Revised NYC Subway map

Harry Beck would be proud.

If he were a lush. Which he probably wasn't.

Rant: Eastern European Train Systems

So, as astute readers know from RJ3's kind posting of all of my dorky pictures of trains, I'm deep in the heart of my Eastern European travels. By this time, I've taken trains in many of the major European countries. And to preface my complaints, I realize that Eastern Europe is still developing and lacks money for many improvements, so I won't comment on the graffiti-covered trains or the three trains and a bus that made up my 'direct' train from Kosice to Krakow. Instead, I'll comment on two things that drive me absolutely nuts about travel on trains in this part of Europe:

1) Seating and Seat Numbering
I'm hoping one of our brethren from across the pond can explain this one to me. First, where the heck did the horrid carriages with eight-seat side compartments (rather than four and four with a middle aisle) come from? Other than conserving on heating and air conditioning costs by keeping the airflow constricted to a smaller area, whose brilliant idea were these things? What possible purpose would this serve that regular four-aisle-four seating wouldn't?

And more importantly, where do the seat numbers come from? My (horribly-drawn) sketch below shows the seat numbers in my more recent train, a very nice InterCity from Krakow to Warsaw. Follow the seat numbering and find logic in the order, please. And this is not unusual -- I've found this type of seat numbering all over Europe, and I can't understand the logic in the least.

Now, I'd understand if the whole system was still in such a bad state that everything was on paper tickets. But Hungary has an extensive ticketing system, including seat reservations that can be done up to several minutes before departure, a trick some British train lines still haven't figured out. In fact, this is the seat reservation for one of the trains on that same trip -- nicely printed, with all pertinent information clearly readable.
So to Hungary, I say: if you want to make sure you're actually getting paid for people riding your trains and, perhaps, actually recoup some of your expenses, don't let them ride on hand-written tickets. Because if you do, people like me are going to think it's a brilliant idea to start counterfeiting tickets and selling them for half-price. And since you never actually collect the ticket, you'd never be the wiser, now would you? Anyone want to help me fund my next European trip?

Subway scenery

Most tourists take the word "Subway" to mean that the New York City rapid transit system is underground, but it's mostly on elevated tracks, with most of the best views available from the outer boroughs. USA Today, of all sources, has a nice guide to subway sightseeing, including favorites such as the 7's nice view of Manhattan as it pops out of its tunnel.

One addition: The F train at Smith-9th gets very, very high up to allow for ships to pass through the Gowanus Canal below. It's majestic, in an urban decay sort of way.

Nothing ever seems to work in Baltimore

As a former resident, I can't tell you how much time I've spent discussing and lamenting how the city has a preternatural inclination to shoot itself in the foot and waste every advantage it has (see here, here and here). Finally state Transportation Secretary Robert Flannagan gets the message:

"Baltimore has not yet figured out ... how to make transit projects [stimulate] economic development," he told a group of business leaders, government officials and community activists at the World Trade Center.

Specifically, he notes how the city has ruined the opportunity to improve the area around Penn Station. A very nice station surrounded by large industrial spaces just itching for conversion to something useful, the city has been slow to part with the warehouses it owns nearby, therefore abdicating any leadership role in making the neighborhood a real urban hub.

But it's worse than that. Let's take a look at some of Baltmore's major transportation screwups and ripoffs of recent years:

Metro poetry

Since some people spend more time on transit than with their loved ones, it stands to reason that at least some poetry should be dedicated to transportation infrastructure rather than love, beauty and all that other nonsense. The Washington Post has a sample:

It's the craziest thing I've ever seen:
If I wait for a Yellow, it's bound to be Green.
If I'm looking for Orange and I know that it's due,
The next train arriving is bound to be Blue.

Marion Reh Gurfein, Arlington

For you out of towners, Marion is speaking of the Washington Metrorail lines that share track in the central business (government) district.

But this isn't unique to D.C. - there's Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" two-liner, which I remember from a presentation I did in high school on subway-related poems.

"The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Yes, as a 16-year-old, I did a presentation on subway-related poetry for an English class.

Why air travel profiling won't work

Because we're just that stupid:

"A Midwest Airlines flight from Milwaukee to San Francisco was canceled Sunday night after a passenger discovered Arabic-type handwriting inside an in-flight magazine.

