BOSTON — Sometimes the best way to find the flavor of where we live is … through a restaurant.
 
Not the fancy places people cross the region to see. The humble spots where people stop and get something to go — and in the process, have conversations across the counter that make life a little bit more human.

WGBH News' Val Wang is spending the next 6 months documenting these for her project "Planet Takeout": a look at Chinese food, our neighborhoods and ourselves.
 
Wherever you go, there they are
 
Every neighborhood in Boston has at least one. In the heart of Roxbury there’s Peking House in an old Church’s Chicken building. In Dorchester, Yum Yum stands shoulder-to-shoulder with nail salons and Irish bars. Jamaica Plain has Food Wall and Charlie Chan’s. They are among the almost 10,000 Chinese takeouts that dot the country, preparing more than 2 million meals every day.
 
Ever since I’ve lived in big American cities, first New York and now Boston, no place has fascinated me as much as the local Chinese takeout. Each is deeply a part of their neighborhood but also somewhat separate. The people who work there come from halfway around the world to serve Americanized Chinese food to people of every color. Those on both sides of the counter have to meet each other halfway, often at a bulletproof window.
 
This cultural crossroad teems with stories. I think of the humble takeout as a lens through which we can see both the tightly knit local neighborhoods of Boston and global immigration patterns to the city. And most importantly, we can see how the two fit together.
 
One restaurateur's journey
 
Tom Chen was born in Hong Kong. After a decade of working in Chinese restaurants he bought his own takeout in Chelsea, Mass., called Dragon Kitchen. He ran it for a decade.
 
Most of his customers were Latino. He said they tended to order three dishes: lobster sauce, shrimp fried rice and chicken wings. Every week, he sold 400 pounds of chicken wings. And because he had to adapt to his customers, he learned basic Spanish. Shrimp fried rice became arroz con camarones. Chicken wings, alas de pollo. And lobster sauce was salsa langosta.
 
Chen said he didn't know much Spanish beyond what he needed for the job, “but I try to make a living. So everybody will adjust yourself.”
 
It wasn’t easy running a takeout: mastering simple Spanish, learning the names of his regular customers and, on two life-threatening occasions, getting held up at gunpoint. But it was a big step up from bartending, his previous job. 
While most restaurant profits hover around 40 percent, Chen said Dragon Kitchen cleared 60 percent.
 
“The takeout restaurant basically is work hard, long hours. You can make a better income. Buy materials by myself, then we cook it, we prepare. Just four people, work close together. I see co-workers more than my wife. The kids, I never saw my kids. The kids go to school at 7 o’clock, get back at 9, we’re still working,” said Chen.

He sold his takeout 10 years ago and bought a more upscale sit-down restaurant in Needham called Mandarin Cuisine.
 
A tight-knit world
 
Talking to Chen may seem easy, but in my experience, it’s difficult to walk in the front door of a takeout asking to interview workers and customers. He only opened up because I met him through Helen Chin Schlichte — or "Auntie Helen," as everyone in the Chinese immigrant community calls her. A native of Charlestown, she is very active both in Chinatown and in the city at large. Auntie Helen immediately understood my predicament.
 
“Even though you’re very Chinese and you can speak fluent Mandarin, they’re not quite sure if you’re from the IRS, or from Homeland Security," she said. "There are all kinds of reasons that they might be a little wary until somebody comes along to say, ‘Okay, this is a great project. This is one that would be terrific for you to participate in and for you to be a part of this larger community of takeout restaurants, and it’s okay to talk to her."
 
I asked Chen what he would have said if I’d come in the door of his old Chelsea takeout asking to interview him. “No,” he responded simply. “I say, ‘Nope, you kidding me?’ Eighty percent, or 90 percent, close the door for you. I already know that. First thing, they don’t know you" — and if they don't know you, they don't know why they'd do you a favor.
 
Furthermore, Chen said, "Most Chinese people don’t like [to] talk in public. They need to close everything in their mind. They’re not open. Even your father, your mother, won’t open anything for you, right?"
 
When asked for his explanation of that dynamic, Chen responded, "That’s the way we brought up. Like, why we eat rice?”
 
I started to wonder about the underlying social structures that hold the community together — and keep outsiders at a distance. So I called Baruch College professor Ken Guest, an anthropologist who studies Chinese immigrant communities living in New York.
 
