While the MTA announced plans for a seatless car experiment in August, Boston’s MBTA has beaten them to the punch. As the Daily News reports today, some Red Line cars in Boston will now be seatless an in effort to increase capacity. According to MBTA officials, this move should increase capacity by 10 percent. For local reaction, check out The Harvard Crimson. In New York, when four out of 10 cars feature the flip seats, the estimated increase is 18 percent. While some people will complain about missing out on the hypothetical seat, most rush hour riders don’t have the chance to rest anyway.
Crowded subway cars often create bad situations for women, and the vast majority of men know little or nothing about it. Ask your female friends, however, and more than one of them are bound to have stories to tell about fellow straphangers getting a little too close, a little too frisky and a little too touchy-feely during rush hour. It is a sad reality of life in the subways.
But up in Boston, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has launched a campaign aimed at raising awareness of subway groping. They’re trying to combat a problem that has long remained under the radar. Tovia Smith on NPR’s All Things Considered had more on this story last week:
Transit officials in Boston recently launched an aggressive campaign aimed at cracking down on people who take advantage of the tight squeeze on crowded trains. Over the past month, officials say the program has led to a record number of arrests for subway sex assaults…
Transit officials say women usually don’t report groping incidents because they’re embarrassed and don’t believe it will have any effect. So officials have plastered subway cars with nearly a thousand signs urging victims to speak out — and warning potential predators that they are being watched by cameras and by “the grope patrol” of undercover police officers.
The ads — one of which you can see above — urge women to report gropers and warn potential violators that they will be caught. It is a tastefully done and very necessary public awareness campaign. Furthermore, women are being more proactive in reporting groping incidents and many are relying on cell phone cameras to catch perps in the act.
Here in New York, the MTA doesn’t enjoy the same threat of security cameras as the MBTA. While that may change, the MTA takes a very hands off approach to subway groping. Now and then, sexual offenders are caught on camera by vigilant passengers, but more often than not, passengers both male and female are subjected to behavior that they shouldn’t tolerate.
I have to believe that perhaps a similar campaign to that in Boston would be a bit more effective than patrols armed with machine guns. But either way, this is a problem we shouldn’t keep silent any longer.
Lucky Chicago. They aren’t afraid of change and progress, and now the Windy City is getting what should be ours if it hadn’t been for Sheldon Silver and his crony of cowardly representatives.
When New York decided not to adopt congestion pricing, the City forfeited around $354 million that would have gone toward anti-congestion measures as part of the new National Strategy to Reduce Congestion. Since our wonderful leaders don’t seem too concerned with reducing congestion, the feds instead decided to dole out $153 million to Chicago. That city will implement a bus rapid transit system with dedicated lanes and ramped-up enforcement as well as variable-rate parking meters.
Los Angeles — the king of congestion — will receive over $200 million that will go toward implementing a tolling system designed to encourage car-pooling and other high-occupancy vehicle commuting. I prefer Chicago’s plan, but the one in Los Angeles is not without merit.
Catrin Einhorn of The Times has the story:
In Chicago, officials said Tuesday that they planned to use $153 million for projects like creating the first 10 miles of lanes dedicated to faster buses that make fewer stops and set off sensors that lengthen green traffic lights and shorten red ones. To discourage driving downtown, meters and parking lots there would charge more during peak traffic times.
In Los Angeles, which would receive $213 million, officials said high-occupancy vehicle lanes would be converted to toll lanes. Cars with three or more people would be exempt from paying. The federal money would also finance bus service in the new toll lanes.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, through a spokesman, applauded the efforts of both cities.
“While it’s sad that Washington, which most Americans agree is completely dysfunctional, is more willing to try new approaches to long-standing problems than Albany is,” Mr. Bloomberg’s press secretary, Stu Loeser, said, “we’re glad other places aren’t as allergic to innovation.”
Mayor Bloomberg is clearly still smarting from the defeat of his groundbreaking (in the U.S., at least) congestion pricing plan. He’s not the only one. “We’re disappointed that New York didn’t get it,” Tyler D. Duvall, acting under secretary for policy for the Department of Transportation, said to The Times, “but we’re extremely happy to have the opportunity to work with L.A. and Chicago.”
For New York, the blow stings a bit. Chicago, in particular, is adopting measures that New York really needs and should have. At a time when many are noting that our own BRT system may be delayed a few years, Chicago’s gain is New York’s loss.
