• Rich Barlow

    Senior Writer

    Photo: Headshot of Rich Barlow, an older white man with dark grey hair and wearing a grey shirt and grey-blue blazer, smiles and poses in front of a dark grey backdrop.

    Rich Barlow is a senior writer at BU Today and Bostonia magazine. Perhaps the only native of Trenton, N.J., who will volunteer his birthplace without police interrogation, he graduated from Dartmouth College, spent 20 years as a small-town newspaper reporter, and is a former Boston Globe religion columnist, book reviewer, and occasional op-ed contributor. Profile

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There are 4 comments on Do You Feel Safe Riding the T?

  1. Some stations are the perfect setting for apocalypses films: dark surrounding, pilling paint, leaking water, periodic sparks from shortened wires and rusty trains produce the grinding sound of a wounded dinosaur.

  2. The MBTA consistently prioritizes new capital investment (new cars, extending rail lines) over maintaining/rehabilitating what they already have. This is for many reasons, but one of the most important is political: it’s harder to get federal funding for operation costs, and MA politicians know that it’s much more sexy to point to new trains and new lines than it is to say that they repaired a bunch of signals (no matter how crucial those signals are). Until those things change, the MBTA will always be falling apart. Someone has to have the courage to raise taxes on driving and road use.

  3. Riding the T is, statistically, much safer than travelling by car (to include Uber and Lyft rideshares and taxis)… Incidents on the T rarely result in fatalities or injuries. When they do occur, they are announced in the news. Meanwhile car fatalities happen so regularly, they rarely make the news.

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