Spring is in the muggy, fetid air on the MBTA
Jeremy C. Fox for Boston.com
The setting sun shone down as an outbound Orange Line train approached Roxbury Crossing.
Jeremy C. Fox can be reached at jeremy.fox@globe.com.
Follow him on Twitter: @jeremycfox.
Follow Downtown on Twitter: @YTDowntown.
Buses to replace trains on part of Orange Line on five nights per week for one month
Subway service between the Orange Line’s four most northern stations will be replaced by buses after 9 p.m. on five days each week for about one month, according to the MBTA.
Shuttles will run between Oak Grove Station and Sullivan Square Station from 9 p.m. until the end of service on every Sunday through Thursday from May 19 to June 21, officials said. However, there will be no evening diversion on the night of Sunday, May 26, due to the Memorial Day holiday that Monday.
The buses, which are accessible for people with disabilities, will stop at those two stations as well as at the two stations in between: Malden Center Station and Wellington Station, according to the T’s website.
During the times the four subway stations and their connecting tunnels are shut down, MBTA crews plan to perform work on the Assembly Square Station Project, officials said.
For more information, contact the MBTA Customer Communications Department at 617-222-3200, TTY: 617-222-5146.
E-mail Matt Rocheleau at mjrochele@gmail.com.
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Man and woman wanted for Hingham bank robbery found in Brockton
Police have arrested a man and woman in Brockton who were both wanted for allegedly robbing banks in Hingham and a New Hampshire town.
According to a release from the New Hampshire Deputy U.S. Marshal’s office, members of the U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force from both New Hampshire and Massachusetts were looking for the man and the woman, who were allegedly involved in bank robberies in both states.
On Wednesday, information was uncovered by the Task Force, which led them to believe the two suspects were in a hotel in Brockton.
Managers at the hotel confirmed that both the suspects were staying at the hotel, but when police went to the room, the suspect refused to open the door.
Police forced open the door and arrested Ryan Patrick Lane, 35, from Charlestown and Amy Cole, 38, from Weymouth on the warrants.
Lane had an arrest warrant issued out of Hampton New Hampshire for a bank robbery that occurred on April 4 at TD Bank. He was also accused of robbing a Hingham bank on March 29, police said.
He will be charged with assault and battery with a deadly weapon in addition to the arrest warrants for the robberies.
Cole was arrested on an outstanding warrant for her role in the Hingham bank robbery, where police allege that she was an accessory after the fact. She will also be charged on three less serious warrants.
Lane and Cole will be arraigned in Brockton District Court and are being held by the Brockton Police Department.
According to the release, both suspects are also believed to have been involved in additional bank robberies in the area. Additional charges may be sought pending the outcome of those investigations, police said.
Police were proud of the capture, especially as the crimes took place across state lines.
“Unfortunately, crime knows no boundaries, and criminals can easily move around to commit offenses in any state.” U.S. Marshal David Cargill, Jr. said. “We are fortunate that the U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force has a broad, nationwide jurisdiction that allows us to pursue these fugitives anywhere in the country and even around the world through our vast network of law enforcement partners.”
Boston's New Urban Mechanics initiative named one of top 25 in nation by Harvard
Jeremy C. Fox for Boston.com
Downtown Boston.
A City of Boston initiative has been named one of the top government innovations in the country by an institute at Harvard University.
The Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics is among 25 semifinalists for the Innovations in American Government Award, presented by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
“These top 25 innovations in government offer real, tangible ways to protect our most disadvantaged citizens, educate the next-generation workforce, and utilize data analytics to enhance government performance,” Stephen Goldsmith, director of the center’s Innovations in Government program, said in a statement Wednesday.
“Despite diminishing resources, these government programs have developed model innovations that other struggling agencies should be inspired to replicate and adapt to their own communities,” Goldsmith said.
The Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics works to deliver an array of transformative city services to residents, ranging from enhancing public spaces, to increasing civic participation, to improving educational outcomes, according to Harvard.
The 25 initiatives were selected by a panel of researchers, practitioners, and policy specialists, Harvard said. The Innovations in American Government Award winner and four finalists will be announced in the fall.
In the list released Wednesday, the programs are presented in alphabetical order and are not ranked.
The Ford Foundation created the award in 1985 to draw attention to effective government programs, Harvard said. The awards program has since recognized more than 400 government initiatives at the local, state and federal level, as well as tribal governments, and provided more than $22 million in grants to support efforts to help disseminate those programs.
