Background

I live in the metro area of Boston, Massachusetts, United States, and have been here since 2021. (For those who aren’t familiar, the metro region goes beyond the City of Boston. Because of this, many statistics that compare between US cities don’t paint the full picture for Boston. “Cities” like Cambridge, Chelsea and Malden are firmly within the urban region and far from “suburbs”.)

I also have extensive backgrounds in China and Singapore. You can imagine how frustrated I was when I first came to the US – especially as I lived in a place with much worse public transit before Boston! Anyway, if you have any questions about transit systems in both countries or need to look up some materials in Chinese, I’m happy to answer them.

My pronouns are he/him/his.

What I do with transit

First of all, I do love riding transit as a hobby during my free time. Of course, I also use my camera to document them. Currently, I am shooting with a Canon EOS R7. While I’ll try to post as many of my photos here as possible, unfortunately I can’t guarantee that, since I am usually very slow at organizing my photos (due to procrastination).

I am a firm believer in crayoning transit routes and solutions, even as an amateur. While the majority of such proposals are unlikely to be considered by official agencies and planners, I do find intrinsic value in such activities, and would like to present my proposals to the agencies when given the chance.

I also have strong interest in analyzing existing data: how the MBTA operates, how people in Boston use transit, where people go, etc. One obvious reason is to ground my ideas and proposals in reality, so that they reflect established or much-needed travel patterns. But I do think simply examining and understanding the data itself is interesting. Fortunately, there is a huge amount of data from MBTA, US Census and other places, which I keep a catalog of in the “Resources” tab on this website. I plan to do some of my own data collection as well.

Lastly, the most recent addition to my transit-related activities is mapmaking. It started off with my map on Green Line Reconfiguration for the Transportation Dreams challenge in late 2023, and I had a great deal of fun doing it. Moving forward, I plan to be more involved in mapmaking, both to visualize my proposals and to sketch out interesting bits of the present-day system and associated data.

Disclaimers

The original contents on this website represent my personal experiences and opinions only. I am not affiliated with, and do not reflect the positions of, any professional organizations related to transit such as MBTA and government officials. Additionally, I have no technical knowledge of transit planning and operations, and I am not professionally trained in this field. While I strive for accuracy in my content, I cannot promise that all claims and information are fully accurate and up to date. When external content is linked, it does not imply endorsement and I am not responsible for the information being referenced.

Contacts

Email: teban54transit [at] gmail.com

archBoston: Teban54

Reddit: u/Teban54_Transit