fares on the T went up today. no big deal, i'd thought, but then, i hadn't heard anywhere whether or not the fare out towards the end of the D-line was going up. turns out it is. and that kinda disappoints me. now, the T has always been dirt-cheap. it was 85 cents for the longest time, and then went up to a dollar, and now $1.25 for the most part. that's still very cheap (although you can argue that for the green line, you don't get service comparable to other subways and therefore shouldn't pay a commensurate fare). but it used to be $2.50 out here in newton, and i thought that was a fair price. it's 7 miles to the center of downtown (outside the green dragon pub, actually, is where mileage is measured to), and service here is excellent; it is but a 25 minute ride in to fenway park, for instance, and even faster going out, since people don't have to pay. and i know that's part of the rationale for it being so expensive. goodness knows that given a choice between fenway and kenmore, now, i'll make a point of getting on aboveground even more often. $3 seems like a lot to me, a lot more than others are paying. i don't even commute on the train, mind you, but i do ride downtown probably 5 times a month, more in the summer; i'm sure this is even more than an annoyance for people who do commute. towards the end of the year, they'll have automated fare-card systems starting up, which i hope will lower the fare (even if it's replaced by a reasonable outbound fare). i doubt very much if the price overall will go down, but then, maybe people besides us 'wealthy newton residents' will bear some of the load of building bits and pieces of a slightly more modern transit system. and no, buses in 'transitways' do not fucking count as a subway. pansies.