A knife is a deadly weapon and as much as you don't like it, calling the cops is the correct course of action. Mental health professionals are not going to respond to a call in the middle of some street for someone having a mental break.

Call 911, yea the police will Show up but the persons best bet is a Paramedic or EMT who can de-escalate and provide appropriate mental health support. EMS is not supposed to enter the scene until it is safe so with the weapon you still need police. Any hotline will just call police first anyway.

Amtrak tickets in advance are often very cheap. You can regularly go two ways for the price of one Commuter Rail ticket. The tickets also "float" and can be moved to a later date in the app if your schedule changes. 36m from Providence Station to Back Bay (40m to South Station) can't be beat compared to other trains and driving.

They may even re-open the S. Attleboro station at some point. This sounds like a solid idea.

Or maybe consider a burb like Cumberland where you can get to the Stoughton line pretty easily?

Attleboro has a reputation for being way cheaper than other Mass towns.

I think there’s a number of factors here, some of which you can only answer.

1. How close in PVD Will your house be to the station? Revisit this after #3.

2. The train itself from PVD to BOS isn’t bad although it seems to have picked back up in ridership (not sure if number of trains are back to pre-pandemic).

3. You’d have to get from the train to Mass Gen - luckily that transfer isn’t that bad. You’ll see other horror stories of transfers and the unreliable and slow T.

4. Revisiting one, this will be the 3rd leg of the commute. That adds up.

At the end of the day, you can get a lot more bang for your buck in PVD. And that can lead to a much higher quality of life. It’s just a matter of whether that 90 mins on a train each way is worth it and every day. The one thing to also consider is if you’re looking actually in PVD and have kids/considering kids, consider the cost of school of private school is needed vs other locations.

The one thing we need less of is people from Boston making Boston money and then moving here and pricing Rhode islanders out of their own neighborhoods.

I commute 1 day a week from TF Green to Boston south station. We decided to move here because we wanted a nice house with a yard. I don’t regret it. I usually work and listen to audio books on the way anyhow so that’s not bad at all.

However, it does feel like ages on the ride and can get uncomfortable after 50 or so minutes.

I’m going to get downvoted for this…

Don’t move to RI. I just left after being there for 8 years. The government is a joke and literally NOTHING is done to help those that live there. The entire state is one big social experiment to see if organized crime should be running governments.

Drove by this - big accident. One car was literally on top of another

How old is the phone that took this photo?

No, just get the stuff from Home Depot. It’s pre wrapped. I did mine and I’m a total home maintenance dunce.

Same thing happened with the Washington Fair this year, everyone apparently has forgot how to put on events after a two year hiatus.

I've done it. It was extremely difficult. You plan to read or get work done on the train but it's not always possible. Sometimes I'd stand most of the way. WiFi doesn't actually work so prepare to rely on your phone. The schedule isn't so hot so try not to miss your train home. All that said, it's doable for a limited time. After two years I really resented all the time I was losing to the commute.

Definitely consider how close the Boston station is to work, too. Commuter rail took about an hour in but getting on the green line from there blew another hour due to incredibly unreliable trains. Same thing in reverse, often missing the commuter train due to trolley issues. Just be prepared to have to kill some time...I did get to read a lot more!

I did. Here's a very long post about it. I actually left my job in Cambridge partially because I couldn't take this commute anymore even on a hybrid (1-2 days a week in office) schedule.

I worked in Kendall but would get off the train at Charles/MGH then walk across the Longfellow for a nice start to the morning. This will be long.

I would drive to Attleboro and take the train from there which made my experience a lot worse. The MBTA is well known for wanting to do big impressive infrastructure additions instead of basic maintenance. In the case of my commute, that means their desire to do a brandy new train station in South Attleboro instead of just fixing what is there for now. South Attleboro is a lot more convenient than Attleboro. I know look on a map and it's 5-10 extra minutes just plan but it's a high variance 5-10 minutes and if you want to make the train you have to plan on the worst variance. I'm still mad about the MBTA fucking over all of us with this asinine decision. You can probably tell.

If you commute from Providence Station you will have a much better time but longer commute. You will have a better time because you can take Amtrak instead of the commuter rail if you plan, and Amtrak is a much better experience. I couldn't justify using Providence Station because of the time to get there plus the extra time the train takes to get from Providence to Attleboro. The Amtrak though is a bit faster, and a bit more enjoyable, less of a crunch (as it does not stop at all the local stations on the line).

My experience is with the Commuter Rail though so let me tell you. It's fine. It is packed as hell now. If you have trouble with Covid-related (or general) crowding, it can be a problem. If you commute together with your partner, a bit less of a problem as you can take a double seat and avoid randos (enough of whom are assholes to make this a bit of a stressor). You will want to be back for your train home early to get a seat. Seriously, you have to be one of those people standing at South Station waiting for them to announce the track 10 minutes before the train leaves. At least for the rush hour trains. Otherwise more than a little chance you will be standing at least until Sharon, and almost no chance you'll be able to sit together.

