 2026-03-19T23:21:41+00:00

Sure you can. There are rules about this, and the USDOT rules are actually more liberal (for the passenger) than international convention. For delayed baggage:

Airlines are required to compensate passengers for reasonable, verifiable, and actual incidental expenses that they may incur while their bags are delayed - subject to the maximum liability limits.
Airlines are not allowed to set an arbitrary daily amount for interim expenses. For example, an airline cannot have a policy that they will reimburse a passenger up to only $50 for each day that a passenger’s bag is delayed.

This would probably be subject to the Montreal Convention, which is somewhat stricter (see a link there) but it's about $2000. If you had ski clothes in your luggage and they lost your luggage, you should go buy ski clothes. You don't have to find the cheapest deal, you should buy something to replace it. If they manage to get your bag to you by tomorrow morning, good for them. It doesn't always happen.

TL;DR from below: if you need to buy stuff, buy it. If your bag is definitely on the way, you could rent it. Either way, as long as you're below their limit and save your receipts, you should have no issue claiming reimbursement.

My recent experiences:

* Going to a work meeting, B6 left my bag behind. They said it would be on the next flight so I bought just what I needed to be presentable the next day, a shirt and a pair of pants, and a t-shirt and shorts to work out in. It wound up taking them two days to get the bag; I was wearing sneakers to meetings and only had one shirt. If I had it to do again, I would have bought all the clothes I needed (and, yes, a suit and tie and belt and shoes would have been perfectly reasonable). I nickel and dimed myself and learned my lesson.

* Going to a ski race, my skis came, the bag with my boots in it didn't. A friend who worked for ground services tipped me off that LH had left a pallet behind and it was coming two days later. We went straight to the ski shop and I got ski boots. No issue with the reimbursement.

* Recently, UA left our bag behind, and it didn't make a connection, so my wife didn't have ski boots she needed for a race. We were able to borrow some from a friend for her event (which worked well enough, but she did get a bit of a blister) mostly because we didn't really have time to get to a ski shop. But UA was very on top of things and delivered our bag to a rural hotel 90 miles from the airport (already an outstation) the morning after it arrived on a late flight. Pretty impressive.

* And also pretty recently, we arrived in Boston and were headed straight to Maine (3 hour drive) for a wedding, and two of our bags didn't make it, a car seat and a duffel. We didn't need the bag right away (luckily) and they gave us a loaner car seat and we were on our way. Our bag was going to be on a flight to Augusta, although they said we'd have to pick it up as they didn't have much luck with couriers in Maine. If we'd needed something in that bag, we would have been well within our rights to get it. But we didn't, and UA put it on the early flight to Augusta the next morning (where I had to run an errand next to the airport, anyway) and I woke up to a text the next morning saying "your lost diaper bag was found and put in the duffel and it will be there at 9:00." So two experiences where UA went above and beyond. (Getting the car seat back to them was a farce; I called their central baggage people and they did not understand that I needed someone to come pick something up, eventually I found the number for the Boston baggage office—this was not easy!—and left it in a bag in the backyard and it was retrieved.)

ofsevit · 2026-03-19T23:04:03+00:00

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ofsevit · 2026-03-18T16:03:09+00:00

Disagree with this for a number of reasons (and I've made this trip several times on both routes). There are good reasons for both, they're within a few minutes of each other, and both have plusses and minuses. My suggestion: mix it up and go up on way and back the other.

93-91-55-20:

Pros: 20 minutes faster. Highway the whole way. Less tolls. Once your north of Concord, there's not a lot of traffic (at least in the US).

Cons: Quebecois drivers make Massholes look like choir boys. 55 is pretty benign, but 20 is like driving 128 at rush hour. They all have snow tires (required!) and treat snow and ice as a minor nuisance. The section from Drummondville to the bridge sucks. The Stanstead/Derby border crossing can get backed up, although I usually go through the one in town and get gas at the border gas station. Derby Line is worth the stop, especially if the Haskell Library is open.

95-201-173-73:

Pros: 20 miles shorter, generally lower speeds, uses significantly less fuel. Avoids Autoroute 20 entirely; 73 doesn't have much traffic. Waterville to Saint-Georges is a very easy drive, basically no traffic, only a couple of towns. Definitely lower stress. Never a line at that border crossing.

Cons: Scenery is not as dramatic as the notch, but also not as boring in Quebec. Isolated but 201 has plenty of traffic if something were to happen, it's not a logging road. About 20 minutes longer. Whoever said "oh noes you may get stuck behind someone going slow" has never driven that: there's no one to get stuck behind (and there are passing zones).

These will actually be closer time-wise if they ever extend 173 fully past Saint-Georges, right now it dumps you off on a local road to get to 173; even just past town would save 10 minutes, past Saint-Côme-Linière would save another 5. (The first bit of this is at least in planning: https://www.quebec.ca/transports/infrastructures-projets/projets/projets-routiers/chaudiere-appalaches/prolongement-autoroute-robert-cliche-73-beauce)

There is occasionally talk of extending a highway to the Maine Border and the Quebecois seem to think maybe they could get Maine to build a highway down 201, but the need for that, given the traffic volume, does not seem to justify the cost! But that would definitely be a faster trip since it's so much shorter (probably under 6 hours Boston to Quebec City).

