I’m Giving a Talk About Regional Rail in Boston
I haven’t been as active here lately; I think people know why and ask that you find other things to comment on.
I’m in Boston this week (and in New York next week), meeting with friends and TransitMatters people; in particular, I’m giving a talk at the Elephant and Castle on Wednesday at 6 pm to discuss regional rail and related reforms for Boston:
What I keep finding on these trips is that public transportation in the US is always worse than I remember. In Boston, I had a short wait on the Red Line from South Station to where I’m staying in Cambridge, but the next train was 13 minutes afterward, midday on a weekday. The trip from South Station to Porter Square took 24 minutes over a distance of 7.7 km covering seven stops; TransitMatters has a slow zone dashboard, there are so many. A line segment with an interstation a little longer than a kilometer has a lower average speed than any Paris Métro line, even those with 400 meter interstations; in Berlin, which averages 780 meters, the average speed is 30 km/h.
In New York, the frequency is okay, but there’s a new distraction: subway announcements now say “we have over 100 accessible stations,” giving no information except advertising that the MTA hates disabled people and thinks that only 30% of the system should be accessible to wheelchair users. There are still billboards on the subway advertising OMNY, a strictly inferior way of paying for the system than the older prepaid cards – it’s a weekly cap at the same rate as the unlimited weekly, but it’s only available Monday to Sunday rather than in any seven-day period (update 10-24: I’m told it’s fixed and now it’s exactly the same product as prepaying if you know you’ll hit the cap), and the monthly fare is still just a bit cheaper than getting weeklies or weekly caps.
Pedestrian Observations 
In NY, the weekly cap was recently changed to any rolling 7 day period. The plan to retire MetroCard has been delayed to at least 2025, and there’s still no public timeline for monthly caps. The transition to OMNY has been painfully slow, and there isn’t a clear path forward. It’s not clear, at least to me, why the implementation of OMNY has been so thoroughly botched.
We had two EasyPay MetroCard accounts. I closed one of them. They made it so difficult that it took almost a month of exchanging emails with them to accomplish it. I’m not clear on why it needs to be so difficult. Part of the problem is that there are no clear instructions on the website about what exactly they want you to tell them in order to proceed, and, once they have everything they want, it takes 10 days to refund your balance.
What the hell is Elephant and Castle doing on Devonshire street? And what are they both doing in Boston?
Boston doesn’t want to be in the EU, votes blue, and has a high murder rate for England and a low one for the US.
Boston MA has a better art museum!
It’s called “New England”…
There’s also an Elephant and Castle in Chicago….. does a good full English Breakfast
Is that a closed door event? I don’t see it listed or promoted anywhere.
It’s an open door event and I have no idea why it’s not on the TM website already.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised but will your talk be?
This one won’t be, it’s at a bar. Wait for the one on November 1st in New York, where we’ll try to record (but it may flounder like last time).
Fair enough … or is that fare enough? Thanks in either case.
on the topic of avg speed, a question for alon & those who have more international transit knowledge: how important is avg speed in mode share?
My experience in US cities is that a lot of transit in the US (esp outside of the northeast) is on the order of 2-4x slower than driving. So transit adoption hinges on how difficult and/or expensive it is to park.
This question is kind of inextricable from land use, but I’m curious what this looks like in other countries.
I need to blog about that. The answer is that it depends on land use and freeways; the streets the buses use are pretty slow for cars too, so the 3x speed factor seen in American cities like Los Angeles hinges on freeway-oriented land use.
Average speed clearly matters to modal split; at exactly the same trip time as cars, transit tends to win out because of things that aren’t counted for in cars, like parking time or walk time from the parking space to the destination, but it’s usually not exactly the same.
Freeways by virtue of being fully grade separated absolutely advantage cars, but I would say even stroads do as well to an extent. Cars are able to get up to higher speeds since they don’t have to make frequent stops.
Stroady cities also tend to have destinations spaced far apart which disadvantages transit.
I’d like to know the answer, but in the mean time I can tell you that people generally budget half and hour for commuting to work and don’t like to accept more than that. (I could have sworn Alon has wrote on this recently – there is some controversy: transit users generally allow a little more time, but I can’t find it). This then lets us derive some principals:
What matters is door to door time. Average speed is generally of a single vehicle, but the simple fact is you can reach vastly more destinations if you get off whatever vehicle you start with and transfer to a different one going a different direction. If you want to measure average speed it needs to use the time as the total trip time, but the distance not as the traveled distance, but the “as a crow flies” distance for each person.
