Frickin' crazy T drivers!

So, apparently last night one of Boston's lovely T drivers was texting and rammed a car into the back of another train. 49 people were injured. 49 people! How fast do you have to be going to injure 49 people?

Here's a quote from the Globe story: "Officials described a chaotic scene, with metal strewn about, passengers in disarray, and some people who had to be removed from under twisted metal using saws and excavation equipment."

What?!?!?!

And bad PR for Boston and the MBTA: "Several of the passengers were on their way to the Red Sox game. Children in blue baseball jerseys were seen on stretchers, one with a bandage around his head."

[See some crazy photos here, and a graphic. Kudos to the Boston Globe.]

I've always questioned the sobriety of some of the T drivers (how you can swerve from side to side when moving along a set of tracks is beyond me) and the spastic feet of others (speed up a tiny bit, then slow way down, then speeeeed up, then slow down. Stop. Speed up. Slow down, okay now we're moving again).

This guy, of course, was texting, which is just stupid.

I wish I could say I wasn't taking the green line anymore, but hey, these accidents can only happen once in a while, right?

This is what the Globe story has to say about the green line, which is news to me. (I always thought the orange line was easily the oldest and most archaic, not to mention unsafe. But apparently it's the green line, which I ride frequently.)

"The MBTA's Green Line is a 19th-century antique and the oldest line in the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, which is the country's oldest subway system. It has been under scrutiny for years because of numerous crashes and derailments. Green Line trains are operated manually, and travel closer together and with less input from dispatchers than the Blue, Red, and Orange lines."

And don't let me see any articles about these problems happening because the MBTA is short-staffed. You don't need extra people to be able to start and stop a train; you just need enough common sense to confiscate their cell phones (and in some cases, books they're reading (I've seen it), although it's rare) before they get in the driver's seat.

[Just as I write this, I see that the MBTA head has indeed banned T drivers from bringing cell phones with them.]