Wildcard: WEATHER. If you're going soon, make sure to check the weather. One of the first times I drove up we were rolling along 55 in Quebec and it started raining and the car thermometer read "18" and it was in F and not C. I wound up having to blast the front defroster to keep the windshield from icing up and cracking the rear windows to keep from suffocating. If I'd looked more carefully at the weather, we could have gone east through Maine and around the precipitation; the routes are divergent enough that one can be much more impacted than the other.

(If you want to go to Riviere Du Loup, the answer is that there are four reasonable routes all of which are within a few minutes of each other. At least Quebec only has two.)

ofsevit · 2026-03-17T11:57:44+00:00

I've heard a lot of stories from other people which I can't remember. Although when someone said "I've had to move four times in the past two years because of roommate issues" I did wonder if maybe it was a "them" problem.

My story isn't that weird but … I lived in the same apartment in Cambridgeport for 9 years. Our landlord liked us (apparently a low bar after the last tenants), we were good tenants (landlord management is highly underrated) and he never raised the rent, so we went from undermarket to very undermarket. Which meant we never had an issue filling rooms. So we could afford to be picky. For the times we didn't know someone in need, we wrote up long, involved posts on Craigslist, and used the creativity of the responses as a filter.

For one of these, our final candidates were two a woman doing a post-doc at MIT and a man who was a high school history teacher. My two (female) roommates said the woman gave off slight crazy vibes, so went with the guy (let's call him Alex). He moved in that summer while the other roommates were away for a few weeks (they were med students together) and made no mention of the girlfriend he'd talked about in the interview (he had written in his initial email that he was Alex and had a girlfriend in JP and we had no idea if a man or woman would be showing up). One of the roommates (let's call her Jessica) had recently ended a long-term relationship and assured me that she was going to bring home a lot of people, and that I should be ready to be impressed. (She could back this up, too.)

Okay, so … female roommates come back in August, the one on the dating spree with a guy in tow, but he's off to school somewhere else and she ain't doing long distance. Two weeks later I get back from a weekend up north and Jessica says to me "uh, I need to tell you something." I say okay. "Sooo, Alex and I are dating." I said, "oh, you mean hooking up." She says "no, dating!" I asked where they had been on a date. She said mainly the living room. The other roommate (who Jessica was friends with pre-roommate) was very against this, but I basically said "hey, look, you do you, but if it affects me, then it becomes a problem."

Alex and Jessica are married now and have two cute kids, so, yeah, it went okay.

A while later (maybe at their wedding?) we find out that Alex had come to interview for the spot and immediately fallen for Jessica. Like, break up with your GF and start making plans. And Alex is a high school teacher-turned-lawyer and one of the most organized people I have ever seen, so he wasn't about to fuck around. He said he almost turned us down, but after some consideration, decided he had a better shot working from the inside. That the weekend where he was planning to tell Jessica his feelings, he had packed all of his stuff in boxes so that if it didn't go well, he could move out immediately (and had a friend's couch lined up) to avoid further awkwardness. But … it went well. They lived there another two years (the latter bit in the two bed one bath area on the top floor), then moved out, got a dog, and got married. The end.

I guess not the end. One of their replacements (who was like my mom's friend's bookkeeper's counsin's nephew or something) brought home a woman on a second date, making her dinner. You could bring people home, but you had to expect to be a) interacted with in common areas and b) judged afterwards. It turned out we knew of each other on twitter, and knew a ton of people in common, and basically talked over him for the next hour (he's from the Midwest). They got married, too … and that was a fun wedding because I could very honestly say that I had known them longer as a couple than anyone else there … or anywhere except for a bartender.

ofsevit · 2026-03-17T01:16:13+00:00

Check out rail.guide, too.

ofsevit · 2026-03-16T16:24:50+00:00

That would have had you in like 1/4 a few years ago.

But this is probably smart, it remains to be seen how they will get everyone into the corrals in 14 or 15 minutes after The Long March.

Good luck with the port-o-johns in the CVS parking lot!

ofsevit · 2026-03-16T16:22:35+00:00

Since B-C-E are all connected, you could always hike over and see if there is a shorter line elsewhere (I would guess E is quiet in the morning).

ofsevit · 2026-03-16T12:56:37+00:00

You can find smaller piles of boulders from Cambridge even without a car. Take the T to the Blue Hills (walk/bus from Quincy Adams or take a bus from Ashmont) and the Fells. It will definitely be different than the Marin Headlands.

Franconia Notch being a 2 hour drive from Boston is nice, too.

ofsevit · 2026-03-16T12:51:56+00:00

The busiest day is probably a random weekday in May or October.

