Umbrella vending machines

Wow, people have been riding underground in wet London for nearly a century and a half, and it took until now before someone decided that they could make money selling umbrellas at Underground station vending machines.

London Underground vending machine moment: On the last train out, jumping off at some empty station, buying a Dairy Milk at a platform-side vending machine and jumping in before the train left. Colossally stupid, but I always made it back.

Ghosts of the trolley system

Local omniblog DCist takes a look at why Washington's bus system doesn't connect very well to its train system. The short answer: many bus routes still follow long-removed streetcar tracks, useless as they may be nowadays.

Are the Venetians Blind?

I may be a fan of mass transit, but how smart could it possibly be to build a subway to a place that is sinking in the sea, like Venice?

"The subway, which supporters say could be ready by 2009, would link up with a tram that goes to Mestre, Venice's commercial heart on the mainland, and would also connect to a station, to be built in the coming years, for a high-speed train line being constructed between Turin and Trieste. The subway would traverse the five miles from the airport to the old shipyards in 14 minutes, less than half the time it takes by boat, at an estimated cost of 2 euros for residents and 6 euros for nonresidents, compared with the boat's cost of 5 euros for locals and 10 euros for visitors."

Of course, it wouldn't be Venice if they didn't try to rip off the tourists.

The Norman Invasion

Transportation Secretary Norm "I have an airport named after me, do you?" Mineta has an op-ed in the Times on why cutting off federal funds to Amtrak is a good idea:

"Today, trains carry as many passengers between New York and Washington as the airlines do. In the Northeast, on the West Coast and in the Midwest, train ridership is growing. The problem is not that Americans don't use trains, it is that Amtrak has failed to keep up with times, stubbornly sticking to routes and services, even as they lose money and attract few users.

This is why dozens of state and local governments are planning new investment in passenger train service. A good example is the Cascades service that connects Portland, Ore., and Vancouver, British Columbia. The State of Washington has upgraded stations and tracks, and purchased new, higher-speed trains. It subsidizes the operating costs, while Amtrak's role is reduced to running the trains under contract. Ridership on the system has more than tripled since 1995. This is the kind of initiative that we should be helping.

Unfortunately, the federal government can do little to support such projects directly, because all of its money goes to Amtrak. Amtrak then decides how to invest those federal dollars, and in the past it has starved new initiatives to cover its operating losses. Even worse, the company has over the years shifted money away from much-needed repairs, maintenance and upgrades for tunnels, bridges and tracks to cover those losses."

Fair enough, even if the cuts are really to fund wars and not restructure the system -- seeing opportunity in adversity is a good thing indeed. Now if we could only get a better gas tax scheme and come up with a more solid nationwide plan to target money for short-haul routes and infrastructure upgrades.

Booth Closings in NYC

The New York MTA is under fire for a plan to close 160 token booths in 2005, according to a Newsday.com report. There is hightened concern that emergency responders may not be able to reach people on the platforms if there is no one available to open the booth. A man was shot in a Chelsea station over the weekend and police officers and EMTs had to borrow MetroCards from passengers to get through a full-height turnstile to reach the platform. The victim later died of his wounds. Not all police officers are given MetroCards -- only those who are assigned to the transit bureau has them.

The question of closing booths is a major one for NYC, which has routinely come under fire for anything involving the cutting of active staff. Often these concerns are wrapped in the language of "safety", even when there are few safety concerns at hand (such as the automation of the L train). To be fair, however, there should be concerns about having completely unstaffed stops in the New York City subway (or any subway, for that matter), as remote-staffed facilities do not offer any crime deterrent. It's like asking people to walk into a dark alley late at night because it's the only way to get to their house. The question, then, is balance - how to balance the cost savings of cutting booth managers with the necessity of always having someone onsite at a subway stop.

When Things Go Missing

The Washington Post has an article about the lost and found for the D.C. metro. Among the more notable items are a stuff alligator head, an acoustic guitar, and a can of peas.

How drunk do you have to be to forget you're carrying a stuffed alligator head on the metro?

Gas tax, Tex

When I lived in Baltimore, I often visited Washington, D.C., and paid the $1.10 base fare to ride Metrorail. When I moved here, the fare had just increased to $1.20. Last summer, it went to $1.35. It's still a steal if you ask me, but the rapid increases over the past few years to make up for a lack of dedicated funding and several years of no increases are worse for farther-out commuters, some of whom pay close to $4 each way for a 40-minute ride.

The price for public transportation rises regularly because of higher costs to run the service and the fact that in most cases, an appointed board approves fare increases.

Drivers, who pay for the road system partially through a gasoline tax, find themselves buffered from price rises because a tax needs to be changed by elected lawmakers, who are much less willing to raise taxes than an appointed board. And since gas taxes are measured in cents-per-gallon and not as a percentage of the cost of the fuel, tax has declined in real terms as many states have dithered.

Texas, of all backwards places, is considering indexing their gasoline tax to cut down on the political factor. Not a bad idea.