A full list of the Top 25 programs is available here.
Jeremy C. Fox can be reached at jeremy.fox@globe.com.
Follow him on Twitter: @jeremycfox.
Follow Downtown on Twitter: @YTDowntown.
Video | MBTA takes steps to boost safety, security throughout system
(Matt Rocheleau for Boston.com)
The temporary extra patrols of well-armed police officers and soldiers in MBTA stations are gone. But the quest to bolster the long-term safety of the public transit system is far from over.
The T still has $80 million in unspent federal homeland security grants, which have been doled to public transportation systems across the country since 2002.
The $60 million in federal grants spent by the T over the past decade has helped make the agency a national leader in the industry of public transit safety.
“The efforts toward security and policing that the MBTA has had in place for a number of years have really been looked at as a benchmark for the industry,” said Greg Hull, director of operations, safety and security for the American Public Transportation Association.
And, when the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon two weeks ago, officials at the MBTA said that, while shocked and devastated like the rest of the city, they were prepared, largely due to the new equipment and training acquired in recent years.
“It was controlled chaos,” said Randy Clarke, senior director of security and emergency management for the MBTA and the Massachusetts Department of Transportation.
He described the atmosphere of the T’s central hub for dispatch and communications, or Operations Control Center, as officials scrambled to secure stations and stop some service after the explosions at Copley Square, and then again several day later when the system was shut down during a lengthy manhunt.
“I hate to say we’re used to crises and trained for them, but we are,” Clarke said.
On Monday, two weeks after the Marathon bombings, MBTA officials gave a tour of the control center, which includes some of the transit industry’s most sophisticated technology for daily operations and security.
FULL ENTRYNational Park Service looking for food vendor for Navy Yard building
The National Park Service is looking for a new business to serve food and drinks in the Charlestown Navy Yard.
The Service has issued a prospectus advertising the opportunity to run a food and beverage concession in the Navy Yard’s Building 10.
The historic building, which is part of the Boston National Historical Park, is adjacent to America’s Ship of State USS Constitution, USS Cassin Young, and the USS Constitution Museum.
It is currently being rehabilitated and when the project is complete the building will have a new slate roof, new copper gutters and downspouts, exterior brick pointing, restored wood windows, new aluminum storm windows, new fixtures and finishes in the restrooms, and newly painted restrooms.
Building 10 has a sit-down dining service on the second floor that can also be used to serve box lunches to groups, and an outdoor deck with views of USS Constitution, USS Cassin Young, Dry Dock 1, Boston Harbor, and the Bunker Hill Monument that can seat about 60 people.
Over 1.8 million people visited the Charlestown Navy Yard in 2012.
The Park Service said it is looking for a concessioner that will offer a variety of food and beverages that appeal to a wide range of visitors, including vegans, vegetarians, and children; use locally grown food whenever possible; and fresh locally grown produce.
The concessioner would also work with National Park Service rangers and education specialists “to develop ways to convey interpretive messages to visitors on park-related themes and topics such as resource protection, NPS values, and how current menu items compare to traditional shipyard worker meals,” the Park Service said in an announcement of the prospectus.
The contract is expected to be effective from January 2014 to December 31, 2023.
Proposals must be received no later than 4:00 p.m. on June 18, 2013. Interested businesses have until Wednesday, May 2 to register for a site visit.
Additional information is available online or by contacting concessions specialist Josh Yocum, at (215) 597-1904.
E-mail Kaiser at Johanna.yourtown@gmail.com. For more news about your city, town, neighborhood, or campus, visit boston.com’s Your Town homepage.
Some pay phones in Boston to offer free Wi-Fi Internet hotspots this summer
Free Wi-Fi Internet access will soon be broadcast from 16 existing pay phones in Boston.
And officials from companies leading the effort hope to, pending city approval, rapidly expand the service so that a total of about 100 existing pay phones across Boston will offer free wireless Internet hotspots by the end of this summer. By the end of next summer, they hope they will have reached a total of about 400 payphones citywide.
The effort, called “FreeBostonWiFi,” is being carried out on a trial basis, company officials said.
So far, the city’s Department of Innovation and Technology has approved Wi-Fi installations at 16 pay phones, located around City Hall, Faneuil Hall, Downtown Crossing and Long Wharf, according to Tyler Kratz, president of DAS Communications, which is one of four private companies partnering on the effort.
