QUINCY — Almost four weeks are down; only 19 months to go.
Nearly a month into the Wollaston MBTA station closure, officials and residents are looking to iron out the kinks of the T's strategies to ease its effects, especially with most of the North Quincy T parking lot closing in a few months.
The North Quincy lot will lose 587 parking spots at the start of May as a big building development begins there this summer. The T is working on a plan to deal with that closure, and will have one by early March, MBTA officials told a citizens group.
T officials said the North Quincy T station lot is packed, while few park at the Wollaston station lot to grab the shuttle bus to one of the other stations. The Wollaston station has more than 400 spaces, so officials have to figure out how many more they need to find.
"We'll figure out if that's enough or more are needed," said Janelle Chan, the T's deputy chief of real estate.
In a public meeting before the T expanded the shuttle route to Quincy Center, Anne Mahoney said she was concerned that the North Quincy T stop would become like the movie "The Hunger Games" — a brutal free-for-all. Mahoney, now an at-large city councilor, said the further measures the T took after that meeting helped bring the North Quincy T station to merely packed rather than unmanageable.
"It's not the 'The Hunger Games' only because we pushed," she said.
The T originally only planned to bus people from Wollaston to North Quincy, but added shuttles running a stop in the other direction in December after several contentious community meetings.
Mahoney said she hopes the T holds community meetings leading up to the North Quincy parking lot closure, too, so they can have feedback the way they did before the closure.
"You're not going to strike gold twice," she said.
By all accounts, the North Quincy T station remains busy.
Mary Lally, a Wollaston-area resident who vocally opposed the closure in the year leading up to it, said the T's extension of the shuttle loop to Quincy Center has made the commute tolerable.
"That's the only way I'm surviving," said Lally, who commutes every day to work using the T.
She said her commute grew about 20 minutes in the morning and about 15 in the afternoon with the addition of the shuttle ride, which has been getting gradually more crowded.
Ward 6 City Councilor William Harris said there's still work to be done in making the North Quincy station run more smoothly during rush hour, likely involving the T enlisting more workers to guide people from the buses.
"There’s a lot of confusion in the morning and at the end of the day," he said.
Christopher Walker, a spokesman for Mayor Thomas Koch, said that in the city's judgment, the first few weeks of the closure have gone about as smoothly as could be expected for such intrusive work.
"It's going well, considering," he said.
He said the city had received complaints about the loudness of the work at the station during the night shortly after the closure as workers demolished the station. The T does plan to continue nighttime work over the next couple of weeks, but the agency has agreed to do so more quietly.
"It will continue, but within the city's noise ordinance," Walker said.
The city prohibits people from making too much noise at night, and the T work exceeded it at times, Walker said.