MTA Technology

The MTA has added more useful information to its countdown clocks. (Photo by Rolando Pujol)

As far as transit technology goes, the MTA’s shiny new countdown clocks leave much to be desired. While the authority now has access to tons of real-time information about train location, its only public presentation of that data is via the countdown clocks, and they suffer from a basic rudimentariness.

The first problem I noticed with the new clocks concerned island platforms. At, for instance, Grand Army Plaza, the uptown and downtown trains pull in on opposite sides of the sole island platform, but the countdown clocks are for the entire station. If I’m heading to Manhattan, I don’t particularly care when the next Flatbush Ave.-bound 2 train is coming. Yet, that’s how the information is presented.

The next complaint is one of design. Most of the signs rotate through only two trains, and it takes a concerted effort to find the next train at times. Furthermore, the green arrows are tough to read at a glance, and the destination indicators — which way is New Lots Ave.? — make a rider think too much about which train they need.

That said, the MTA is not resting on its laurels. They’re upgrading the countdown clocks. In a release late Wednesday, the authority announced the UI changes. “To remove some of the confusion in the busier stations serving multiple train lines we have added express (EXP) and local (LCL) icons to help riders identify arriving trains,” the authority said.

The PA/CIS signs now have a visual representation of the train direction. (Photo via New York City Transit)

With 110 signs now up throughout the system, the authority has been able to see what works and what doesn’t. At stations with only one type of service and island platforms — generally express stops in Brooklyn or Lower Manhattan — the signs will differentiate between uptown and Brooklyn-bound service. The release explains the upgrades:

Depending on the station configuration, signs will include direction and/or service type (express or local) information, as appropriate. So at Wall Street, only the 2 and 3 trains stop there—no locals. These are express trains traveling in different directions, so the signs only display uptown (UP) or Brooklyn (BKL). At 14th Street, the island platform is common for all trains going in the same direction so we show local or express.

The addition of the icons is just a little bit more of a good thing for customers waiting for their trains. The changes were made initially at the Wall Street, 14th Street and 34th Street Stations on the West Side IRT. Stations were chosen where the Countdown Clocks are required to display multiple services and directions. The upgrade is also being performed at Chambers Street on the No.1 as well as Franklin Ave., Nevins Street and Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. The ability to include the additional information was available in the system and deployed at no additional cost.

It’s a welcome change for a technology far too many years in the waiting. By the end of the year, all 153 stations will be equipped with the clocks, and then we wait for the B Division rollout, however that will look and whenever it will be. The next step though in the MTA’s technological renaissance will be access to real-time train location information. The countdown clocks might make our waits more tolerable, but knowing where a train is at what time would revolutionize trip planning across the city.

This weekend, I did something I haven’t done in years: I went to camp. This wasn’t my old sleep-away sports camp or the baseball camp I attended for years in the early 1990s. Rather, it was OpenPlans’ Transportation Camp, an unconference that gathered many of the sharpest minds working the transit and transportation space working on the side of the country.

Now, the very idea of an unconference makes people raise an eyebrow. Shouldn’t conferences be structured with set agendas and leaders conducting the pace of things? In a society driven by open-source development and collaboration, a transportation unconference is an ideal format for people to meet and greet each other while bouncing ideas around. I met many readers there and many folks I read elsewhere. While San Francisco gets to enjoy a West Coast gathering next week, I’m already looking forward to next year’s event in New York.

The sessions — which are listed here — were uniformly interesting. I sat in on a Q-and-A with MTA COO Charlie Monheim and US DOT’s Giovanni Carnaroli and Peter Appel. I met the gang from Greater Greater Washington, listened to a presentation on subway signaling and the PA/CIS system and checked out a discussion on matching service with demand. Other sessions — including those on taxi cab applications, road pricing and congestion alleviation — drew raves, but unfortunately, I couldn’t be in more than one room at a time.

Throughout the weekend, the theme was clearly the interaction between technology and infrastructure, and although I missed most of Monheim’s keynote speech due to the MPRE, he hit upon a theme that bears discussion. While the MTA’s data leads itself quite easily to app development, there is an inherent incompatibility between the MTA’s system and technological investments. Last week’s stories on the supposedly obsolete fiber-optics network and the NYPD’s communications problems highlight that gap.

