Archive for February, 2011
Feb
28
Report: SBS fare enforcement netting $1.4M
Posted by: | CommentsCarly Baldwin in Metro today has one of those Select Bus Service fare enforcement stories I just love. Alexander Barton, a 27-year-old accountant who apparently had not heard about the new service, tried to hop on a bus without paying. He alleges that the bus driver waved him on and said the MetroCard reader was “broken.” Meanwhile, other passengers tried to explain the pre-board payment system to Barton, but MTA cops gave him a $100 ticket when he couldn’t procure his proof-of-payment receipt. “The thing that extremely frustrates me is, I was totally unaware I’d done anything wrong,” said Barton.
It’s easy to laugh at the he said-he said battle between a rider who didn’t know about the Select Bus Service changes and a bus rider who denied wrong-doing, but there’s a different story at work here. According to Baldwin, the MTA has issued over 14,000 $100 tickets to those who could not procure proof-of-payment on the M15 Select Bus Service routes since October. That’s a whopping $1.4 million in revenue and an average of around 94 tickets a day.
Customers can’t be happy about it, and advocacy groups aren’t either. Transportation Alternatives, a group that has long fought for faster buses, bemoaned enforcement while Gene Russianoff made a rather obtuse point to Metro. “Clearly, education is an issue,” he says. “I can’t imagine issuing a million dollars’ worth of tickets in a country like Sweden, where they’ve had off-board fare collection for years.” For now, though, if we want buses to move faster, if we want people to pay before they board and keep the new Select Bus Service moving, a ticket blitz has become a part of that education process. Talk about tough love.
Feb
28
On lawsuits, raises and rational economics
Posted by: | CommentsIf you had a 10 percent chance to save $80 million, how much would you pay to do so? What if you had a 25 percent chance to save $300 million? In a traditional economic model, the right answers are $8 million and $75 million respectively. Why then are Pete Donohue and the Daily News so surprised by the MTA’s legal bills?
In his column today, Donohue slams the authority for “paying hired-gun lawyers more than $540 an hour to deny token booth clerks earning $18 an hour a modest raise.” The MTA, he notes, is trying once again to overturn the third year of raises awarded to the TWU by an arbitration panel in 2009. After an unsuccessful lawsuit and appeal to stop the first set of raises, the MTA racked up a legal bill of nearly $700,000 after claiming a victory would have saved them close to $300 million.
Riders, of course, are “baffled” by what one man called “a clear example of the MTA wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars of public money on something they agreed on anyway.” Yet, they shouldn’t be. The MTA, which can’t really afford to dole out more money in raises, can save $80 million, and if it feels its chances of winning — admittedly slim due to the precedence of courts upholding binding arbitration awards — are worth the expenditures, then it’s a cost that makes economic sense. Despite Donohue’s portrayal of the challenge as a class issue, it is simply one of economics through and through.
That said, the real issue here concerns the bigger picture. Later this year, the MTA and TWU will again sit down to negotiate a new contract, and while the MTA won’t accept an arbitration offer so quickly this time, they do plan to dig in for a long fight. It might make more sense to save those labor bullets for later in the year and avoid this uphill cost. The MTA may be doing its legal due diligence, but this is a battle it will likely lose in court while courting bad press as the larger labor war with more at stake looms on the horizon.
Feb
28
Eliminating MetroCards, eliminating scams
Posted by: | Comments
The MTA is moving ahead this year with plans to phase out the MetroCard system. While London, as I wrote late last week, will have its bank card-based system in place by 2012, the MTA’s own process will likely be slower. The authority will soon issue an RFP and will eventually make way for a new system. The MetroCard is on the way out, but it’s going to be a slow death.
When the MetroCard goes, the MTA will begin to save on fare collection costs. By eliminating the proprietary infrastructure behind the MetroCard, the MTA can cut down significantly on the amount of money it spends to collect fares, and thus its revenue from fares will increase. That’s, at least, the intended consequence. One of the other consequence — call it a semi-unintended consequence — concerns MetroCard scams.
Nearly since the beginning, scams have plagued the MetroCard system. In January of 1998, the Daily News marked the end of the first scam when cops and MTA officials busted a ring of scammers who were mutilating MetroCards to game the system.
