MTA Technology

Electronic timers at E. 143rd St. tell straphangers when the next 6 train will arrive. (Photo courtesy of New York City Transit)

Around the world, subway systems these days come with countdown timers that tell impatient passengers when the next trains will come. One line in New York — the L — has enjoyed this luxury for the last few years, and early this fall, the MTA announced plans to introduce countdown clocks to the IRT lines by mid-2011. Currently, the signs are in place, but the agency is at work updating signaling technology to allow for properly function clocks.

This week, Transit took a big step forward with this project as the Public Address Customer Information Screen (PA/CIS) signs went live in five stations in the Bronx along the 6 line. Riders at the Brook Ave., Cypress Ave., E.143rd St.-St. Mary’s St., E. 149th St. and Longwood Ave. stations will now enjoy these signs both on the platforms and at station entrances in front of the fare gates. This latter location marks an improvement over the implementation on the L line where passengers must arrive down on the platforms in order to find out when the next train is due to arrive.

“Based on information provided by the subway’s electronic monitoring system, these signs are extremely flexible and customer friendly,” NYC Transit President Thomas F. Prendergast said in a statement. “Our customers have long been accustomed to having to guess when the next train will arrive and, of course, we are well aware of the complaints about poor quality public address systems in the subway. With this system we are taking a quantum leap forward in customer communications and the information we are offering.”

For a system that has struggled to bring new technologies that enhance the ridership experiences online, these signs are a bit step in the right direction. Prendergast has recently spoke of speeding up the technology process at Transit, and although he is riding the coattails of efforts in place long before he arrived at Transit, getting the PA/CIS system up and running would be a great step indeed.

As mobile device use permeates our society and smartphone penetration rates soar, application development has become the wave of the present. From the mundane — the weather, the nearest restaurants — to the complex — what subway car should I ride in if I want to exit efficiently at another station — mobile applications have revolutionized the way urban dwellers interact with their cities.

This weekend, The Times explored the onslaught of applications in an article about the inner workings of the Apple iPhone Application store. With low barriers to entry, low development costs and the opportunities to realize a high profit margin, programmers continue to search for ways to make life more convenient for those who carry advanced mobile devices.

Enter urban governments. For years, government operated not quite in secrecy but not with great transparency. Before the Internet Age ushered in a digital way of life, condensing and synthesizing data was simply too onerous for the work. But now that information and records are kept online, government agencies are suddenly finding themselves besieged with requests to make the information available. Some governments, in fact, are complying with the requests, writes Claire Cain Miller in today’s Times.

“It will change the way citizens and government interact, but perhaps most important, it’s going to change the way elected officials and civil servants deliver programs, services and promises,” Gavin Newsom, San Francisco’s mayor, said. “I can’t wait until it challenges and infuriates the bureaucracy.”

Miller talks more about this push for more publicly-available data:

Advocates of these open-data efforts say they can help citizens figure out what is going on in their backyards and judge how their government is performing.

But programmers have had trouble getting their hands on some data. And some activists and software developers wonder whether historically reticent governments will release data that exposes problems or only information that makes them look good.

It is too early to say whether releasing city data will actually make civil servants more accountable, but it can clearly be useful. Even data about mundane things like public transit and traffic can improve people’s lives when it is packaged and customized in an accessible way — a situation that governments themselves may not be equipped to realize.

So what does this have to do with the MTA? Well, although Newsom is waiting for this drive toward openness to infuriate the bureaucracy, we have already seen it in practice here in New York. In September, I wrote a lengthy piece about the MTA’s struggles in an age of open information. At the time, they were battling Chris Schoenfeld, creator of the Station Stops iPhone App (and an advertiser here) as well as a few other application developers over information that was not really theirs to copyright.

The MTA has long held a reluctance to release application-ready data such as schedules because the agency doesn’t want to become responsible in the eyes of the public when the applications offer up improper or wrong information. On the one hand, the MTA’s rationale seems to be somewhat sound, but the other, it is a weak defense against the opportunities afforded developers and, by extension, the public were the agency to release detailed schedules, maps, exit locations, etc. The possibilities are truly endless.