“The Chinese restaurants are deeply embedded in an ethnic economy. And there is a sense of ethnic solidarity that people draw on to make a go of it. There’s a way in which that economic framework also shapes some of their notions of how they are in American culture, where they fit. It frames a lot of their business and social networks,” he said.
 
Getting connected
 
Networks were the key word here.
 
“Get somebody know somebody," Chen summarized. "From the back, not from the front. You walk in the front, you don’t get any answer. They will tell you they’re busy. No. Thank you. That’s it. Get somebody behind the owner. If you not Helen Chin introduce you, you won’t be sitting here. I tell the truth.”
 
It’s good advice. I found I had to work through existing networks — social service agencies, civic groups, food suppliers, menu printers, academics, filmmakers, hoping someone could introduce me to someone else who could get me in that proverbial back door.

But the project also needs the other half of the story: your half.
 
I found Philip Lodge, 17, at Yum Yum in Dorchester after school, waiting for his takeout order.
 
“Well, I got hungry after I left school, so I just had to eat a little meal before I go home," he explained. "A $2 plate of rice and ribs and I added crab Rangoon, fried shrimp and chicken teriyaki."
 
And it's not a rare visit. "I come like three times a week. My mom told me that their food was good so I started ordering my own plates, and I liked it," he said.
 
I bet you’ve probably been to a Chinese takeout before — you might even be a regular at one. Or maybe you went to one with your family growing up. If so, I want to hear your story.
 
If you have a story about a Chinese takeout, give Val and Planet Takeout a call at 617 477-8688. It's a free call in the Boston area, and the recording will explain what to do. You can also leave a story, upload photos or listen to others' stories at planettakeout.org.

BOSTON — Thursday is the first installment of Planet Takeout, Val Wang's exploration into Boston Chinese takeout joints as a nexus of community. She talks to Bob Seay about how she got the idea for the project. To share your experiences with Chinese takeout, visit planettakeout.org.

Planet Takeout is produced by Val Wang and brought to you by WGBH 89.7 and Localore, a national initiative of the Association for Independents in Radio.

BOSTON — In this area, it can be hard to find housing you can afford: The city ranks among the most expensive in the country. For seniors, the high cost of housing is especially troubling. If they do have housing, the elderly are often isolated and rarely leave their homes — and as a result, they could suffer from depression. But one unique partnership is making a difference for at least a few.

Names in a hat for housing

Under a noontime sun, a street-corner minister preached to no one in particular in Boston’s Dudley Square, telling inattentive commuters that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to inherit the kingdom of heaven. Just a parable away, an elderly man, Gregoria Rivera, steered his wheelchair toward the entrance of a brand new apartment building and said he prays that one day he can move here.

“I live across the street over there in that building," he said. "I don’t like it over there. It’s only one room.“

The Dudley House apartment complex is just a few months old and it contrasts with much of the mid–20th-century architecture in this area — and everyone, it seems, wants to live here, said David Morgan, president of the board of directors of Central Boston Elder Services next door.

“There was a lottery — no relationship to the Massachusetts lottery — but there was a lottery and they put 450 names into the hat and drew them out and if they qualified they’re here," he said.

In the community room of the Dudley House — a 56-unit modern building —Wiles recalled the moment she got a phone call 3 months ago telling her that her name had been plucked from a drawing for a chance to move into this building in the heart of Roxbury.

“I was shocked, first of all, and then I was really excited. 'Cause when they asked me if I was interested I practically came through the phone. I wanted to move so badly,” she said.

Wiles was joined in the community room by three other local women over 62.

“I saw it being built," said Shirley Hargrow. "I used to come by every day on a school bus cause I worked for the Metco program as a bus monitor. And when they dropped me off to go home I just walked across the street and was inquiring and I was, I guess, proud that I got selected.”

A desire for safety spurred Cynthia Lopes’ move to Dudley House:

“In Dorchester there was a drive-by shooting," she said. "So I knew that I couldn’t stay three anymore. I wasn’t safe. And then to go from that — to this!”

Assessing the need

This is a 7-story building designed by world-class architects. This structure cost millions; the funds came from the City of Boston and also included federal stimulus, tax credits and HUD housing money.
 
