By Adrian Walker | Boston Globe | February 16, 2015

If you have been a frustrated customer of the MBTA in the past few weeks, Laverne Lassiter-Pina feels your pain.

For the past 18 years, Lassiter-Pina has driven a train on the Red Line. She leaves her home in Avon before dawn to arrive at work at 5 a.m. and typically makes four daily runs from Braintree to Alewife. It’s usually about 50 minutes from one end to the other, but of course, that has been subject to change lately. Lassiter-Pina’s train did not budge for about two hours during a run a couple of weeks ago.

“People are just fed up, and we are too,” she said Friday. “When [riders] are stranded, we’re stranded too.”

Once a train is stalled, she stops being a driver and turns into a communicator. Her role, basically, is to try to keep people from freaking out. “I’m there to keep them informed as to what’s going on, give them updates as I get them, and just keep them as comfortable as possible until the train’s moving again.”

Although we have heard a lot from high-ranking officials about the MBTA recently, we have not heard much from the people who are actually struggling to keep the system running. Which is why I wondered what life is like for someone who has to face several trainloads of anxious passengers each day. As it turns out, customers have shown a surprising amount of empathy for the beleaguered employees.

“Some of them yell,” Lassiter-Pina said. “But others say ‘Hang in there’ or ‘It’s not your fault.’ Those are the ones that make it good for us. But we understand the ones who are upset, too. You need to get to work, and this is your alternative transportation. We should be able to get you to work.”

Lassiter-Pina, 43, said she became an MBTA employee almost by chance. Her number came up in a lottery for prospective hires, and then she aced an exam. She has driven on the Red Line her entire career.

As a veteran driver, Lassiter-Pina is not especially surprised by the T’s struggles this month. “If there’s snow on the tracks, you lose contact with the third rail,” she explained. “The other thing people don’t understand is that these trains are like cars: You have to keep them warm, or they’ll stop running. And they’re so old.”

As we talked in frigid South Station, she did not know that this past weekend’s storm would shut down the entire MBTA on Sunday. The system’s woes continue mounting, with no end to winter in sight.

Lassiter-Pina, an active member of the MBTA Carmen’s Union, seemed encouraged by general manager Beverly Scott’s impassioned defense of the agency’s employees last week.

“She showed that she’s human, and she showed that she’s frustrated as well,” Lassiter-Pina said. “She’s frustrated with the lack of acknowledgment of what we as employees go through. I think she handled herself very well and I think she empathizes with both sides: the public and her employees.“

It has been a tough few weeks for everyone associated with mass transit. Charlie Baker probably never thought the
MBTA would be the source of his first crisis as governor. As far as anyone knows, Scott was not planning to quit. For the people who go to work on the system’s front lines, all they can do is keep shoveling, so to speak.

“It’s just snow fatigue for everyone,” Lassiter-Pina said “We’re all trying to get through these acute storms.”

The next snow is forecast for Tuesday, and it is hard to believe that it will be good news for the MBTA or its passengers. But Lassiter-Pina is an optimist at heart.

“It’s been hard; it’s been frustrating. The passengers are frustrated. But it’s New England, and we’ve learned to persevere.”

Given the T’s poor performance to date, perseverance will be needed for quite a while.

Here is a link to the article on the Boston Globe’s website: http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/02/16/the-snow-woes-though-eyes-one-veteran-motorwoman/YrJMpZ3QaAtiIxVE9bdJgJ/story.html.