New York Provincialism, and the MTA’s Flawed Smartcard Report

New York’s MTA recently published a report proposing a next-generation payment system replacing the MetroCard. You can find it here: to read it, download it and add .pdf to the file extension. Sections 4-5 are the most relevant here.

The report is full of little facts about New York such as the number of transactions on each component of the MTA, but never once mentions case studies abroad – Hong Kong’s Octopus, Tokyo’s Suica and PASMO, or the many European cities that are happy with paper tickets. It uses factoids to intimidate more than to explain. For example, it repeats the fact that New York City Transit spends 15% of its revenue on fare collection, but never breaks it down to parts, does cross-city comparisons, or even estimates how much a smartcard system will save; the only purpose of the number is therefore to scare people into doing something.

Despite advertising its intention to save money, the MTA makes no mention of bundling smartcards with proof-of-payment, widely used way to speed up bus boarding and reduce train staffing levels, even with plain paper tickets. On the contrary, the report specifically mentions equipping commuter rail conductors (and not fare inspectors) with card readers, and only mentions inspectors in relation to Select Bus Service and the Staten Island Railway.

Even on the level of checking existing technology use, the report falls short. The MTA rates smartcard options as “medium-low” on “inter-modal interoperability,” on the grounds that they require card validators and card readers. In reality, card validators are cheap: in Singapore, they cost about S$950 per unit (about US$770); placing one at every bus stop and commuter train station and on board every bus door and commuter train door pair would cost $20 million, less than a tenth the cost of a smartcard implementation.

Similarly, the report rates internal transit smartcards’ lifecycle risk as “medium: mature technology, though standards are not.” The closest thing to truth in there is that there are two open standards, Sony’s FeliCa and a separate standard whose top vendor is NXP’s MIFARE, and the ISO chose the standard used by MIFARE over FeliCa (FeliCa was already in place in Japan and Hong Kong, so it still has the most users). In reality, both FeliCa and MIFARE date to the mid-1990s, making them older than the smartphone and broadband Internet.

The report mentions a foreign city exactly once: it says that “The technology risk is mitigated by Transport for London’s adoption of open payments, planned for 2012, and its role in advising the MTA and potentially sharing technology.” Optimistically, it means the MTA listens to other cities when they say what it wants to hear. Pessimistically, both cities are using each other to justify a prior decision. MTA Chairman Jay Walder, the primary proponent within the MTA of the credit card-based smartcard, worked in London until 2007 and was responsible for introducing the Oyster card.

And speaking of London, Oyster is bumpy at best. It is superficially similar to Hong Kong’s Octopus, down to the similar name, but in practice it is much more primitive. Octopus is licensed as anonymous electronic money (in a culture that according to Western stereotype is authoritarian and indifferent to privacy), generating additional profits to the MTR; Oyster is not, and the MTA report makes no mention of this possibility. Octopus comes in more forms than just a card – for example, there is an Octopus watch and an Octopus keychain, making tapping easier since the rider does not need to take out their wallet; Oyster does not, and when riders took out the chip to create a makeshift Oyster watch, TfL fined them even though they were not dodging the fare.

The MTA keeps underperforming because it doesn’t listen to other cities’ experience, unless it’s what it wants to hear. And this is perhaps the worst abuse, because here the person who’s leading the charge for reform in New York has a track record of screwing up abroad. New York has spent decades convincing itself that it is the best city in the world and needs to learn from no other, taking pride in its subway. The result has been a metro area transit mode share lower than that of European cities one tenth New York’s size. Walder speaks like a reformer who tries to change this, but the one time he’s proposing something concrete, it’s the usual New York provincialism.

New York’s Awful Grade Separation

After Rick Scott rejected the Florida high-speed rail funds, a bunch of states as well as Amtrak applied for the redirected funds. The money has just been redistributed – see breakdown here. New York State applied for $300 million to grade-separate a junction between Amtrak and the LIRR, which it spins as an important capacity upgrade and which some online commenters have misinterpreted as a speed upgrade. Let me dispel the myth here.

The track map of the LIRR (link scrubbed for copyright reasons) shows clearly that, in the westbound direction, the junction has no conflicts. Amtrak trains (blue) using the northern tunnel pair to Penn Station have no conflicts with any other trains, except for other trains using the same tunnels. This is not a grade crossing, but a simple switch. In the eastbound direction, trains using the northern tunnels do have an at-grade junction with LIRR trains (purple) – but only trains going to a track farther north than the tunnels to Penn Station, and those all stub-end at Hunterspoint Avenue or Long Island City.

There aren’t a lot of trains going to Hunterspoint or Long Island City: at the peak, only 5 per hour, and of those one uses the Montauk Line, so we’re really talking about 4 trains per hour; Amtrak never runs more than 2 trains per hour to New York from the east. To put things in perspective, the 3 and 5 train on the subway have more than 10 trains per hour each and have a similar conflict in Brooklyn. What’s more, Hunterspoint’s main use is that it has an easy subway connection to Manhattan’s East Side, so once East Side Access opens and LIRR trains can go to Grand Central, traffic there will go down even more, making the flat junction even less relevant than it is today.

So the $300 million the state applied to has no relevance to either Amtrak or LIRR traffic. The only use is to let Amtrak use the southern tunnel pair to Penn Station without conflicts. Since Amtrak can already use the northern tunnels without any conflict apart from the one mentioned above, it is a pure nice-to-have. It would be good for operational flexibility if the tunnels were at capacity, but they aren’t: total LIRR plus Amtrak traffic into Penn Station peaks at 37 trains between 8 and 9 am, where the capacity of the tunnels is about 50 – and as with Hunterspoint traffic, Penn Station LIRR traffic will go down once East Side Access opens.