New-to-Me MP36 at South Station with passengers disembarking

The riding public was treated today to the sight of two brand-new-to-me locomotives that the MBTA purchased from the Utah Transit Authority.  (Yes, Utah has a transit authority, which has a surplus of trains in preparation for a big expansion in service scheduled for 2013-14).  One of the two locomotives made its first service run today and met a contingent of reporters and VIPs at South Station.  (Note to reporters: let the riders disembark before trying to board yourselves).  The Worcester-to-Boston service was only 20 minutes late, so riders were not eligible for a complementary fare.  Incidentally, the train also had two locomotives — the new one on the front and the usual one on the back.  Not taking any chances with mechanical problems, these transit bigwigs.

Side view

Originally the T planned to purchase or lease as many as nine new-to-me locomotives from the Utah Transit Authority with delivery beginning in the fall 2010, but that number appears to have been cut back and the delivery delayed. Even so, the new locomotive was a welcome shot of good press for the MBTA during a dreary stretch of winter weather.  The units are said to be a little bit more fuel efficient while also being a little bit more powerful than the MBTA’s existing stable of geriatric locomotives.  The press releases don’t mention a model number, which apparently is a variant of Motive Power’s MP36.

Where on this platform do I stand?

For a new rider on the commuter rail, one of the most basic questions is “where do I stand” to wait for the train?  There are long areas astride the tracks for boarding and disembarking. The areas typically are long enough to accommodate a maximum-length train of six or maybe even more cars, at eighty-five feet apiece.  That’s more than 500 feet, or well more than a football field — endzones and all.  In other words, it’s a lot of space to cover.  And there is only one of me, the rider.

The question of where on the platform to wait is all the more pressing because the midday trains only open a few doors.  There may be 12 doors to the train but rest assured only two of those doors will open — the doors where the MBCR conductors are located.  The same train generally will follow the same practice … but different trains apparently follow different practices.  Some trains board passengers on the leading cars, while other trains board passengers on the trailing cars.

How can a rider predict where on the platform the train will stop and which doors will open?  The easy answer is that you should stand with the other riders.  But that only works if you are slow to arrive at the station and time the train closely.  As you can see there are no riders in this picture of Mishawum/Woburn station a few minutes prior to the arrival of a Boston-bound train.

How about standing on the elevated platform?  The MBCR and MBTA have made handicap accessibility a priority, so more boarding is conducted from the platform in recent years.  However, clearly not all elevated platforms are in use.  You can see the picture above was taken from an elevated platform that was in a state of disrepair and not the correct choice.  The train did not board from the elevated platform.

In fact, riders boarded on the far end of the Woburn/Mishawum stop, and that only was clear when the usual riders began gathering in that area just moments before the train arrived.  There has to be a better way to help riders who are unfamiliar with a train or a station.

Walk this way to board the train

And it turns out that the MBCR already has the solution, in the form of the sign to the left posted at the Needham Junction station.  Call it obvious (or brilliant) but it is a hurtling leap forward in communications with riders.  Stand where the sign says to go and you will be alright.  Now if we could just get these signs at all of the stations!

In an interesting twist, at a recent MBTA Rider Oversight Committee meeting (which are open to the public), Eugene Benson of TRU-ACE gave a presentation in which he mentioned that the T has published the results of an emissions monitoring program online.  The test results themselves are stale and the most recent is from January 2009.  Halfway is better than not-at-all, I guess.  In addition, Eugene didn’t mention it, but in an unexpected twist, the diesel buses rarely fail their tests!  Sparkly clean!  Ten MBTA buses required repairs in the most recent six-month report, and only one diesel bus (#293) made the list.  Only the clean-fuel CNG buses required remedial work.  If you believe the reports, I suppose you might conclude that the clean-fuel buses are nastier than the diesels.  Who would have guessed?!?

But can you believe the reports?  Remember, the reports presumably were generated by the same MBTA mechanical supervisors that recently were dismissed for allegedly fudging their record-keeping.