Musical Metro

Over on DCSOB, RJ3 links to a new song about the metro in our nations capital, aptly titled, If The Metro Don't Go There, It Don't Exist. Check it out.

Song from Songs to Wear Pants To.

The worst transportation city in America?

Some may say that Houston or Los Angeles top the list, but Miami, where I just visited for the weekend, may be a contender.

One of the main problems with getting around in Miami is the quality of the drivers. A quarter of the people on the road are geriatrics in huge domestic barge-cars who should probably have their licenses revoked for poor vision, hearing or reaction time. Another 10 percent ride around in high-performance Italian or German sports cars that aren't designed for urban use by amateur drivers. The purring of the engine goes to their head and they become as maddeningly aggressive as the geezers are annoyingly passive. Another quarter of the cars on the road are operated by people who can't be bothered to learn English and thus miss exits and instructions since they're not in Spanish or Kreyole. I'm not an anti-immigrant nut, but coming here to work and getting a license without knowing what "merge left" means are two very different things.

The next big problem is bottlenecks. Miami and neighboring Miami Beach are stitched together by a few causeways and within the city, rivers and canals create a series of bottlenecks for drivers. Should there be a problem on one bridge or causeway, it's usually not a big deal to find the next one over, but the signage warning of potential tie-ups is just not sufficient. Why must one spend two hours going ten blocks because of a Haitian festival downtown and only hear about what's causing the delay from the sound of music and the sight of people with flags going to and from the event? Sure, there are traffic reports on the radio, but who would think of regularly checking them at 2 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon?

Public transit is a joke. There is one all-elevated heavy rail line that is inconvenient to everything and doesn't go to the airport, one commuter-rail line that runs infrequently and requires convoluted shuttle-bus transfers to get anywhere and one downtown peoplemover that is great for sports fans and just about nobody else. There are buses here and there, but for a tourist to take a bus would require maps and schedules that most bus stops lack.

Miami Beach, since it is essentially a sandbar, has its own problems. The concentration of Ferarris and Hummers is highest here, but they can't go more than 15 miles per hour because there is no space. A better cicrulator or tourist trolley wouldn't catch on because the whole point of South Beach is to cruise around, letting people see you in your flashy rented car. Of course, people live here, and their predicament is worse, since parking is as limited as my tolerance for bridge and tunnel types hanging out at the Clevelander with popped collars.

That, and the high water table, is why so many apartment buildings were built with first-floor garages. How much "Art Deco charm" is lost strolling down the street and looking up close at something that is more Deep Throat in All The President's Men than Robin Williams in The Birdcage. Feh.

Underground fashion

When I'm in New York killing time at Grand Central Station (I always meet people at the clock), I usually wander into the Transit Museum store and consider buying something. A t-shirt emblazoned with my line? Naah, overdone. An old two-tone token? Useless and hard to display. A subway map shower curtain? I already have a shower curtain that works just fine and looks like the opening credits of Coupling. The store has never done it for me.

But now the MTA is upgrading its fashion sense (if not the signaling system) by auctioning one of a kind designs with subway themes from top designers. If I had a lot of money, these might make a good gift. In the meantime, I'm waiting for WMATA to start selling a waffle iron that makes the pattern found on Metrorail station ceilings.

Eye in the sky

Satellite navigation for U.K. trains is under consideration by the rail industry. Tracking trains from space would make it possible to know where every train in the country is at any time, preventing collisions and lessening congestion delays.

They've been trying to do something similar with New York's notoriously bunchy buses, but the tall buildings have made it hard for to transmit accurate signals.

Federal transit priorities announced

The Federal Transit Authority announced its funding priorities for the new budget yesterday. Needless to say, some agencies are happy, others are not.

Winners

- Colorado will have federal money for its ambitious ligtt rail expansion.

- New York has the OK for the Second Avenue Subway and a LIRR link to Grand Central.

- Oregon light rail expansion will be funded.

- San Diego will line up for some light-rail expansion chedda.

Losers

-Dallas gets some mixed messages.

- Florida commuter rail didn't make the cut. That's what they get for not having a painfully close election.

-Houston won't get money for the expansion of its nascent light rail. More DeLay backstabbing?

- Minnesota won't get dough for the Northstar commuter rail line, perhaps because the Northstars moved out years ago and hockey sucks.

- New Orleans gets no federal lovin for more streetcars. That's what they get for unleashing Master P on the world. Uggggh. Na na na na.

- North Carolina doesn't get the nod for a Triangle-are rail.

- San Francisco gets the thumbs down for an extention of the BART. D'oh!

Amtrak Subsidy Flushed

Our ever brilliant president has proposed sending Amtrak into bankruptcy, reports CNN.com. The new budget has exactly $0 in subsidy funding for the national passenger railroad, down from $1.2 billion last year. The government wants to reorganize Amtrak in bankruptcy and kill off some of the lesser travelled lines. At the moment, however, Amtrak has been seeing a revival: new record ridership figures, especially on the almost-profitable Northeast Corridor.

