The MTA’s love/hate relationship with its escalators and elevators has continued, according to a report from the MTA Inspector General. The Daily News provides the details:

Straphangers stuck in elevators may have been trapped longer than necessary because a new monitoring system was plagued by false alarms, the Daily News has learned. Instead, staffers on a control desk in the MTA’s Elevator and Escalator department waited for notification from trapped riders or other transit workers before sending mechanics to the scene… “Despite public concern, media attention and demands for improvement by the MTA Board, elevators and escalators remain a problem,” the report said…

Other findings include:

• Some inspection and maintenance work reported as having been done may not have been performed.
• In addition to the many false alarms, the automated monitoring and alert system sometimes failed to send a warning during true entrapments. There were 208 entrapments in the first six months of last year.
• Managers didn’t know false alarms were a problem and wrongly thought staff was immediately dispatched. They weren’t aware that monitoring equipment was disconnected at some elevators – including some with the highest number of entrapments.

For its part, the MTA says it will create a position in charge of escalator and elevator oversight who can spearhead “maintenance and reliability.” “We know we have to,” Caremn Bianco, senior vice president of subways, said. “We know this is a huge source of frustration for our customers.” I think I’ll take the stairs.

Countdown clocks at Bergen Street offer a glimpse into the MTA's true headways.

As regular readers know, I am a big supporter of the MTA’s new countdown clocks. In fact, outside of those people who rabble over money spent on something they personally deem superfluous without understanding the rationale behind the expenditures, I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t find the countdown clocks calming. We know how far away the next train is; we know the trains are moving closer as time ticks away; and we no longer have to deal with the mysteries of waiting and peering into darkened tunnels.

Yet, the countdown clocks allow us to sneak a peak at the MTA’s operations, and now and then, we see things we do not like. Let me tell a story that I’ve told in various forms before. I wish I didn’t have to keep repeating myself, but this type of incident happens far more regularly than I would like.

To set the stage, it is Friday night at 11:38 p.m. I have just taken the 4 train back to Brooklyn from Yankee Stadium, and I am hoping that I won’t need to wait long for a connecting 2 or 3 train that will take me to Grand Army Plaza. When we slowly pass Hoyt St., I can see the countdown clocks threatening a 13-minute wait until the next 2 train is due to arrive, and I hope that there is a train at Nevins awaiting connecting passengers.

When we pull into Nevins St., I get my hopes up. There’s a 3 train across the platform, but the 3 train has its doors closed. At that hour of the night and with the next train so far behind, I had hopes that the operators would grow less worried about adhering to the MTA’s fantasy idea of a schedule and more concerned with customer service. Instead, as the doors on the 4 open, the 3 train pulls away. So much for those poor saps who have to get to Bergen St., Grand Army Plaza or Eastern Parkway. Instead of waiting for 12 minutes at Nevins, I opted for the 20-minute walk back home from Atlantic Ave.

To me, there is nothing quite as frustrating as watching a local depart as an express pulls in when nighttime headways at their worst. We’ve heard frequently from the MTA about improving on-time performance, but as I’ve said in the past, on-time performance means little if customers aren’t inconvenienced by it. On Friday night, more than a few of us sighed audibly or cursed under our breaths as that 3 train pulled out. We were inconvenienced by it, and because of the countdown clocks, we knew that the next local train would be an interminable 12 minutes away.

Enter the law of unintended consequences. In the days before countdown clocks, I likely would have waited for that next 2 train, growing more and more impatient with every passing minute and thinking ill of the train operator who left us stranded at Nevins. With the countdown clocks, I could better plan my trip home, but I also knew with certainty that the local train should have waited 20 extra seconds for a connecting express because the next train wasn’t particularly close.

Meanwhile, the countdown clocks gave me a glimpse of the MTA’s true headways as well, and I’ve noticed this problem with some frequency. Ideally, headways at 11:40 p.m. on a Friday at Nevins St. would be around 8-10 minutes per train, and technically they are. There is, however, a catch. The countdown clocks told me that the next 2 train was 12 minutes away while the next 3 was 17. Two trains in 17 minutes makes sense, but no trains in 12 minutes doesn’t. When different routes — in this case the Flatbush Ave.-bound 2 and the New Lots Ave.-bound 3 — share a track, the headways might sound convenient, but often, bunching happens. The countdown clocks lay it all out there for everyone to see.