[...]

The writing, which was scribbled on a page of the magazine, turned out to be Farsi, the Iranian language, said Midwest spokeswoman Carol Skornicka."

So thousands of dollars in fuel, lost time and rescheduling fees went down the tubes because someone assumed some scribbling in a magazine was a sign of imminent doom because it looked Middle Eastern. Even if racial profiling were officially practiced, it would only result in the detention of a whole lot of angry Sikhs, Israelis and Greeks.

A double-decked shame

There has been much consternation in London over the retiring of the last of the Routemaster buses, which have plied the streets for decades.

Of course, Diamond Geezer is all over it.

We had a similar (but smaller) lamentationwhen they took the redbirds off the NYC subway, but it was more muted because the new trains were obviously better, with automated sinage, better lighting and modern climate control. London has replaced the Routemasters with articulated "bendy" buses, which take longer to get through traffic and don't offer the nice view from the top level. One wonders if TfL could have introduced new buses actually liked by riders that would have prevented all this hand-wringing.

"As long as nobody opens their doors, I'm fine"

An intrepid soul sets out to prove how stupid it is to drive in New York City by biking through the massive (~1.5 mile long, carries 33,000,000 vehicles per year both ways) Holland Tunnel during rush hour and ending up handily beating the cars and trucks, capturing it all on video. Of course, taking a bike into the tunnel is dangerous, stupid and very, very, very illegal in these Code Orange times, but the point is made.

Putting the 'fun' in funicular

A.G. is in Budapest, Hungary.

Silly Europeans, hills are for Hummers!

When Airlines Are Like Greyhound, Will Airports Be Like Bus Stations?

Written by A.G. from somewhere in Europe

My travels, of late, have taken me to Barcelona, Spain. I flew into the Barcelona Airport on easyJet, one of the multitudes of European “Low-Cost” carriers that have let me jet around the continent for next to nothing. Barcelona airport itself is decent, if aging and run-down, and is served mostly by the major, more costly airlines. My recent departure from Barcelona, however, took place out of Girona airport, billed by RyanAir and others as Barcelona’s second airport – an amusing idea, given that it resides an hour and a half from the city by train, but I’ll let that slide.

Girona airport has become just another bus station. The airport itself has that same dank feel and smell that inhabits bus stations. People line up with no real sense of order to buy tickets and check their luggage. The floor looks like it hasn’t been mopped in weeks and tables are continually dirty. Trash seems to be never picked up, so cups, bottles, and cans are strewn everywhere. The soap dispensers in the bathroom no longer function and soap is instead dispensed from a old squeeze-top water bottle. The chairs in the gate area look like they are left over from the 1970s. I had to step over standing puddles on the floor where the roof had leaked through. There are no “extendable arms” to reach the airplanes – you walk down onto the tarmac and then up the stairs into the plane.

My working hypothesis is that an airport such as Girona, served almost entirely by low-cost airlines -- RyanAir, EuJet, and my personal favorite W!zz air (exclamation point theirs, not mine) fly from here – where people buy their seats for about the same price as a greyhound ticket in the U.S. When travelers feel like they’ve spent a good portion of their money on a plane ticket, they expect a certain level of quality in the facilities – be it the plane or the airport itself. But when ticket prices drop so extensively, people are less concerned with the facilities around them and airport authorities no longer have a reason to keep airports in exceptionally good shape.

There’s an alternative hypothesis, however: Girona airport is just rather dirty and that it is unique among European airports. Given that American low-cost carriers are just getting started, we haven’t seen this phenomenon yet over there, so I’ll leave it to our European friends to correct me if I’m wrong.

"May I have this seat?"

He're an interesting article on the physical discomfort and paralyzing fear caused by an assignment requiring students to ask subway riders for their seat. I'd comment on the psychological implications and the unwritten code of subway culture, but I'm a busy, busy guy today.

Shutterbugs can rejoin all the other bugs underground

Thank goodness the MTA is reconsidering it's ill-advised and unenforcable ban on photography in the New York subway system. Chalk one up for reasonable rulemaking in an age of paranoia.

Photo from Bluejake.