The need for rental housing for many of Boston’s 60,000 elderly residents cannot be underestimated. Like most of the residents here, Wiles worked hard her entire life to make ends meet in Boston, but her Mission Hill neighborhood, once an eyesore, became more and more gentrified. Pizza joints were taken over by latte-driven cafes and housing costs soared.

“I had a nice unit but the major concern for me was rent. Over the course of 22 years, of course, the rents would go up every year and finally it got to the point where it was just unsustainable, almost $1200," she said. "I was on Social Security and I was only working part-time and I just couldn’t afford it anymore. So this building is a blessing.”

Boston is the third-most-expensive housing rental market in the country, surpassed only by New York and San Francisco. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment ranges from $1200 to $1600 a month. For a large percentage of elderly people on fixed incomes, paying this amount approaches the impossible.

“I never thought that I would live here,” said Lopes, “ and then when I got the call I talked with my daughter because I didn’t think that I wanted to live in Dudley. But once you get here, people tell me when they come to visit, it’s like going to a luxury condo. I said, ‘Good — That’s fine with me!’ You know, I’ve never lived in a place that was brand new. There wasn’t even any dust."

From homeless to Dudley House

New housing studies suggest that rental pricing is a prime reason why more of the areas elderly are being pushed into the streets. A 2011 Harvard Medical School Study concluded that more than 7,000 men, women and children in the Boston are homeless and that a significant percentage are over 55.
 
Of the 56 people who won the lottery for a chance to live at Dudley House, Morgan said 11 percent were previously homeless.

“There were a few units targeted for the homeless elderly," he said. "There’s supposedly a huge need and I think it’s because of real estate prices and people who though even maybe they have their mortgages paid off taxes are so high.”

Phil Hyde, whose last residence was a church basement, was one of them.“I spent too much money and I could not afford the rent where I was staying and so I basically was homeless,” he said.

70-year-old Hyde is not your stereotypical picture of a homeless man. He’s a Harvard University graduate. But his situation, in the view of some housing advocates, illustrates how high rents can lead to elder homelessness for even those thought to fall outside the standard rubric of poverty.
 
In recent weeks, instead of starting his day from a Cambridge shelter, he has left his new Dudley House apartment and taken the No. 1 bus to the Back Bay where he attends an Episcopalian Church each Sunday. Hyde waited 14 months for his name to come up in a Boston Housing Authority pool and another few months before he was selected to live in the new building.
 
He counted himself lucky.

“The tragedy, of course, is that it is endless waits — I mean for this list," he said. "The people I was at the shelter with, some of them have been waiting for far over a year for their name to come up on the list.”

Looking at the community level

Boston City Councilor Tito Jackson, who represents the Dudley Square area, said the Dudley House should not be the only modern, efficient housing alternative for the elderly, and especially for those who are homeless through no fault of their own. He said the notion of short-term housing was short-sighted.

“It is so much more cost-efficient to house folks in permanent housing rather than spending $100 a day in motels and then coming out at the end of the month with housing costs where you could live in the core of the city of Boston,” he said.

Jackson said the Dudley House has also had another impact as well. Perhaps in a twist of irony, with the new senior housing facility, it is older people that are helping to revitalize Dudley, a once severely run-down neighborhood. Some of the merchants in the area, such as the owners of the 99 Cent Store on Washington Street, said that Dudley House residents are among their best new customers.

It’s all part of what the residents of Dudley House call their expanded community. Said resident Betty Harris, “I know God put us all together for a reason.”

Harris, who walks unsteadily, said this facility has literally helped her get back on her feet. She credited the community of new elderly residents that surround her; friends like Wiles, Lopes and Hargrow.

They take care of her and each other, she said, going for walks twice a day for 10 minutes each. "And then I walk every Saturday," she said. "Right, ladies? I have to walk everyday so that I won’t get blood clots.”

Hargrow said Dudley House provides something that could never be replicated.  "We see each other face to face. On a daily basis we can see each other’s smile. Know each other’s strengths. Know each other’s weaknesses. We can really communicate," she said. "It’s a wonderful feeling. And I think its great that a place like this can be here for the seniors. And I think because we’re a community within a community, we’re all beginning to appreciate how Boston is changing. Especially in Dudley Square.”
 