Ultimately, my trip home lasted a few minutes less than it would have had I waited for the next train, and I was able to take a nice walk on a warm evening to let out my frustration. But with technology that allows us to see just when the next train is coming, the MTA should ask its train operators to think about customers when its late at night and headways are long. The extra few seconds would make for many more satisfied customers.

The new look for the MTA's website went live a few minutes ago.

For the second time in two years, the MTA has redesigned its homepage. In an effort to simplify the amount of information on its public landing page and better present customers with directions, service alerts and useful transit apps, the authority has just flipped the switch on a simplified design that borrows from transit agencies across the country and world. For a peak at the new site, check out MTA.info.

“Despite last year’s complete overhaul of our website, there was still room for improvement,” MTA Chairman Jay H. Walder said in a statement. “Today’s redesign improves further on the customer experience, adding new features and making it even easier to get real-time service information and easy-to-use travel planning.”

The website, which the MTA says was created and built in house, features a “new minimalistic design” that is “better organized and geared toward enabling customers to quickly identify the information they need.” With the new look comes some new functionality as well. The MTA has unveiled an App Center that highlights third-party transit-related apps for iPhone, Android and other mobile platforms. The new Innovation section has been designed to showcase technological improvements that improve customer service. Here, the MTA has given customers the ability to comment on these changes as well.

Finally, an enhanced Trip Planner Plus creates what the authority calls “a truly regional trip planner for the first time.” Users will receive directions for Metro-North and the LIRR as well as subways and buses, and these directions will incorporate planned service changes.

Following the debut of its January 2010 redesign, the MTA saw web traffic increase by nearly 65 percent on a daily basis. If the new redesign is a success, if information is better presented and easy to find, the authority will likely continue to see an increase in use. It is, after all, completely about customer service and putting the best face forward.

The MTA has added more useful information to its countdown clocks. (Photo by Rolando Pujol)

As far as transit technology goes, the MTA’s shiny new countdown clocks leave much to be desired. While the authority now has access to tons of real-time information about train location, its only public presentation of that data is via the countdown clocks, and they suffer from a basic rudimentariness.

The first problem I noticed with the new clocks concerned island platforms. At, for instance, Grand Army Plaza, the uptown and downtown trains pull in on opposite sides of the sole island platform, but the countdown clocks are for the entire station. If I’m heading to Manhattan, I don’t particularly care when the next Flatbush Ave.-bound 2 train is coming. Yet, that’s how the information is presented.

The next complaint is one of design. Most of the signs rotate through only two trains, and it takes a concerted effort to find the next train at times. Furthermore, the green arrows are tough to read at a glance, and the destination indicators — which way is New Lots Ave.? — make a rider think too much about which train they need.

That said, the MTA is not resting on its laurels. They’re upgrading the countdown clocks. In a release late Wednesday, the authority announced the UI changes. “To remove some of the confusion in the busier stations serving multiple train lines we have added express (EXP) and local (LCL) icons to help riders identify arriving trains,” the authority said.

The PA/CIS signs now have a visual representation of the train direction. (Photo via New York City Transit)

With 110 signs now up throughout the system, the authority has been able to see what works and what doesn’t. At stations with only one type of service and island platforms — generally express stops in Brooklyn or Lower Manhattan — the signs will differentiate between uptown and Brooklyn-bound service. The release explains the upgrades:

Depending on the station configuration, signs will include direction and/or service type (express or local) information, as appropriate. So at Wall Street, only the 2 and 3 trains stop there—no locals. These are express trains traveling in different directions, so the signs only display uptown (UP) or Brooklyn (BKL). At 14th Street, the island platform is common for all trains going in the same direction so we show local or express.

