Author Archives: Garrett Wollman

In preparation for writing my end-of-decade review, I wanted to get a quick, plain-text listing of my posts on this blog, so I requested an export from WordPress — but then I realized that the export was in a modified … Continue reading →

Posted on 2019-12-30 by Garrett Wollman | Comments Off on A little XSLT hack for extracting titles from WordPress exports

Trip report: 2019–20 IBSF Skeleton World Cup, Lake Placid #2

Posted on 2019-12-29 by Garrett Wollman

Three Fridays ago, I again went to Lake Placid, site of the 1932 and 1980 Olympic Winter Games, to watch the third BMW IBSF World Cup skeleton competition of the year. Why third? I had already gone to (but didn’t … Continue reading →

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Comments on today’s Rail Vision decision by the MBTA board

Posted on 2019-11-04 by Garrett Wollman

I don’t usually write blog posts with my comments before the MBTA board, but after today’s momentous decision, with which I mostly agree, I wanted to memorialize my own comments in a more public place than the video replay of … Continue reading →

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I’ve written in these pages before about creating a cordon-type congestion charging zone (à la London) for Boston, and argued for it to be geographically quite large to reduce shunpiking. And I’ve also supported doubling the motor fuels tax — … Continue reading →

Posted on 2019-09-05 by Garrett Wollman | 2 Comments

About those stations on the Providence Line…

Posted on 2019-09-02 by Garrett Wollman

Two Sundays ago, instead of going for a bike ride in the nice weather like I should have, I went on a road trip of sorts to look at the condition of the six stations on the MBTA’s Providence Line … Continue reading →

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My trip to the Dublin Worldcon

Posted on 2019-08-26 by Garrett Wollman

Folks who have followed this blog for a long time will recall that in 2017, I made two trips to Finland. For the first trip, I attended the World Figure Skating Championships. When I realized that the 75th World Science … Continue reading →

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Scheduling Regional Rail for the Providence Line

Posted on 2019-06-20 by Garrett Wollman

Followers of this blog will recall that nearly a year ago I started doing simulations for various MBTA commuter rail lines under plausible operating schedules for TransitMatters’ Regional Rail proposal. Since I live in Framingham, I concentrated mainly on the … Continue reading →

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Other people’s recipes: Claire Ptak’s Ginger-molasses cake

Posted on 2019-05-25 by Garrett Wollman

I know it’s been an incredibly long time since my last proper recipe write-up, so here’s a lovely little cake from Claire Ptak’s The Violet Bakery Cookbook (Ten Speed Press, 2014 — wow, I’ve been working through this cookbook for … Continue reading →

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Two months of thinking about buses

Posted on 2019-04-16 by Garrett Wollman

You may be wondering why I never followed up on my promise to simulate Regional Rail ridership for the Providence Line. In part that’s because it’s actually really hard — the Providence Line is much more complicated than the Worcester … Continue reading →

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Updating my MBTA Commuter Rail modeling for the Worcester Line

Posted on 2019-02-04 by Garrett Wollman

On Friday, the MBTA quietly released the results of its 2018 in-person passenger counts. I’ve been waiting for this numbers since I started modeling service on the Framingham/Worcester Line last fall, and apparently everyone else has been waiting for them … Continue reading →

Posted in Transportation | Tagged , , | 1 Comment