Snow and cold temperatures have sidelined the new fare gates at South Station out of service barely a month after their installation.
Commuters to South Station this week have noticed that the new fare gates have been swaddled in plastic, allowing riders to pass freely in and out of the platform areas.
We reached out to the MBTA on Monday to learn what was going on. A spokesperson from Keolis, the contractor that operates the T's regional rail network, responded.
"The gates were turned off due to the unprecedented accumulation of wind-driven snow in the concourse and platform areas of South Station during peak of the storm last week," wrote Keolis spokesperson Jake O’Neill in an email to StreetsblogMASS on Monday. "Keolis and Schiedt & Bachmann (the gates' manufacturer) are assessing the impacts from the snow and taking necessary actions to return the gates to service as soon as possible."
Scheidt & Bachmann is the German company that also manufactured much of the fare collection equipment and vending machines for the T's original CharlieCard system in the mid-2000s.
In a 2017 agreement aimed at increasing fare collection on the regional rail system, the MBTA directed Keolis to install new fare gates at North Station, South Station, and Back Bay, the three busiest stations in the MBTA's regional rail system.
Keolis installed its first fare gates at North Station in 2022. However, those gates are indoors.
The new South Station gates are located in a covered outdoor passageway under tall arches that support the new South Station tower high-rise.
That passageway is oriented in a northeast-to-southwest direction, aligned with the prevailing winds during the strongest winter storms. Keolis says that last week's snowstorm carried drifts of snow throughout the South Station concourse.