RCN Business Services, LCC International Inc., Pacific Telemanagement Services and DAS Communications announced their plan at a conference in Boston last week.
Four temporary demo sites were set up at pay phones near the Hyatt Regency hotel where the conference was held, the companies said.
One site at Cambridge and Court streets near City Hall Plaza was heavily used even though nothing was done at the site to advertise that the Wi-Fi signal was there.
“People had no idea it was there unless they saw it on their phone,” or other mobile device, said Kratz. “People were using it quite a bit. It blew my mind.”
Over about a 24-hour span last week, about 18,000 mobile devices “noticed” the Wi-Fi. About 2,000 devices connected and more than 200 people spent and average of 17 minutes using the Internet connection, he said.
“There’s a demand for this,” said Kratz.
He said the Wi-Fi service at that payphone by City Hall was supposed to be permanent. But, last week it was struck by some bad luck. A vehicle rammed into and damaged the booth. But, Kratz said the companies plan to have it replaced and restore Wi-Fi service within a couple of weeks.
The other 15 pay phones in line to get Internet hotspots are also located in downtown Boston and in areas that draw a high number of pedestrians, including commuters, business professionals and tourists.
Kratz said another focus will be to add the service to pay phones in low-income areas of Boston where some people cannot afford their own Internet access.
“Boston is a great city. With all of the college students and the young people it’s perfect demographically,” he said. “And we really want to make sure this is not just clustered in one spot.”
The Wi-Fi hotspots will offer around-the-clock Internet access for an unlimited amount of time at no cost to users or taxpayers.
The signal is usually accessible within 100 to 200 feet of the kiosk, though range can vary depending on whether there are objects or structures around the kiosk that could interfere with the signal.
To connect to the Wi-Fi hotspots, users need to select FreeBostonWiFiSSID on their mobile device and then accept the connection’s terms and conditions. No password is needed and no personal information gathered.
The companies that own the kiosks and run the service pay for installing and maintaining the new infrastructure at the payphone stations.
Some of the kiosks themselves have advertisements on them to generate revenue for the companies, but Kratz said the Internet service will not display ads on users devices.
"The partnership is giving new life to telephone booths that have almost become extinct due to the evolution of the cell phone," said a statement from Jeff Carlson, vice president and general manager of RCN Boston. “Small cell and Wi-Fi technology deployed through this partnership is another step toward delivering high quality wireless by lighting up hotspots in Boston using RCN's unparalleled fiber network."
The payphone kiosks will broadcast Wi-Fi in part by using small cell technology, which allows mobile devices, such as cell phones, to work.
"It's interesting and a little ironic that capacity demands from the cellular market has allowed for the repurposing of existing phone infrastructure, like payphone kiosks,” said a statement from E.J. von Schaumburg , vice president of Advanced Mobility Solutions at LCC International. “Utilizing small cell technology, we can take advantage of the excellent kiosk locations throughout an urban area and deliver high quality cellular capacity at the street level."
Last summer, a pilot program launched in New York City in which free public Wi-Fi Internet hotspots were emitted from routers installed at about 10 payphones.
Kratz said his company has been involved with the efforts in New York City and that his company now runs Wi-Fi from about 20 payphones there and plans to soon add the service to about 40 more payphones.
City officials in New York have said they plan to have Internet service added to all 12,000 payphones there.
Several weeks later after the program debuted in New York, two at-large City Councilors in Boston – Felix G. Arroyo and Ayanna Pressley – proposed doing something similar here.
Kratz said he has since met with Arroyo to discuss replicating the service in Boston and that he and other city officials have been instrumental in helping it launch.
Use of payphones has become rare because of cell phones. Some payphones no longer function to make calls. Others have been removed entirely.
Wi-Fi hotspots will help restore some use to the old payphone kiosks, officials have said.
The first-ever payphone was installed at a bank in Hartford in the late 1800s.
Since 1997, the number of payphones nationwide has dropped from an estimated peak of about 2.2 million to about 400,000, according to a petition that the American Public Communications Council, which advocates for payphone use, sent to the Federal Communications Commission last spring.
Kratz said the roughly 400 payphones in Boston his company hopes to bring Wi-Fi to are all owned by Pacific Telemanagement Services. He said there are few others in the city.