Over the next few years, MetroCard scams became a low-level annoyance for the MTA. The authority took some heat from politicians in 1999 when it didn’t know how much money it lost due to MetroCard scams. In 2000, a station agent was arrested for MetroCard fraud, and throughout the decade, cops and transit officials continued to vow to crackdown on scammers selling swipes.
Recently, scammers have gotten confrontational. Those selling swipes will harass costumers at stations missing their agents, and they’ll jam machines. In November, the MTA and NYPD started targeting stations from which they’ve received a high number of complaints. Sutphin Boulevard, which was highlighted by the Daily News, saw one scammer make $200 off of a 30-day unlimited card.
Yesterday, The Post again went inside MetroCard scammers. Here’s how the paper reported it:
Swipers, as the hustlers are called, commonly jam the bill slot in MetroCard machines to force riders to buy a “swipe” to get past the turnstile. They charge anywhere from $1 to $2. The fare is $2.50. They exploit flaws in discarded cards that allow someone to get through after repeatedly swiping it, or they charge people to go through a service gate, transit workers said.
At the Fordham Road D station in The Bronx yesterday, The Post found several busted MetroCard machines unable to accept bills — and swipers more than willing to help out. “I’ll let you in. Give me $2. Come on,” one man muttered.
Transit workers were quite hyperbolic about the gangs — allegedly organized — that hang around stations. “It’s like the Thunderdome in some stations,” one said. “I fear for the riding public. It’s dangerous,” another said.
Cops say they’ve been more vigilant about enforcement. After nabbing 74 scammers in December, police arrested 148 people in January. Yet that doesn’t begin to scratch the surface. Reportedly, vandals broke machines at the Utica Ave. station 198 times in December and at the Nostrand Ave. station 228 times. Lower-income areas of the city appear particularly susceptible to scammers.
For now, the MTA and the NYPD will continue to work together to combat these scammers, but it’s going to require more than just a token effort to nip this problem in the bud. When the MetroCard is retired though, scammers won’t be able to jam fare machines and harass costumers. For those subjected to these scams on a daily basis, that is welcome news indeed.
Feb
27
Photo of the Day: Vandalizing, non-stop
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Where: The Church Ave.-bound G platform at Metropolitan Ave.
When: Thursday, February 24, 2011 at around 8:00 p.m.
When the MTA unveiled their new signs in December, the rebranding effort was sure to be met with a certain public skepticism. It’s easy to say that the MTA is improving, non-stop, but it’s much harder to show. With fares on the raise at the end of 2010 and services scaled back six months earlier, straphangers aren’t feeling too good about the state of their transit network.
Over the past few days, I’ve seen the sign praising the MTA’s construction workers with the tagline “Improvements don’t just happen” vandalized in numerous ways. Mostly, clever commuters cut out the word “just,” and the new message is clear. New Yorkers, frustrated with the MTA, think improvements aren’t happening, period. A more obscene edit gets that point across.
In a sense, it’s a short-sighted zinger. Over the past 25 years, we’ve seen new subway connections into Queens open up; we’ve seen the Manhattan Bridge overhauled; we’ve seen the onset of MetroCards, reduced fare options and free subway-to-bus transfers; we’ve seen a near-total overhaul of the MTA’s rolling stock; and a slow-moving State of Good Repair program inch forward. We have countdown clocks in over 100 stations, and now, we’re seeing a part of the Second Ave. Subway move toward a Phase 1 conclusion. Progress is there, but it’s slow.
On the other hand, progress is slow, and we’ve seen the system slide back a bit lately. Stations are dirtier, and station agents have become an endangered species. The give-and-take between capital improvements and daily maintenance leaves many frustrated.
That said, I don’t think New Yorkers will be satisfied with the subways until the trains arrive constantly, there’s always a seat, no one is ever delayed and the fares decrease. Perhaps promoting improvements is a losing battle no matter what happens underground.
Feb
25
Weekend service changes
Posted by: | CommentsFriday night. You know the drill. Subway Weekender has the map.