Average speed matters only in that it increases the distance you can go on each service before running out of time. And this in turn increases the number of destinations that can be reached via transit. However you can rearrange your transfer points and service to allow reaching some destination in less time with a slower average speed if you move the transfer points to a more useful location. If these destinations are more important (whatever that means to your city!) this may be good even if it is at the expense of some other destination. You can also add transfer points and so decrease travel time just because you spend less time going to that transfer point you didn’t want to be at – at the expense of $$$ as you need more express routes between them and probably more frequent service just so the transfers work.
Reading this made me think of an isochrone map which is a great visual representation of what you’re describing.
I suspect for many Americans cars provide consistently more reach. Since cars have a low marginal cost for additional trips once you’ve absorbed the fixed costs most wouldn’t bother with transit at all.
Agreed on transfers, when I lived in SF I found a lot of transfers expensive both due to headways and routing. A 10-15 minute wait for a second bus will destroy the average speed of the trip.
Cars provide more theoretical reach. Except in the densest down towns (where traffic slows things down), a car typically will take a more direct route and so have more reach. However most of those destinations are not places you go. I might visit “uncle Joe” who lives on the other side of the city (presumably he has moved there to be closer to his work) for holidays, but few people from my neighborhood go to his. People from my neighborhood are more likely to go to the jobs, schools, shopping, churches and such that are close. So long as I can get to those I’m good.
People arrange their life around what is convenient to get to. People do move when they get a job across town, or they refuse such a job if there are reasons to not move. If roads don’t go someplace people arrange their life not to go their either (if there is a river with no convenient crossings they don’t cross the river, someone closer to a bridge will) . They go much farther in the direction the freeways and highways go than other directions.
Transit needs to serve every place in the city, but not every place needs great service. If it is a long ride to “uncle Joe” – well I don’t do that often. If it is a long ride to work I’ll either drive, move, or find a new job. Set your goals on giving every house great access to services close to their house, and major destinations that a lot of people across the city go to. Don’t worry about less common destinations across the city – roads don’t provide good service to them either.
I have no skin in the game on ADA accessibility but why do you say that only having 100 of according to MTA’s website 472 stations as being ADA accessible in NY means that MTA hates disabled people? I mean go back to when they were built by the privately held operating companies and no one cared about ADA accessibility. Just wondering how MTA should be approaching this, all at once?
If Berlin can make its system 80%+ accessible by now (100% soon), and if Madrid can aim for 100% in about 10 years, New York should be well beyond 30% right now.
The ADA passed in 1990 – more than 30 years ago. Generally the federal government is behind states (particularly states/cities like New York that like to think of themselves as progressive). Any building should have a major remodel every 30 years (and a minor refresh every 10). So that New York hasn’t managed to add ADA in 30 years says that they hate disabled people and are fighting to disenfranchise them. If there was 1 or 2 stations left I’d accept that those are hard for some reason, but not 60% (even then I expect 3-4 identified early as hard and then they watch those stations for conditions to change – hard often means some other building is in the way and those buildings also get regular updates so when the owner does an update MTA should jump in and demand they allow station ADA to happen).
Alon’s point about the progress of peer cities is apt, but if you look at the history of the MTA’s response to accessibility requests you can get an even stronger sense of the trend.
So part of it is that the reason the MTA is in this position is because they have spent the last fifty years fighting accessibility requirements rather than accommodating them. ADA was only passed in 1990, but the predecessors (e.g. the Rehabilitation Act of 1973) have been around for a long time–though still well after the era of private operators. Regardless, right from the beginning, the transit agencies were fighting any obligation under the new laws, claiming it’d be too expensive. They forced a compromise that became enshrined in law, which was that accessibility improvements only need to be made when major renovations are done; lawmakers agreed to this on the assumption that surely renovations would happen at a rapid enough rate that everything would be accessible in a reasonable time frame.