We could have had BRT money; we could have had funds for traffic reduction programs and public transit expansion. Instead, we have risk-averse politicians who wouldn’t even put the plan up for a floor vote, and we get to sit back at Chicago enjoys the money that could have been ours. That’s some example to set as a global city in 2008.
Every now and then, I like to check in on how the MTA’s competitors in other cities are doing. Today, we journey down I-95 — or is that Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor? — to our Nation’s Capital where the WMATA is facing its very own funding crisis.
For the last ten days, we’ve watched in New York as the state Assembly dealt a blow to the MTA’s financial situation, and we’ve seen the agency begun a fund-searching review in order to meet goals for its next five-year capital plan. Things could be worse.
In Washington, the WMATA is in the unenvious position of receving one-third of its funds from the Federal Government, and one of the Senators who holds the purse strings — Sen. Tom Coburn, a hard-line Republican from the car-happy state of Oklahoma — is threatening to block a $1.5 billion federal grant for Metro.
Now, this isn’t just chump change for the Metro. It’s money the WMATA needs to bring their old and decaying system up to a state of good repair. Considering that environmental movements are all the rage, the government — both in New York and in DC — is strangely hesitant to help out the greenest of green options: public transportation. WTOP Radio’s Adam Tuss has more from DC:
Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., has authored a bill which would provide $1.5 billion for Metro over the next 10 years. If the bill passes, Virginia, Maryland and D.C. have agreed they will match the $1.5 billion. The funds would go a long way for Metro, which is the only major transportation system in the nation that lacks a dedicated source of funding.
But the Davis bill, as it is currently constructed, will likely never make its way past Coburn. “I’m happy to be a roadblock to that bill,” Coburn tells WTOP. “It’s $1.5 billion they want, we (the government) don’t have the money to pay for it, so where are we going to get the money?”
Coburn doesn’t think one penny of funding for Metro should come from American taxpayers. “How dare us say we are going to steal opportunity from our children so that we can have a ride on the Metro. I think the vast majority of Americans would disagree with that.”
Isn’t it cute that all of a sudden a Republican in the Senate is concerned about spending? And where, oh, where could the government find the meager sum of $1.5 billion for a transportation network that has a ridership of millions of federal workers and tourists? Considering that we’ve spent trillions of dollars on overseas wars — and, yes, Coburn supports those efforts without noting any effect whatsoever on our children — I’d think $1.5 billion wouldn’t be tough to find.
Coburn, ignoring that self-sustaining public transit would be too expensive to attract any ridership, wants the Metro riders to pay. “My position is, if you want to ride the Metro, pay what it costs to ride the Metro,” he said. “Riders will pay for the upkeep and the capital improvements that are needed.”
Coburn’s opponents on both sides of the aisle are ready to fight him for these funds, and I’d have to believe that Metro will get its money. But yet again, politicians are doing all they can to obstruct funding for mass transit. One day, maybe mass transit will get the respect it deserves as a major driver of urban economics. One day, politicians might be willing to go out on a limb to fund it.
But as we’ve learned in New York and as we see in DC right now, mass transit proponents are fighting and losing an uphill battle right now. We’ll just have to keep on trekking ahead as the cars continue to win.
Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee went down our Nation’s Capital recently and spied a sign extolling the supposedly rat-free environment of the WMATA’s Metro. Her subsequent blog post on City Room about the sign has spurred on a 112-comment debate comparing DC’s Metro to New York’s subway. As I’ve written in the past, I’m no fan of the WMATA. Its cleanliness, however, is about the only thing it has going for it. [City Room]
When it comes to subways, the concept of “on time” is a rather amorphous one. Most New Yorkers would consider the subway to be on a time if a train were pulling into a station and getting ready to open its doors right as we were making our way down (or up) the staircase to the platform. In reality — pesky thing that — the folks who run subways have a stricter definition of “on time” that even involves some schedules, and according to recent reports, New York is faring pretty well with that “on time” thing.
The recent report to which I am referring is one that comes from Washington, D.C. The Metro, according to WTOP News, is suffering from a performance gap. More trains are arriving off schedule. Adam Tuss has more:
On the rails, Metro has set a goal of 95 percent when it comes to on-time peak service during the morning and afternoon rush periods. The actual on-time performance statistics during November, the latest month Metro crunched its numbers, show 85 percent of trains were on-time for a.m. service, a full 10 percentage points off. Even lower at 83 percent was p.m. service.
