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Commentary
Train dreams: A beach adventure
Editor's note: This is an excerpt from Cognoscenti's Sunday morning newsletter. If you like what you read and want it in your inbox, sign up here.
When I was a teenager growing up in the Boston suburbs and craving someplace weirder and more savory, the MBTA opened up the world to me.
Today, our public transit network is literally falling apart. It is, perhaps, a predictable but no less infuriating outcome of fiscal starvation and chronic mismanagement. But now is not the time to walk away (or rather, drive away) from the MBTA. It’s a moment to embrace the system: to demonstrate Greater Boston wants a thriving, well-oiled public transit network to dodge the traffic that seems to get worse each year and to take advantage of the routes that can still take you places.
This week, I wrote about two wildly different transit adventures that Greater Boston residents and visitors can try this summer — in a single day, if desired! You can ramble through the rustling woodlands connecting Lincoln and Concord commuter rail stations, with a stop at Walden Pond along the way. And then, near dusk, you can change into more debonair duds, head south and hit the restaurants, bars and nightclubs of Providence. All those rides will cost you no more than $10, thanks to the T’s weekend commuter rail pass. A very good deal.
But would you believe me if I told you there are more MBTA adventures to choose from?
A few T treks ended up on Cog’s cutting room floor due to space constraints. I’m taking this opportunity to unfurl the map a little bit more. Yes, it's time to head to the beach.
Many of you have likely experienced the Massachusetts shoreline through the windshields of your cars on broiling summer days. You can imagine the scene: sitting in gridlock, glancing in the rearview mirror at the beach gear in the back, frantically thinking, “What if the parking lot is full?”
But when you take the MBTA’s Newburyport/Rockport Line to North Shore towns, including Lynn and Manchester-By-The Sea, you’ll never have to worry about this. You simply disembark, take a little stroll, and the beach will be there, waiting for you.
Lynn’s main commuter rail station is closed for renovations right now, but the T has set up a temporary station (“Lynn Interim”) near the center of town. From this stop, it’s only a 0.8-mile walk to the northern entrance of beautiful Nahant Beach — where cars line up as early as 8 a.m. in the summer, jousting for very limited parking spots. One of the nasty secrets of Massachusetts is that only about 12% of our iconic coastline is accessible to the general public. The rest of it is privately owned, figuratively, and sometimes it's literally fenced off. Coastal towns have made it difficult for people to access the limited beaches that are open to all by limiting non-resident parking and imposing steep visitor fees.
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But public transit is an overlooked lifeline that can allow you to sneak around some of these hurdles. Take the Newburyport/Rockport Line further north to Manchester-By-The-Sea and you can walk just over half a mile down Beach Street, step onto Singing Beach and forgo the $30 parking fee. (You still might have to fork over a $10/person walk-on fee, but a 66% discount is nothing to sneeze at.) And for $5 more than the cost of a one-off parking spot, you can buy a walk-on pass for the entire summer season.
I’ve always considered trains to be the stuff of dreams, a ticket to accessing the world around us. Imagine where else they could take us one day.