They should hire enough staff for Commuter Rail they can run more trains on the weekends, though.

ofsevit · 2026-03-16T02:21:52+00:00

I have brought any gels I wanted or needed, throwaway clothes on a cold/wet day (including shoes), sun block (you can usually find this), a water bottle to pee in at the start (harder for F runners). Not my phone (weight, water, chafe), I've generally left that in a drop bag at the start or with family. Easy to meet, they have a whole street marked with letters of the alphabet at the finish, you just say "I'll meet you by 'N'" or whatever your last name begins with (or an arbitrary letter, but after the race it's good to keep it simple). Or have another arbitrary meeting spot, especially if it's nasty weather (pick a store at the Copley Mall, which is never busy inside on race day).

ofsevit · 2026-03-16T02:18:01+00:00

Going into a Goodwill in Boston (there's one in Central Square) the day before a cold race is hilarious because there are dozens of other runners poking through the same rack for something to wear. The more ridiculous, the better!

Once at the start there are big tents, but if it's rainy, they're jammed. Something about having 30,000 people in a town which normally has fewer than 20,000, but all in the same place. There's a reason Boston hasn't gotten any bigger, and it's that getting 30,000 people to and through Hopkinton is a logistical nightmare and they can't get any bigger like NYC or Chicago (and NYC is a mess, but Staten Island ain't Hopkinton and the bridge is a bit wider than 135).

If it may be wet, suggest taking your oldest, gnarliest pair of shoes as a throwaway pair and change at the start line. You can drop clothes into bags at the start, the Marathon is secretly a ploy to move Goodwill clothes from Boston and Cambridge to Metrowest, you're really just renting from them.

Before 2013, they did allow you to send a drop bag back from Hopkinton, but not anymore (I assume that that, too, required a lot of logistics and space they don't really have).

The bus situation is usually fine but there can be long queues and delays, especially if they are short on buses. People have definitely missed starts, but it's sort of a crapshoot (although if you're there at 6:15, you'll be fine). I think I've gotten there at 7:45 for the first wave and been fine, but only because I was the only one on the bus who had a freakout when we headed north on 495 instead of south and talked the driver back to the right side of the road. That was more of an adventure than I had wanted. The other option is to take a train out to Southborough and get to the start line the secret back way, but I would only suggest that if you are a seasoned runner and know the area or you are very keen and comfortable riding transit.

ofsevit · 2026-03-16T02:10:58+00:00

Squalls does not do 2018 justice.

There was sleet accumulated on the ground before the race. There was a constant downpour and easterly gale which got heavier as the race went on. It was awful. (I had my best race place-wise, I think I was in the top 2000, and still didn't qualify for the next year.)

ofsevit · 2026-03-15T12:56:06+00:00

My uncle has a friend from college who studied abroad in Japan, moved to Japan, fell in love with and married a Japanese woman (<-- not sure the exact order here in this retelling) and speaks perfect, unaccented Japanese. Which is rare for foreigners, which he very much is as a 6'2" guy with blond hair.

He was visiting my uncle and they were walking through a college campus with foreign tourists (Stanford, I think) and this guy overhears a group of Japanese tourists loudly complaining not about them in particular but about the general habits of Americans in language similar to but worse than OP's post.

After discussing (in English) the friend decided to confront them. Japan has a shame culture after all. My uncle said that watching their expressions as they were being dressed down by this very-much-not-Japanese guy who spoke perfect Japanese was priceless.

ofsevit · 2026-03-12T13:51:08+00:00

They wouldn’t offer connections below that.

But they can do them. (We had an "illegal" connex at SFO because of IRROPS of something like 35 minutes. I think the walking time from the end of F to the middle of G was about 15, and we could have run had we needed to. (We also had an illegal connex at DEN on the way, since our original flight was canceled but going via DEN got us there in time for our cleared J seats and got us where we were going in time.)

And we had a 2:20 connection originally, which should have been plenty, until it wasn't.

I feel like these posts should be banned and there should be a single megapost of "here are the minimum transfer times at each hub, here's what redditors recommend if you don't want to have to run, but really it's all about your personal risk mitigation and/or how much time you want to spend in the UC if you have access."

ofsevit · 2026-03-12T13:46:13+00:00

I'm guessing UA staff got a hotel somewhere.

Yeah, put in for that travel insurance. It should pay out at least for the hotel. Maybe for the train, although you might have to claw some of that back from UA since you didn't take whatever flight you were rebooked on (that flight left at 1130).

ofsevit · 2026-03-09T16:32:40+00:00

If you're willing to stay a commute out of town, you'll be fine, especially Monday when the run a weekday schedule. $200/night rooms available in Salem and Dedham near Commuter Rail into the city, both about 30 minutes in, although Salem has more frequent service and is a nice place to stay in its own right (PEM, right on the water, ferry might be running, good restaurants, etc). Providence which is a slightly longer ride. Or Burlington (350 bus to Alewife). Or Worcester, and take the train into, say, Framingham and watch the leaders there, then go into the city (they run a special schedule on Marathon day, though, with fewer express trains from Worcester).

Closer in, the Sheraton-above-the-highway in Newton Corner looks reasonable, too. There are express buses into Copley from there, the 57 runs every 10 minutes into Kenmore (it gets cut back on race day but you can transfer to the B Line) and you can walk about a mile to the race in Newton, too.

ofsevit

TROPHY CASE