The red line is running at something like 70% capacity with all of the MBTA problems. Like a lot of things, on paper (8 minute instead of 6 minutes headways IIRC) sounds like no big deal, but you feel the difference. And the average headway has a lot lot lot of standard deviation. Some days I waited as long as 25 minutes for a red line train. Then it would be overpacked. And of course, have two empty trains behind it. But, you can't always count on that so everyone packs into the first one that arrives.

What this adds up to is that you just have to account for a lot of time. So sure, on a good day, you might have:

Home to Providence : 5 minutes

Wait at Station: 5 minutes

PVD -> South Station: 50 minutes

South Station Walk and Wait: 5 minutes

Red line to MGH: 5 minutes.

That's not too bad. But you will find you don't want to cut it too close to catch the train, so you actually make the first 10 minutes 20 (give yourself 10 minutes to get there and plan on arriving 10 minutes early). Slow days even the express MBTA can take over an hour. Catch the timing wrong and you will be at South Station for 20 minutes. Get a red line train with shitty doors and you will spend 5 minutes at Park St as they constantly open and close (OK this is an exaggeration but god damn it felt this way some days). Now you are looking at an additional 30 minutes for you commute and frankly it sucks but I have a real problem with patience and might not be the best person to talk to about it. Also I'm a stats nerd so I actually tracked my commute times door to door and they were anywhere from 1:20 (good train luck including it being 5 minutes late which allowed me to catch it by a hair in Attleboro and took red line all the way to Kendall instead of morning walk) to 2:45 (missed train at SS due to slow red line from Kendall to South Station, this was not an outlier though it happened three times) Average was about 2 hours with the walk and 1:45 without. Again this is drive from Pawtucket to Attleboro, Express commuter rail (skips a few of the local stops) to SS, red line to MGH, walk to Kendall.

Some days I would drive to Quincy and just take the red line. This was more for if I was doing something in the evening and didn't want to risk missing the last commuter rail at 11). That was great in Covid-era traffic but sucks now. I also tried doing the drive to 128 station mostly because I like to shop at Wegman's but the fact that you can't get there easily from 95 (you have to go through the split or through very busy backroads in Norwood/Canton) makes it too high variance to plan.

If you're going to do it and you can make your schedule work, Amtrak is the way to go. Their monthly pass is $40 cheaper than MBTA and half the time. Pre-COVID I was 5 days a week. It got a little monotonous but I also enjoyed the commute to decompress. It's not for everyone but it's a small price to pay for what I would argue is a better quality of life for my family here.

Ok, so what did you mean? It was a weird comment either way.

If you work remote 3 days a week and commute 2 days, it’s not bad. It’s so much cheaper To live a little outside boston.

Before Covid, I took the MBTA commuter rail to Boston from providence for 5 years Monday-Friday. It takes a lot out of you. Each way was 1.5 hours door to door for me. I took a Lyft to the train station every morning because the parking garage fills up early in the morning, like, my train was 7:15am and the garage would already be filled. I slept a lot both ways but nothing was worse than the train breaking down or a train being out of service so other trains were packed. It’s a doable thing, but it is tough. You have to be ready for unexpected delays and long train rides! Good luck if you decide to do it. Become friends with the conductors and the drivers of the trains, it makes it easier.

You didn't say why it was unfortunate so people are filling in the gaps, uncharitably.

I used to commute, I took the commuter rail and ended up switching to Amtrak. It was worth the fare but the schedules are limited.

It’s a pretty tough pill to swallow. I don’t recommend. Quick math, 260 working days a year. 2.5+ hours of public transport a day (or more, but never less) remember getting to and from the train station… earlier than the train gets there. It ends up being ~27 days of your year will be spent commuting A MONTH OF YOUR YEAR in slight or moderate discomfort. You can always make more money in life you can’t make more time.

I can’t speak regarding the trains. However, my husband and I just purchased a home in Pawtucket because house prices are literally $100,000 cheaper in RI compared to MA (we lived in MA previously and are originally from the cape). Anyways, we live only a couple hundred yards away from the Mass border. My husband has to travel to Logan weekly for work trips. He can commute to Logan in about 45-60 min depending on the time of day. We are so close to the highway that it is almost easier than when we lived in Franklin, MA. So maybe checkout Pawtucket and consider driving? We also have a new train station coming soon I believe, so in the future, train could be an easy option.

We are still close to Providence (which was something we wanted) but we still get a suburbs feel and live on a quiet street with a big yard. We also got our house for so cheap it’s crazy lol. We are thrilled so far.

Houses are cheap in attleboro