Clearly, this City Hall News story is an April Fool’s joke, but it’s a thorough one that serves as a commentary on the state of our public transit system. The inside-politics publication reports that the MTA will discard all R160s and instead bring back the R26. The cars will be covered in graffiti, and I’d imagine the Massimo Vignelli map will make a triumphant return.
As a obvious a joke as that report is, it made me reflect on the state of our subways. Two years ago on April Fool’s Day, I wrote about how the MTA had just announced plans to shutter the subway at night. It seemed just plausible enough to rope people in but not realistic enough for the MTA to implement it. Today, the MTA is facing a budget hole of $750 million and will be cutting service drastically this summer. The joke has become reality, and it doesn’t seem nearly as funny today as it did in 2008.
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From the article: “That sound is a quintessentially 1970s sound,” said Jeffrey Pfeffer, the MTA’s commissioner for safety and operations. “You think there’s something wrong, but there isn’t, probably.”
That line could also apply in 2010, probably.
Weird timing. I realized today that I can tell if an R train is pulling in because it sounds different than the R160s.
Since they blew $300mm on a few cameras that don’t even work, there’s no $ left to run the G at all. So it will discontinued with immediate effect and retrospective Board approval sought at the next meeting.
At least they’re engaging in a legal fight against Lockheed Martin over the cameras. Usually, we just hear about cost and scheduling overruns with no word of any sort of penalties. If the MTA can win its court case against Lockheed or work out a settlement, they’ll probably recapture a fair portion of the costs.
I question why service cuts have to lead to worse customer experience all the time. You can easily come up with ways to save money while also making the customer experience better: OPTO, restricting overtime to 5 minutes of turnaround or deadheading, fining train and bus operators who are late for no good reason, employing more foreign expertise instead of expensive local consultants, consolidating the hotlines.
OPTO and fining employees have to be approved by the union, and we all know what the union thinks of OPTO.
Scheduled overtime is only used where it’s cheaper than hiring additional bodies; it’s not something you want to avoid. Unscheduled overtime comes up whenever something goes amiss and a crew clears late; it can’t be avoided unless you want crews to abandon their trains wherever they happen to be at their scheduled clearing times.
No, I want crews to stop getting paid for train dwells that would embarrass 21st-century railroads. The Chuo Line is capable of turning mainline trains back in under two minutes, and the Tokaido Main Line is capable of turning trains back in about five minutes; the commuter operations in the city should be held to the same standards.
What does that have to do with overtime?
The MTA would need way, way fewer operator hours if trains turned around in five minutes instead of an hour.
Which MTA facility is unable to turn trains in under an hour?
“fining train and bus operators who are late for no good reason”.
Not that it matters Alon but MTA employees are regularly disciplined up to and including dismissal for chronic tardiness and absenteeism. There are strict call in limits that, when violated, also result in discipline.
I should probably clarify that I’m not talking about being late for work, but about being off-schedule. I forget which Swiss city pioneered the concept of levying small fines whenever a train or bus arrived late beyond a short grace period, but this practice helped transit run on time.
Lateness on the subway is almost never caused by train operators who just feel like operating slowly. It’s generally caused by problems with the train/track/switches/signals, passengers holding doors, sick customers, police investigations, etc. On buses there is probably some degree of lateness due to operator slowness, but the operator could simply blame it on traffic conditions and nobody could prove otherwise, so your proposed fine would be unenforceable.
Train operators are sometimes lax on closing the doors on time, and let passengers hold doors. (Well, they do in cities where they actually control the doors, i.e. almost all of them.)
Bus operators can only blame traffic in cities that let them. The Swiss fines on buses manage to keep buses on time even though they run in mixed traffic. The amount of traffic on a route is predictable.
Passengers don’t ask permission before holding the doors. The ones who want to hold the doors will hold the doors regardless of whether the conductor wants them to.
I don’t think that individual bus drivers are fined for lateness in Switzerland. Could you be getting the terminology confused? “Operator” can refer to either the individual operating the vehicle or the company that bus operation is contracted out to. If buses are being operated by contract, it’s quite common for the operator (i.e., the contractor, NOT the driver) to be penalized for not meeting performance standards.
The mta needs to stand up to the union an roll out opto starting with overnights. Need to consolidate bus operations and roll out gps bus management. The communist working families party has lots of money to run propoganda.
Before this thread disappears into the back pages, I should probably add that the more punitive ideas in my original comment were semi-facetious. (However, fining operators who are late is still routine in Switzerland, and turnarounds of 5 minutes or less are common in any city where commuter rail has evolved out of the steam era.)