Because John Liu is still one of the city’s elected representatives, the City Council is gearing up for another run at the MTA. This time, they are going to hold a hearing on the lack of response from the Rider Report Card program. Only 7 percent of the 700,000 were turned to the MTA, and City Council Transportation Committee Chair John Liu feels that the report cards were simply a “wasteful gimmick.” Funny; that’s exactly what I think of Liu. [New York Sun]
Outdoor wifi ads may show useful information too
With their new technology, the MTA could now get train arrivals times wrong outside of the station too. (Robert Stolarik for The New York Times)
A few months ago, the MTA and CBS signed a deal that will help bring free wireless to midtown. By installing wireless access points and advertising screens above various subway stations in Midtown, the MTA and CBS Outdoor are hoping to run a successful pilot program.
While the MTA benefits from this program fiscally since CBS is paying them for the right to use MTA-owned property, the Transportation Authority will benefit as well. As amNew York’s Marlene Naanes reports today, the MTA may be able to use the advertising signs to show important subway information as well.
Video screens perched atop 80 subway entrances could keep commuters out of harm’s way soon if wireless technology is able to transform them into more than advertising displays…
The technology — installed by the MTA’s advertising contract holder CBS Outdoor — would allow the agency to override the video ads and transmit messages to straphangers during emergencies. “So if there is an issue with the trains downstairs, we can tell our customers not to go down there,” said Roco Krsulic, the MTA’s director of real estate.
The MTA and CBS hope to roll out the pilot program later this month. Considering that they announced this program two months ago, this must be record time for an MTA roll-out.
Anyway, I love this idea. One of the biggest complaints I’ve heard both in New York and Washington, DC, focues around the lack of information available outside of stations. In DC, the Metro has long been equipped with signs displaying the time until the next train, but oftentimes, those signs are a legitimate five-minute escalator ride away from the street. Nothing is more discouraging than finding out, after a long ride down, that you’ve just missed a train or have another 15 minutes to go. With information outside of stations, potential passengers can figure out if indeed the subway is the best way to go.
Now, right now, with the way the MTA is talking, it doesn’t sound as though they are tempted to merge the two programs. In other words, it’s doubtful that train arrival times would be posted outside. The MTA after all wants to encourage subway use, and I don’t know too many who are going to head down into the trains if they know the next train is still 15 minutes away. As long as the hope exists for a train to come sooner, people will continue to use the subways.
But in terms of emergency preparedness, this has potential great news written all over it. If the MTA can figure out how to bypass the seemingly non-existent in-station communications system through which station agents are often the last to know about problems, we’re all better off for it. Imagine finding out that trains are out due to a flood before swiping through the turnstiles instead of after waiting on a crowded platform without cell service for 35 minutes. Amazing!
What’s happening with the BRT plans?
Brooklyn Junction notes that the MTA’s plans for Bus Rapid Transit lanes may be changing. Originally planned for the Nostrand Ave. corridor in Brooklyn, BRT may be off the table for now. According to the blog, at a recent community meeting, the Department of Transportation said that the project is on hold for Nostrand Ave., and earlier this week, the Tri-State Rapid Transportation campaign noted the same thing. I have no new information, but I will try to get to the bottom of it. New York badly needs their BRT service; I hope it’s moving forward. [Brooklyn Junction]
There’s a reason why the trains are more crowded
According to recent statistics, MTA ridership levels were at an all-time high in 2007. More on this story later. [Daily News]
Spitzer wants to rename Triborough for RFK
When Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, he was at the time a Senator from the great state of New York. Yet, since we associate the Kennedy’s with Washington, DC, and Massachusetts, no one really remembers RFK’s ties to New York. Now, Gov. Eliot Spitzer wants to correct that oversight.
In today’s State of the State address, Spitzer will announce his plans to rename New York City’s Triborough Bridge in honor Robert F. Kennedy. The new name for New York’s iconic bridge will the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Bridge. That’s a mouthful.
The New York Times’ Sewell Chan has the response from the Kennedy family at Cityroom:
“I think we’re very excited about it, and very pleased,” Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland and the eldest of Senator Kennedy’s 11 children, said in a phone interview this morning. “I do know this has been a dream for quite awhile. We’re very, very happy that Governor Spitzer has decided to take it on.”
Mrs. Townsend, who was 17 when her father died, recalled traveling over the Triborough Bridge with him from La Guardia Airport as a child. “I remember going over it so many times with my father, when he was a senator, coming into Manhattan, going out,” she said. “It’s really touching. It would be really fabulous to recall that he was the senator from New York, if ever so briefly, and that there would be a way to remember him in that city. It would be wonderful tribute to all that my father did.”