Kratz said his company is also in talks with city officials about the possibility of having free wireless Internet access broadcast from key municipal buildings, like police and fire stations, as well as from old-fashioned fire alarm boxes around Boston. But, Kratz said, no agreement has been reached and other companies are pitching similar ideas to the city.
E-mail Matt Rocheleau at mjrochele@gmail.com.
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For the latest updates about your community, follow some of our local neighborhood, city and town Twitter accounts, here.
MGH Charlestown Healthcare Center talks about using web for better health
The following is from Marissa Velarde of the MGH Charlestown Healthcare Center on the using online resources for better health.
The MGH Center for Community Health Improvement and the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital have been working on a community health assessment for Charlestown that is designed to determine the community’s overall health, allow residents to prioritize their concerns, and develop a plan to improve community health. A meeting to discuss the results of the assessment is scheduled for May 2.
By: Marissa Velarde, MPH
Americans use the Internet to help them make decisions in their daily lives – from job seeking to selling a car or getting government information on Social Security. Increasingly, they are also using the Internet to make health care decisions. In fact, 72 percent of Internet users say they looked for health information within the past year, according to a 2012 survey by the Pew Research Center. One in three (35 percent) U.S. adults say they have gone online specifically to try to figure out what medical condition they or someone else might have, and half of these followed up with a visit to a health professional.
Historically, people have always tried to find answers to their health questions at home and made personal choices about whether and when to contact a health professional. The Internet is an addition to their personal health toolbox to help themselves as well as family members and friends. While online resources can be helpful in making health care decisions, they should not be the sole reason for that decision. Information that you find on a website does not replace your primary care provider’s advice. Always discuss your health care concerns with your PCP rather than self-diagnosing yourself or loved ones. It’s best to let health professionals make the expert evaluation. Indeed, clinicians remain a central resource for information and support. According to surveys, 70 percent of adults sought a health care professional during their last serious health issue.
Social media is the latest tool for health information and resources to emerge from the Internet. Health-related organizations, including hospitals, are actively using social media to connect with patients, families, and their communities. This includes Massachusetts General Hospital and the MGH Charlestown HealthCare Center. Our department, the Roger Sweet Patient & Family Learning Center, has launched a social media campaign to increase and enhance our communication with patients and the Charlestown community. Through Facebook and Twitter, we are reinforcing health messages, marketing our programs and services, and raising awareness on relevant community events and health news. We hope that you utilize our pages to access information that helps in your health care decision-making.
Please like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MGHCharlestownRSLC and follow us Twitter: https://twitter.com/MGH_RSLC
Once we have 50 “Likes” on Facebook, we’ll be randomly selecting someone to receive a gift card. Good luck!
A Twitter tribute to MBTA Officer Richard Donohue
AP Photo/Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority
In this 2010 photo provided by the MBTA, Richard Donohue Jr., left, and Sean Collier pose together at their graduation from the Municipal Police Officers' Academy.
Jeremy C. Fox can be reached at jeremy.fox@globe.com.
Follow him on Twitter: @jeremycfox.
Follow Downtown on Twitter: @YTDowntown.
Charlestown to see results of community health survey
Massachusetts General and Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospitals are set to release the results of their Charlestown community health assessment.
The hospitals, working with Charlestown residents and organizations, have conducted surveys and hosted forums and focus groups to determine the community’s overall health, allow residents to prioritize their concerns, and develop a plan to improve community health.
After a year and a half of work, they will present and discuss the results of the comprehensive health needs assessment and the community’s next steps Thursday, May 2, at the Knights of Columbus at 545 Medford St.
“Almost 700 Charlestown residents from every corner of the community had input into this assessment,” Joan Quinlan, executive director of the MGH Center for Community Health improvement, said in a statement. “Working together we can make real progress on becoming an even healthier community.”
MGH has long conducted health assessments with nearby communities, and the new federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act now requires all non-profit hospitals to conduct assessments.
To complete the assessment, the hospitals established an assessment committee with Charlestown residents serving as experts and liaisons to the neighborhood.
“As Spaulding begins to call Charlestown home, we are proud to participate in ways that improve our community such as this health assessment that will improve the lives of our new friends and neighbors,” Rebecca Kaiser, director of community relations for Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, said in a statement.
The community forum will begin with dinner at 6 p.m. The meeting will run from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
E-mail Kaiser at Johanna.yourtown@gmail.com. For more news about your city, town, neighborhood, or campus, visit boston.com’s Your Town homepage.
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