My blogorythms, after peeking around June 6th, are back in a valley. I have no rage these days. The last time I got rage fatigue this bad was back in early May, when I posted my first rage fatigue notice. This time it’s partly to do with the heat-wave we just had, I’m sure. It was too damn hot to get up in arms over anything. I mean, just thinking cool thoughts made you break a sweat, never mind waving your arms, writhing around, wailing and gnashing your teeth.

I also think I shot my rage-wad on the lead-up to that awful MBTA hearing. What a cynical, utterly futile process that was. And as I said soon afterwards, I knew I’d have to hang back “in seclusion” and “regroup.” As silly as it was, it was all a little too activist for me. I’m all for talking the talk and walking the walk, but activism is kind of like speed-walking, and people usually look just as ridiculous doing it. I decided back in the Spring to basically “vote with my feet,” and I have been very happily pedaling all around the city ever since, through the theft of one bike, and a rusty old loner. I am now on my third in about as many months–and should this one go the way of the others, I will get a fourth. Nothing can stop me. I think in the last four months I’ve spent about seven-fifty on the T, and that only very, very grudgingly. never mind that I have spent about seven-hundred-fifty on bikes. I am hoping I will, in the end, deprive the T of at least that much. And it’s not that I don’t believe in mass transit. On the contrary. It’s that I don’t believe in the T.

I found it amusing, somehow, that after the Big Dig collapse, the local TV news was really pushing the T as a viable alternative. I can see an alternative. Yes. But not a viable one. That’s stretching it way beyond credibility. I mean, who are we trying to fool here? Well, obviously people who never use the T, and with good reason. But you knew that the truth would eventually out.

I enjoyed watching reporters trying to find some T-rider who would sing the T’s praises. The only one they could come up with, that I saw, was a tourist, who said she loved the Silver Line and that it was efficient and cheap. Well, we know that it’s different for tourists, that they can shrug off an inconvenience or two over the course of a couple of days. It’s sort of like the difference between the common cold and chronic emphysema. If it’s terminal, and you have to live with it every day, it starts to wear on you, you start looking for some miracle cure. I mean, sooner or later you get desperate.

So, even before the heat-wave came along and crushed even the tourists’ sense of goodwill, the commuter lines had buckled. The lesson? Just because the Big Dig is a miserable gazillion dollar fiasco doesn’t mean The MBTA isn’t, too.

And now everyone knows it for sure. Julia Talcott of Newton summed it up in a letter in today’s Glob:

OUR OUT-OF-TOWN friend took the MBTA to the Science Museum with two small children last Tuesday . At the Chestnut Hill station they found they did not have the six dollars in change needed to board the train. They tried unsuccessfully to get it from the only establishment within walking distance . When they called in desperation, we drove the change over to them. Once they were on the train, the trip took an hour.

Leaving from Science Park for the return trip, they found themselves surrounded by tourists looking for tokens or change. There were token machines covered in bubble wrap, lying inert inside the station. The trip back took an hour. They returned exhausted.

The trip by car usually takes 30 minutes round trip without traffic. Is it any wonder Bostonians prefer to drive when they can?

The T’s Silver Line may be coming to the rescue of airport travelers. Could the MBTA make it easier for those who want to get in and out of the city?

Wouldn’t it have been great if all the misspent money on the Big Dig had been used to overhaul the MBTA?

But it’s not always gratifying to know that people now know what you knew all along, especially when it doesn’t change anything. I mean, it’s like this woman says, wouldn’t it have been great if even a fraction of the grossly inflated cost of the Big Dig had gone to improving the MBTA? (Yes, I know that part of the deal was that improvements would be made to the MBTA, and they’ve been largely delivered, but I’m talking real, systemic improvements and upgrades, not little tit-for-tat projects here and there–and I’m talking billions in investment, not millions.)

Now, ironically, even more money’s been appropriated for the Big Dig from the projected budget surplus of somewhere between a hundred and two hundred million to go over the entire system and redo what it cost $10.5 billion more than it should have to do wrong in the first place. So far it’s another twenty million bucks down the hole on account of corruption and incompetence–but I’m confident it will be ten times more in the end–and rest assured it’s going right back into the pockets of the pigs whose shoddy work caused the collapse.

By the way, that twenty million (so far) would have covered almost a third of the T’s FY07 shortfall. By the time this crisis is past, they’ll have spent more than enough on it to have bailed out the T, I’m sure.

It’s not only money, though. In both cases it’s the culture of obfuscation, cronyism and corruption within these organizations, and the contractors they use, that’s to blame for troubles that sometimes, inevitably, turn tragic.

While Lee Matsueda and TRU soldier on with their “action alerts,” God love ‘em, there’s very little hope for their cause. Because there’s just no money in not raising fares, and there’s no real political price to pay for raising them, either. Suck it up, Boston. You’re used to it, anyway.

From here in my blogofunk I think it’s all pretty shrugworthy. Frankly, if you feel you’ve got no other choices in transportation in Boston, then you’re right.