As Miller’s article notes, government agencies often do not have the capacity to offer up mobile applications as sophisticated as those developed by private programmers. It’s not a part of the part of the expertise expect of, say, transit experts, and we need not look further than the MTA’s current website for validation of that fact.

Meanwhile, under Jay Walder’s short tenure as CEO and Chairman and at the command of Albany, the authority has begun to release more materials about board meetings and the agency’s finances. The rest of their data — the currency of developers who want to improve everyday life while making a few bucks — shouldn’t be far behind.

Train arrival boards at Nevins St., seen here last December, will remain unused for four months longer than originally anticipated. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)

When we last checked in on New York City Transit’s plan to bring train arrival boards to New York, the $200 million project was set to debut along the IRT’s numbered subway lines in December 2010. At the time, Transit warned that this date was “subject to the successful resolution of contractual issues,” and I called that language a big red flag.

Unsurprisingly, then, Transit’s efforts to bring this much-needed and decade-old technology to New York City are officially delayed. This news was hidden in the copious amounts of material the MTA Board put online in advance of Monday’s committee meetings, and Michael Grynbaum gently broke the news this evening.

Grynbaum’s story focuses around the three Bronx stations that will see their train arrival boards activated next month as part of a preview. Considering, though, that these signs have been in use along the L line since 2006, that’s hardly the big news. The delay is though, and he writes:

Still, riders may want to hold off celebrating just yet. Last month, officials said they hoped to install all clocks at 152 subway stations by December 2010; that is now expected to be April 2011.

And while the No. 6 line, with 700,000 rides a day, is the city’s busiest, the stations selected for next month’s rollout are some of the sleepiest. On average, those stations — Brook Avenue, East 149th Street and Longwood Avenue — each carry about 4,500 rides each weekday, fewer than 3 percent of the rides handled at Grand Central…“Work was completed first at those stations, that’s why they will be the first to be turned on,” said Charles Seaton, a spokesman for New York City Transit.

There is, of course, more bad news. When I first wrote about the train board project in early October, the Transit documents alleged a cost for just this IRT rollout of $171 million. Now, Transit is estimating the costs of installing this system at the 156 A Division stations at $199.6 million.

Documents say that the budget increase of nearly $30 million is due to “increased…labor costs, in-house construction, consultant services and additional work orders.” The contractors, says Transit, “believe this estimate is sufficient for current work in schedule barring any unforeseen developments.” The MTA, it seems, specializes in unforeseen developments.

And so we continue to wait for a service riders in Washington, D.C., London, Paris and even Rome have enjoyed for years. We wait for Transit to drag its 105-year-old system kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. We wait for not even half of the stations to receive a simple notification system. We still don’t know when or if the B Division will receive these boards, but for now, as with most other MTA projects, these arrival boards are behind schedule and over budget. No one is too surprised.

Generally, I have enjoyed the Google Maps integration of the MTA’s subway and bus network. Since Sept. 2008, Google Maps users have been able to generate intra-city subway directions through Google Transit and the main Google Maps interface. As Google recently expanded some of its transit offerings, it’s worth a minute to explore some of the problems with this partnership.

First, the news: Google has added a transit layer to its map of New York City. As On NY Turf and Gypsy Maps have already done through the Google Maps API, so now has Google. As the search engine giant’s Lat Long blog reports, “To turn it on, just point Google Maps to somewhere in New York, click on the ‘More…’ button at top-right, and select ‘Transit.'”

The map itself is interactive. By clicking on a station name, a potential traveler will see the lines that serve that station highlighted while a pop-out bubble displays the station information. Furthermore, Friday saw the transit layer make its debut on the Google Maps mobile application as well. For those with an internet connection, the subway map on Google is now far more accessible than anything available on the MTA’s website.

