The London Overground’s orbital route is seen here as a closed circle

Nearly five years ago, then-MTA Executive Director and CEO Lee Sander celebrated the 40th anniversary of the founding of the MTA by trumpeting the agency’s next four decades. He spoke as a visionary would, highlighting train routes the city needs to expand and compete over the next four years. Most optimistic — for New York — was his vision for a circumferential subway route through Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.

Known as the Triboro RX route in planning circles, this train line would use preexisting rights-of-way to connect Outer Borough neighborhoods with radial subway lines, and if the city could enjoy it by 2048, we’d be golden. Or at least that’s what the New York City-centric thinking went. Most other cities have more ambitious plans than that, luckily for them. Let’s look across the pond at a recently completed orbital line.

This past weekend, London celebrated the completion of the London Overground orbital loop. Using preexisting rights of way, the new surface rail skirts the congested core of the city and connects key underground routes. As The Atlantic Cities site notes, it’s a part of London’s so-called “make do and mend” transit efforts. Feargus O’Sullivan has this report:

This new line will ease pressure elsewhere and allow travelers to circumnavigate the city without passing through its congested core. Colored rust on the city’s transit map, the new line looks like a huge clockwork orange, closely connecting neighborhoods that were once strangers to each other and further helping the ongoing march eastwards of London’s city center. It’s all part of an ongoing radical overhaul of London’s public transport system, the scale and ambition of which the city (or any western European capital, for that matter) hasn’t seen since at least the 1980s. And it’s all arrived so quietly.

It’s not surprising that this revolution has gone largely unnoticed internationally. When a sparkling new metro line is unveiled, transit geeks across the world drool, myself included. By contrast, London’s new links (part of a growing network under the umbrella name London Overground) have arrived through creating new, tunnelled connections that bolt together old, underexploited tracks, a sort of make-do-and-mend network. This doesn’t make it any less effective, and the Overground is already helping to redraw the London map and, as one of the UK’s most reliable railways, it’s making the city that bit more liveable…

This new network is already re-chanelling the flow of London transit. Nowadays, many London office jobs are in the redeveloped former docks in the East, while much of London’s nightlife has also moved to the area just north. The Overground makes getting to these areas while bypassing the historic center much easier. It’s also helping to create a new commuter drainage basin for Docklands jobs. South East London has pretty much the last pockets of affordable Victorian property in the city and they’re now within 30 minutes of financial centers like Canary Wharf. Now that Londoners are giving up on the city’s West as an exorbitant playpen for super-rich property speculators, the Overground’s improvements both reflect and facilitate the city’s shift in gravity eastwards.

For more background on the Overground, check out London Reconnections and, in particular, this 2011 post. The site has tirelessly chronicled London’s efforts to improve its transit network, and as New York builds the small Second Ave. Subway, London has constructed the Overground orbital with Crossrail set for a 2018 revenue service date. If only we could do the same in New York.

We could though, and it wouldn’t take much creativity. The Triboro RX line is New York’s answer to the London Overground. Similar to London’s new route (as one TFL planner noted), New York’s proposed circumferential route uses existing rights of way and existing tracks to build out a better transit connection. As the last part of the Overground required 1.3 kilometers of new rail, Triboro RX would require some construction and upgrades, but the path is there, waiting for rail service.

What London has that New York does not is leadership devoted to transit. We don’t need ambitious plans or money to dig out new tunnels. We have the plans, and we have the path. We just need politicians willing to commit as Boris Johnson has. For London, the Overground is just the beginning while for New York, Triboro RX remains a dream. As the self-proclaimed center of the universe, though, New York City can ill afford to fall behind its international competitors, but without real transit leadership, that’s exactly what’s happening.

The naming rights wave has become a plague throughout North America. What started a successful one-off in Philadelphia with AT&T purchasing the rights to SEPTA’s stadium stop has turned into an unobtainable Holy Grail for cash-strapped transit agencies. If they could just convince major companies and big advertisers to pony up dollars for naming rights, all of the financial ills can be cured. Or at least, that’s the thinking.

Over the last year or so, we’ve seen countless cities bring up naming rights deals. Chicago tried to parlay the success of its venture with Apple into a broader attempt to attract corporate sponsors. Austin and New Jersey Transit have mentioned their interest, and Boston too wants to lure in naming partners.

It is, though, just a mirage. Companies don’t draw much power from teaming up with transit agencies that often aren’t very popular in the public mind to stick their names on stations that attract a few thousand folks per day. Still, that won’t stop everyone from trying, and this time, it’s Toronto’s turn.

The story from Canada is frankly hilarious. Toronto has a $774 million budget gap, and it thanks it can close a significant portion of that gap by renaming everything. Never mind that few cities have been able to attract $10 million in naming rights, let alone a few hundred. “As long as it’s called the right name — Spadina McDonald’s, whatever — if it brings in revenue, I honestly don’t believe anyone cares,” City Councillor Doug Ford said.

Toronto officials claim that the TTC is in dire need of both an infusion of cash and some renovations. If private companies want to help out, some will welcome them with open arms. Others, however, seem to recognize the reality of the situation. “There is not big money in them there hills,” Joe Mihevc said. “You need millions of dollars to fix up a subway. It really is not the way we should be naming these public assets.”

The complaints put forward by those in support of the deal in Toronto are the same we’ve heard everywhere. Station names should retain their geographic signifiers as both tourists, locals and everyone in between need to be able to navigate the system. If corporations are willing to work out deals within those parameters involving significant amounts of cash, TTC officials are certainly willing to listen. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

The problem, as it always is, boils down to the dollars. Naming rights deals are over. The Nationals, playing in a new baseball stadium in DC, haven’t found a corporate naming partner in four years. The Meadowlands closer to home are still just that. On a more local level, authorities often find it difficult to scrounge up those willing to commit to more ambitious display ads or wrapped subway cars. Naming rights are rarely even on the table.

For all of the talk of naming rights as the next great thing, the largest deals barely deliver revenue. Barclays will append its name to Atlantic/Pacific for a few hundred thousand dollars a year over 20 years. AT&T’s deal with SEPTA runs for a few million over five years. Other than that, politicians and transit planners are wasting their time and shirking their duties. Across the country, officials should try to find true and steady sources of revenue. Naming rights just represent an idea that wasn’t very good in the first place and hasn’t led to any significant amounts of money.

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.