BOSTON — In some neighborhoods, the stray cat population is out of control. Often these animals are killed — part of a debate about how to best handle the problem. On Monday, WGBH News went to the backyards of Dorchester, where volunteers trapped several feral felines. Now we go behind the doors of a free clinic that's making a difference.

BOSTON — If you’ve ever been woken up by the sound of a screeching cat, then you probably have a stray in your neighborhood. Male cats who aren’t neutered often get into fights, and females who aren’t spayed can birth litter after litter of kittens who then struggle to survive. But some dedicated cat lovers are trying to change the fate of homeless cats.

Caroline Woodard is known in the animal rescue world as a “trapper.” She and fellow-trapper Jamie Wilkins are on a mission to help reduce the population of unwanted cats in Boston, in a humane way. They are part of a national movement called trap-neuter-release, or TNR. Volunteers catch the felines and bring them to a clinic, where the cats are spayed/neutered, vaccinated and then returned to the streets.
 
On a recent cat roundup, I watched as Woodard set out a can of salmon as bait and then hid with Wilkins behind a nearby car on Howe Street. The bait worked quickly: The cats seemed to be coming out of nowhere. A gray one had a collar, but Wilkins said that didn’t mean it has a home.
 
“Sometimes we find full-grown cats with collars that were put on them when they were kittens, and they’ve been abandoned since, and they’ve grown out of the collar,” said Wilkins. “It’s strangling them.”

The volunteers rig up a special trap for strays. (Ibby Caputo/WGBH)

Wilkins and Woodard use a trap that you’d imagine in a Road Runner cartoon: a cage that’s propped up with a wooden stick connected to a 30-foot-long piece of string. When they pull the string, the stick is released and the cage crashes down, trapping a bewildered cat. The cage is covered with a white sheet to keep the cat calm.
 
To trap a cat
 
To trap a cat, you need skill, patience … and a strategy. So each cage was labeled with the exact location of where the cat was caught so volunteers know where to return the cat after surgery. “You never want to release a cat to where it's not from,” said Woodard. 

That’s because even a stray cat lives somewhere on the streets. Returning it to a strange place would be giving the cat a death sentence.
 
“They just basically are so disoriented when you release them anyway, and they know they are home by their smell, and when they’ve lost that, they can cross streets, and the cars drive fast,” Woodard explained.
 
Cat heroes
 
Woodard and Wilkins belong to an unofficial and somewhat underground community of cat heroes — individuals dedicated to easing the suffering of homeless cats. As trappers, they’re on the front line against feline overpopulation. Like detectives, these volunteers rely on tips from informants, who lead them to the cat colonies.
 
Informants like Milta. Milta is what’s known as a “feeder,” someone who feeds cat colonies so they don’t starve. She didn’t want her last name to be used because she said her boyfriend didn’t know the extent of her dedication to cats. (Though it would be hard not to notice: Milta said she had eight rescued cats living in her home.)

Every day she drives across Dorchester and puts out food for the strays. The trunk of her SUV looked like she made a trip to Costco — it was packed with cat food. If anyone knows where there are feral cats, it’s Milta.
 
“He’s a male, and he’ll get those girls pregnant over there,” Milta said about a black cat she recently encountered, urging the trappers to find him on Howard Street.
 
On the trail
 
With Milta leading the way, we entered a "Bourne Supremacy" movie: a four-car caravan cat chase with two trappers, one feeder and one reporter. I followed Milta to the parking lot of a liquor store, crept with Woodard between houses and waited with the cars running while Milta and Woodard caged some friendly strays on the sidewalk.
 
Then Milta led us to another backyard littered with tires, wooden planks and broken glass. She put down a plate of food and five, maybe six cats surrounded her immediately. They knew her: She is the hand that feeds them.
 
But Milta’s generosity is not always appreciated. Earlier in the morning, she was confronted by a woman walking her dog, who complained that the cat food attracted raccoons.
 
“She’s just not feeding the cat,” said the woman. “It’s like a little zoo right here.”
 
Wilkins said this sort of interaction is not unusual. "Sometimes we encounter people in the neighborhood who don’t want us feeding them,” she said. “We have to feed them to be able to trap them because we have to know when they are going to show up, and they just don’t want us doing any of that, because they think it's encouraging the population. But we’re really trying to stop them from reproducing and suffering.”
 