Essentially, this conflict boils down as such: When the MTA purchases rolling stock and upgrades its physical plant, it expects its equipment to last for decades. Subway cars, for instance, have a shelf life of around 40 years before they’re up for replacing, and in the interim, it’s possible that hundreds of newer and better models have hit the rails since then. For better or worse, the same is true for major station renovations, signal upgrades and rail replacement projects.

Meanwhile, when I purchase a new piece of technology, I expect it to last for four years, and I know it will be painfully obsolete by the time those four years are up. My laptop isn’t meant to last 40 years, and the technology behind it improves too quickly for it stay usable much beyond half a decade. For example, the software powering the R160 FIND displays will be obsolete long before the rolling stock is ready to be retired; in fact, the FIND displays have long since passed technological middle age. How then does a transit agency as extensive as the MTA incorporate rapidly-changing technology into a system built for long-term durability?

This conflict is one with which the MTA must grapple on a regular basis. Take, for instance, the BusTime project. As the MTA moves forward with bringing the technology to more than just the B63, those behind the initiative are eying all 800 of Staten Island’s buses, and they hope to retrofit the buses and get the system up and running before the end of 2011. With over 6000 buses operating throughout the city, it’s not a surprise then that it takes a few years to get these wide-reaching technological initiatives up and running.

From Transportation Camp, then, I drew the conclusion that transit agencies face two tasks when it comes to technology. They must make sure that the data these innovations produce gets into the hands of developers who can bring it to the public, and they have make sure that the innovations are compatible with infrastructure that will outlive the technology. What will happen to the countdown clocks in 10 years when they’re due for upgrades? What happens with those FIND displays as they age?

We scorn the MTA’s on-again, off-again attempts to bring technology underground, but ultimately, it’s just not as easy as plug-and-play. As long as the developers have access to data though and the authority is willing to share the real-time information it produces, the public should benefit.

Transit's new countdown clocks are a welcome addition to the system, but the technology infrastructure behind them is already out of date. (Photo via New York City Transit)

The MTA’s not-so-new fibers optics-based communications infrastructure is already out of date even before the system is fully operative, the Daily News reports today. Work on the network, which cost $370 million is $76 million overbudget, first started in 2000 — eons ago in technology years — and will be completed later this year.

The countdown clocks are its public face, but behind the scenes, as it improves internal communications and emergency response preparedness, the system already needs an upgrade. “Due to technology evolution and other factors, many components in this network are at or nearing their end of life,” one authority document obtained by the News says.

Donohue has more:

In the document, a request for information, the agency asked technology companies for advice on designing a “next-generation” communications network and fixing shortcomings with the existing one, which is up and running in much of the subway system.

The MTA on Tuesday stressed the existing network – called ATM/SONET and designed by Siemens Transit Technologies – is functioning and carrying beneficial data, like next-train arrival times, at more than 100 stations…

MTA documents say existing problems include:

• Some of the equipment no longer is being made, which could make it more difficult and costly to maintain or upgrade.
• The network may not have enough capacity for remote viewing of the growing amount of video from surveillance cameras.

“This will put a large strain on [NYC Transit’s] current network, which was not originally designed to support the video capacity needs,” the October document states.

The numbers on the cost overruns are both staggering and unsurprising. The first phase of the project is four years behind schedule and $36 million over budget. The second part will cost $40 million more than expected and isn’t delivering the same public benefits — in the form of countdown clocks — that Phase 1 provided.

James Vacca, the chair of the City Council’s Transportation Committee, had some words to share. “Delays don’t just add millions of dollars to projects. They also lead to products that are obsolete even before anyone hits the ‘on’ switch,” he said. “That’s unacceptable.”

The problem with any technology project is that the product is often obsolete before anyone hits the “on” switch, but in this case, the delays have led to litigation and headlines for years. Now, as Donohue notes, the promised safety benefits of this project may go unrealized without further investment. It is, in every sense of the word, one giant snafu.

It’s worth noting too Vacca’s point. The MTA must get its capital house in order if it wants to find a way to fund the rest of the current five-year plan and close the $10 billion gap. When this project was first contracted out, Virgil Conway was the MTA Chair, and sense then, Peter Kalikow and Dale Hemmerdinger have come and gone. It’s tough to provide oversight with so much change at the top.

This is exactly the situation though for which Jay Walder was brought to New York. The countdown clocks are a welcome addition to the system, but the technology behind it with its behind-the-scenes uses will have to be maintained and brought in line with current technology standards. That is so small task indeed.