You point out that NYC is a liberal part of a liberal(ish) state. And indeed, NY laws were out ahead of federal ones in this regard. There were state court lawsuits in the late 1970s and early 80s to block subway renovations that were scheduled without accessibility features (required by state law before the same compromise was adopted in ADA). MTA leadership of the time was more openly contemptuous of people with disabilities–arguing, among other arguments, that there was no point to adding elevators, since no one would actually use them, as the leadership involved couldn’t imagine that people with disabilities might have a place in public life.
Anyway, the outcome of this lawsuit was an agreement to make certain “key stations” accessible, and that same compromise also found its place into the ADA; this resulted in a list (from 1992) of 54 “key stations” that should be made accessible, growing to a list of 100 in 1994 due to revisions to local laws. These were to be completed by 2020–another set of three-decades-long promises, in this case to make less than a quarter of the system accessible. And yet, as of this writing, MTA still hasn’t finished reaching even that commitment.
Meanwhile, the agency continues to spend millions more to fight, as hard as they possibly can, to narrow their obligations under the renovations clause or the triggers for accessibility improvements, where they don’t outright ignore it. They spent two years renovating Smith-Ninth Street (so extensively it was closed from 2011-2013), and yet added no elevators. They’ve argued (even as recently as the last couple years) that building new platforms and staircases does not constitute enough “renovation” to trigger access requirements. Where that obviously doesn’t fly, they’ve insisted on a “technical infeasibility” standard to avoid adding accessibility, typically using transparently specious arguments–in some cases arguing that things are “technically infeasible” that are subsequently actually done. Clearly the MTA, faced with a multi-million-dollar price tag for an accessible system, would rather spend half as much in legal fees to get no accessibility whatsoever.
At the same time, what elevators have been installed are notoriously under-maintained. Even among stations that have elevators, the most charitable estimates cite 95% uptime (other reports suggest 90% or worse). Now, 95% sounds great–except that to make a trip, you have to take (at least) four elevators; so your chance of functional elevators for the whole trip is only about 80%. And once again, the MTA has found it a better use of its money to hire white-shoe law firms to fight its obligations than to hire elevator mechanics.
Given all this history, including a longstanding history of public comments actively contemptuous of people with disabilities, it’s hard to draw any conclusion other than that the MTA views elevator access as the easiest thing to slash whenever its budgetary incompetence leaves it short. In places where the agencies actually care–in Europe, obviously, but even in Boston–the situation is much better, but New York would rather waste as much money as possible fighting its obligations than do the right thing for its citizens. And for the same reason, it’s difficult to give the agency any sympathy for the scale of the job it’s accumulated for itself–the only reason they need to install access at 400 stations is because they’ve been procrastinating for two generations. “Look at all the work I’ve not been doing for forty years” is not a persuasive argument for anyone.
I’m certainly curious to learn what on Earth is going on with the MBTA these last few years. The GLX restart suggested that someone somewhere in the agency was at least trying to take things seriously. Now, lots of T slow zones, no progress of any kind on regional electrification, the NSRL appears on no one’s radar….
The MBTA seems as off-the-rails as ever, only not yet literally, but that seems impending these days, too.
What’s are the odds of Boston beginning to upgrade some lines to electric and picking up Caltrain-style KISS EMUs to run them?
They have a line with electric trains running on it. The MBTA runs diesels on it.
Have you shared the details about your New York talk? I’d be interested in attending if I can.
When I first moved to the Boston area when I was 15 in 1960, I found the headways extremely erratic and they do not seem better 60 years later. New York for its subways seemed to have one headways compared to a city like Toronto. When I worked at SEPTA in the 1970s, headways were strictly maintained. I remember I did a check on the Market Frankford line EB in the PM period and out of 60 trains I checked the most late train was all of 20 seconds late. Political turmoil in the 80s erased that. I spent a lot of time in my transit career in Detroit and have nothing to show for it. When I arrived in Detroit, the best bus route, Woodward had a 2 minute rush a 3 minute base. Nowadays it is something like an all day 9 minute headway and only has a severely truncated rail line on Woodward. Boston still has a relatively good modal split (unlike Chicago and Philadelphia) because the auto traffic continues to be awful.
Can you please tell us where and when you’ll be speaking in NYC next week, if it’s open to the public ? ? Thank you.
Likely November 1st. I’ll announce when it’s confirmed.
I assume that this will be recorded?
It wasn’t, but I’m going to mine some questions for posts, as I just did with the issue of consultants.