A Little Light Reading

Over a year ago, Beyond Brilliance/Beyond Stupidity had a posting on free books in the Reykjavik subway, encouring people to read as they travel. Barcelona, Spain has an interesting twist on the books-for-transit idea. Inside the TMB Metro station at Catalunya, one of the major hubs for the city, there is a book vending machine, identical to the vending machines selling candies and snacks but selling popular novels.

Apologies on the poor picture quality.
 

Where in the world is A.G.?

It looks like Barcelona:

He has other pictures of the Barceolona Metro with actual friends in them, but they're sort of shunted off to the back so as to make more room for the (admittedly cool) train.

Bus stop. Permanently.

Greyhound's recent decision to cut service to small towns across the rural Western U.S. has garnered press throughout the eastern media, either as a symbol of the decline of rural America or the heartless nature of big business.

As a liberal, I'm tempted to believe both, but I think the most heartless businesses of all are those who go broke and leave customers and employees in a lurch. Greyhound, as a non-government entity, owes it to customers to do everything it can to fight low-fare airlines and private auto transportation in a bid to stay in business. Frankly, going miles out of the way and slowing down intercity service to stop in towns that have been in decline for decades is not a good way to survive as a transportation company.

But this creates a gnawing problem crying out for a solution. Greyhound is the absolute bottom rung on the U.S. transportation network, the final safety net for people who need to get around but can't afford a car. There could be thousands of people who travel from small towns to regional centers for medical treatment, school or irregular work who will have to move. Of course, those people probably number fewer than the average number of daily riders on one of those new stumpy light rail lines you see popping up all over, but it's still important politically, if not economically.

Perhaps the problem lies in the buses themselves. Correct me in the comments if I'm wrong, but Greyhound uses only one size of bus. Having (grudgingly) used their service a few times, I can report that I haven't seen anything smaller than the standard size. I'm also fairly sure that Greyhound does not cancel buses if no tickets have been sold, since the company counts on certain buses to be in certain places for the next day's runs.

Long story short, this is what I'm getting at: Take the "ride board" common at college campuses and make it professional. Have people with vans and spare time (college students, the underemployed, those in seasonally-busy jobs) register with an online service that performs a criminal background and driving record check and collects a deposit. In exchange, the drivers are allowed to enter the times they are available to drive into a network that matches vans with riders. Place kiosks in small-town gas stations where otherwise-stranded riders can sign up and pay either by credit card or by paying cash to the attendant. The rider would either be notified immidiately or later by phone when the van is full enough to make the run, and the driver would be notified by a dispatcher of who to pick up, where and when.

The organizing firm would pay the drivers and could withhold payment for missed runs, late arrival or dirty vans. Riders would get peace of mind and many would end up with reliable, regular routes, perhaps more convenient than the ones they lost to Greyhound. The underemployed or unemployed van-owners would not have to leave their hometowns. Everybody wins.

Are there problems? Sure. Insurance for one. But I think it's worth exploring and could make somebody a fair amount of money.

New York's Ghost Stations Don't Even Come Close

Unlike normal travelers, when I went to Berlin, Germany and started traveling on the incredibly nice and clean S-Bahn and U-Bahn trains, the first question that popped into my head was, "Wow, I wonder how the metro ran when the city was divided?" My travel companion seemed not to share my entusiasm in finding the answer to my question, but I later discovered the answer from a friend whose tour guide had explained it.

As UrbanRail.net explains:

After the war, the U-Bahn and S-Bahn kept running from one side of Berlin to the other until the Wall was built in 1961. Today's U2 was split into two lines, U1 was cut off at Schlesisches Tor and U6 and U8 began travelling through East Berlin skipping all stations on GDR territory (ghost stations). An exception was Friedrichstraße (U6) which was a border crossing for pedestrians and a transfer point to the S-Bahn.

Two entire lines, the U6 and U8, skipped many of their stations because they were technically in another country. According to the guide (although this is uncorroborated), many of the train cars had blacked out windows to prevent passengers traveling through the ghost stations from seeing out and some even had armed guards to prevent escape through these stations. Oddly, however, mass transit did much better in Communist East Berlin than it did in West Berlin. East Berlin built an extensive streetcar/tram network and greatly expanded the S-Bahn network.

Today, much of the planned work to extend the U-Bahn and S-Bahn system has been delayed due to lack of available funds.