MBTA emissions testing apparatus plainly designed to ignore errant emissions from undercarriage (click to see report)

Well, here’s another reason to doubt.  The MBTA included a diagram in its robust report explaining the emissions methodology.  The report explained that the T uses an elaborate visual detection system that scans the tailpipe on the roof of the bus.  When the emissions come out the tailpipe, the computer analyzes what is left and gives a result.  What happens when emissions come from the undercarriage and not the tailpipe?  Those emissions, dear reader, do not exist.  Poof!

Even the most credulous among us would have to admit that the detection system that is depicted will not determine whether the exhaust system on a bus is compromised and leaking.  And if the exhaust is leaking then the bus will not be flagged as having an emissions problem.  Wow.  That has to be a flaw that even an overworked, ethically flexible MBTA maintenance manager could appreciate.

It’s not much of a leap to wonder whether, at the same time that T maintenance supervisors were revising mileage logs to avoid required servicing, were they also circumventing the emissions testing program by … simply allowing leaking exhaust systems to keep on leaking?  Discuss among yourselves.

Crowd waiting for rider to drive inactive bus

The 57 bus.  What can I say?  Forty-five stops in five-and-a-half miles of Brighton, Allston, Newton, and Watertown.  One stop for every 650 feet.  In traffic.  It isn’t exactly the kind of ride that anyone really looks forward to.

But the 57 gets riders.  Lots of riders.  One might think that would prompt the T to emphasize frequent, reliable operations.

Why then, does the T allow excessive numbers of riders to accumulate at peak hours, waiting for that bus?  The T’s foot-dragging seems doubly strange when there is both an inactive bus and a driver waiting at the 57′s origin in Kenmore Square, just waiting … waiting … waiting for … I’m not sure, just waiting.  Ten minutes, fifteen ….

This picture was taken on a Tuesday evening at 9:15 p.m., at Kenmore square.  This was the scene for perhaps 20 minutes (that I personally saw); I would guess that the earliest arrivals were waiting at least 40 minutes.  The group in the picture (which continued to form for some time) is actually quite large; the people are standing right up to the edge of the curb, and not exclusively for the view of the inactive bus directly in front of them.  The erstwhile bus driver was sipping a latte, taking it all in.  And this was (according the the Red Sox recap) about an hour before the end of the game.  This was not part of the post-game rush.

The run at 9:12 p.m. run obviously was dropped.  It seems very doubtful as well that the 8:52 p.m. or 9:00 p.m. routes ever left the station either.  If they occurred, they certainly failed to accommodate everyone who was waiting for the bus at those times.  At least two other empty (or nearly empty) buses went through the station while the group was waiting.  One was “Out of Service,” and the other was running a route that no one apparently was riding.

Eventually the loitering bus driver restarted the bus, marked it as the 57, and pulled it to the curb.  The driver must have been scheduled for the 9:24 p.m. run.  Never mind that the three preceding runs of the 57 bus never happened.  It was a cozy ride with the large group that had gathered to wait, made more unpleasant by the over-earnest warnings of a second T employee who urged packed-in riders to stand behind the yellow line or else.

In another context, for another agency, this would be a sign of part of an organization headed in the wrong direction, unable to motivate employees to provide critical services in an appropriate manner.  But for the T, unfortunately, it is another night of business as usual.  At least on the 57 bus.

When the crosswalk button works — and often it does not work at all by design or accident — the walk signal takes a long time.  It’s like waiting for the tooth fairy.  All the while wondering when that magical white signal light ever will illuminate, and seeing multiple opportunities to cross safely without it.

At least one intersection in Newton requires three entire light cycles to cross from corner to corner.  Here is a dramitization of the process.  Press a button.  Wait a minute.  Cross.  Stop.  Press another button.  Wait a minute.  Cross.  Stop.  Press a third button.  Wait a minute.  Cross ….  Whew, that was exhausting.  And it was only 150 feet of walking.  That is a walk signal functioning (by some meaning of the word) as designed, and it is not really much of an outlier as crosswalk signals go.  Many other crosswalks require at least two cycles to go from corner to corner.