Interestingly, this isn’t the first time that someone has tried to rename the bridge in honor of RFK. According to The Sun, in 1975, Gov. Hugh Carey wanted to name the bridge after RFK but was blocked by none other than bridge builder Robert Moses himself. Gov. George Pataki also thought about the idea.
In response to this announcement, well, I’ve never seen such vitriol from the Cityroom commenters. While a lot of people were critical of the idea, basically, it came down to two complaints: New York tradition and RFK’s tenuous relationship to the state. The Triborough, they argue, is a self-explanatory name and evokes images of New York’s spirit during the Depression. Plus, RFK ran for Senate in New York so he could better position himself to run for president. (Hmmm. Doesn’t that sound familiar?)
My initial thoughts here turned to Robert Moses. The Triborough Bridge is a symbol of Good Robert Moses. This was Moses when he got stuff done that people wanted him to get done. This was well before the seemingly racist Moses who had no regard for New York City neighborhoods or its people.
If anything, the bridge should be named for Robert Moses himself. Of course, we can’t name the bridge Good Robert Moses Memorial Bridge, and associating Moses’ name with anything in this city is still problematic even today, nearly 30 years after Moses’ death.
My next thought is to live the bridge as it is. The Triborough Bridge is a simple name for a rather majestic set of roadways and bridges that pass through and connect three boroughs and a few islands. But it’s a New York icon. If this name change goes through, in ten or twenty years, New Yorkers will still call it the Triborough Bridge. Don’t believe? Just ask someone to point out the Joe DiMaggio Highway, so named in 1999.
In the end, this name will serve as a fitting tribute for a man who was a real leader in civil rights in America and a man whose career and live were cut tragically short. But I do have to wonder if the bridge is the best of things to name after RFK. The Triborough already has a name, and New Yorkers are not quick to forget it.
Not too many calls from people who saw and said something were all that important
Apparently, the MTA anti-terrorism tip line doesn’t yield too many leads. Raise your hand if you’re surprised.
In a rather amusing piece in Monday’s Times, William Neuman crunches some numbers and runs some anecdotes to find that no terrorist activity was reported but New Yorkers sure are paranoid. And, oh yeah, friends like to try to pull practical jokes on each other by reporting them as potential terrorists. Hardy har har.
Here’s what Neuman had to say:
Now, an overview of police data relating to calls to the hot line over the past two years reveals the answer and provides a unique snapshot of post-9/11 New York, part paranoia and part well-founded caution. Indeed, no terrorists were arrested, but a wide spectrum of other activity was reported.
The vast majority of calls had nothing to do with the transit system. Some callers tried to turn the authority’s slogan on its head. These people saw nothing but said something anyway — calling in phony bomb threats or terror tips. At least five people were arrested in the past two years and charged with making false reports. Eleven calls were about people seen counting in the subway, which was interpreted as ominous by some.
Those 11 calls mostly concerned Muslims counting prayer beads in the subway. At least our politics of racial profile and fear of Muslims is working!
More specifically, the numbers don’t quite add up. The MTA has claimed that 1944 people saw and said something. Police data but that figure closer to 109 in 2006 and 45 through early December 2007. That’s quite the difference, but, hey, we know how good the MTA is with counting.
The calls that were successful, according to Neuman, were related more to criminal activity rather than terrorist threats. One guy was arrested after the drunkenly called in a phony bomb threat against Penn Station and other calls to the anti-terrorist tipline that weren’t transit related resulted in a few fake ID busts, a firearms cache discovery and an illegal fireworks arrest.
I won’t dismiss outright the idea that the New York City subways aren’t an insecure terrorist target. They are indeed both insecure and a terrorist target, but with this information out, I have to wonder if it would be a better use of resources to seal the security holes instead of driving home paranoia with constant reminders about seeing things and saying things. In the end, people tend to envision threats that they don’t really see.
But then again, without this program, where would we be without this great story? Neuman writes:
A Brooklyn jeweler, Rimon Alkatri, was convicted last month of making a false report and faces up to seven years in prison. Mr. Browne said that in May 2006, Mr. Alkatri told a hot line operator that terrorists were planning a subway bomb attack. But Mr. Alkatri was charged with falsely reporting an incident and accused of making up the story to get back at some former business associates.
You gotta love disgruntled former business partners.
If the MetroCard design ain’t broke, don’t fix it
Over at The Times’ Cityroom blog on Monday, Sewell Chan posted a diatribe on the design of the MetroCard. His thesis is that the MetroCard design is, in a word, terrible. The ubiquitous yellow cards with the familiar blue writing aren’t the most exciting of graphics in the subway world. Taking his cue from five subway riders and graphics designers, Chan opened up the floor to Cityroom commenters, and they responded in kind with 92 suggestions of varying of degrees of practicality.
