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.

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.

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 NTSB found that the crash probably occurred because the trolley operator didn’t stop at a red light on the tracks.  And the most likely reason the operator didn’t stop was because she didn’t see the red light.  And the most likely reason she didn’t see the red light was because she was asleep.  And the most likely reason she was asleep was because she had a hidden medical condition that deprived her of sleep.  Thus the most likely cause of that unfortunate collision was resolved as thoroughly as it probably ever will be.

But the NTSB made another interesting finding.  The red light was broken and stuck on red.  The signal was red all the time, even when it should have been yellow or another color.  Even more strange, the T did not know about the broken signal because “[MBTA] operating rules do not require that train operators report signals [erroneously] displaying red.”

Accidents happen, and everyone knows that the cash-strapped T relies on antiquated systems.  But what about “see something, say something?”  When passengers see something suspicious they are supposed to run breathless to a station attendant.  And when a conductor notices a piece of essential safety equipment is broken and out of service … silence?