I figure that after patiently and dutifully pressing buttons and waiting for that light, a pedestrian ought to get a real prize.  When a driver waits for a green light he gets free passage through the intersection without competing traffic.  The light is green, and cars in other directions stop and wait.

No such luck for a pedestrian.  When a pedestrian waits patiently at the “Do Not Walk” sign, and then crosses with the white “Walk” signal, he is as often as not likely to see more oncoming traffic.  To facilitate traffic flow, many signals don’t actually stop competing cars and trucks, and to the contrary they send them through the crosswalk with the “Walk” signal with no appreciable change in frequency.  When you see a “Walk” signal and look down the crosswalk, just as often there will be a car driving through.

What do you get by pausing for a “Walk” signal?  Too often, not much.

If highways were regulated like railways, you would drive a vehicle like this.

In the 1970s, the federal government instituted automobile regulations to increase vehicle fuel efficiency — in part by decreasing vehicle weight.  The initiative, called “CAFE” or “Corporate Average Fuel Economy,” has been renewed and enhanced as recently as 2007.  Heavier vehicles tend to be safer vehicles, but Congress and the President have judged that the gain in efficiency at the cost of safety is worthwhile and justified.  The stakes are high; roads are dangerous, automobile accidents are common, and literally thousands of people die each year as a result of the CAFE efficiency standards.  The government made a tough choice and for four decades the decision has withstood constant scrutiny.

At the same time, the government has effectively been mandating heavier, more polluting, less useful passenger trains.  Although rail collisions are rare (particularly compared to auto accidents) the federal agency in charge of the national rail system has banned lightweight railcars from the national rail network.  Never seen a single-car train beyond the interior suburbs?  That’s because they aren’t allowed there.  Trolley and subway cars operate only on closed-off portions of the rail network that are physically disconnected from the national rail network.  Passenger trains must be bulked up in weight to be allowed on traditional rail corridors, even where freight traffic is rarely seen, if ever.  For example, the Acela Express Amtrak trainset nearly doubled in weight to comply with the regulations, and as a result it developed numerous design and performance problems.

To recap: the feds required passenger trains to get heavier or be banned from the basically safe national network at the same time that other federal regulators have required passenger cars operating on a dangerous road system to shrink in mass.

The two sets of regulations could not have been more different.  Imagine for a moment what the roads would look like if they were operated like the rails.  So much for the freedom of the open road; that would be history.  If you owned a subcompact car– or an SUV for that matter– you would only be able to drive on your driveway, unless you first put up barriers to block off the local road network from the national road network.  To be able to drive on a national highway or Interstate, you would need to buy a vehicle the size of a cement mixer, and fill it with cement.  Everyone would be required to do this, because (in the language of the rail regulators) otherwise the passenger automobiles would be too lightweight to avoid deforming in a head-on collision with the heaviest tractor-trailers on the road.  Vehicle fuel efficiency of these passenger-cement-mixers would be abysmal, people would be forced to pay for excessive vehicles and unwanted tons of cement, and maintenance costs for the vehicles and roads would be much higher.

In effect, rail regulations would convert a useful network of highways into isolated islands of local roads interspersed by connections that are accessible only to impractical overweight passenger vehicles.

No one would seriously suggest that we should have regulations on the highway system like the ones that have been imposed on the rails.  That begs the question why we have such onerous rules for trains.  A passenger train that can survive a high-speed collision with a locomotive may well be safer to its passengers in that respect.  However, the result of the requirement has been a far less connected and useful, and far more expensive, passenger rail system that has forced more and more people into their automobiles.  And automobiles are proven to be far more lethal to passengers than trains, in addition to the deleterious impact of automobiles and asphalt on the environment.

So in its zeal to make passenger trains safer by making sure that no passenger rail car on the national network will deform if was unfortunate enough to collide with a coal freight train (whether or not anyone could remember a coal train operating in that location), the federal government has undermined the competitiveness of rail technology and forced everyone to take much more serious risks on the highways, where the risk of death is many times higher than the rails.  And where no one expects a passenger automobile to bounce back from a head-on collision with a semi-trailer.

