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.