During the weekend overnight hours from 12:01 a.m. to 6:30 a.m. Saturday, Sunday and from 12:01 a.m. to 5 a.m. on Monday, northbound 4 trains run express from Brooklyn Bridge to 14th Street/Union Square due to work on the Broadway/Lafayette Street-to-Bleecker Street connection. The uptown 4 skips Canal, Spring, Bleecker Streets and Astor Place.
From 5:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., Saturday, February 26, from 7:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., Sunday, February 27, and from 5:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., Monday, February 28, 5 trains run every 20 minutes between Dyre Avenue and Bowling Green due to work on the Broadway/Lafayette-to-Bleecker Street transfer connection.
From 12:01 a.m. Saturday, February 26 to 5 a.m. Monday, February 28, uptown 6 trains run express from Brooklyn Bridge to 14th Street/Union Square due to work on the Broadway/Lafayette-to-Bleecker Street transfer connection. The uptown 6 skips Canal, Spring, Bleecker Streets and Astor Place.
From 10:30 p.m. Friday, February 25 to 5 a.m. Monday, February 28, the Rockaway S Shuttle is suspended; the A train replaces the S shuttle between Broad Channel and Rockaway Park. Free shuttle buses operate between Beach 90th Street and Far Rockaway. (Note: At all times until early summer, Manhattan-bound A trains skip Beach 36th Street and Beach 60th Street due to station rehabilitation.)
From 12:01 a.m. Saturday, February 26 to 5 a.m. Monday, February 28, Brooklyn-bound D trains run on the N line from 36th Street to Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue due to structural repair and station rehabilitation. There are no Brooklyn-bound D trains stopping at 9th Avenue, Ft. Hamilton Parkway, 50th, 55th, 71st, 79th Streets, 18th and 20th Avenues, Bay Parkway, 25th Avenue and Bay 50th Street stations.
From 12:01 a.m. Saturday, February 26 to 5 a.m. Monday, February 28, E trains run on the F line between Roosevelt Avenue and West 4th Street due to work on the 5th Avenue Interlocking Signal System. The platforms at 5th Avenue-53rd Street, Lexington Avenue-53rd Street and 23rd Street-Ely Avenue are closed. Customers may take the R, G or shuttle bus. Free shuttle buses connect Court Square (G)/23rd Street-Ely Avenue (E), Queens Plaza (R) and the 21st Street-Queensbridge (F) stations. Note: During the overnight hours, E trains stop at 36th Street, Steinway Street, 46th Street, Northern Blvd and 65th Street.
From 12:01 a.m. Saturday, February 26 to 5 a.m. Monday, February 28, Brooklyn-bound F trains run on the A line from West 4th Street to Jay Street-MetroTech due to cable work. There are no Brooklyn-bound F trains at Broadway-Lafayette Street, 2nd Avenue, Delancey Street, East Broadway or York Street.
From 11:30 p.m. Friday, February 25 to 5 a.m. Monday, February 28, free shuttle buses replace L service between Lorimer Street and Broadway Junction due to rail work at Myrtle Avenue and Halsey Street.
From 4 a.m. Saturday, February 26 to 10 p.m. Sunday, February 27, Manhattan-bound N trains skip 30th Av, Broadway, 36th Av and 39th Av due to track panel installation from Astoria Blvd to 36th Avenue.
From 12:01 a.m. Saturday, February 26 to 5 a.m. Monday, February 28, Manhattan-bound N trains run on the D line from Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue to 36th Street due to track panel installation from north of Kings Highway to north of Bay Parkway. There are no Manhattan-bound N trains at 86th Street, Avenue U, Kings Highway, Bay Parkway, 20th Avenue, 18th Avenue, Ft. Hamilton Parkway or 8th Avenue stations.
During the overnight hours from 12:01 a.m. to 6:30 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday, and to 5 a.m. on Monday, Brooklyn-bound N trains run over the Manhattan Bridge between Canal Street and DeKalb Avenue due to the installation of platform tiles at Cortlandt Street. There are no Brooklyn-bound N trains at City Hall, Rector Street, Whitehall Street, Court Street and Jay Street-MetroTech. Customers may use the 4 at nearby stations instead.