By late morning, four scared, silent cats sat in metal cages in Woodard’s car. Next she would take them to a friend's house, who would keep them overnight in the garage. And then early the next morning, they’d go to a clinic to be fixed. 

Coming Tuesday: WGBH News goes to the next stage of the cat roundup: the clinic.

The Irish president meets with Boston mayor Thomas Menino on May 4. (Isabel Leon, Mayor's Office)

 
BOSTON — Each year Ireland chooses one American city to help commemorate the Great Potato Famine. This year, Boston received that honor … and President Michael Higgins of Ireland visited the weekend of May 4 to observe the event. WGBH's Jordan Weinstein talked with Higgins during his Boston trip.
 
The famine led to the emigration of millions of Irish — many of whom came to the Bay State. In 1850, the Irish made up a quarter of the city's population. "Boston is particularly important, of course, because such a very large wave of Irish came in different periods," Higgins said.

He noted that those different waves of emigration represented "different Irishnesses." The arrivals of 1848 were "poor Catholics that have nothing. They are in fact poor, ragged, they're carrying disease," Higgins said — and that caused some tensions.
 

WGBH's Bob Seay, right, interviews Richard Davey of the Mass. Department of Transportation

Excerpts from the interview ...

Seay: The first suggestion: Expand service. More riders, more revenue.

Davey: True. That is true. But what folks have to realize, though, is usually that our costs go up.

The only service we run that makes money is our Patriots game-day commuter rail.... All the service that we run is subsidized. Today it costs you $1.70 to ride the subway with a Charlie Card? To run the service costs more like $3.20 per ride.

Seay: The second suggestion: Have the state take back the Big Dig debt.

Davey: I think that's a fine idea but with the caveat that — that is about $1.7 billion. It equates to about $125 million a year. You're just handing them, the state, the same problem. How are they going to pay for it? What kind of either programs would be cut or revenues would be raised? ... I think folks have to be careful what they wish for.

Seay: Suggestion #3: Raise the gas tax.

Davey: If we did that in the future, as the governor proposed, we have to be clear that that or any other revenues we might raise, would be dedicated to transportation across the Commonwealth. I think that whether real or imagined, folks that live outside the metropolitan Boston area... feel as though in the past, too many resources or a disproportionate number of resources have gone into Boston-based projects.

Seay: Suggestion #4 is have better PA systems so we can hear what they're saying.

Davey: [laughs] Charlie Brown's teacher has been retired. ... I think the PA systems certainly in the stations are pretty clear. I agree that the PA systems in some of the trains aren't so clear and so as we buy new trains we're moving to automated announcements. And soon, coming soon, we've been talking about it for a while but we don't want to roll it out until we get it right, will be the countdown clocks in the subways. 

Seay: The fifth suggestion was improve fare collection.

Davey: I think the most challenging piece for us has been our commuter rail. And we just announced last week that we're going to launch a pilot program later this year with a company from England that allows you to purchase your commuter rail ticket on your cellphone. It will be the first commuter rail in the U.S. to adopt this. ... We estimate through surveys that about 75 percent of all of our commuter rail customers have smartphones. So rather than spending tens of millions of dollars to put in gates and Charlie machines, this will cost us virtually nothing and the customer will literally have the ticket machine in their hands.
 

As fare hikes and service cuts await passengers, there's been little movement on solving the T's long-term problems. In the second part of his interview with WGBH News, Davey addressed the question what will happen if the legislature fails to act to address the T's budget deficit by the start of the new fiscal year on July 1.

 
BOSTON — There's been a hopeful development in the fight against one form of cancer. Sarcoma is rare in adults but rather prevalent in children. For the first time in 30 years, a drug to treat soft-tissue sarcoma has been approved by the FDA. The news coincides with a fundraiser this Saturday in Hudson to raise money for the Jennifer Hunter Yates Sarcoma Foundation. WGBH News' Jordan Weinstein talked with Dr. Edwin Choy from Massachusetts General Hospital to see how fundraisers like these generate awareness and money. Choy said the foundation led the way.