The addition of the icons is just a little bit more of a good thing for customers waiting for their trains. The changes were made initially at the Wall Street, 14th Street and 34th Street Stations on the West Side IRT. Stations were chosen where the Countdown Clocks are required to display multiple services and directions. The upgrade is also being performed at Chambers Street on the No.1 as well as Franklin Ave., Nevins Street and Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. The ability to include the additional information was available in the system and deployed at no additional cost.

It’s a welcome change for a technology far too many years in the waiting. By the end of the year, all 153 stations will be equipped with the clocks, and then we wait for the B Division rollout, however that will look and whenever it will be. The next step though in the MTA’s technological renaissance will be access to real-time train location information. The countdown clocks might make our waits more tolerable, but knowing where a train is at what time would revolutionize trip planning across the city.

This weekend, I did something I haven’t done in years: I went to camp. This wasn’t my old sleep-away sports camp or the baseball camp I attended for years in the early 1990s. Rather, it was OpenPlans’ Transportation Camp, an unconference that gathered many of the sharpest minds working the transit and transportation space working on the side of the country.

Now, the very idea of an unconference makes people raise an eyebrow. Shouldn’t conferences be structured with set agendas and leaders conducting the pace of things? In a society driven by open-source development and collaboration, a transportation unconference is an ideal format for people to meet and greet each other while bouncing ideas around. I met many readers there and many folks I read elsewhere. While San Francisco gets to enjoy a West Coast gathering next week, I’m already looking forward to next year’s event in New York.

The sessions — which are listed here — were uniformly interesting. I sat in on a Q-and-A with MTA COO Charlie Monheim and US DOT’s Giovanni Carnaroli and Peter Appel. I met the gang from Greater Greater Washington, listened to a presentation on subway signaling and the PA/CIS system and checked out a discussion on matching service with demand. Other sessions — including those on taxi cab applications, road pricing and congestion alleviation — drew raves, but unfortunately, I couldn’t be in more than one room at a time.

Throughout the weekend, the theme was clearly the interaction between technology and infrastructure, and although I missed most of Monheim’s keynote speech due to the MPRE, he hit upon a theme that bears discussion. While the MTA’s data leads itself quite easily to app development, there is an inherent incompatibility between the MTA’s system and technological investments. Last week’s stories on the supposedly obsolete fiber-optics network and the NYPD’s communications problems highlight that gap.

Essentially, this conflict boils down as such: When the MTA purchases rolling stock and upgrades its physical plant, it expects its equipment to last for decades. Subway cars, for instance, have a shelf life of around 40 years before they’re up for replacing, and in the interim, it’s possible that hundreds of newer and better models have hit the rails since then. For better or worse, the same is true for major station renovations, signal upgrades and rail replacement projects.

Meanwhile, when I purchase a new piece of technology, I expect it to last for four years, and I know it will be painfully obsolete by the time those four years are up. My laptop isn’t meant to last 40 years, and the technology behind it improves too quickly for it stay usable much beyond half a decade. For example, the software powering the R160 FIND displays will be obsolete long before the rolling stock is ready to be retired; in fact, the FIND displays have long since passed technological middle age. How then does a transit agency as extensive as the MTA incorporate rapidly-changing technology into a system built for long-term durability?

This conflict is one with which the MTA must grapple on a regular basis. Take, for instance, the BusTime project. As the MTA moves forward with bringing the technology to more than just the B63, those behind the initiative are eying all 800 of Staten Island’s buses, and they hope to retrofit the buses and get the system up and running before the end of 2011. With over 6000 buses operating throughout the city, it’s not a surprise then that it takes a few years to get these wide-reaching technological initiatives up and running.

From Transportation Camp, then, I drew the conclusion that transit agencies face two tasks when it comes to technology. They must make sure that the data these innovations produce gets into the hands of developers who can bring it to the public, and they have make sure that the innovations are compatible with infrastructure that will outlive the technology. What will happen to the countdown clocks in 10 years when they’re due for upgrades? What happens with those FIND displays as they age?

We scorn the MTA’s on-again, off-again attempts to bring technology underground, but ultimately, it’s just not as easy as plug-and-play. As long as the developers have access to data though and the authority is willing to share the real-time information it produces, the public should benefit.