By itself, that’s not a very impressive figure. When we start to compare it to New York, it looks even worse. According to the most recent NYCT performance indicators, the numbers for 2007 were down compared to 2006, but trains were still running on time — that is, within five minutes of their scheduled times — 93 percent of the time for the first eight months of 2007.
So there, Washington! Take that.
Now, I’m sure some of you are wondering why I’m making such a big deal about this. Just this week I finished Zachary Schrag’s The Great Society Subway, an excellent history of the D.C. Metro. In it, Schrag highlights on more than one occasion the fact that the Metro’s planners didn’t want the system to be like New York’s; rather, they wanted to be better than New York’s.
I’ll give the book a proper review next week, but after reading how D.C. officials, who lord over what I consider to be a very nice-looking subway that offers mediocre service, consider their system far superior to New York’s, it’s comforting to get concrete information that Washington’s system isn’t as good as New York. For all our complaints about service, the MTA is better at being “on time,” whatever that means.
Before getting to the record low two weekend service changes, let’s journey down to Washington, D.C. for a brief jaunt. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority just unveiled one whopper of a fare hike, and it certainly makes you appreciative of the inevitable fare that the MTA’s board will pass next week.
Basically, here’s the situation. Unlike the MTA, the WMATA has no dedicated source of revenue and instead relies on fare box intake as well as relatively meager contributions from the Commonewealth of Virginia and the great state of Maryland. The fare increase is needed to shore up a budget that faces a 2008 deficit of $109 million. The fare hike details, courtesy of Lena H. Sun’s article in The Washington Post:
After months of contentious debate, the board compromised in a 5 to 1 vote that will raise the subway rush-hour boarding charge by 30 cents, to $1.65 per trip, and increase daily parking fees, which are as high as $4, by 75 cents for six months. The board has an option to raise parking fees an additional quarter after that. Virginia member T. Dana Kauffman cast the sole opposing vote
The fare and fee hikes are scheduled to take effect Jan. 6 and would be the first such increases in four years, officials said. There are no increases for off-peak subway fares or MetroAccess…
As a result, rush-hour riders, who make up the biggest portion of daily users, will experience the largest increases. A trip from the Vienna Metrorail station to Dupont Circle would increase from $3.65 to $4.35; a trip from Shady Grove to Tenleytown would go from $3.35 to $4.
Percentage-wise, these increases are astronomical. The base fare increases by 22 percent; the fares from suburban stations will increase by approximately 19 percent. In comparison, the cost for a 30-Day Unlimited MetroCards is increasing by 6.5 percent.
With the WMATA’s tier fare structure comes a suburban vs. urban debate. Board representatives from Virginia and Maryland say that their suburban constituents are against these astronomical increases and are open to the idea of sitting in soul-crushing DC-area traffic to avoid paying up to $8.70 a day for a round trip on Metro. Those commuters who park-and-ride could see weekly increases of up to $10.75 a week. Yikes.
Once again, no matter how inept the MTA can be sometimes, all things considered, we have a pretty sweet subway in New York, fare hikes and all.
And now a segue.
Luckily for you, that pretty sweet subway system tones down the service advisories for the holidays. Thank the tourists. There are only two service alerts this weekend, and neither of them are all that inconvenient.
From 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday, December 15 and Sunday, December 16, Bronx-bound 4 trains run express from 149th Street to Burnside Avenue due to cable work north of 149th Street station.
From 12:01 a.m., Saturday, December 15 to 5 a.m. Monday, December 17, Brooklyn-bound D trains run express from 36th Street to Coney Island/Stillwell Avenue due to switch renewal north of 9th Avenue.
The WMATA’s board voted today to raise fares for the D.C. Metro. The increases are very substantial with the rush hour base fare increasing by 22 percent and the maximum fare going up by nearly 16 percent. It certainly makes our upcoming fare hike pale in comparison. More on this story later. [Washington Post]
So the MTA’s fare hike hearings are suffering from something of a PR backlash. As I noted on Monday, MTA board members — those very same board members who don’t ride the subways but have to vote for the fare hike next month — haven’t bothered to show up to the hearings. That’s certainly the way to win over a very skeptical public.
In fact, the non-attendance has gotten so out of hand that one legislator is proposing stripping absentee board members of their votes. Rory Lancman, a Democratic Assembly representative from Queens, has written a bill that would bar board members from voting on the fare hike if they haven’t attended at least 50 percent of the hearings. Lancman, an avid opponent of the congestion fee, raises a valid point, but right now, it’s too little too late.
