Metro New York rehashed the recent MTA technological failures. (Click to enlarge)
Let’s jump again into Mayor Bloomberg’s ubiquitous plan to reform the MTA. While the constant radio and TV spots scream of the pandering I wrote about last week, one aspect of Bloomberg’s plan deserves a closer look.
Mayor Bloomberg would like the MTA to hire a chief technology officer. According to Bloomberg, this CTO would restore a position the MTA once filled in the 1990s and would be, in the words of our mayor, “responsible for overseeing and upgrading technology for the entire system.” He presents more in the PDF detailing his plan:
Establish a Chief Technology Officer – Much of the MTA’s subway infrastructure was built 75 years ago and upgrading the technology, even under the best of circumstances, is an enormous task. Unfortunately, the MTA lacks a single office that is exclusively dedicated to this task. As a result, the Authority constantly lags in adopting technologies that have been in other systems for years; those technology upgrades and improvements it does attempt to make are consistently scuttled by poor planning, cost overruns, bidding problems, and other failures. The MTA should create an Information Technology department and appoint a Chief Technology Officer responsible for overseeing and upgrading the technology for the entire system. The CTO should be responsible for developing and implementing a technology plan.
Of course, this is a proposal that makes perfect sense, and it’s one that’s a little less populist than the Mayor’s call to make crosstown buses free. The MTA, as Metro New York detailed, has a terrible track record with its recent technology upgrades and innovations. The free daily wrote:
With the exception of MetroCard, the MTA has routinely floundered on high-tech. Contracts to put GPS on buses and an anti-terror surveillance system in the subway are now the subject of lawsuits.
“This agency has real trouble dealing with computer software,” said rider advocate Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign. “They’ve spent years trying to get GPS on buses. Avis has it in cars, so why wouldn’t they be able to do it in buses?” he asked.
According to Metro, the MTA eliminated the unifying CTO position a few years ago. Now, each division handles its own technology, and the results are obvious. From a website stuck in the late 1990s that pales in comparison to Transport for London’s or Washington’s WMATA’s to stalled train- and bus-arrival boards, technology-based projects are years overdue and plagued with problems that just shouldn’t exist.
Once the State Senate finally gets around to confirming Walder, the real work begins. The new MTA head will have to find the right person for the job, and that person will have to be willing to cut through the bureaucratic red tape of an authority whose division are not used to working with each other.
While I was away, NYConvergence suggested Walder himself for the job, but Walder can’t be both the MTA CEO and the MTA CTO. Walder, however, knows the need for a streamlined technology-focused office. I’m with the mayor on this one, and I hope Walder will be too. It’s time for a better and more robust focus on technology from the MTA.
5 comments
Software is not easy! People seem to think that it is, even (especially?) people selling their services writing software. Consider, for example, the Metrocard: the MTA got that one pretty much right: it’s reliable, it’s secure, it mostly just works. You’d think that Boston’s CharlieTicket would just be a metrocard knockoff. But no, they didn’t learn the lesson, and as a result made a system that basically has no security and makes it trivial to give yourself free rides if you can rewrite the magstripe. Or look at the TransLink smart-card system in the SF Bay Area. They’ve been working on the system since what, 2002? And they’ve rolled it out in a “limited test” on BART only this month. With any luck, they might get it deployed on all the major local transit systems by 2012, but nobody has any faith in their schedules anymore. The Translink hardware has been on Caltrain for at least 2 years now, it’s just a matter of software and possibly politics to get the system working.
Grafting 21st Century technology onto a 19th Century System (and the IRT portions of the Subway were designed in the 1890s, with the ‘newer’ portions not far behind) is far more easily said than done.
One of the major hurdles of introducing the MetroCard was that NONE of the 260+ stations had sufficient electricial capacity to even power all the equipment needed for the Automated Fare Control (“AFC”) system, much less wiring and equipment needed to process & transmit the data.
Certainly the designers of the IRT – which remember, operated with TICKETS, not tokens – couldnt conceive of digital technology, much less set aside space for it.
That the Computer Based Train Control (CBTC) system including those oft-discussed digital train arrival displays is on the Canarsie Line, a later BMT route that not directly intersecting any other line is not a coincidence. The L train terminates at the (relatively) huge 8th Ave& 14th St terminal, within a (also relatively) cavernous IND station, with space available for wiring & equipment.
Such equipment & wiring cannot easily be grafted onto IRT infrastructure. There is simply NO room. Even the Canarsie CBTC project required expensive acquisition of private property outside the Subway to construct signal & equipment rooms.
Adding interoperable State-or-The-Art signalling and communications to a 700 mile-long 100-year-old subway is not like going to BestBuy for a wifi setup.
Its certainly not easy work, that’s why they are spending so much money on it. However, by spending hundreds of millions of dollars into a technology that other systems have adopted (such as cellphone access) and not getting any returns whatsoever is pathetic. The MTA’s adaptation is technology is woeful, and the age of the system is absolutely no excuse, for example, for having a website in 2009 that looks like a GeoCities page from 1997.
Don’t even get me started on this subject.
*smoke arises from ears*
Having studied IT during my time at RPI, I’m not unfamiliar with the fact that businesses and most anyone whose job it isn’t to actually manage computer systems takes IT for granted and is usually the first to go or get downsized when organizations are in a pinch. I’ve read countless business cases where businesses suffer as a result of their short-sighted decision and then scramble to improve their IT resources because it’s the very asset that allows them to compete in the market.
While market competition isn’t necessarily the MTA’s priority, IT can certainly reduce operating and maintenance costs, but in order for this to happen, a significant amount of infrastructure needs to be upgraded and integrated and this comes at a cost. From the perspective as an IT professional, the biggest challenge I see any CTO of the MTA facing is convincing EVERYONE that the invisible components of IT (read: infrastructure), the components upon which a lot of service-enhancing technologies are based, are well worth the investment.
The second largest challenge the CTO will face will be dealing with IT projects integrating with tight, damp, century-old infrastructure and concrete caverns. Finding someone who is resourceful with experience in dealing with leading projects in unorthodox IT operating environments should be paramount, as unfamiliarity with the MTA’s operating environment and infrastructure seems to be the main reason construction and technology-based projects continually get redesigned and delayed.