Maybe it’s time that regulators considered that heavier passenger trains and a less connected rail system are not actually a safer or more convenient for the public at large.  A lighter passenger train (or trolley service on regular railways) operating on the national rail network might help drivers off of the roads … and that alone would save lives.

Tailpipe up high, but the exhaust leaks out below

Recently, I saw bus 0462 (marked in the picture for route 504) belching fumes.  That itself is not remarkable.  Some buses just stink.  Bus this bus stunk in a peculiar way.  See in the picture to the right how there is an exhaust pipe up high to the left of the bus, strategically above the passenger compartment and away from the curb?  That is where one would expect the bus fumes to escape.

Instead, the fumes on this bus came out the bottom, apparently whenever the driver hit the gas, in a big gray plume.  (The picture shows the bus idling).

I’ve seen several buses like this in the last year.  Exhaust pipe on the top, heavy stinky exhaust cloud down below.  When I’ve been unlucky, I’ve ridden on that bus and been made queasy by diesel fumes that perfumed the passenger compartment.  Maybe it was the same 0462 bus over and over.

If the cloud of exhaust underneath the bus is indicative of a major leak in the exhaust system — the other possibility of a dummy exhaust pipe seems unlikely — one might wonder how the bus ever made it out of the shop.  Ahem … make that “might have wondered,” i.e., wondered in the past.  Turns out the bus maintenance people have been falsifying records to keep up the appearance that they could handle their backlogs of work.  So far nineteen supervisors have been disciplined for faking regular maintenance of the buses.

Here’s guessing 0462 is overdue for its next checkup.  Hopefully the T will have enough supervisors to deal with this problem soon.

The only thing louder?  Interestingly, riding in the back seat of the bus is as much as four times louder than staying at the stop.  My handy Radio Shack meter clocked a very impressive 112dB (peak volume) when the bus was accelerating at moderate to high speeds.  That puts riding on the back seat of the bus on par with … sandblasting or attending a loud rock concert!  Better change seats after 15 to 30 minutes; sitting in that back seat much longer could exceed OSHA’s daily permissible noise level exposure.  Incredibly, standing ten feet away from an MBCR locomotive accelerating through an underpass did not beat that peak from the interior of the bus, although the locomotive may have sustained a higher average noise level.

It probably would not exaggerate much to guess that the MBTA’s diesel and natural gas bus fleet has become Boston’s de facto alarm clock.   Of course, it didn’t have to be that way.  Years ago, the diesels replaced whisper-soft trackless trolleys.  Trolleys of the trackless variety still operate through Harvard Square on overhead lines, and still barely make a sound over the background traffic.  Sure beats having a double-volume alarm clock for a neighbor.

Red is fast; blue is not.

Let’s say you live near Porter Square, Cambridge.  From Porter Square, destinations in Cambridge, Somerville, and downtown Boston are close — less than a half-hour by T. Almost by default, practically speaking that becomes the entirety of your city.  You might plan a shopping trip to Harvard Square, a movie at Kendall or Boylston, or you might schedule a bus out of South Station. You’d think carefully before you would put the time into visiting places like Chestnut Hill, Roxbury, or Mattapan — even if you needed to be there — because those all are basically day-long excursions on the T.  The ride one way on the T is at least an hour, including a bunch of connections.  (By contrast, in an hour of driving in a car, you could be at least a state away.)  And places like most of Needham, Westwood, or parts of Dedham?  Fuhgettaboutit.  Two hours or more, on average.

Well, finally we have an interactive graphical representation of what this looks like, on a map.  Software guru Dan Tillberg has done a fabulous job illustrating the world traveling by T, in color.  Using the T service information database posted by developers at MassDOT (kudos to the government folks for posting the extensive dataset), the map shows in red and yellow the places that are relatively close by T (and walking).  The places that are further away are in greens and blues.  Dan’s map is interactive, and it is pictured above.  Click the image to browse through to his site, and check T connectivity of other locations.