From 6:30 a.m. to midnight, Saturday, February 26 and Sunday, February 27, Brooklyn-bound R trains run over the Manhattan Bridge between Canal Street and DeKalb Avenue due to the installation of platform tiles at Cortlandt Street. There are no Brooklyn-bound R trains at City Hall, Rector Street, Whitehall Street, Court Street, and Jay Street-MetroTech stations. Customers may use the 4 at nearby stations instead.
(Rockaway Parkway)
From 11 p.m. Friday, February 25 to 5 a.m. Monday, February 28, A trains replace the S shuttle between Broad Channel and Rockaway Park (see A insert). Note: At all times until early summer, Manhattan-bound A trains skip Beach 36th Street and Beach 60th Street due to station rehabilitation.
(42nd Street Shuttle)
From 10 p.m. to midnight, Saturday, February 26, the 42nd Street shuttle is suspended due to a safety exercise. Customers should use 7 service instead.
Feb
25
T&LC upping service refusal fine for cabbies
Posted by: | CommentsAs the Taxi & Limousine Commission works to bring more taxis to areas outside of Manhattan, the city is upping the penalty it levies on cabbies who refuse fares. According to a report in The Post, fines will jump to $500 for first-time offenders while a second offense carries a $750 fine and a 30-day suspension. A third conviction will result in a mandatory revocation of a license.
Over the last year, New Yorkers have either been confronted with ruder cabbies or are fighting back. The Commission says complaints over service refusals — especially to Outer Borough destinations — have increased 38 percent over the past year. “A core component of taxi service is that the passenger chooses where to go in the five boroughs,” T&LC Chair David Yassky said. “Unfortunately, it is getting to be like the bad old days when taxis wouldn’t go to Brooklyn. I strongly encourage taxi riders to call 311 each and every time they are denied service.”
Taxis are an integral part of the city’s transportation picture, and it has long been against T&LC rules to deny passengers service to any part of the five boroughs. Still, cabbies are often loath to take the trips, and some can be downright nasty. This fine increase, still to be approved by the City Council, is a welcome one.
Feb
25
PATH’s WTC transit hub costs now at $3.44 billion
Posted by: | CommentsIf any transit project in Manhattan deserves to be labeled a boondoggle, it is the never-ending one with the ever-increasing budget at the World Trade Center. As The Times reports today, the price on Santiago Calatrava’s World Trade Center PATH hub has now reached $3.44 billion, thanks to a sharp increase in the cost of the steel framework supporting the ostentatious hub. This new price represents, says Michael Grynbaum, “a 5.5 percent increase from the agency’s last estimate of $3.26 billion, issued in 2008.” Interestingly, though, this cost is in line with an estimate issued by the contractor in 2004, and the Port Authority, who described the total then as “simply unacceptable,” eliminated the retractable roof in response. So much for that.
When all is said and done, the Port Authority expects grand things for this PATH hub. It will be, as The Times notes, the third-largest transportation hub in the city with an estimated 250,000 people passing through each day, and the space will feature 500,000 square feet of retail. Yet, as the costs have spiked by $1.2 billion since the project was first proposed in 2002, I have to wonder if the Port Authority is spending altogether too much on a glorified PATH/subway station. The $3.44 billion certainly could have been used on projects that would have actually improved transportation into and out of the city.
Feb
25
London readying bank card fare system for 2012
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A swipeless, credit card-based fare payment system is in our subway-riding future.
Here in New York City, we are witnesses the slow but inexorable death of the MetroCard. Despite the fact that the technology is alive and well underground, forces are plotting behind the scenes to replace. Later this year, the MTA will issue an RFP for companies who will bring a contactless, credit- and bank-card-based fare payment system into the subways, and sometime in the hazy future, the MetroCard will be a historical footnote.
In London, a city that already has its own contactless payment system, things are moving faster. According to recent reports from the other side of the Atlantic, Transport for London will have a bank card system in place by 2012, and it will be the first international city with a major public transit network to do so.
Rail.co’s A. Samuel has more:
By the end of 2012 card readers across the whole of the Transport for London (TfL) network will have been upgraded so that a touch of a contactless bank or credit card will allow passengers to touch in and out for pay as you go travel on the bus, Tube, Docklands Light Railway (DLR), Tram and London Overground network.
