I could've gotten to Alewife faster if the MBTA had the foresight to hitch up our train to a team of oxen.
No joke, I was a young man when I boarded that train full of naive' hopes about overcoming "switching problems in Davis Square", decades later we limped into Alewife liked the starved survivor's of Stalin's GULAG.
Honestly, the T compares unfavorably in almost every way to the Moscow Metro which I actually rode back in the early eighties. As I recall the schedule was reasonably dependable for the harried communist commuter. And that was Andropov's USSR we are talkin' about, seething with torpid deadheads and party hacks...yet somehow the damn trains rolled.
Can't say as much for the MBTA wherein daily one is exposed to the perils of premature senility from the slack-assed pace of the Red Line.