The MT Position

Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit

While I was away for business last week my wife thought she heard a noise downstairs. Since the kids were already in bed with her, she understandably got nervous. So she slept with a flashlight and the phone next to her until I got home.

Now the flashlight and phone really didn’t provide her much extra security, but the thought of having them there made her feel better. This week King County Metro fired eight security guards who had past criminal records. The off-duty police officers who normally provide security for the service were up in arms. How could this happen?! The riders — not so much. One rider even said the security guards seemed approachable and that he didn’t feel frightened. I guess for transit it’s more about having security than being secure.

This got me to thinking about my last business trip. Going through an airport is such a chore these days. You practically have to strip down to get through security. You have take off your watch, coat, belt, shoes and pretty much everything else. The last time I went on a train, I stood on the platform reading my newspaper until the train arrived and then walked on board with my coffee in my hand.

Now here’s the interesting thing for me. Transit agencies have been fighting for riders for … well, ever. And to be honest, they’re winning that fight. 11 billion trips a year is pretty impressive. But it is interesting to note that a recent Mineta Transportation Institute (MTI) report stated that transit agencies fight increasing security versus increasing hassling riders and/or delaying buses and trains.

When was the last time the airline industry worried about balancing ridership hassles against security? Every security measure in an airport, at least from what I have seen, is stated as being a necessary measure based on past events. We take off our shoes because someone put a bomb in theirs. We have to bag our liquids and not take anything liquid through security because of a plot to mix chemicals on a plane.

The thing here is that is this level of security making us safe? Sure, but more importantly it is making us feel safe. As the MTI report states, security for the transportation industry all changed on 9/11. With the level of that attack on airlines it’s no wonder the government threw a ton of money for increased security.

But there’s the thing, transit handles more people every morning than airports due in several days for a minute fraction of the funding they have on security. And transit does it with an open system. You can’t protect all of those bus stops and rail lines all of the time.

And yet, a massive amount of money goes to airports to make people safe — or is it feel safe. The thing about handing someone a security blanket is that you have to be careful not to throw it over his or her head in the process.

For the latest industry news, check out MassTransitMag.com’s Daily News section.

Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,

Fred
fred.jandt@cygnusb2b.com

Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit

How connected are you? I don’t mean the Tony Soprano kind of connected, or even the head of a major corporation kind of connected. I mean technologically connected. How in touch are you with what’s going on in technology? And by relation, how connected is your transit system?

Most transit systems have some sort of trip-planning set-up on its Web site. Many even have automated alerts sent via text message or e-mail to riders who sign up for the service. But is this the level of your system’s connectivity?

In California a group of tech-savvy riders have banded together to come up with new ways to track their local system. They have even staged a two-day “camp” to pool their creative resources and come up with better solutions. This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened, though, having already taken place several times in Canada.

California seems to be the nexus for this type of activity in the United States. Of the 20 or so agencies listed on Google Transit, nearly half are from California. Not surprising, but with only 12 states listed on Google Transit, the question is why more agencies don’t use the resource.

Take Vancouver’s TransLink for example. They have launched a massive Internet undertaking called iMove (www.i-move.ca) that incorporates the various modes of transit with alerts on construction and traffic delays. This invaluable resource has uses by more than just transit riders and I think could well be the first of a series of similar Web sites.

This whole edition of the MT Position sprung from a couple of things. The first was spending the long weekend trying to see if it was feasible to drop our home landline and just go with cell phones and cell-based Internet service. It also came from the recent announcement that Verizon and AT&T just launched unlimited service plans (the first of many I am sure) for a flat fee. Sprint has had a similar service, including unlimited phone, text and Web usage, but only in select locations so far.

So the question arose, how connected are you and your transit agency? Because if you aren’t you had better catch up because your riders already are.

For the latest industry news, check out MassTransitMag.com’s Daily News section.

Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,

Fred
fred.jandt@cygnusb2b.com

Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit

Transit is a hotbed for invention. It is. Just look at all of the testing that is going on with alternative fuels, especially fuel cell technologies. Most electric trains utilize technologies like regenerative braking. And new technologies are tested every day in agencies across the country.

But rather than focusing on how to reengineer the fuel systems, perhaps the future of transit power lies in its greatest untapped resource — riders.

I read a story this week on an “electricity generating floor,” which could be used in transit agencies. The idea is that the movement of riders through a station would generate electricity due to the pounding of their feet on the floor.

This process of using people to generate electricity is already in use. The East Japan Railway Company is using the motion through turnstiles to activate piezo elements to generate electricity. In fact, piezo elements are one of the methods suggested as a means of generating electricity from people walking on floors.

These “crowd farms” are being studied by such places as MIT where two students are looking at the creation of a subflooring consisting of blocks that would slide against each other as people walked on them. This sliding action would work like a dynamo and generate electricity.

Mind you, any practical use of either technology is still a long ways off. But imagine having your stations powered by the very riders who walk into and out of it every day. The money it would save! Spin this out further to buildings or sidewalks. It is a very interesting idea.

Again here, this idea wouldn’t work without transit. A single person can only generate enough electricity to make a single bulb flicker slightly, but the crowds generated through transit could power so much more. And what better place to test things like this out.

As we move into the future, it’s important that we get across to the people funding transit — and those responsible for securing its funding — the benefits of mass transit beyond just moving people. I think the general public underestimates transit. I think most of them still see it as the local bus — you know, that thing that gets in your way when you’re driving.

How many people realize all the benefits transit provides not just the communities it serves, but our human community as a whole by its use. If we got that across, maybe it wouldn’t be a matter of us versus them when it comes to funding.

For the latest industry news, check out MassTransitMag.com’s Daily News section.

Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,

Fred
fred.jandt@cygnusb2b.com

Ask the locals in London for the nearest subway and you’ll be pointed somewhere you didn’t want to go: to a pedestrian underpass, forbidding and barren, a walk through which is likely to stir one, irrepressible thought: that someone very bad is waiting for you at the other end.

What you really want, of course, is London’s tube or underground, a considerably better-attended venue that delivers the transport you thought you were asking for. Native New Yorkers like me will naturally liken the tube to their home town’s storied system, and, in some respects, the latter indeed tops the former.

The London tube falls about 5 hours a day short of New York’s 24/7 ubiquity, calling it a night at about 12 am, and its cars are in fact decidedly scruffier than the Apple’s, all but recast into a lending library for that day’s free Metro newspaper discards. Air-conditioning is a non-starter on the tube, and while the London system website (tfl.gov.uk) sports a cool Mapquest-like tube destination finder, its directions often ask me to start my journey from places I’ve never heard of. But the tube owns one mighty advantage the New York system can’t touch: if your train ride takes 15 minutes longer than it’s supposed to, you get your money back.

That incredible factoid is, well, credible. Supply the authorities with some identifying information and a passably accurate recollection about the place and time of the delay, and a reimbursement voucher heads your way in a week or two. I have been compensated twice so far for tube trips gone wrong, and when my stepdaughter was made to take to the buses after her line underwent serious problems a few years ago, she, and lots of other Londoners, were paid back for every day of their above-ground detours.

And the voucher is accompanied by a mea culpa that, for New Yorkers, seems unimaginably contrite:

Once one overcomes the disbelief that attends such official acts of kindness, the obvious question begins to loom: could the selfsame fare pay-back system be brought to New York’s subways, or any other American transit system, for that matter? I emailed that very surmise to New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, a response from which bobbed up in my inbox the next day. A representative explained:

Of course my correspondent has a point. What, after all, prevents scam-minded Londoners from imagining a delay, or more plausibly, alerting themselves to the news of an actual tie-up and insisting that, they too were on the 10:46 out of Tooting Bec (they really have station names like that), the one that languished beneath the Thames for an hour?

The answer to that near-rhetorical question is sealed in a chip implanted in the system’s Oyster card, a protean stub of plastic that, in addition to affording entrée into the tubes, collects a history of the bus and tube journeys amassed by its owner. Graze the Oyster against a tube stop scanner and a diary of the rider’s trips unfurls onscreen, with all the wheres and whens duly remembered. It’s rather eerie, and perhaps born of deeper security concerns, but these mini-archives enable system watchdogs to cross-check their reports of delays against actual passenger whereabouts. And by simply requiring claimants to post their Oyster card number on refund applications - submitted easily online - the system stops a good many of the fraudsters in their tracks, as it were. (And consider the new Oyster incentive - top up, or refill, your card on the Transit for London website and you get to download 5 free iTunes selections. I’m making my list even as we speak.)

Is there, then, any good reason why the London precedent couldn’t be transposed to American transit systems? The technology is there, and the example has been set. New York’s Mayor Bloomberg has already folded London’s auto congestion charge idea into his budget strategy; why couldn’t he, and mayors of other cities, imitate London’s fare-back beneficence as well? Mass transit, is, after all, nothing if not a time-sensitive enterprise - and if London is prepared to take the hit for its tardy trains, why should American systems recuse themselves from reprisal?

Abbot Katz is a New Yorker currently living in London.

Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit

It’s interesting to look back on things. Just a few decades ago we had no idea how much of what we were doing was bad for us. Take smoking for example. You watch old movies and everyone was smoking. Even movies not so long ago had people smoking in them. Now smoking is not only been declared dangerous for your health, but for those around you and the World Health Organization has declared a massive worldwide effort to stamp out (pardon the pun) the spread of smoking.

It’s amazing how in a few decades you can go from something socially acceptable to seemingly taboo. Take biofuel for example.

Biofuels?

Yep, the darling of the transit industry, biofuels, which only a month ago were touted as being able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 90 percent are now being cautioned against. New reports that widespread conversion of crops to biofuel producing varieties could increase the release of carbon by 420 percent.

Here’s the thing, though. These reports have focused on corn-based ethanol and they are assuming widespread converting of rainforests and grasslands to make the corn for the ethanol. Haven’t we been told for years that destroying the rainforests would add to the increase in greenhouse gases and global warming?

Yes, but if you tack that information on to a study about ethanol crop production it makes that look bad. I can’t help but shake my head at this. Socrates said, “Everything in moderation. Nothing in excess.” That kind of seems common sense.

That should apply here, but it doesn’t. The study talks about widespread conversion to biofuel crops. Not conversion to biofuel crops to supplement our current fuel supplies.

It’s much like what the current administration is looking to do with transit funding. We had a report come out earlier this year that the entire transportation infrastructure was in need of fixing. Note the word ‘entire’ here. Of course, the response was to underfund transit and basically steal from the Mass Transit Account in the Highway Trust Fund to bolster the Highway Account.

Everything in moderation, remember? Balance the highways with mass transit, not sacrifice one to prop up the other. But right now with the public in fear of their local bridges collapsing, it’s far easier to justify this shifting of funds.

It’s just easier to get someone to pay up for something they are scared about.

For the latest industry news, check out MassTransitMag.com’s Daily News section.

Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,

Fred
fred.jandt@cygnusb2b.com