MTA Technology

Bus shelters in London know when the next bus is coming. New Yorkers have to result to the tried and true peer-down-the-street method. (Image courtesy of the Department of Transportation)

Public transportation-minded New Yorkers have long bemoaned the state of the MTA’s technology. The Website, as I noted on Friday, has never been too reliable, and other systems around the globe have figured out how to tell riders how far away the next train or bus is. And don’t even get me started on the MTA’s mobile alert system or lack thereof.

But with Wednesday’s crippling flood, everyone else is starting to take notice. On Friday, The New York Times ran an article about the poor state of communications technology in the subways and how riders were left stranded with little information as events unfolded last week.

Citing rapid-response alerts in the Washington Metro, mobile alerts from New Jersey Transit and a mobile trip planning site in San Francisco, Ken Belson and Sewell Chan spoke less glowingly of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority:

In New York — home to the country’s largest transit system, with an $8 billion annual budget — information is doled out in a more elementary fashion. During Wednesday’s crippling storm, when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Web site was overwhelmed by people seeking the latest information and directions, legions of commuters had to rely on station agents scrawling updates on white boards. Only a handful of riders already on train platforms had access to digital screens with up-to-date information…

Compared with commuters in many of the world’s leading cities, subway riders in New York live in something of an information vacuum once they enter the system’s 468 stations…But the storm this week, highlighting yet again deficiencies in how the authority gets information out, seemed to push riders past the limits of their patience. Those flaws are one focus of a 30-day review that Gov. Eliot Spitzer has ordered into what went wrong after the intense early-morning rains of Wednesday.

In the age of cheap bandwidth and pervasive cell phone use, the MTA, the article details, still relies upon telephone calls to every single station agent in the system. These agents are then supposed to be able to recall all of the service information in case passengers need help. Little wonder, then, that system breakdowns are so complete and total when they occur.

But now, the city and state leaders want this ludditism to become a relic of the past. City Councilman John Liu and U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner have renewed their calls for a wired subway system. A cell phone-compatible subway system would allow for text message and voice mail alerts during emergencies.

But outside of a wireless system, the MTA should be able to equip every station and bus stop with the same information readily available elsewhere. It’s not hard to tie the signal system in to a computer that displays the next train’s arrival time. It’s not that hard to equip buses with GPS monitors that show passengers waiting at busy stations when the next bus is due to arrive. It happens in London and Washington, in Madrid and Rome. It’s time to make this happen in New York.

Everyday, at West 4th St., I pass one of the MTA’s digital displays that is, without fail, an hour and 15 minutes slow. If the MTA can’t even get their digital displays to show the time correctly, if they can’t even secure accurate bus route maps at every bus stop, it’s almost naïve of us to think they can handle a full technological upgrade of the subway system. But as the system ages, we need better technology, not more excuses.

It was a big weekend for the New York City subway as the MTA finally figured out that the 1990s started seventeen years ago. No longer will passengers be forced to stand at the platform’s edge peering into dark tunnels searching in vain for the faint glimmer of the headlines of an approaching train.

Instead, New York has finally caught up to London, Washington, D.C, and the vast majority of the world’s subway lines as they unveiled the first of what promises to be many boards notifying passengers just how far away that next train is.

As The Post noted over the weekend, these signs, pictured above, debuted on the L train a few days ago and should be “fully operational” in February. Considering that these other subway systems had long featured train notification, we should be more skeptical of the MTA and less celebratory.

But maybe the celebrations have been met with the appropriate levels of New York cynicism. As with all things MTA, the debut of these signs has been far from smooth. First, these signs were supposed to be unveiled last July, but as another who lived through the reconstruction of the 41st St. Times Square tunnel recontruction, MTA timetables are notoriously terrible.

More notable, however, was The Sun’s examination of the new signs after a few days of use.

The screens, which display departure times for two scheduled trains in each direction, regularly overestimated the time until a train’s arrival or else announced only a “Delay.” At some stations, the screens were not working at all, and displayed just one generic message: “This is a test. May not be accurate.”

The Sun also notes that these signs will only go up on the old IRT lines. So while the numbered subway lines, the city’s most popular routes, will get technology of, well, the past, the lettered subways of the city’s old BMT and IND lines still won’t run too frequently and passengers still won’t know when the next train is due in at their station.

Image courtesy of thelexiphane at Flickr.