 
BOSTON — Around the world, May Day is celebrated as the workers' holiday. Occupy Boston marked the occasion in pouring rain with demonstrations starting Tuesday morning in Boston’s downtown Financial District. The local movement’s protests were coordinated with similar events around the country.
 
Occupy activists called on Massachusetts residents to strike, walk out of school and abstain from shopping and banking in support of the "99 Percent." Few seemed to heed their call.
 
Though they didn't take the day off, some people who work in the Financial District agreed with the Occupy movement’s message that income inequality is a major problem facing the country.
 
"I think that’s pretty accurate," said Florence Lee of Quincy. "I got laid off a year ago and I just got back to work, actually."
 
Jean Fabrizzio felt a certain affinity with the Occupy message as well: "I'm not against them, no. Because I'm not wealthy, I do work every day, but yes, in some ways, I can agree with some of the things they say."
 
But Tom Ryan of Bellingham was less sympathetic, saying, "It's raining. I'm not too impressed. If they want to get wet and protest, that's their right under the Constitution."
 

 
BOSTON — Bay State Bike Week is coming up, the Hubway bike share stations have reopened for business and inaugural Boston "bike czar" Nicole Freedman is departing to plaudits: In the last 5 years, Boston has added over 50 miles of bike lanes and cycling has increased by 50 percent.
 
But there's a downside to the bike craze: increased tension, frequently, between drivers and bicyclists.
 
Traveling down the old cow paths
 
No one knows that better than bike commuter John Aslanian. Rain or shine, he puts on his helmet and rides from his home in Brookline to his office in Cambridge.
 
"I ride a bike for ease of commute. It’s a faster way to get from my house to my office," he said. Plus, "there is the fitness aspect."
 
But with the gain comes pain — or at least, some aches. Even with many new bike lanes, Aslanian still has to deal with streets that aren’t bike-friendly. And his biggest frustration is drivers who think the road is meant just for them.
 
"The roads were actually meant for horses and then they were meant for trolleys. So we’re all kind of using the same space," he said.
 
Other cyclists agree: Bikes and cars fighting over limited space leads to limited patience. Said cyclist Morgan Staples, "The infrastructure for Boston is dated and was made 100 years ago and not really made for today’s amount of traffic, so everybody kind of fighting for their space leads to a lot of tension."
 
Red light, green light, 1-2-3
 
The biggest complaint to WGBH was riders who don't follow the rules of the road.
 
Ask Cambridge driver Michael Purcell who the true road rebels are, and he points the finger at cyclists: "They don’t stop at red lights. They pretend that they are different than cars. So what are they? They are vehicles and yet—it’s hard to treat them exactly like vehicles."
 
"It's definitely an issue. We strongly believe that everyone should be following the rules on the road," said MassBike executive director David Watson. "But you have to keep it in perspective ... it's happening with everybody. We have a culture of incivility on our roadways."
  
However, Watson thought one typical driver complaint was tired. "The time is past where motorists can say 'I didn't expect anybody to be there' because we're there in growing numbers, and so there's a greater responsibility on everybody, not just the bicyclists, to pay attention to what's going on around them," he said.
 
One cyclist told WGBH that he doesn’t always follow the law — but that it’s actually out of courtesy.
 
"Sometimes I don’t come to a complete stop at a stop sign," said Lance Stephens, because it's easier for drivers "if I just keep moving rather than them having to deal with a cyclist who has stopped and is restarting."

Former Boston city councilor Tom Keane uses the Hubway system and pointed to the issue of awareness. "Between a bike and a car, bike loses, every time," he said.
 
Serenity … soon?
 
Even though plenty of locals own both bicycles and cars, peace can be a hard sell to the frustrated and angry. One woman told WGBH, "The cyclists are flat-out evil." We started gathering comments from Twitter on the bikes vs. cars debate but dropped the attempt due to the amount of profanity from drivers.
 
Aslanian admitted that some cyclists embrace a rebel image, but he keeps it in perspective: "A few decades it was popular to have a muscle car and go out on the drag strip."
 
He'll continue riding to work in his business suit, which he thinks is the best way to show that not all cyclists are rebels ... some just want to get to work.
 
"The more regular people like myself, that bike on a daily basis — the less appeal [there is] for it to be a rebel activity," Aslanian said.
 
