T says State Street upgrade will finally be done next year

“Can you find out why the State Street Station renovation is taking so long and what the final result is going to be?’’ reader Herb Gleason e-mailed in March, when I took over the beat, asking a question I would subsequently receive from others as well. Gleason, a Boston native who has practiced law in the city for a half-century — including more than a decade as the city’s corporation counsel for then-mayor Kevin H. White — has an office near the station and e-mailed me again recently about State Street. “No apparent progress,’’ he wrote.

I posed the question to MBTA spokeswoman Lydia Rivera, who acknowledged that the project was supposed to be completed by September 2007. As recently as last November, the T said it would be completed by fall 2010. Now the transit agency says it is about 80 percent done and should be finished by next spring.

While the original construction contract was awarded at $38.4 million, a series of change orders and amendments with contractor Barletta Heavy Division Inc. pushed the tab to $52.4 million, Rivera said. (That’s not counting another $12 million invested in design, land acquisition, and other costs outside of construction.)

For all the groans that may elicit, the cost overruns and delays are slightly less than those at Copley, another project that the T says is coming to a close soon — and another demonstration of just how complicated and unpredictable it is to complete an above-and-below-ground infrastructure project in a crowded urban environment, while attempting to keep that work site open as a functioning station.

The work at State Street includes extending the Blue Line platforms to accommodate six-car trains and constructing two new elevator-equipped entrances and a new ramp and corridors connecting the Blue Line and Orange Line platforms, to assist riders with disabilities. The work also includes a host of modernizing touches, like new lighting, communications equipment, and graphic panels reflecting the history of the area above ground.

The relocation of utility lines nearby, particularly under State and Congress streets, proved more complicated and expensive than expected. The design had to be retooled after the T, in April 2006, settled a federal lawsuit over its inadequate compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, agreeing to spend $310 million on accessibility improvements — including changes at State — and submit to independent monitoring. And the switch from tokens to automated fare collection during construction — yes, that’s how long the project has taken — also added to the cost and time, Rivera said in an e-mail.

The roadway utility work will continue through this fall, with restoration of the Boston streets above scheduled to be finished in the spring, while the station itself should be substantially completed by January, Rivera said.

Gleason said the T has done little to inform the public about what is going on at State, but he wasn’t surprised to learn that utility work took longer than expected. It reminded him of Dock Square, a block away and across from City Hall, which a generation ago always had work crews present. On the verge of opening Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market in the 1970s as a revitalized destination, White told Joe Casazza — who would serve three mayors as public works commissioner over a remarkable 39 years, and who died last month at 76 — to instruct the utilities this was their last chance to tear up the block.

“But Kevin,’’ Casazza told the mayor, as Gleason recalled, “that’s where they practice.’’

The answer is yes. Talking on the phone — as long as you’re 18 or older — is still legal in Massachusetts, with or without a hands-free device, as is punching in the number. When legislators were debating the bill, some law enforcement officials expressed concern that the law would be difficult to enforce if a texting driver could claim he or she was merely putting in numbers pre-call instead. But backers of a ban on all handheld phone use could not muster majority support, partly because of research showing that hands-free devices do not eliminate the cognitive distraction, and potential danger, of the phone call itself.

So punching in a phone number is legally OK — unless you are weaving or obstructing traffic in the process. In that case, officers can write citations under a different statute predating the Safe Driving Law, which allows for $35 tickets for “unsafe’’ or “impeded operation’’ covering a myriad of offenses, from driving with headphones to driving with the seat reclined too far to see.

On Thursday, Globe photographer David Ryan and I accompanied a pair of state troopers as they enforced the new and existing laws, for a story that appeared Friday. The ride-along made it clear that discretion, intuition, and common sense will all play a role in whether someone gets a ticket.

On Columbia Road in Dorchester, the troopers pulled up alongside a woman who was glancing down and tapping on her phone — but who then immediately put the phone to her ear. Had she not appeared to be making a call — or had she still been staring at the phone and tapping when the light changed, blocking traffic — she could have earned a ticket under either the old or new law.

In the Q-and-A, I also explained that the law is murky about whether you can use a navigation application on a smartphone. The law makes an exception for an electronic device “affixed, either temporarily or permanently, in a motor vehicle for the purpose of providing navigation.’’ Agencies charged with upholding the new law aren’t entirely sure what legislators meant by that. A spokeswoman for the Registry of Motor Vehicles said she thought using a GPS app on a phone would remain legal. A State Police spokesman had a different interpretation, but thought it would be situational, based on an officer’s discretion. That happened in the ride-along, when the troopers issued a written warning to a woman staring down at the navigation application on her phone in Dedham — though only after she failed to notice the light change, forcing traffic to stream around her on Route 1.

Some readers wanted to know why the Green Line was not included in the data release, which covers only the Red, Orange, and Blue lines — another case of the Green Line being less, well, rapid than its rapid-transit siblings. Dave Apfel, a reader who lives near the St. Paul stop on the Green Line’s C branch, wrote: “I’m sure many folks who live on the line — myself included — would be very interested in this. By the way, there should be a word for people that ‘live on the Green Line’ . . . perhaps suckers is most appropriate.’’

Here’s the answer, from MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo: “The Green Line employs different and less sophisticated technology to track its trains. The current system on the light rail line does not collect enough data for the kind of countdown system that the MBTA is launching on the three heavy-rail lines. The MBTA is currently preparing a multiyear plan to upgrade the Green Line system.’’

For August, the agency counted 1.25 million daily riders — that’s one-way trips, so divide roughly in half to get the number of distinct human beings using the T in a given day — including an all-time high of 390,300 daily bus riders. That’s a 15 percent bus-riding increase over August 2009. T officials credited the growth to investments in fleet upgrades and the release of real-time bus data this year, making catching the bus more convenient.

Light rail ridership — the Green Line, plus the Mattapan trolley — was at 231,800 a day in August, about the same as August 2009. The three heavy rail subway lines were at 476,800 — a 1.4 percent increase over August 2009 — and the commuter rail was at 129,700, a year-to-year decrease of 6.8 percent.

Drop-off locations where commuters can donate backpacks, paper, notebooks, pencils, and other supplies have been set up at the ticket offices for the Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad Co. at North Station, South Station, and Back Bay.