Of course, there are some assumptions behind the map that would change the way it looks depending on, for example how far or fast you were willing to walk, and whether you were willing or able to time your trip precisely to meet a particular bus or train.  Transit diagramming is tricky.  And this map probably is something like a best-average case … the dataset of delayed or dropped MBTA routes isn’t presently available and so Dan was left to assume that, for example, the Number 1 bus midday from Harvard St. was right on time.  Even though we all can guess is was late and overcrowded.  That will be another project ….

Unfortunately, the T never has gotten one particular aspect of its fares right: monthly passholders pay full fare in cash when they ride on a higher-level service.  A pass might be good for several dollars credit against the fare on one service, and not a dime on another.  The T inexplicably fails to give passholders the full value across the entire system that they purchased for one particular service.

An illustration might help.  There are two levels of express bus service, inner express and outer express.  The outer express bus generally travels to more distant stops.  An $89 inner express bus pass is good for the entire $2.80 inner express bus fare.  Not surprisingly, the pass is not good for the $4.00 outer express bus; there is a more expensive pass for that bus.  But here’s the riddle: if I offer an inner express pass good for a $2.80 fare, and the actual fare is $4.00 for the outer express bus, I only should have to pay an extra $1.20 cash, right?  Not so, at least on the MBTA.  Passholders receive no discount on the more expensive service.  They pay full fare, even though they hold a pass that would entitle them to credit for all of the fare on a different bus.  (And as an aside, there is an additional complication that the T charges different cash fares and prepaid pass/charlie card fares).

This has been a problem for years.  It is most obvious with the flexible passes for the express bus, commuter rail, and boat, because there are multiple levels of service.  However, “Link Pass” on the stored value card offers no solution, except to add a further technological hurdle to the administrative one.  Fare-takers on the commuter rail and boat don’t have the equipment to verify that a rider has a valid “Link Pass” on their stored value card.

To their credit, T fare takers typically are generous when it comes to making accommodations to passengers to ameliorate this nonsensical no-discount policy.  But wouldn’t it be better if the T used a more rational fare structure?  A $4 fare, minus a $2.80 credit for a monthly pass, ought to result in a $1.20 cash fare.

Query: what have the “high-level” people at “MassDOT” been doing all this time?  And why weren’t they involved in this particular study which was initiated by no less than his Excellency the Governor.

Overall, the report was a disappointing exercise in stating the obvious as if it was being noticed for the first time.  Proverbially, lots of trees and very little forest.  But then again perhaps that is all that could be expected from four lower-level “authors/researchers” in a short sixty-day window of time.

I would have been pleased to have seen some more comprehensive thought about what ought to be, both in terms of services and finances.  Is Boston receiving the transit services that it needs?  Practically speaking, how can services be maintained or improved while cutting costs?  Where are the inefficiencies?  The report did not make even a baby step in that direction.  It defies credulity that all the low-hanging fruit really was picked.

What about removing door-openers on the Red Line?  If the MBTA was in such dire shape, why all the excess attention to prettying stations and broken air conditioning units in the past few years?  Was the Silver Line tunnel-to-nowhere at South Station the massive costly mistake that it appears?  What would be the cost savings from standardizing all of the multiple vehicles from the Green, Orange, Blue, and Red lines (all of which are different)?

As for financing, the solution seems obvious and perhaps it already is being implemented.  The MBTA simply should operate transit services, and those services should be near-fully funded by fares.  If a bus costs $3 to operate, riders should pay.  On the other hand, infrastructure should be 100% funded and maintained by other sources and those projects and monies should be outside the direct control of the MBTA.  That appears to be at least part of the theory of the recent reform legislation that created MassDOT.  The challenge, of course, would be in the details.

The content of the report was unimpressive … but the format and web site sure were snappy!

Looks like history is repeating … or at least rhyming.  Gov. Patrick directed that the proposed 2009 hike is off the table, for now.  Hopefully major service cuts also were averted.  If the consensus economic view is correct that inflation will remain subdued for some time — and assuming the inflation-adjusted fare of $1.75 remains the third-rail of subway pricing — that proposed hike won’t be finding its way to riders anytime soon.