And maybe they can unite against a shared foe. Said Keane, "Pedestrians, I think, are the bane of both drivers and cyclists."

BOSTON — Liam Day is writing a series of poems inspired by riding the MBTA bus routes. In each poem, like the view from each bus ride, his passing look at the city tells us something about what it means to be human.

Day explores the meanings of the word moraine while riding No. 214 and contemplates how our human-made landscape also changes over time. While taking the No. 15 to Haymarket, Day spies some withered fruit and ruminates on our own aging and mortality, while on the No. 10, a view of the Hancock’s lit offices becomes a persistent reminder of the daily grind. Sitting on the No. 43, coasting past the State House and civil war memorial, is a meditation on the tension between 21st century living and the sacrifices our ancestors made to put us here. In all these works we get a deeper understanding of our city, an appreciation for its glorious and grimy parts, and a sense of how remarkable an ordinary bus trip can be.


Day shared some more of his bus route poetry with us to put on view:

BOSTON — The door closes behind me and I slip $1 into one slot and 50 cents into another. I’m on the #28 bus heading to Dudley Square. Many residents of Boston’s Black and Latino neighborhoods who use mass transit each day pass through that historic depot. The station, among the city’s oldest, is located at the heart of those communities, and all area buses — like the road to Damascus — lead there.
 
The problem with elevated rail
 
Beginning in 1901, Dudley was the main stop for direct train access in Boston. Like Chicago’s famous "L," the Orange Line traveled above the city on an elevated rail line until it was torn down in 1987 and moved to the Southwest Corridor. It’s what happened after that that has made so many people in Boston’s minority neighborhoods question the fairness of mass transit policy.

Those questions are the subject of a recent documentary titled Equal or Better: The Story of the Silver Line, by Kris Carter. The film maintains that a promise was made to replace the old Orange Line with equal or better transportation options. But the service that replaced the elevated T was a bus, the Silver Line, which can take more than half an hour to get downtown. The elevated rail got you there in 10 minutes.
 
However … “elevated rail in a city cuts the city in half," said systems expert John Sterman of MIT’s Sloan School of Management. “This was the problem with the old elevated rail in Boston and the old elevated highway for cars, and we have a much better environment now that that elevated railway is gone.” Sterman is a member of MIT’s newly created transportation initiative, which was formed to explore innovative ways of improving public transportation.
 
“Even though it’s cheaper to throw up some steel and put the train up overhead, there’s a lot of social costs to that,” Sterman said. The old elevated rail line also literally cast a permanent shadow over houses and business along Washington Street.
 
Arriving at Dudley at rush hour, Camera Core said though she’s not all that nostalgic about the old elevated train, it was easier and more reliable getting back and forth from downtown than buses. “It’s just always late,” she said as her bus finally pulled into the station.
 
Alejandra St. Guillen leads the Massachusetts Latino Civic Education Organization from offices just blocks from Dudley. She asked, “Why can’t we go underground in the places that are really crowded and come up for each stop, which would facilitate the traffic and really allow for direct access in town instead of having to take two buses or take the bus and the Silver Line, which is really just another bus?”
 
Getting to the workplace, whether urban or suburban
 
Marilyn Swartz Lloyd heads up MASCO, the Medical Academic Scientific Community Organization. She said Latino and Black activists in Boston have long pointed out a disconnect between minority neighborhoods and historic transportation policy, and that with cutbacks in service it is more important than ever to ask questions.
 
“How do you get people to work in their neighborhoods to the larger areas like the Financial District and the Longwood area, so that they have jobs and so that it takes them as short a period of time as people who are going on the direct spokes on the wheel?" she said. "You have to have more transportation that ties the spokes together and I think that it's particularly true in the Longwood area, where the highest population of our workers are from Dorchester and Roxbury.”
 
As many as 104,000 workers, students, patients and vendors pour into Longwood each day. According to MASCO, about 20 percent of employees who work in the medical district would be affected by cutbacks, including the elimination of two bus routes.
 
But it’s not just downtown Boston and inner-city job centers like Longwood that are dealing with how to get their workers to their desks, stations or machines.
 
Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson wrote the seminal book When Work Disappears. He said there is a mismatch between many new jobs — which are in the suburbs — and the people who need them most.
 
