MTA Technology

When I first came up with the idea to begin this blog in November of 2006, I brainstormed a name that I could spell with subway bullets. I wanted to relate the name of the blog to the subway and express that through an easily recognizable image. The current name and above banner were the end result of my brainstorming.

At the time, I didn’t realize that the MTA had trademarked the subway bullets and that I had run afoul of their trademark. Nearly 20 months after starting this site, I received a letter — in the form of a comment on a post that was at the time three weeks old — from the MTA’s Senior Associate Coounsel (sic), as he spelled it. In the initial letter, Lester Freundlich told me that I couldn’t use the image of the MetroCard in a blog post reporting on a MetroCard and that I couldn’t use the subway map. He didn’t even complain about my using the subway bullets; that issue came up later on.

Eventually, I worked out the issue with the MTA’s Marketing and Advertising department. I had to change the image, as you can see from the current one evocative of the Massimo Vignelli-designed subway signs, and I had to add a disclaimer to the site. As the use of the MetroCard image was a fair use, I was in the clear. All’s well that ended well for me.

I’m not the only person though that Lester Freundlich and the MTA legal department has contacted over the last few months. Two stories — one involving a Metro-North blogger and his iPhone application and one involving someone in San Francisco — raise some serious questions about how the MTA enforces its intellectual property rights and how prepared the MTA is for a digital world.

StationStops and an iPhone Application

Chris Schoenfeld is a Metro-North commuter and a web programmer. (Disclaimer: He’s also one of my advertisers.) In 2006, he started the Metro-North blog Station Stops, and in 2007, he wrote an application with the Metro-North schedule data. The MTA hasn’t yet figured out the digital world, and Schoenfeld’s application filled an obvious niche.

Over the years, Schoenfeld had, as I did, ran afoul of some of the MTA’s intellectual property rights. He had employed some copyrighted images of MTA property. At each turn, he removed them as requested.

In August, the MTA stepped up its campaign against Schoenfeld. In its original dealings with Schoenfeld, the MTA claimed that Station Stops was presenting itself as an official MTA site. That claim is, quite frankly, laughable. Schoenfeld’s site doesn’t resemble an MTA site, and it’s clearly a journalistic blog. A few days later, they seemingly dropped this complain but ordered him to cease selling the iPhone application. This charge rested on the claim that the MTA owns the copyright to the schedule data and that Schoenfeld’s use of the data violates that copyright.

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.

For those of you who are on Twitter, there are now Twitter accounts for mass transit lines and highways throughout New York state, including the New York City subway. There’s a full index of accounts here. Those of you in New York City can choose to follow the general 511 account, or simply follow the line you take the most often.

If you’re a Twitter fan or just want to check online to see if there are problems along your subway line or highway before you set out on your commute, this is a great quick way to get information. And if you hate Twitter, keep in mind that you don’t have to have an account to view a specific page. Don’t worry – I won’t tell anyone.

Next up? The PATH is planning to get an account too.

As the MTA’s project to bring communications-based train control to the L line continues apace, Transit is beginning its plan to bring CBTC to the 7 line. As The Post reported this morning, the MTA is now taking bids on the project to automate the IRT Flushing Line. Officials believe it will cost $348 million to complete this 6.5-year project.

According to The Post, the MTA hopes to have a contract signed by the end of the year. Getting this project set up for 2016 makes it better late than never. However, as Larry Littlefield noted in the Streetsblog comments earlier today, if this project costs $350 million just to implement, what will be the cost of maintenance and upkeep?

The article in The Post rehashes the various safety concerns that anti-CBTC (and generally anti-job elimination) groups have, and Transit responds. The reality is that CBTC, as implemented throughout the nation, is a safe alternative to human control and allows for more trains per line than human control does. Transit does not plan to eliminate drivers and has a built-in redundancy system as well.

Finally, as a postscript of sorts, Beth Stebner and Tom Namako end their article with what I consider to be an egregious quote. “It’s a great idea,” Anna Callahan, a rider on the 7, said. “But I’d rather those millions of dollars go toward lowering my fare.”

