MTA Technology

Conceptual drawings for two of the three designs that would serve to keep water out of the subway tunnels. (Source: The MTA)

Six weeks later, the MTA is ready to tackle deep-seated institutional problems that came to the forefront in a terrible flood. Yesterday, the MTA released its report (available here as a PDF) on the August 8 subway floods. The report calls for the Authority to change and improve practices in four areas.

According to the study, “the severity, timing and lack of warning of the August 8 storm hindered storm preparations and exposed the vulnerabilities of several aspects of the MTA’s transportation system.” The tunnels flooded because large volumes of water poured into the subway, overwhelming already-overtaxed pumps. The drains were further clogged by debris from the storm itself.

At the peak of the problems, when nearly every single subway line was suffering from service changes, the MTA employees “could not provide alternative travel options, and customers had difficulty gaining access to timely and accurate information.”

Now, readers of this site will know that I have long criticized the MTA on its communications efforts. In fact, the MTA employees generally know things long after everyone else does. We also knew back in July before the flood that the pumps along the Queens Boulevard line were in need of an upgrade. But now that this report has been issued, the MTA is freeing up the resources for key long-standing issues that should improve service in weather emergencies.

The report gives us a glimpse into the future of storm preparedness at the MTA:

Operationally, Doppler radar is being installed in each agency’s operations center, an MTA-wide Emergency Response Center has been created, and new storm protocols will be put in place to guide alternative service.

Engineering solutions target the top ten flood-prone locations … with an action plan already in place. Solutions for the remaining locations will be developed over the next 60-90 days, working with NYC DOT and DEP, drawing from a toolbox of potential fixes to both prevent water inflow and to remove it once it flows in, including installing check valves to prevent backflow, pursuing better sewer connections, increasing pumping capacity, pre-deploying portable pumps and personnel, installing closeable vents and constructing step-ups at station stairwell entrances that flood. Innovative street furniture will be considered to raise vents at key locations.

Communications solutions include email and text message alerts, cell phone service on subway platforms, web site upgrades, advancing new public address technologies and improving communications between ops centers and field personnel with PDAs and Blackberries.

These are common-sense solutions to problems that should have been solved long before the flood hit. But it took a flood of epic proportions for the MTA to commit $30 million to short-term fixes and untold millions to long-term solutions to critical communications and engineering issues.

For his part, MTA CEO Elliot “Lee” Sander said all the right things yesterday while discussing the report and the MTA’s institutional problems. “While the August 8 storm was the most severe in memory, it is clear that the MTA must do more for our customers in extreme situations,” he said. “The solutions identified in this report will dramatically improve our ability to handle future emergencies and ensure that we will better communicate with our customers 365 days a year.”

The MTA will soon be replacing all of the signals in the subway system. (Photo courtesy of flickr user larryosan)

So let’s talk signals. You, the daily subway rider, know them more as an annoyance than as anything else. Earlier this week, those pesky signals at 59th Street caused massive delays up and down the IND lines.

Like much of the subway system, the signals are aging, and the MTA is looking to replace them while jumping on the ever-popular green bandwagon. After six years of development working along side Dialight, the worldwide leader in LED technology, the MTA is ready to get moving on this project. This week, the MTA awarded Dialight a $1.8 million contract to retrofit the subway signals. LEDs Magazine – seriously, they have industry publications for everything — has more:

Dialight Corporation has been awarded a $1.8 million contract to provide LED trackside signals for the New York City subway system. The contract calls for retrofitting 13,400 incandescent units with LED modules, thereby completing conversion of all of the system’s more than 50,000 signals.

The LED signals are saving the city nearly $1 million a year in utility bills and maintenance. They are designed to retrofit two 16-watt incandescent bulbs with a robust module based on the latest high-flux LED and driver technology. With a projected service life of 10 years, the LED modules provide energy savings of 85 percent.

So the MTA is saving money and contributing to the drive toward an energy-efficient society. Is everyone at MTAHQ feeling ok? (Just kidding, guys.)

The Dialight folks praised themselves for the new LED lights. “The new signals are being well received by the city’s transit workers, who have indicated they are performing extremely well, and that the saturated colors of the LEDs are much more visible, resulting in greater safety on the tracks,” Business Development Manager Laura Hoffmann said.

While I like what I’m hearing — lights that are easier to see, greater track safety, saving money through energy efficiency — I can’t help but wonder how the city plans on replaces 13,400 lightbulbs. I’m going to have to go with weekend service delays and more irate passengers. But it will all pay off in the long run. The lights at the end of the tunnel will be brighter.

Bringing Google Transit to New York would be an ambitious undertaking.

Google Transit, part of Google’s plan to take over the world laboratory of experimental services, is pretty nifty. Using, as Google puts it, all available public transportation schedules and information, the service supposedly plots out the most efficient route from point to point. It includes the option to view various routes and has a cost comparison tool.