“80 percent of the entry-level jobs are located in the suburbs," he said. "And, therefore, a lot of people really depend on transportation to get to the jobs. The lack of feasible transportation, however, exacerbates this mismatch because the lack of transportation options not only increases reliance on automobiles, it also makes it difficult, very difficult, for those without cars — particularly inner-city residents — to get to suburban jobs.”
 
That’s a catch-22. You might say, “Well, there is commuter rail.” But most MBTA rail service was set up to get suburbanites into and out of the city and not the other way around.
 
Searching for solutions
 
“The Brookings Institution actually did a big study last year and they specifically looked at how well the transit system served jobs," said Stephanie Pollack of the Kitty and Michael Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University. "And we weren’t .the best and we weren’t the worse. We were in the middle of the pack.”
 
Even so, it’s going to take some major planning to alter the way we think about transportation and jobs, especially as it affects the poor and minorities, she said. “So we need to both make the transit system better serve the places where jobs are and where people are who need those jobs, and we need to change land use policy so that we make sure that when we’re locating new jobs in the region we put them in places that folks can get to on transit.”
 
Swartz Lloyd and others are calling on companies — public and private — to step up efforts to provide transportation to and from transit stations for workers and job seekers without the means to get to those jobs. “I think just like the private systems are working to pick people up from train stations and at subway stops, there may be some way that we can all interconnect as well,” she said.
 
It’s estimated that companies to subsidize the cost of transportation for their workers are spending as much as $40 million. Waiting for a bus, commuter Sean Walker said that’s the only way he could afford the rising costs of getting back and forth from his home near Ashmont Station to his job: “I got a pass for both the bus and the train, so it’s about 60 bucks.”
 
But he’s still dealing with the lingering problem of time. He works near Symphony Hall and lives near Ashmont Station in Dorchester. “It takes me overall an hour," he lamented. "In some areas if you don’t catch [a bus], another won’t come for half an hour to 45 minutes. “
 
Alternatives to the bus
 
African Americans, Latinos, Cape Verdeans and Haitians are heavily dependent on bus service. MBTA ridership is estimated at around 400,000 per weekday, with the heaviest passenger concentrations in Roxbury, Mattapan and Dorchester.
 
Boston city councilor Charles Yancey is lauding a joint MBTA and community plan to provide minority commuters more direct rail access, getting them from Mattapan to downtown in 20 minutes rather than 60. “It’s called the Fairmount Line, which runs right through the heart of the communities of color from the Newmarket down to Mattapan Square,“ he said.
 
The crown jewel of that plan is a new station that will be located off Blue Hill Avenue near the Cummings Bridge. The station will include a modern platform with wind screens and a message board announcing train arrivals.
 
“I also believe that we should improve the connections with Dudley Square and ultimately in the future we should have a Green Line–type of LRV type of operation running from Dudley Street all the way downtown," Yancey said.
 
Still, for those who rely on buses to get home, to school, to work or in search of employment, the amount of time it takes to get there leaves many frustrated. Some on that day passing through Dudley Station thought back to the time when the elevated trains pulled up to the platform and headed downtown. It was not the best system, but it was faster.
 

 
Some using wheelchairs and walkers, the riders said they were upset with increases in the cost for The Ride (the service for disabled and elderly passengers in the Boston area) and a similar service in the western part of the state. Carolyn Villers, executive director for Massachusetts Senior Action Council, which organized the demonstration, said the hike in the cost of The Ride is unfair to those who can least afford it.
 
“For many who depend on this service, that’s going to be unaffordable," she said. "What it means is that they won’t be able to access transportation to get to many of the medical appointments that they have, other commitments, work, school, family and community.”
 
The MBTA's board of directors approved a series of fare increases on April 4 that doubled the cost of The Ride service from $2 to $4 one-way for most riders.

What You Said ...

In a response to our online "how I'd fix the T" survey, rider Dodie Catlett of Boston weighed in on MBTA service for seniors:
 
I'm 81 years old and independent. Until otherwise, I won't use The Ride. However, I will find an increase in senior fares a problem. Also, a small point: it would be ever so welcome if motor persons would make announcements from time-to-time to the effect that offering seats to seniors would be appreciated. Young people should be encouraged to do so. Thank you.