Meanwhile, down in the our Nation’s Capital, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority is going through its very own fare hike motions. The WMATA, despite double-digit ridership growth over the last five years, claims they need a fare hike in order to maintain their current levels of service. In fact, as I noted in August, the WMATA is already threatening to cut DC’s already-pathetic late-night subway service if they don’t get the fare hike. Aw, how cute. They’re resorting to the same threats as the MTA. They want to be just like us.
In fact, they’ve even gone so far as to schedule a series of meetings in Virginia, Maryland and the District so that riders can give feedback on the fare hike proposals. Now, while our fare hike hearings suffer from a noted lack of officials, DC’s hearings have another problem: Only four people showed up to the first one yesterday.
As Lena H. Sun in the Washington Post reported, this poor turnout was probably related to the location chosen for the fare hike. The WMATA picked a conference center in Reston, VA, a DC suburb that is Metro-accessible. The conference center, however, is not at all accessible. Here’s how the WMATA’s Website recommends you get there:
By Metrorail: Orange Line to the West Falls Church station, transfer to the Fairfax Connector Bus 505 or 950 to the Reston Town Center Transit Station where a free shuttle bus will leave at 6 and 6:30 p.m. to the public hearing. Fairfax Connector will provide free shuttle bus service from the public hearing to the Reston Town Center Transit Station.
Got that? Take the train to a bus to a free shuttle bus to a public hearing. I don’t think the WMATA has set up enough hoops through which it expects the public to leap. For her part, WMATA board member Catherine Hudgins said it was “possible” that the location may have contributed to the poor turnout. Ya think?
So as New York and the MTA go through a few growing pains on the long and torturous path to a seemingly-inevitable fare hike, at least the MTA has picked places that are rider-friendly. No one shows up to listen to the complaints, but in New York, the people are out in force. In Washington, where the WMATA is involved, it’s a whole different beast all together.
On Sunday afternoon, I headed off from Brooklyn to the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival in Alphabet City’s Tompkins Square Park. Generally, the best way for to go is via the F train to 2nd Ave. It’s a short walk from 1st Ave. and Houston to Tompkins Square.
But it’s the weekend, and things never go as planned on the weekends. Manhattan-bound F trains were running along the A tracks from Jay St./Borough Hall to West 4th. So I had to take the F to West 4th and then switch to a Brooklyn-bound F train making the stops in Manhattan. That Brooklyn-bound train showed up right away, and this weekend service advisory cost me just a few minutes of extra travel.
In New York, we tend to grumble and groan about the myriad service changes. We never know which train is running when and where. But as I silently bemoaned the endless service changes, I realized things aren’t much better elsewhere.
Take China. As The Times pointed out on Sunday, it’s a different — and dirtier — world across the Pacific. With the Olympics headed their way in just under a year, China is panicking. For the largest nation in the world, the Olympics will serve as a coming out party. After years of following an isolationist foreign policy, China will welcome emissaries from all over the globe.
As part of the Olympics, the Chinese are constructing a new subway line at breakneck speed. But they’re also have problems with customer service on the current rail systems, Reuters reported last week:
China is trying to stamp out protests over rail delays ahead of the Beijing Olympics, threatening passengers with legal action if they stay aboard their train once it has reached its destination. “Refusing to leave the train will be regarded as an illegal act endangering train safety,” the China News said, citing a long list of unlawful measures proscribed by central authorities.
There have been several instances of Chinese passengers refusing to leave their trains after serious delays, demanding compensation and an apology from state-run railway operators…In the report, jointly released by the ministry and the Public Security Bureau, passengers must conform in order to ensure a safe and orderly environment before the Games taking place in the capital in August next year.
Yikes. I’d hate to end up in a Chinese prison over a train protest.
Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., a city with just five subways lines, every single line had a problem on Sunday. According to the WMATA, five different incidents of smoke and fire on the tracks or in equipment rooms led to rampant delays all day. This is of course analogous to the subway floods from a few weeks ago that knocked out nearly all of the subway lines.
So as another week begins — the last one before the Labor Day holiday — we should take comfort in knowing that New York is not alone in dealing with subway problems. But more importantly, the MTA is listening to its riders and subway bloggers. They’re using report cards to grade lines, and they’re keeping their eyes and ears on the pulse of the riders. We have a great subway system with room for improvement and a whole bunch of leaders willing to take the steps to improve it. And that is always a good thing.
Photo: Firefighters in DC work to restore order to the Metro. (Courtesy of WUSA 9)