But, leaving aside issues of journalistic integrity, Chan’s post is besides the point. The MetroCard doesn’t need to a new design; it needs to be scrapped entirely. As Wikipedia adequately demonstrates, everywhere else but New York City already employs smart card technology in various walks of life but mostly for public transportation. The Metro in Washington, D.C., has used smart card technology since 1999, around the time that the MTA introduced MetroCard Vending Machines. That would have been the perfect time to be one of the early adopters of smart card technology.
While a redesign for the MetroCard wouldn’t cost much — the MTA could, after all, open it up to the public for no cost — it’s just an unnecessary project. The design of the MetroCard isn’t impacting its function; it’s outdated technology is doing that just fine. In November, I wrote about smart card technology and its slow-as-molasses arrival in New York, and its time has long come. We don’t need design contests or a new look; we just need a new — or, at this point, not-so-new — technology for our subway system.
The MetroCard Challenge and thoughts on a fare hike
The anti-fare hike forces aren’t going to like this one too much.
At the end of November, I started the 30-Day Unlimited MetroCard Challenge. My goal at the time was simple: I was going to track the number of times I swiped my 30-Day Unlimited to see how much I pay per ride. Could I afford the fare hike and how much would it impact me? The answers, as you will see, are quite supportive of the fare hike.
For the 30 days surrounding my MetroCard — November 21 to December 20 — I swiped my MetroCard 74 times when I would have needed to pay a fare. Once or twice, I went from the subway to a bus. As that would have constituted a free transfer under a pay-per-ride card, those didn’t count against the monthly total. With the card costing $76, those 74 swipes resulted in a cost to me per ride of $1.04. That’s nothing.
Now what happens to me when the MTA raises the fares in March? To be honest, not much. My 30-Day Unlimited Ride card will suffer the most under the new fare structure. The cost will rise by six percent, going from $76 to $81. At $81, my month would have averaged out to $1.09 per ride. That’s still a miniscule fare compared to any other mass transit system in the world.
The next question, you might ask, goes something like this: Am I representative of a typical 30-Day Unlimited Ride MetroCard user? Anecdotally and numerically, I think so. I would believe that the vast majority of 30-Day card users are workers. They have jobs, sometimes more than one, that demand at least two subways ride a day. If you assume about 20 working days in a 30-day period, a rather conservative estimate in my opinion, we’re up to 40 rides with 10 days to spare. Now, let’s take a trip down mathematics lane.
The break-even point right now on Unlimited Ride cards is 46 rides. At 45 rides, it’s cheaper to use the pay-per-ride discount; after 45, the Unlimited Ride card is a better bet. So all anyone has to do is ride six more times to make it worthwhile, and extra rides are a bonus. Forty-six rides equates to just over 1.5 a day for 30 days, and anyone with a semblance of a social life will take more than 46 rides over the course of 30 days. My 74 rides averages out to just under 2.5 rides a day. That certainly seems about average to me.
Under the new fare structure, the break-even point at an average pay-per-ride fare of $1.74 becomes 46 and 47 rides instead of 45 and 46 as above. So the average folks like me will see their cost per ride go up less than the average pay-per-ride cost, and we would still be paying a very low base fare.
All of this is to say that, for all the hullaballoo, the fare hike will not hit riders as hard as it could or, as some economists might argue, as hard as it should. Even just two rides a day on a 30-Day Unlimited card puts the subway fare as $1.35, and that’s very affordable for a mass transit system.
As the MTA went about selling the fare hike, maybe they followed the wrong path. Maybe it’s better to look at how this will impact the commuter on a trip-by-trip basis, and maybe it’s important to highlight how good a deal frequent subway and bus users can get with their Unlimited Ride cards. I’m happy to pay my $1.04 per ride or even my $1.09 per ride. The subway is well worth it to me. How about you?
Happy now, mom?
The MTA, now with less corporate shilling
Stories such as this one make me believe that simply by jettisoning former chairman Peter Kalikow, the MTA started heading down a better path.
This story begins in 2006 when subway conductors started mentioned “Top of the Rock” as trains pulled into the Rockefeller Center station. Now, Top of the Rock is the rather expensive observatory level at the top of 30 Rockefeller Center, the tallest building in the complex. It opened, not coincidentally, in 2006. At the time, New Yorkers were rather critical of the move. We didn’t need to hear some tourist trap plugged on the subways. Little did we know the true extent of the corporate shilling going on.