The new system will be up and running on all of London’s 8,000 buses in time for the 2012 Games, enabling quick and easy bus travel for the millions of visitors who will flock to the Capital to enjoy the greatest show on earth.
The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, said: “It is tip top news that from next year a simple tap of a contactless bank card will be enough to whizz you from A to B in this great city. London leads the way in so many different fields and we will be the first in the world to allow the millions using our Tube, trams, buses and trains to benefit from the ease of using this technology.”
London is one of many cities globally working informally together to help create a network of reciprocal credit- and bank-card readers. Authorities in London, Paris, New York, Boston, Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Salt Lake City and Sydney are working with the banking industry to ensure a secure, simple and quick solution that can scale across cities and countries. The example for London concerns tourists who are fresh off a plane but don’t want to confront the challenges of purchasing a fare card in a foreign city.
Meanwhile, TfL says the new system will lead to a more efficient and money-saving approach to fare collection. The MTA has noted the same benefits and believes this is a prime example of how spending capital dollars will lead to savings on the operations side of the ledger. How the system works in London will help illuminate how ours in the U.S. will eventually work as well.
Of course, this news out of the U.K. is intriguing because of the timeframe. New York City has been testing some form of a PayPass trial on and off for nearly five years, but because London has the Oyster card infrastructure in place, it can rapidly move to a credit card-based fare solution. We have to wait because our system must undergo an entire top-to-bottom overhaul.
Still, I’m intrigued by the idea of an international standard, and as long as New York’s project is moving forward, I don’t mind the wait. It will be a few years, but slowly, the technology is moving forward.
Feb
24
Wanting nicer stations without the inconvenience
Posted by: | CommentsI love stories such as this one. It’s a typical person-on-the-street piece from the Daily News about the station closures along the Pelham Line. As the final phase of this rehab project, the Elder and Lawrence Ave. stations are to be shut for eight months beginning next months. Some residents are unhappy with the project. Or not.
Basically, Daniel Beekman spoke to enough people to find those who want their cake and others who want to eat it too. “It’s going to be bad,” one commuter said. “Eight months is too long.” Another whose son will have to walk to another stop: “I’m concerned for my son’s safety. Why can’t they just do patchwork?” A third: “The paint is peeling. There’s a lot of graffiti. It looks terrible.”
It’s always easy to find a good number of people with varying opinions on anything in New York, and this is just another example of the tenuous relationship with transit improvements everyone has. We want our system to look good, but we don’t want to pay the price of a shuttered station for eight or nine months. Our stop needs work, but I don’t want to be inconvenienced, and as long as everyone else’s stop looks new, leave mine alone. Seems perfectly irrational to me.
Feb
24
The MTA’s escalator problem
Posted by: | CommentsAs we recently learned from Washington, D.C., transit agencies and escalators just don’t mix. Government agencies that are forced to take the lowest bids on projects often end up with escalators that can’t withstand the constant pounding they take, and fixes are costly and slow. The MTA too, as The Post briefly notes, has its own escalator problem, and agencies leaders are vowing to fix it. “I don’t think we’re providing the service,” Jay Walder said at the MTA Board meeting yesterday. “We have been trying a number of things on elevators and escalators, it’s not a budget issue, and they have not worked.”
The MTA’s Transit committee meeting books provide a more nuanced look. Scroll to page 8-25 of this pdf for the full report. In essence, the MTA hopes for a 96 percent availability goal, but but 24-hour access is now hoving around 91.7 percent. That figure omits escalators targeted for capital replacement, and it doesn’t explore for how long these escalators are out of service. A quick glance at the Transit escalator outage page shows some that have been shuttered since late October and early November, and the one at High St., for instance, was available only 44 percent of the time last year.
The systemic root of the problem seems to arise from technological failures and an inability to conduct efficient repairs, but that’s not stopping the MTA from expanding the escalator system. For instance, the current plans for the deep station at 34th St. and 11th Ave. along the 7 line extension call for only escalators — and no staircase access — at one end of the station. The MTA claims the depth makes a staircase inefficient, but I’ve often seen people walking up the flights at 63rd St. and Lexington Ave. Relying heavily on escalators though seems to be an avenue to inconvenience and steeper costs.
