Ten days ago, I delved in depth on the legal battle between the MTA and various software developers. The agency had taken issue with iPhone and other online apps that present MTA scheduling data, and its lawyers were overstating its copyright claims in an effort to shut down perfectly legal applications. While Chris Schoenfeld, the creator of the Station Stops iPhone application (and an advertiser on Second Ave. Sagas), reported that the MTA has dropped its legal challenged to his Metro-North scheduling app, the battle is far from over.
Still, the MTA does not have real-time scheduling information available anywhere. Still, the MTA is far more unwilling to release its scheduling data in a format suitable for developing. Open source is not the MTA’s forte. At Streetsblog yesterday, Ben Fried made the case for open source scheduling information as a way to drive more people toward mass transit. The argument is simple: If the MTA makes it easier for people to know when the buses and subways are coming, if the agency can make their data available to those who have the time, money and expertise to write information-delivery applications, mass transit becomes easier to use. With transparency the latest MTA buzzword, Jay Walder, as Fried concludes, should and could lead an MTA data revolution.
8 comments
Yeah, but the incentives are all wrong. The MTA doesn’t get revenue with every customer, it loses revenue with every customer. If the trains were perfectly empty, they’d run on time, they’d be clean, they’d require less energy to move, and the MTA would have much lower expenses. It’s not in the MTA management’s interest to increase ridership. Riders are pains in the ass. The way to change this would be for government subsidies to be explicitly dependent on ridership. Instead of a fixed amount every year, they get paid $1 or whatever for every subway rider.
Labor is one of the MTA’s biggest costs. It costs less per employee to move a jam-packed train than an empty one.
It’s not in the MTA management’s interest to increase ridership.
While I agree with the rest of your comment, Harlan, I think you’re wrong there. The MTA isn’t a private or publicly-held for-profit corporation. It is a public benefit corporation established as a state authority. Its mandate, per its charter, is “the continuance, further development and improvement of commuter transportation and other services related thereto within the metropolitan commuter transportation district.” It’s not supposed to make money; it’s supposed to encourage more ridership.
Harlan, both costs and revenues rise with ridership, but revenues rise faster.
Energy is mostly fixed: at current crush loads (~75% of capacity), the train weighs 33% more than when empty.
Labor costs are also mostly fixed per train: experimentally, I see the 1 travel about 25% faster when empty than when full, which means that when it’s full, it costs 25% more than when it’s empty to run trains at a given frequency.
I believe that when you divide the average passenger loads by the farebox recovery ratio, you get that any train with more than 36 people per car makes a profit for the MTA.
There is no conceivable number of passengers that would make the MTA profitable. Can’t happen. It loses money on every trip. However, increasing ridership on under-utilized routes would narrow the amount of the loss.
If Tokyo didn’t exist, you might be able to say that 2.5 billion riders a year is inconceivable. However, given that it does exist, the subway can make a profit, even at today’s labor costs. Right now the subway recovers 67 cents on the dollar at the farebox. A 50% increase in average load factors, which is easy with current off-peak service, will make it break even operationally.
Anyone curious as to why open transit data matters or interested in helping the city stay on the cutting edge of public transportation should join the discussion going on at http://nytransitdata.org/.
Trimet in Portland OR has been open sourcing it’s apps for some time now. You can find it directly on their home page. And the MTA? *SILENCE*