Pete Donohue from The Daily News tells us more:
The plug – unpopular with train crews – came about because developer Peter Kalikow, then Metropolitan Transportation Authority chairman, wanted to extend a “courtesy” to one of the building’s owners, authority officials said after the announcements began in 2006. In late November, not long after Kalikow left the post, subway managers told conductors to stop shilling for the tourist site…
An MTA spokesman in 2006 said that one of the principals at the real estate firm Tishman Speyer initially asked if the entire station could be called Top of the Rock. Kalikow rejected that but offered a compromise, the spokesman said.
So one real estate mogul did a so-called favor for another. I wonder what Kalikow got back in return for this free advertising in the subway.
When Kalikow gone, the current MTA leadership instructed train conductors to drop the Top of the Rock reference from their announcements in November. The Transport Workers Union, for one, was thrilled with the change.
“We applaud the new administration for rectifying this,” Curtis Tate, a vp at TWU, said. “We didn’t think it was appropriate. We pass a lot of landmarks and popular places, and we don’t advertise them or call them out. We don’t announce ‘Joe’s Pizzeria,’ this place or that place.”
NY1’s Bobby Cuza had more feedback from subway conductors. “We don’t advertise for other businesses. So why advertise for Top of the Rock? I don’t even know where it is,” one of them said to Cuza. “I never been there.”
I could have done without the announcement from the start. I think it’s pretty inexplicable that a public official was using the New York City subways to advertise for another real estate buddy of his, and these announcements probably should been halted soon after they started. But such is the state of MTA oversight in the city.
As I wrote in July, I’m in favor of the right approach to corporate sponsors for train stations. But clearly, a free plug for some real estate buddies and the Top of the Rock tourist attraction wouldn’t be a part of my plan.
Subway anti-litter PSAs, now starring The New York Times
At long last, the MTA is embarking on a much overdue public service campaign aimed as those beacons of journalistic integrity. After years of dealing with piles and piles of free newspapers littering the stairways (see right), platforms and subway tracks, the MTA is now urging riders to throw out their papers when they finished with them.
This new public service campaign — with the tagline “Your city. Your subway. Your station. Your LITTER.” — is spurred on by both customer relations and safety concerns. The MTA wants the subways looking clean, and they want to avoid track fires.
“Newspapers and subway tracks are not a good combination,”Steven Feil, senior vice president at New York City Transit’s department of subways, said. “The papers can cause fires when ignited by electrical equipment and, if it rains, can lead to flooding when they block drainage areas.”
These PSA’s however has created something of a mini-scandal. The new posters, shown here, feature none other than the Grey Lady herself, and the writers at The New York Times are none too happy about it. In a late-afternoon post on Cityroom on Friday, The Times’ transit writer William Neuman uncovered this scandal:
You’d think that when New York City Transit launched a new anti-litter campaign trying they might have shown someone tossing away one of the freebies…
A sharp-eyed producer magnified the image on the poster and discovered that it indeed shows Page A8 of the Oct. 24 edition of The Times, featuring an article and photograph from Baghdad.
For their part, the MTA was a bit red-faced. Despite earlier denials that the paper in question was not The Times, New York City Transit Spokesman Paul Fleuranges was apologetic. “I was told it was not The Times,” he said in a statement to Cityroom. “If you are correct, it was in no way meant to imply that The Times or its readers are responsible for an increase in litter within the system. We attempted to obscure the paper in the shot so as to represent newspapers in general. We obviously didn’t do a good enough job. Going forward we’ll have to redouble our efforts to make sure no paper or any other entity is depicted — no matter how blurry the photo. Be that as it may, it doesn’t diminish the message to readers of all papers — throw them in the trash.”
While we can get a good chuckle over this story, Fleuranges’ last point, and the overall message of the campaign, is a valid one. Too often, people treat the subway like one giant garbage can. I hope that most riders don’t treat their apartments or houses the same way. If someone is done with amNew York or Metro, that someone should dispose of those papers in the appropriate fashion.
A few weeks ago, I took a look at how the MTA deals with its garbage, and I think the problem is institutional. The MTA doesn’t provide recycling bins — as they do in Boston and Washington, DC — and the garbage cans in the stations are not right next to an exit as they are in Washington’s Metro. Furthermore, in Washington, police are fairly aggressive about ticketing passengers who litter, and a few high-profile tickets act as a deterrent for everyone else.
Now I’m not advocating criminalizing subway litter; in fact, I think it’s already criminalized. However, if the MTA were to make a concerted effort to draw attention to potential recycling bins or the current trash cans, people would be more inclined to throw out their newspapers, and staircases wouldn’t look as the one at the top of this post does. This PSA campaign is a start, but as most riders just ignore the posters in the subways, the MTA will have to overcome public resistance to the campaign’s presence first.
Photo Credit: The stairs at 16th St. and 8th Ave. are often covered with newspapers in the morning. (Photo by flickr user Second Ave. Sagas)