Bus shelters in London know when the next bus is coming. New Yorkers have to result to the tried and true peer-down-the-street method. (Image courtesy of the Department of Transportation)
Public transportation-minded New Yorkers have long bemoaned the state of the MTA’s technology. The Website, as I noted on Friday, has never been too reliable, and other systems around the globe have figured out how to tell riders how far away the next train or bus is. And don’t even get me started on the MTA’s mobile alert system or lack thereof.
But with Wednesday’s crippling flood, everyone else is starting to take notice. On Friday, The New York Times ran an article about the poor state of communications technology in the subways and how riders were left stranded with little information as events unfolded last week.
Citing rapid-response alerts in the Washington Metro, mobile alerts from New Jersey Transit and a mobile trip planning site in San Francisco, Ken Belson and Sewell Chan spoke less glowingly of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority:
In New York — home to the country’s largest transit system, with an $8 billion annual budget — information is doled out in a more elementary fashion. During Wednesday’s crippling storm, when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Web site was overwhelmed by people seeking the latest information and directions, legions of commuters had to rely on station agents scrawling updates on white boards. Only a handful of riders already on train platforms had access to digital screens with up-to-date information…
Compared with commuters in many of the world’s leading cities, subway riders in New York live in something of an information vacuum once they enter the system’s 468 stations…But the storm this week, highlighting yet again deficiencies in how the authority gets information out, seemed to push riders past the limits of their patience. Those flaws are one focus of a 30-day review that Gov. Eliot Spitzer has ordered into what went wrong after the intense early-morning rains of Wednesday.
In the age of cheap bandwidth and pervasive cell phone use, the MTA, the article details, still relies upon telephone calls to every single station agent in the system. These agents are then supposed to be able to recall all of the service information in case passengers need help. Little wonder, then, that system breakdowns are so complete and total when they occur.
But now, the city and state leaders want this ludditism to become a relic of the past. City Councilman John Liu and U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner have renewed their calls for a wired subway system. A cell phone-compatible subway system would allow for text message and voice mail alerts during emergencies.
But outside of a wireless system, the MTA should be able to equip every station and bus stop with the same information readily available elsewhere. It’s not hard to tie the signal system in to a computer that displays the next train’s arrival time. It’s not that hard to equip buses with GPS monitors that show passengers waiting at busy stations when the next bus is due to arrive. It happens in London and Washington, in Madrid and Rome. It’s time to make this happen in New York.
Everyday, at West 4th St., I pass one of the MTA’s digital displays that is, without fail, an hour and 15 minutes slow. If the MTA can’t even get their digital displays to show the time correctly, if they can’t even secure accurate bus route maps at every bus stop, it’s almost naïve of us to think they can handle a full technological upgrade of the subway system. But as the system ages, we need better technology, not more excuses.
7 comments
It’s amazing that some MTA buses have tracking technology that informs the drivers, and obviously MTA HQ wether the bus is on time (or more likely, how far off time it’s running) yet they can’t figure out how to put this system to a beneficial use.
Personally I’d rather see the MTA use this system to track bus drivers and stop them from illegally using private streets for a shortcut, thus bypassing several seldom used but important stops.
I certainly agree that this is fixable without rocket science. But I think your allocation of the blame is misplaced. The problem is not MTA luddites, but the huge capital cost of wiring every subway station and bus stop. The available capital is limited, in turn, by the amount politicians are willing to allocate to mass transit. As it is, the current capital program came in below what the MTA requested from the legislature.
The fact is that the capital budget could double, triple, or quadruple, without being adequate to remedy decades of neglect in the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. London understood the importance of investment in mass transit; New York didn’t. The people to blame for it are long gone, and it certainly isn’t the fault of the current MTA bosses, who actually do want to fix it—within the constraints of what the legislature will allocate.
If you want all of this technology within current capital constraints, you have to identify the projects you’d prefer they didn’t do, so that the funds will be available. If you want more capital investment overall (as most of us do), you should blame the legislature. Better yet, get involved directly. Write your state senator and assembly member.
Obviously, before more capital can be allocated, the MTA needs to have strong advocates arguing for it. But there is only so much they can realistically do, in the face of constituents who oppose tax increases, and in the face of upstate legislators who oppose spending more money on New York City. At any rate, several of the top jobs at the MTA have changed in the last year, and they are working with an inherited capital budget that they can’t just change willy-nilly. I think you need to give them a bit of time before declaring their efforts a failure.
There’s no reason they cant do it like Jersey transit and send email or text updates every morning when the service is slow or down. There is also no reason why they cant buy $200 GPS transmitters for every bus and relay that information on their websites giving direct access to the information to the consumer. There is also no reason they can’t install LED screens at subway station ($500 a pop) that would relay the information via wifi modems from the website.
The solutions are there, many small business track their delivery vehicles in the tri state area, and call if there’s a delay. If a small business can do it, if the big distribution companies that deliver everything from liqueur to bread can do it, the MTA has to do it.
MTA cant clean it’s cars and it’s station but it’s great at giving excuses for everything from delays to slow reaction to downed websites. MTA has to go. Outsource the damn subways to logistics companies that can run it as a business and let them break the unions, thats the only way to save transportation in NYC without taxing the poor more and more every year.
Now that’s a brilliant idea. You seem to forget that most of the subway system and bus lines were originally operated by private companies. Those companies went bankrupt. Running a subway isn’t a profit-making venture. That’s why every municipal subway system in the world, as far as I know, is operated by a governmental entity.
Of course, I am not suggesting that the MTA is doing a perfect job of it. But private companies aren’t perfect either. Just look at bankruptcy filings. A capitalist system requires that some firms must fail. That might be okay if it’s a restaurant or a Broadway show. It’s not so great when it’s your subway system.
How hard would it be to put a simple computer terminal in each token booth so the clerks could get email updates about service changes instead of relying on phone calls?
[…] plan — similar to ones already in place in New Jersey and Washington, DC — is a welcome development. It first hit the news one week after the flood and was featured as a […]
[…] years, New Yorkers have bemoaned the state of the MTA’s technology. While London has advanced tracking systems that show how far away, in minutes, the next Tube […]