This is a prime example of my questioning those who cover the subway. Callahan has absolutely no idea what she is talking about here, and including her quote just serves to subtly and unnecessarily bash the MTA. While there is a real need for modern signal technology and train control, there’s no need for Callahan’s ill-informed opinion on it. That’s not helping the discourse.

Last month, the Senior Senator from the Great State of New York issued a call for the MTA to outfit their commuter rail trains with wireless Internet. I used his call as a launching point for a brief discussion on how Amtrak, Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road should all be equipped for wireless.

Today, we learn that the MTA, both independent of and because of Schumer’s call, is moving the ball on their wireless plans. Late last week, the agency issued a Request for Expressions of Interest for wireless access on commuter rail trains and in stations. Proposals are due on September 1, and the MTA will establish a timeline of access and hopefully technological adoption in the fall.

Agency officials said that they had these plans in the works prior to Schumer’s comments. “We had [the proposal] in the works prior to the Schumer announcement,” MTA spokesman Aaron Donovan said to amNew York’s Heather Haddon.

Meanwhile, MuniWireless, a municipal wireless access blog, has the full RFEI. The full document is 50 pages long and includes a breakdown of ridership demographics and daily station ridership figures. It will make sense to outfit the more popular ones with wireless and to skip some of the lesser used stations.

NYCWireless notes that the RFEI does not include free wi-fi. Dana Spiegel believes that, since these networks are expensive to install and maintain, the MTA will have to charge for wireless access aboard the trains.

In the end, as the RFEI says, this early-stage request will give the MTA “the opportunity to review different technologies and solutions and to evaluate different business cases. As an option, one or both of the Railroads may decide to permit a technical trial of one or more technical solutions at no cost to the Railroads. After the Railroads review the responses to the RFEI (and the results of technical trials, if any), a decision will be made whether to proceed with a wide scale on-train and/or station wireless broadband implementation pursuant to a subsequent request for proposals (“RFP”).”

It’s early for sure, but it’s a start. As I mentioned yesterday in discussing Transit’s public address problem, the authority has lagged across all divisions in bringing new technology on line. To see them moving forward on this project and with an aggressive two-month time frame gives me home for transit-related technology improvements sooner rather than later.

In amNew York today, Heather Haddon tackles the problem with the public address system along the G train. While she gets the story right — the lack of public address system is a big problem — there are some deep-seated issues at play here that did not get any press.

Basically, the story is simple: Many of the G train stops do not have a public address system. Thus, passengers do not know when the train is coming and cannot be told of unscheduled delays and problems further up the line. Haddon notes that a signal problem earlier this week laid passengers up at Hoyt-Schermerhorn for nearly an hour with no word of a delay.

Her first point is that the station agent elimination, planned a slow phase-out, will cause problems. “NYC Transit is eliminating hundreds of station agents across the system through attrition, so G riders craving information may need to develop ESP,” she writes.

That is obscuring the real story. Earlier this week, when the G train was laid up at Hoyt-Schermerhorn, the station agents will still in place. Yet riders still had no idea what was going on because NYC Transit lacks a comprehensive internal communications system.

Station agents at Hoyt-Schermerhorn don’t know what’s happening down the line at, say, Classon or Flushing Aves. With or without station agents, waiting for a delayed train is still just one big guessing game. Meanwhile, every station will still have at least one agent. Technically, those workers, if they knew of the problem, could still provide updates.

Haddon explores the real issue a few paragraphs later:

A 2005 report by the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee found that nearly a third of the 468 stations lacked PA systems. Transit installed speakers connecting to some token booths since, but the G seems to have gotten the short end of the stick.

At the Court Square stop in Queens, for example, an address system feeds to the E line but not the neighboring G. The next G stop, 21 Street, also lacks a PA. “It’s a big gap,” said Ellyn Shannon of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee. “There’s no means of communication.”