Yes, sprawl is expensive

From a very interesting New York Times op-ed:

There is a mistaken notion that American drivers pay for their roads through gas taxes. Actually, even though states collect gas taxes and a modest federal levy was imposed to pay part of the Interstate expenses, the total of these charges never amounted to more than one-third of highway costs. Such taxes, adjusted for inflation, have actually decreased, and efforts to increase them are politically risky, even though each 1-cent rise in the gas tax costs the average driver less than $8 a year. In practice, our roads and highways have been underwritten by general taxation. With gas taxes and tolls capped by effective lobbying, this annual subsidy has grown, amounting to billions of dollars annually.

So, there you have it. You and I are paying for sprawl out of our taxes, whether or not we use interstate highways, to an even greater extent than car drivers pay for transit.

For comparison:

Passenger fares covered 67.3% of the operating costs of New York City subways in 2002, the highest farebox recovery ratio among the nation’s 14 heavy rail transit systems, according to a just released Brookings Institution study. Close behind were the Washington Metro, 61.6%; New Jersey/Philadelphia’s PATCO, 61.4%; Philadelphia’s SEPTA, 58.6%; and San Francisco/Oakland’s BART, 58.4%. Chicago’s CTA came in at 44.3%; Boston’s MBTA, 43.7%; PATH’s trans-Hudson tubes, 41.0%; Atlanta’s MARTA, 39.2%; Maryland Mass Transit (Baltimore), 26.3%; Greater Cleveland’s RTA, 21.5%; the Los Angeles Metro, 19.6%; Miami-Dade Metrorail, 16.1%; and the Staten Island RTOA, 15.2%.

Bike Rental by the Hour

For those of you unfamiliar with the "Car By the Hour" rental agencies that are now springing up in Washington, New York, Boston, and San Francisco, the idea is something like this:

Say you're at work and you need to run out to a doctor's appointment about 15 minute drive away. Normally you take the metro to work, but because of the appointment, you need to drive or spend an extra hour on the metro getting there and back while missing quality work time. Or, you live in the city and, like RJ3, have an unnatural attraction to IKEA but no way to get there. Companies like ZipCar and FlexCar solve this problem by letting you rent a car for a couple of hours for a simple hourly fee.

Vienna, Austria has a new twist on the plan. Instead of renting cars by the hour, they let you rent bikes from automated bike rental machines (like the one below). This is the second iteration of the program. Apparently, you could originally rent the bikes by inserting a two-euro coin to release them, but too many weren't being returned. Now, you use your credit card to release the bikes (I'm unsure if there are any fees involved, as I speak no German), and you can use the bikes to run all the same types of errands that you don't want to have to walk or take transit to. Quite an innovative idea and one that gets the Third Rail seal of approval.

Freight

Stephen Karlson posts an analysis of Monday's post on freight railroads' unwillingness to play nice with passenger rail. Check it out.

Television Advertising in Metro Stations

Sometime last year, there was a large uproar in Washington, D.C. over WMATA's discussions around adding "television" advertising in the stations and trains. People in D.C. were up in arms about the idea of their daily commute being interfered with by advertising. And, given that I've heard nothing about this idea in a while, I'm assuming WMATA has given up and started looking elsewhere for funding.

The idea seems to be nothing new, however. Pictured at right is a gigantic screen from a Vienna metro station which broadcast a combination of news and advertisments. Platforms in Barcelona, Spain have small television monitors displaying news and ads directly behind the train arrival screen, and some of Berlin's S-Bahn trains even have monitors in the train cars.

Originally, I was worried that the advertisements would become too intrusive. But given WMATA's complete lack of funds and the low likelihood of more funding becoming available from the local governments, this now strikes me as a way to bring money into the system that would not be too intrusive. None of the screens I saw had audio, only video, so it would not distract people who want to use their commute to read, write, or sleep. And at least it will provide for more stupid lawsuits about what can and can't be advertised on trains.

Amsterdam's Historic Streetcars

The picture below is of one of the historic streetcars from Amsterdam. While I know many cities kept their historic streetcars, Amsterdam is actually running this one across regular tram lines (of which there are many) [San Francisco does this on the F-Market line - RJ]. Best I could tell, it was being rented out for tours, so that people could tour the city of Amsterdam by historic streetcar using the city's many active tram line rails.