In 2005, Grabauskas took the job of general manager with a clear vision.  The T would treat riders like customers; the system would be reliable, clean, courteous, and safe.  But mainly clean.  And accessible; inaccessibility “impacts not only on the disabled, but on parents with children in strollers, as well.” Grabauskas professed to be a neatnik; he was particularly concerned about the condition of elevators and escalators.  He apparently believed that if he made the T a comfortable place to be, riders would flock and revenues would soar.  And, of course, he wanted to control costs.

So four years later, how did he do?

Grabauskas never shrunk from the gaze of his “customers,” for example writing a regular Q+A column in the free daily paper Metro, and appearing more than once on WBUR public radio.  He was determined to keep riders safe; he initiated random, highly visible police screening checkpoints.  He committed to spending hundreds of millions of dollars to make the T more accessible, installing announcement screens and elevated platforms on the Green Line.  He resisted union contract demands and agreed to wage increases only after being overruled by a labor arbitrator.  The T renovated the Charles Street station and installed a new train control system on the Red Line that permitted more frequent service.  And there is the electronic fare system.

The list goes on.  Grabauskas was nothing if not engaged in the goings-on at the T.  Perhaps one can disagree with him on policy matters — for example it might be reasonable to question the wisdom of a having a broke organization with heavy capital needs spend hundreds of millions of dollars in an effort to meet the unique requirements of less than 0.1% of T riders — but the man demonstrated integrity and dedication to his “customers.”

But many things never changed.  Yes, the trains still are slow and late.  Yes, the escalators have at times been scandalously unreliable.  Yes there still are door-openers on the  Red, Green, and Orange Lines.  Yes, Kenmore Station still is under construction nearly five years later.  No, Dan Grabauskas does not commute to work on the T.  Yes, the T still is broke.

No Cell Zone

But none of those were the reasons that Governor Patrick and his appointees gave for the reasons they had lost faith in Grabauskas.  The breakdown occurred, they said, because two Green Line drivers in two years apparently had ignored traffic signals for different reasons, and Grabauskas was not in Washington, D. C. when the NTSB released its report on one of the accidents.  And there was a power outage on the Green Line.  That’s it.  Never mind that Grabauskas nearly overmanaged the aftermath of the Government Center Green Line collision by banning cell phones from drivers.  And never mind that he was on an unpaid budget-related furlough at the time the NTSB report was released.  And never mind he is not the T electrician.

No matter; Grabauskas is out, but to Gov. Patrick’s likely chagrin, the former T general manager emerges from the tussle virtually unscathed.  That isn’t true for the Governor and his appointees.  The termination looks like short-term political retribution — at taxpayers’ expense.

Unfortunately, the real loser here looks to be the T.  The authority is leaderless at a critical time where the patchwork of agencies is being reexamined and when the modes of transportation finance are in flux in a way they have not been in memory.  The Governor has made noises time and again that he is a friend to transit.  Now he has an opportunity to go from words to action.

The Legislature was wise to insist that bicyclists err on the side of safety and caution.  Someone on the road has to, and it probably won’t be automobile drivers, chatting on cell phones and shuffling through the songs on i-pods.

Traffic Sensor Doesn't Notice Bikes

So here’s a question:  what is a bicyclist lawfully required to do when the light never turns green?  It’s a frequent problem.  Modern traffic lights (i.e. the ones used everywhere except the city of Boston) are triggered by sensors that detect automobiles.  Roll over the sensor in a Chevy, and the light turns green.  Roll over the sensor on a Raleigh bicycle and … the light stays red.  It never turns green.  Ever.  Roll back and forth on it.  Jump up and down.  Nothing.

The question is sort of academic; the obvious answer is that you treat the traffic signal an ornament with little relevance to a bicyclist … but still you do so at your own risk — risk of physical injury and risk of legal jeopardy.  Injury because the lights are most frequently used at the most dangerous intersections.  There is a chance that the ornament will be you.  Jeopardy because who is to say the law enforcement officer will agree with your choice.  And it takes some significant waiting and experimenting to be sure the sensor really doesn’t work; that’s not a small inconvenience with traffic lights every few blocks.

I wish I had the answer.  It’s unfortunate, but perhaps the only safe thing to do is to drive.