The MTA planned to replace all of the PA systems by 2009. Instead, it prioritized the installation of the digital boards on subway platforms. The boards are up and running on the L line, but rampant problems with the contractor has slowed the expansion to a crawl. The boards won’t go live in 156 stations until 2011, five years after the deadline, according to the most recent report by an independent engineer mandated to study MTA projects.

Because funds are tight, the MTA was not able to pursue the true solution: a unified public address system and digital notification boards. Now, with some station agents on the way out, the system will be understaffed and lacking enough technology to support the reduction. And that, my friends, is why we need proper levels of investment into transit infrastructure.

As we all know because we pay attention to these things, the MTA raised their fares yesterday at 12:01 a.m. Throughout the system, stations featured SubTalk posters with the new fare structure, but what about people sitting at home? How could they find out the latest fare information?

The obvious and most logical place to look would be the MTA’s Web site. After all, in 2009, when people at home need information fast, they generally turn to the web. As those who cover the subways for the city’s papers did a poor job of covering the fare hike on the day it went into effect, we would expect the MTA’s site to draw attention to the new hikes.

The only problem is that it didn’t. As you can see from the above screenshot — click the image to enlarge — the site looked the same as it did on Friday. The graphics boxes on the right side did not broadcast any new information, and just two links in the very busy right sidebar — one under “Features” and one under “Facts & Figures” — went to the new fare information. Neither of those two links were on top in their respective boxes, and both had been featured on the home page for some time. Meanwhile, nothing on the New York City Transit homepage featured anything about the new fares.

My critiques of the MTA’s site are nothing new. When Washington’s WMATA unveiled its new site in January, I took the MTA to task for its poorly designed and organized site. The story today is much the same. The Web site is the public face of the agency, and it should present the vital information in clear, easy-to-find areas. Riders should be able to get the new fare information right away; they shouldn’t have to click around for it.

In survey after survey, straphangers say they don’t trust the MTA because the agency is not transparent and tough to reach. Their site is full of useful and interesting information for those that want to dig, but we shouldn’t have to dig for fare information. In a web-focused age, the MTA’s current site leaves much to be desired.

Sometimes, the Associated Press under-writes a story. Take, for example, this short one about Senator Chuck Schumer and the MTA.

In it, the AP explores how New York’s senior Senator would prefer to see the MTA implement wireless service aboard commuter rail trains sooner rather than later. It could be perhaps the most understated story in a while. Take a look:

Sen. Charles Schumer contends the commuter railroads serving New York City have been slow to implement wireless Internet service.

Schumer is calling on the MTA to follow through on plans he says have been in the works for months. He says other major mass transit systems across the United States already have on-board major wireless Internet service.

He says that puts the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad behind railroads in Texas, California and Utah.

The senator says adding wireless Internet would help improve productivity for commuters and the thousands of students who use the rails.

That’s the whole thing. My favorite part is how Schumer is contending that the MTA has “been slow to implement wireless Internet service.” Considering the state of the MTA’s various wireless campaigns, “slow” is a compliment. I generally opt for the less flattering “inept.”

The truth is that Schumer is 100 percent correct, but his critique extends well beyond the MTA’s reach. It’s true that railraods in Texas California and Utah may offer wireless service on board, but in our own backyard, Amtrak doesn’t even provide wireless service in its heavily-traveled Northeast Corridor.

This call, then, by our Senator strikes me as a perfect opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. Through New Haven, Amtrak and Metro-North share rights-of-way. Schumer should work to ensure that the wireless service for the commuter rails can cover Amtrak. It may be infeasible. Perhaps the trains are equipped with different signal receivers. Perhaps what works at Metro-North and LIRR speeds doesn’t work at Amtrak and Acela speeds. It’s worth a shot though.

In response to Schumer’s calls, the MTA said it would be fielding requests for proposals on the project until September. The agency wants to gauge both interest and feasibility. Considering that airplanes now come equipped with wireless, our commuter rails should too.