Protesters marched on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority headquarters in Boston in April with a single, deeply researched demand.
Put googly eyes on some trains, they said. Two months later, their demands have been met — at least until the stickers come off.
The campaign was organized by two recent graduates. With their action they wanted to improve the mood of commuters and create empathy for the metal devices they use to travel.
“If T trains are delayed, at least people can look into the eyes of the train when it finally arrives and feel some love and understanding in their hearts,” the organizers wrote before the march to the Transport Authority’s headquarters.
“The T doesn’t want to be late,” they wrote. “It feels bad to be late.”
Organizers said the Transportation Authority also “has a responsibility to improve the lives of Boston residents.”
If the city trains cannot be reliable, they wrote, they can at least bring a smile to travelers. The system an average of about 766,000 riders on weekdays.
To make things easier for the authorities, the about twenty demonstrators those who participated in the march brought their own googly eyes.
Philip Eng, the authority’s director, said in an interview that he was open to their question but saw a safety problem: the googly eyes could fall off during transport.
The solution? Self-adhesive stickers.
On June 14, Ryan Coholan, the authority’s chief operating officer, picked up a set of googly-eye stickers and went with a colleague to the nearest maintenance facility. Mr. Coholan affixed the first set of stickers to the front of a Green Line train.
“We handed out a few more and said, ‘Let’s Google these trains,’” Mr. Coholan said.
Workers spotted five trains, including four on the Green Line. It didn’t take long for Bostonians to start spotting the trains with gooey eyes and posting photos on social media.
Arielle Lok, co-organizer of the march, shared a photo of one of the trainsalong with a screenshot of an email from the Transport Authority informing her of her win.
“Today the @MBTA and we agreed,” Ms. Lok wrote.
Ms. Lok, who moved to the United States from Canada after her recent graduation, told Boston.com what she was inspired by the public transportation system in her hometown, Vancouver.
During the Christmas period, the buses there are decorated with red noses, representing Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer. The noses are generating an enthusiasm among Vancouver riders that she said was lacking in Boston.
Ms Lok did not immediately respond to a question on Saturday. Co-organizer John Sanchez could not be reached for comment.
Mrs. Lok’s idea for googly-eyed trains, she wrote, was just one of more than 100 “miscellaneous ideas to do” she entertains. She began a lettuce eating contest at her university in Canada, for example.
When Boston officials figured out a way to keep googly eyes from falling off moving trains, Mr. Eng and Mr. Coholan saw no harm in the stickers. They just saw an easy way to brighten up commuters’ days.
The cost of printing the 9-inch stickers was “a few dollars each,” Mr. Coholan said.
“And the beauty of a round emblem is that I can make the eyes point in any direction I want,” he said. “It’s not about the train going around to make the eyes move.”
It is unclear how long the eyes will remain. The agency said it had no clear plans for their future.
But Mr. Coholan said there were six other pairs of eyes sitting in an envelope in his office, waiting to one day greet Boston commuters.
