Tales Of A Frustrated Commuter

As WGBH News' transportation reporter, I hear from many commuters about their daily struggles to get to and from work. Recently, as I was scrolling through my Twitter feed, one such struggle caught my eye. Commuter Suzie Soloviev had recounted her July 9 trip home from North Station to Lawrence, on video.

Soloviev and her husband Greg are a young couple in their 30’s, with a three-year-old daughter. Like many couples, both work while their daughter is in daycare, and their days have to be carefully timed out for all the pieces to work.

They live in Methuen but work in Cambridge, and that means a challenging commute.

They could drive, but then there is the cost of parking, and the stress of dealing with the traffic on a trip that can take up to 2 hours one way.

“We tried driving for the first month that we lived in Methuen, and it was awful. ... Greg was so, so anxious every morning about being late. At least with the T it's out of our hands. We also try to use the commute as downtime to read, nap, or chat with a friend who takes the train once per week," Soloviev said. "Both the commuter rail and driving are a crapshoot, but with one we get to nap and not worry about being in a car accident."

Those plans, though, only work if the train they take — the Haverhill line on the Commuter Rail — is on time.

According to the MBTA, on-time performance — which the T considers to be a train arriving no later than five minutes past schedule — averaged 90 percent over the past year for all 14 commuter rail lines. The Haverhill line reported 92.7 percent on-time performance between June 2018 and June 2019, the third-best in the system.

But Soloviev isn't buying the T's estimates. Even if the T's definition of "on time" is only five minutes past the scheduled time, that makes a big difference for her. Soloviev said the train is late at least twice a week, and so is she — either for work or getting home to pick up her daughter.

“Our commute is timed very carefully," she said. "We can't take an earlier train because we only have one car and daycare opens at 6:30. We leave the house at 6:23 to 6:26 , drop our kiddo off, drive to Lawrence and pray that traffic is ok — we've missed the train due to traffic in the past."

Thankfully, Soloviev said, her daycare provider could charge her a late fee but doesn’t. And that’s good because Soloviev and her husband need to save as much as they can. The couple spends $340 each for monthly commuter passes. Half of this $680 cost is subsidized by their employers, but both get paid by the hour, so when the train is late, that's reflected in their pay. Parking in Lawrence, subsidized by MIT, is around $25 a month. Daycare is $300 per week.

It all adds up to $1,765 a month, and that’s before mortgage and taxes, Soloviev said.

"I don't know what we're going to do. We can't afford to live in Boston but it's starting to look like we can't afford to live in the Merrimack Valley, which is one of the few affordable places left to live in the area," she said.

Considering the cost of commuting, Suzie said it might have been cheaper to stay in Roslindale where she grew up, but the cost of a home there was more than in Methuen. She said she and her husband didn’t fully realize at the time how much it would cost them to travel to and from work. What Soloviev finds especially galling is paying increasingly more money for a service that is so unreliable. She said despite what Keolis reports, there are problems every day: overcrowding, late arrivals and departures, or mechanical breakdowns.

But things finally reached a boiling point for her on July 9, when on the way home from work, Soloviev and her husband were forced to change trains and endure severe overcrowding. Then, as the later train pulled out of North Station, it came to a stop and all the power — including the lights and air conditioning — went out for several minutes before the train got going again. The couple faced a grueling 3-hour commute.

As she summed thing up in a video posted to Twitter the next day: ”The sad thing is while the whole experience together was a total nightmare, each individual piece of it is not that uncommon. So we couldn't even feel that surprised when all the pieces came together,” she wrote.

That’s when Suzie made her first video on train, which she called, “The 5:15 to Haverhill — Definitely Not a Love Story.”

”I just felt like I had had enough," she said. "There's no outlet where you feel like you're being heard, and there aren't any effective changes, so I thought, 'The heck with it, I'm just going to post a video to Twitter.' I'm at least going to show people that this happening.”

In the video, Soloviev documented what happened that night. It has become the first in a series of video diaries she is making about the Haverhill Line. Soloviev is trained as a theater educator and believes in the power of art to make change. So she has encouraged others on social media to relate their own stories, and she hopes at some point that Gov. Baker or Keolis will take notice.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Soloviev is required to pay for a separate monthly T pass in addition to a commuter rail pass. Her T pass is included with her commuter rail pass.