QUINCY – John Keenan didn’t get many phone calls on Monday, and he counts that as a good thing.
Keenan, a Quincy state senator who’s taken on the role as some thing of a point man for the interactions between the MBTA and the people of Quincy, said only about five people had called him with issues involving the closing of the Wollaston T station.
“We got through the day,” he said Monday evening.
This day – or, more accurately, the moving target that has been the closing date for the station since it was announced nine months ago – has been one dreaded by many in Quincy, but it appears to have gone better than some people expected.
During the 20-month closure of the station, the T is running shuttle buses from Wollaston to Quincy Center and North Quincy and back.
“I was waiting less than 10 minutes,” said Quincy resident Edward Shields.
He had taken an MBTA bus to Quincy Center, where he then grabbed the shuttle up to Wollaston to go to the CVS there.
During Monday afternoon, buses came every few minutes, alternating northbound and southbound.
Keenan, who rode the T to and from work and said he rode the full shuttle loop during both the morning and evening commutes, praised both the commuters and the T guides for being patient. He said a couple of tweaks that will need to happen are adjustments to how the buses travel down Dimmock Street and the area near the North Quincy T station.
“They have to look at the intersection of Hancock Street and East and West Squantum,” he said. The T and the city need to work on the light cycle to stop the increased traffic from backing up onto Newport.
Buses also were backing up Dimmock Street onto Burgin Parkway near Quincy Center. Keenan said that’s likely because snow has cut a lane off of that street, so the city needs to plow it.
Shortly after 3:30 p.m. Monday, a ride from Wollaston to Quincy Center took under 10 minutes, and the same trip back took a little over 16, with much of that ride spent around Dimmock.
On Monday the T had workers out at all of the shuttle-bus stops. Many were multilingual, as were the signs that adorned the temporary bus shelters. The workers, directing people where to go, handed out fliers that explained the shuttle system in English, Vietnamese and two dialects of Chinese.
The T worked with Quincy Asian Resources to get 16 translators along the route, and they will be there for the duration of this week, said Department of Transportation spokeswoman Lisa Battiston. She said the other guides will be there for the remainder of the week, too.
The station’s closure has riled residents, leading to several contentious community meetings over the past year. When the station was open, it served an average of 4,624 people, with about 60 percent of them walking to the station from the surrounding area. The T is building a new station primarliy because the current one is the only Red Line station that isn’t handicap accessible.
Most of the parking lot at the Wollaston station remains open so people can still park there and take the shuttles north or south, though few people appeared to be doing that on Monday afternoon shortly before 3 p.m., as the lot was very largely empty.
Keenan said officials should continue to watch the lots in the coming days and weeks, as many people may have avoided the T altogether and taken to the roads during these first days of the closure.
“It may have been today that more people drove than usual,” he said. “I heard the Neponset bridge was terrible.”
The T counted 1,223 people who had used the shuttle buses by 9:45 a.m. Alessanda Basten had been one of them, taking the shuttle from Wollaston in the morning up to North Quincy. She said it took about 15 minutes to get on a bus that morning.
“It was kind of crowded,” she said. As she was getting back to Wollaston shortly after 3 p.m., she said buses filled up quickly during the afternoon, too, when school let out.
The North Quincy High School junior had always taken the train up one stop to go to school, but now she’s going to have to settle into a new routine, she said.
“It’ll be like this until I graduate,” Basten said.
While the station is closed, 423 parking spaces will remain available. Parking availability at Wollaston and North Quincy Stations will be tweeted every 30 minutes weekdays between 6 and 8 a.m. @MBTA.
Visit mbta.com/wollaston for more information.
– Sean Cotter covers Quincy for the Ledger. He may be reached by email at scotter@ledger.com or by phone at 617-786-7049. Like the Ledger page on Facebook to follow more South Shore news.