I understand their concern about some of the higher-loss routes, but this is just plain absurd. We can spend an additional $80 billion on the war in Iraq and still have a massive deficit, but we can't fund viable transportation networks for the country as a whole.

Idiots.

Will there be any room left for office buildings?

This is pretty big news:

In the budget plan he issued Monday, President Bush proposed using $2 billion in Sept. 11 aid to build a $6 billion rail link connecting the World Trade Center site to the Long Island Rail Road and Kennedy International Airport.

[...]

Planners estimate that the rail link project could be completed by 2013. It would allow travelers heading to Manhattan from Kennedy Airport to travel aboard new trains on existing AirTrain tracks that loop around the central terminal area and then run along a viaduct in the middle of the Van Wyck Expressway to Jamaica, Queens.

There, a new 1,500-foot elevated connector would carry the trains from the AirTrain tracks to the Long Island Rail Road tracks heading toward Brooklyn. Near the Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn, the trains would enter a new three-mile tunnel and travel beneath the East River into Lower Manhattan. An underground station would serve both the tunnel and the Atlantic Terminal.

The tunnel would allow access to Hanover Square, the intended terminus of the prospective Second Avenue subway, and the World Trade Center station, the existing terminus of the E train.

So in one complex downtown, you have the train to Kennedy, the E train and Second Avenue subway terminals, some LIRR trains and easy underground connections to PATH trains to New Jersey and the soon-to-be-upgraded Fulton Street tangle of subway lines. While I'm not sure there will be enough money to build another tunnel under the East River for quite some time, this has the potential of being the intermodal masterpiece that spurs development elsewhere and eases congestion across the entire road and rail system.

Potential benefits:

- It allows some LIRR trains that terminate at Atlantic Avenue to go through to Manhattan, allowing some commuters in deepest Brooklyn to avoid long rides on the subway and allowing some Long Islanders to skip transfers at Jamaica or Penn Station, both of which are a mess.

- It creates the one-seat ride from the international airport to downtown, like every other civilized world city.

- It will include a terminal for the Second Avenue subway. Hopefully, that will help get the darn thing built.

- It makes it far easier to get from JFK to Newark, which is a good thing if you're a cheapskate on airfare like me and are willing to trudge across the width of the nation's largest city to save $40 on a flight.

- At $5 to get you from the airport to a distant rail crossing on the outskirts of town, the AirTrain is a ripoff. Now it'll be a steal, assuming they don't bump up the prices.

Potential problems:

- The train goes to Lower Manhattan. The hotels are in Midtown.

- A one-seat rail link is needed more urgently at LaGuardia, where shorter flights mean more domestic riders who are likely to want cheap downtown access.

- Sometimes people forget just how small Lower Manhattan is. Imagine the City of London surrounded by water on three sides. The streets are narrow and thousands of more cabs idling at a train station won't make things any better.

Pushing vs. pulling

We're very sorry we didn't say anything about the commuter train crash in California, but as you can tell, it's been hard for us to keep this blog both up-to-date and exciting with all the other blogging and life persuits that demand our attention. That being said, this Baltimore Sun editorial on how other commuter lines could be at risk for similar accidents has some interesting information I did not know.

"Collisions between trains and cars don't usually have such catastrophic effects (at least not for the trains). But the Metrolink train that hit the SUV (and subsequently hit and derailed a second train) was vulnerable. Why? The train was being pushed, rather than pulled, by a locomotive. That means a relatively light "cab car" (a kind of reinforced passenger car with remote controls to operate the rear locomotive) was the lead vehicle. A heavy locomotive might have thrown the truck aside. Metrolink's cab car derailed."

Does this mean the DMUs, which also have passengers in the first car, face the same safety problems? In the past, we've advocated increased DMU use in the U.S. because running cars without a locomotive allows for more flexible and frequent service at lower ridership threshholds for profitability. Lower fuel costs and one less car to drag over the tracks means you can run two-car trains twice as often as four-car trains with a fuel savings and the only additional cost that of one more driver. As anyone who's ever considered taking the MARC knows, frequency matters in deciding how to get to work in the morning.

Back when Transport Blog was operational (those were the days), Patrick Crozier often used to write about the costs of safety and the necessity of living with a degree of risk. Taking the train is still far safer than driving, which should be enough for most people, although mass-transit accidents of all sorts are rare but spectacular and mass-casualty events that end up on the news for days. So, how do you run a train with a passenger compartment up front that can handle the impact of a car?

Cow-catchers, perhaps?

Gentleman's 'C'

After dire threats of a three-to-five year outage, the C train is back, leaving everyone just a little confused.

Take your Oystercard and...

Here's a great flash animation for a parody song about the London Underground. Being a Jam fan and a LU fan, it really hit the spot.

They really should do one for the New York subway. A little known fact: "Take the 'A' Train" has lyrics.

My shot at it:

You can't take the 'C' train
To go to Yeshiva U up by the bridge
If that bum had refrained
From warming up and just slept in a ditch
Worry -- It won't be coming
not until Dubya's kids inherit the throne
settle for the 'V' train
soon you'll want to light the match yourself

(link from Going Underground)