The only problem for us in New York is that the service is available only in a few regions of the country right now. All of that, however, could change. This post on Read/WriteWeb points to an article on Bloomberg.com announcing that Google is looking to take on a Transit map for the entire New York Metropolitan area.

Chris Dolmetsch and Ari Levy from Bloomberg News have more:

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and New Jersey Transit, which together carry more than 9 million people a day, are working with [Google] to give users one place to go for maps, schedules and trip planners. The agencies serve the five New York City boroughs and suburbs in New Jersey, Connecticut, Westchester County and Long Island.

“We are always looking for ways to incorporate technology in what we do,” Jim Redeker, assistant executive director of New Jersey Transit, said in a telephone interview from Newark. Google has “good experience at making this work.”

According to the article, New Jersey Transit will share its route map and schedule information with the search company, and the MTA is in talks to do the same. Furthermore, this would be, by far, the most ambitious undertaking for Google Transit as New York City alone has 468 subway stops, just 35 fewer than the rest of the nation combined. When one factors in the Long Island Railroad, Metro-North, PATH and New Jersey Transit, the number of stations just keeps on growing.

While the article notes that public transportation use in Duluth, Minnesota, increased by 12 percent after Google Transit took on the city’s public transportation system, I would find it hard to believe New York would be in line for a similar increase. First, the city’s public transportation system is so pervasive that it is already an ingrained part of life in New York City. I wonder if Duluth can say the same?

Additionally, we already have many of the services that a New York-oriented Google Transit service would provide. From the MTA Trip Planner and the NJ Transit Itinerary Planner to Hopstop, OnNYTurf’s Subway map and GypsyMaps, New Yorkers aren’t lacking for direction-minded Websites.

None of those sites, however, provide information for all of the city’s transit services (bus, regional rail, subway) in one place, and Google, who, according to Bloomberg, hopes to make a pretty penny from a New York-oriented transit site, would fulfill that need. And as Allison L. C. de Cerreño, director of New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management, said to Bloomberg, “Most people know Google. That’s actually a very powerful way to get the information in one place, in a way that most people are familiar with.”

A hat tip to Brian for this story.

A screenshot of the Facebook Subway Status application. The Seventh Ave. Express is definitely running local on the weekends for now until the end of time, it seems.

This afternoon, SUBWAYBlogger pointed its loyal readers in the direction of a nifty new Facebook application. The application — which you can find here — is called Subway Status. And that, folks, is the genius of Facebook and the orgy of (mostly) crap they unleashed with the application roll-out a few months ago.

(For all of you who don’t know Facebook, it’s a social networking site that started with colleges, expanded to high schools and has ended up open to everyone. It’s more addictive than crack if you were born in the 1980s or later.)

Anyway, the application, as you can imagine, brings subway information to the Facebooking masses. Using information readily available to the public as well as input from readers, Subway Status keeps subscribers attuned to the latest service alerts. To use this informative application, a Facebook user installs it on his or her profile and selects a favorite or oft-used subway line. That person can then view the alerts in that line and contribute. While nearly everyone in New York takes more than one subway, the application limits users to just one line, but it’s very easy to “transfer lines,” as the application so aptly puts it. I like where this is going.

Now, while SUBWAYBlogger and this Daily Intel post took care of the preliminaries, I decided to use Facebook for its true purpose: stalking your friends making new connections. I contacted Amos Bloomberg, the application’s creator, via Facebook, and he graciously answered some questions about this app. As Bloomberg mentioned, he’s worked on an idea such as this for a while, and it all stems from the lack of communication from the MTA, something with which we are quite familiar after recent events.

So take a read through the interview. And if you want to Facebook me, do it here. I’ll be your friend.

Second Ave. Sagas: Is Subway Status an independent application or was it developed in conjunction with the MTA?

Following last week’s communications debacle on Wednesday, the MTA is looking to establish a real-time text message alert system for service delays, amNY reported today.

Marlene Naanes has more:

Text messages alerting passengers that a train is not running are far from reality, but a task force the MTA created after last week’s transit meltdown is looking into the possibility. The group — the response to a gubernatorially ordered 30-day investigation — is also looking at possible real-time email alerts for New York City Transit riders.

“We are going to be looking at all of the electronic ways to communicate including text messaging,” said Chris Boylan, deputy executive director of MTA corporate and community affairs. “I think that the issue is not that we want to do it but what the technological limits are.”

While the writing in this amNY story is among the worst I’ve ever seen in a daily newspaper, that’s beside the point. As I noted earlier this week, text message and e-mail alerts are a reality in other transit systems. It couldn’t be that hard for the MTA to implement a similar feature.

But I have a better idea. Why not subcontract out an alert system? There are plenty of enterprising folks on the Internet who could design a text message alert system for the MTA. I bet the folks at Dodgeball could manipulate their service to serve a similar function for train lines. Text a train line to a number and get back a service alert.

It couldn’t really be that simple, right?