A few weeks ago, Alex Bell, the brother of a long-time classmate and baseball teammate of mine, e-mailed me about a project he’s working on. A lifelong New Yorker, Bell wanted to use something prevalent — smartphones — to track subway trains. Instead of a complicated and expensive technology solution to real-time train location systems, Bell believes he can, in his words, “use the sensing capabilities of the smartphone to map the current location of all the NYC subways in real time.”

Enter the Subway Arrival Mobile Phone application. By using passive data and Base Station ID numbers, those who opt into Bell’s project can assist in providing essentially background data on train location. Bell pondered those who know where a train is when and determined that the short list includes the people on the train, the conductor, the MTA control room and, most importantly, those who have just gotten off the train.

“In a perfect world,” Bell said to me, “all I would have had to do was write a simple application which let users broadcast that they had left such and such train heading downtown. But of course no busy New Yorkers would have engaged in that, which is called participatory sensing. Instead I had to devise a method of using opportunistic sensing — sensing that doesn’t involve the user.”

To accomplish this, Bell focused on the BaseStation Identification number, which provides information on which cell tower is sending and receiving data to that phone. The application, he says, looks for periods of “no reception underground coupled with a large distance change.”

“By using some signal processing algorithms the false positives are weeded out and the results are sent, anonymously, to a server,” he explained. “I have optimized the application to have almost negligible effect on battery life. And by keeping the data anonymous, the security concerns are removed.”

This is crowdsourcing at its finest, and it just might work. To allow for differences in, say, walking speed or mobile signal pick-up, the application relies on a hidden Markov model to adjust the time variables. Of course, though, the app still relies on a critical mass of people to make it work. “As I have constructed it, when more and more users download the free application their phones will start reporting the location of the trains. The annotated Google Map, on both the phone and the website, will show icons which indicate which train and traveling in which direction,” Bell notes. “I may configure the server to also approximate arrival times; however, i think it may be more intuitive to see the icon approaching your station. The biggest IF I see is that if not enough users download the app then the data will be spotty and incomplete. Then users will delete the app before it had reached the critical mass of people to make it truly useful.”

Recently, Bell has updated the map to include confidence intervals based upon the amount of data he has collected, and he is working on building an API so other developers can take advantage of the platform. Currently, Bell is maintaining a Twitter feed and is part of the NYC Big Apps competition. It’s certainly a solid idea behind a problem that has plagued the city’s subway system for years.

Platform screen doors, such as those seen here at London's Westminster station, could soon come to New York's subway system.

Transit is exploring the possibility of installing glass doors on its platforms to keep passengers safe, tracks clean and stations climate controlled, the Daily News reported today. With a recent spate of high-profile accidents involving straphangers who have fallen or were pushed into the tracks as well as concerns over debris in the tracks, the MTA is trying to focus more sealing off the station edges and are soliciting expressions of interest for plans to install platform screen doors, platform edge doors or a platform edge gate. They want, however, to find a project that involves “little or no upfront costs” to the authority, according to the Request for Information.

“We are very early in the process,” Kevin Ortiz, Transit spokesman, said to the News, “of looking at the possibility of installing platform doors that would go a long way toward enhancing passenger safety and station appearance.”

According to the RFI, Transit is looking for vendors who can a proposal with a variety of attributes. First, the authority wants something that won’t require service diversions to install, and they want a system that can be controlled remotely and opened in case of emergency. Due to varying car lengths on the B Division, Transit wants a system that can detect and respond to door placements.

Learning from previous mistakes, Transit is searching for a system that requires “minimal preventative maintenance” that can withstand an “extreme operating environment.” The doors must be tamper and vandal resistant and must have space for informational displays and advertising posters. It must integrate well within the existing infrastructure and station technology and should be compatible with the various signaling and CBTC systems. The authority also said it will consider only venders whose systems that “have been proven in large-scale applications” in a “heavy-rail environment.”

It’s hard to dislike this project. Doors would keep passengers safely away from tracks, allow for a more temperate station environment and keep garbage on the platforms where it is easier to clean. For the MTA, though, the key is cost. As I mentioned, the authority wants to pay as little as possible and could pursue revenue-sharing plans with the chosen vendor. Otherwise, this project, as previous MTA officials have warned, will be too expensive. Still, any excitement over this project may be a bit premature. The response to the RFIs are due in March, and the authority will then evaluate whether or not it wants to proceed with an RFP process.