There is, however, a problem with Google Transit. It doesn’t stay up-to-date with MTA changes. For example, the new South Ferry station that connects the 1 with the BMT stop at Whitehall St. isn’t reflected on Google Transit. That station opened in February. The G train extension, in place since July and on HopStop since then, hasn’t been entered into the Google Maps’ iteration of the New York City subway system either. Bus route changes aren’t incorporated into the map either.

Overall, Google Transit’s service should be a boon for New Yorkers. Other cities — D.C comes to mind — are clamoring for it. But in reality, the service is only as good as those supporting it. If Google can’t find the time to update its map when the MTA changes its service patterns and opens new transfers or stations, it won’t benefit the rest of us who turn to it for directions. It is technology gone almost right, and for once, this one is on Google and not the MTA.

Update 2:28 p.m.: As a few people have noted in the comments (here and here), Google Transit relies on data feeds from transit authorities to maintain up-to-date maps and scheduling info. One commenter notes that the MTA is not providing licensed developers with timely updates and may not be doing so with Google either. I’ve posted the question to Transit and will post what, if anything, I can find out. Still, enough licensees have maps more current than Google’s pre-February/new South Ferry iteration.

For the last few months, the MTA and Chris Schoenfeld, a Second Ave. Sagas advertiser and the programmer behind the Station Stops blog and Metro-North scheduling iPhone application, have been engaged in a legal battle over data. The MTA has at times erroneously claimed copyright in its scheduling data and has generally made life tough for Schoenfeld. While you can read all about this conflict in my extensive post on the MTA’s struggles in an age of open information, the transit agency is not certain how it wants to proceed in a digital era.

The MTA is, of course, not alone in this sense. Public authority and governmental agencies are among the last to adopt technological innovation. While data in our wired world of 2009 wants to be freely available for people with the time and knowledge to create useful applications with it, government entities are hesitant to cede control of its information to those without ready access to it. Although programmers attach their names to these applications and draw revenue, when scheduling data is incorrect, the MTA would bear the brunt of the criticism. Or so the argument goes.

After this legal fight, though, the MTA claims it is turning a corner with its information. The agency has dropped its claims against Schoenfeld and a similar Long Island Rail Road application, and although Station Stops is still not available on the iPhone App Store, the MTA is changing its approach to data and developers, according to an article in today’s Times. Michael Grynbaum reports on this sea change at MTA headquarters:

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority said that it needed to ensure that information provided to the public was accurate, and that it was concerned about protecting its copyrighted logos, maps and other trademarks. A spokesman said that a licensing program offered an additional layer of scrutiny and protected the public’s interest in information that is produced with taxpayer dollars.

Christopher P. Boylan, the director of corporate and community affairs for the authority, said the agency was moving toward a more open stance with its data. Right now, for instance, many agencies offer their raw data on a shared Web site; New York’s agency makes it available only on a compact disc. Mr. Boylan said that and other policies may change soon.

“All of a sudden the word ‘apps’ has become part of the lingo,” he said. “We probably wouldn’t be having this conversation six months ago, exactly like this.”

Authority officials readily admit that their Web operations could use sprucing up. “We don’t have a staff that sits around thinking about apps,” Mr. Boylan said.

Based on the way the MTA’s website looks and navigates, I don’t think they have a staff sitting around thinking about something as basic as a transit web portal, let alone mobile phone applications. The MTA should not be afraid admit this institutional shortcoming and by opening up its data, outsource a potential solution to its digital problem.

It’s hard to tell based on Grynbaum’s article just what approach the MTA will be trying. The agency will still fiercely protect its trademarks and will ask for royalty fees for the use of copyrighted symbols — subway bullets and maps. As I explored a few weeks ago, the agency has no legal grounds for a copyright claim to its schedule data though.

Politicians throughout the country have pressured government agencies to open its scheduling data to a hungry public, and the MTA is no exception. Schoenfeld called upon some politicians to side with him in his David-vs.-Goliath fight, and the MTA may be ready to respond. For now, this is a provisional victory for transit advocates and riders. I won’t celebrate until we actually see the data out there for the world’s enjoyment. Progress, it seems, will be incremental.