How Boston Got Its ‘T’
The history of mass transit in the United States begins in Boston, when, in 1631, a chartered ferry service began taking passengers between Charlestown and the Shawmut Peninsula. Two and half centuries and many horse-driven carriages later, Boston had the nation’s first underground rail system.
By the 1960s, when architect and designer Peter Chermayeff and his team of designers were asked to come up with a simple set of design rules for the region’s subways, streetcars, and buses, even more had changed. The state government took over the the city’s mass transit services in 1947, establishing the Metropolitan Transit Authority. And in 1963, regional services for 78 municipalities were all placed under one umbrella, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA).