The MT Position

Posted by Fred Jandt
Mass Transit magazine editor

With rail fever sweeping across the nation, is it any surprise that there is likely a price to be associated with it? This week the current administration proposed federal oversight on subway and light-rail safety regulations. What does this mean? It means that if you have light rail or subways in your system, you’d better hope you’ve been doing your job.

As Secretary LaHood states in this article the federal government already oversees safety when it comes to plains, trains and automobiles. It does make sense for them to extend this purview to light rail and subway lines. That said, how the feds regulate it is the sticking point.

I’ve been railing (no pun intended) against cell phones being in operators’ hands for a while here and now it seems that issue has come home to roost. Simply telling operators not to use their cell phones while working isn’t working, and I figure it is only going to be a matter of time before we see that even threatening to immediately fire an operator caught using his or her cell phone doesn’t work. Plain and simple, the phones need to go and it looks like since the transit authorities didn’t step in quickly and forcefully enough the federal government is going to step in and lay the proverbial smack down.

On the one hand, this is arguably a good thing for transit agencies. Now they can throw up their hands if the operators’ union cries foul to new restrictions. It wasn’t their doing. They were just following federally mandated rules. Of course, there is likely going to be extra costs associated with this. Leave it to Bill Millar to be the first one to point that out. And he’s right.

If the federal government is going to come down with new regulations that agencies will have to implement, then they should pony up the money to implement them. To do any less is at minimum putting an extra burden on transit agencies already struggling with operating funding deficits and most asking for the new regulations to be skirted or outright ignored in order to keep the trains running.

As the former head of the NTSB, Mark Rosenker, is quoted as saying, how cheap do you get in safety?

Transit agencies were put on notice that safety policies needed to change after the Metrolink crash. Now it looks like the federal government has had enough waiting for change to happen and is instead going to make changes unilaterally across all agencies. Let’s hope agencies with rail systems or looking to add them are ready and willing to make these changes, because they soon will no longer be able to make that choice on their own.

Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,

Fred
fred.jandt@cygnusb2b.com
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Posted by Fred Jandt
Mass Transit magazine editor

When we talk about safety and security it usually pertains to someone knowingly or unknowingly hurting themselves — crossing railroad tracks in front of a train — or the agency — vandalism. Although I think one thing we need to talk more about is the safety of transit employees and how increased security may be needed to protect them.

There was a story out of the Bay Area this week about a Muni station agent who got into an altercation with a teenage girl and her older sister that escalated into him being held for apparently punching the teenager.

This wasn’t the transit worker’s first altercation with a rider, which makes this pretty easy to dismiss this as an out-of-control person smacking around a young girl. And you know what, at first glance I did that as well. But when I went back and reviewed this week’s news, as I do every week before I write the blog, I found this story went deeper.

It seems the girls were seen throwing sodas from a nearby coffee stand at the agent, and when he tried to close the door of his booth, they tried to hold it open and continue attacking him. This was all reported by eyewitnesses to the police.

My first question is if you see two teenage girls yelling and throwing sodas at a station agent before trying to break into his booth and get at him, did you call the police? Did you try and help? Barring that, did you stick around to tell the police what you saw? Evidently, some did of course, but I would hazard a guess a great number of people just put their heads down and headed into the station.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

Attacks on transit employees are nothing new. Unfortunately it seems to be happening with more regularity and with a frightening amount of brazenness from the attackers. Slapping a bus driver and running off a bus is a cowardly action. Trying to break into a station agent’s booth is downright insane.

With the SEPTA strike last week, as with all strikes I guess, the union was trying to show (among other things) how important its members were to the agency. I get that. But I also know that the agency already had that figured out. I have yet to interview a transit executive who told me his employees were dispensable.

I know that employee safety is and always will be a primary concern for transit agencies, but as these attacks have apparently ratcheted up, perhaps the critical issue of safety for transit employees needs to be equally increased. Otherwise incidents like the one that just happened at Muni’s Embarcadero Station will continue to happen.

Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,

Fred
fred.jandt@cygnusb2b.com
Check out our LinkedIn page!

by Joe Caruso

I’m about to commit transit heresy but in doing so I’m betting that those of you reading this have had similar thoughts. So here it is … let’s rethink the whole idea of half fares for seniors and people with disabilities.

Back in the 1970s, transit systems began providing seniors and the disabled with half fares in non-peak hours as prescribed by federal law. In 1975 the first transit system I worked for was charging seniors and the disabled only 10 cents, which at the time was less than half the 25-cent base fare. Fast forward to today and often half fares are in the range of 75 cents to $1. Not bad over nearly 35 years, unless you’re a transit operator strapped for funds. Then the revenue losses can be quite significant. In the extreme instance of Chicago, Ill., the CTA estimates it will lose $60 million in 2010 due to giving free rides to seniors, the disabled and other economically disadvantaged groups. No wonder they are considering going back to doing only what is required by law. In Pennsylvania, seniors and the disabled ride free too, but at least the commonwealth provides a reimbursement for those rides.

At the time half fares were mandated the rationale was that, aside from being a huge voting block, seniors were mostly poor. There was also a much narrower interpretation of what a disability was which meant a much smaller eligible population. Transit systems then, as today, had off-peak capacity they wanted to fill. And let us not forget that at the time the feds provided both capital and operating assistance.

The premise that most seniors are poor is inaccurate and demeaning of that population segment. The U.S. Census estimates that only about 10 percent of seniors are below the poverty level. My guess is that there is another 10 percent or so at or on the edge of the poverty level. Yet so are a significant number of non-seniors who rely on transit and have to pay full fares.

Even if we buy into the economic argument being more relevant to people with disabilities, there is still the expense of operating two parallel services and the expansion of the definition of disabled through the Americans with Disabilities Act. These are factors that didn’t exist when the original mandates were legislated.

Basing transit fares solely on age, income or disabilities is dicey at best and potentially unjust to non-senior and non-disabled transit riders who pay full fares as well as taxpayers, all of whom are likely making up the difference.

It’s time to rethink the half-fare policy, not just in Chicago, but nationwide. For example, seniors and the disabled could benefit from lower average fares simply by buying passes and other discounted fare forms. These fare forms are more equitable ways to pass along savings and at the same time reward loyalty, simplify most fare structures and speed up operations.

Is there a middle ground between where we are today and no half fares? Possibly, but as an industry, transit and those who make decisions for transit need to recognize that, just like many other aspects of our business, we should not continue half fares just because “we’ve always done it that way.”

Joe Caruso is senior consultant for Brecon Hill Consulting. He’s the former marketing director for the Milwaukee County Transit System (WI) and has nearly 35 years of transit marketing experience. He welcomes your comments at jcaruso@breconhill.com.

Posted by Fred Jandt
Mass Transit magazine editor

Are you tired of defending public transit? I am. I get asked a lot by family, friends, coworkers and people I meet why they should use public transit. What are the benefits? Why does it deserve the government support it gets? I can list off the answers as well as the next guy, but then news comes out about some egregious action by a person in public transit that makes me tired of defending them. This week I take a look at our top three offenders.

Our third place trophy goes to this moron driving a bus in traffic in New York City while texting. As if we haven’t had enough trouble on the rail side with operators texting and getting into accidents, we have a bus driver doing it.

And evidently he was so consumed with his text messages that he paid no attention to the rider right behind him taking a photo of him doing it! And the guys out at Metrolink wonder why the agency wants to put cameras in the cab. Did this guy not realize that not only were his passengers watching, but the dozen or so cameras on the bus probably caught him in the act, too?

How much time and how many accidents is it going to take for someone to step in and take the phones away from bus and train operators? We’d better do it before the FTA steps in and legally mandates it.

This week’s runner-up goes to the BART operator who decided it was a good idea to not only invite a female passenger into the cab with him, he also asked to fondle her and when told no, tried to keep her from leaving.

Umm…he was on the clock, right? How is this acceptable in any workplace, let alone where he is driving a train? And the Metrolink operators were worried about cameras in the cab being an invasion of privacy?

Come on. This is beyond ridiculous. This is a black eye on the transit industry. It won’t take long for people to start wondering how often this happens on trains. I can see some local TV station doing an “in-depth examination” of the issue on the evening news. Transit doesn’t need this kind of publicity.

Our winner this week is TWU Local 234, SEPTA’s transit workers’ union for calling a surprise strike in the middle of the night after the Phillies and Yankees finished up the last game of this year’s World Series in Philadelphia.

A couple days later and the strike is still on with no end in sight. In fact, despite a SEPTA car catching fire and burning up there are no talks scheduled. I was talking with my publisher about the strike this morning and I couldn’t understand how the union hopes to gain anything but pissing more people off.

It’s not like it can prove how important SEPTA is to riders. Riders already know how important it was, that’s why they were so ticked when they woke up Tuesday morning to find the buses and subways shut down.

They say no publicity is bad publicity, but sometimes that simply isn’t true. When transit is strapped for cash and desperately in need of funding, the last thing it needs is a lot of bad publicity making people wary of riding. Ridership is up. Transit needs to keep it that way to prove it deserves the funding it is asking for. And shooting yourself in the foot with idiocy like this just doesn’t help.

Our You Decide! poll is ending next week. Please take a look if you haven’t already and help us decide which of these dozen agencies will be on our cover in 2010. We value reader input and really do want to know which agencies you think are the best to choose from in public transit. Thanks for the help!

Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,

Fred
fred.jandt@cygnusb2b.com
Check out our LinkedIn page!