House passes transportation bill

The house of representatives finally passed a new transportation bill today, which goes next to the Senate and then to the President - and it looks like we've finally got agreement from everyone. The bill (which has a great acronym: SAFETEA - Safe Accountable Flexible and Efficient Transportation Equity Act) is two years overdue (we are currently on the 11th extension of the last one). Out of the $284 billion over six years, there is about $56 billion for transit.

Some thinking going on...

The MTA announced the other day they had $833 million surplus, a bit more than they thought. The mayor mentioned that they should cancel the next fare increase. The MTA is thinking of building the platform over the LIRR tracks on the west side by itself, which could bring in lots of money from development. They could also move their headquarters over there and make some $ selling the old building on Madison Avenue.

The MTA budget report, out the same day, mentions laying off more conductors, which they are definitely taking heat for. Could the new amount of money mean a change in plans? So much to think about.

WMATA funding bill in Congress

Big news for Metro: Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia will introduce a bill offering Metro $1.5 billion in funding.

This is not free money: the bill demands that the federal government get two seats on Metro's board. The bill also meddles in land sales--some members of Congress do not like some real estate projects that are going up near Metro stations. Most importantly, the bill requires that D.C., Maryland, and Virginia create a dedicated source of funding for Metro.

I hate to see Congress meddling in land use decisions. But this bill might finally provide the impetus for Metro's three partner jurisdictions to create a dedicated funding source, something sorely needed.

I'll post a link to the bill text as it becomes available...

515-foot hill challenges rail engineers

Folks in Northern Virginia have long hoped for a rail extension to Tysons Corner, which is the de-facto downtown of Fairfax County. Currently on the drawing board is a plan to extend rail from WMATA's Orange Line. The cost would be $2.4 billion--a bit steep, so planners are searching for ways to cut the cost.

That won't be easy though, in part because Tysons sits on a 515-foot hill. Engineers can either build an expensive tunnel or some ugly elevated structures that would soar high above the ground.

This graphic is a real eye-opener to the challenges that rail engineers face.

Trade road for rails? Sort of...

A group of road builders and toll road operators will offer the Commonwealth of Virginia over $1 billion to privatize the Dulles Toll Road, which runs between the Capital Beltway and Dulles Airport west of Washington, D.C. Well, sort of "privatize." The state would still own the road (well, sort of own the road--the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority owns the land the road sits on) and, perhaps most importantly, the state will still set tolls. Hmm, doesn't sound so private to me...

The Washington Post bandies about the suggestion that the $1 billion could go to pay for a Metrorail extension to Tysons Corner, a large commercial center in Northern Virginia. True, but it could also go to build another road in Richmond or who knows where else...

Free Rides

San Francisco Bay area residents get free transit rides tomorrow morning as part of a Spare the Air campaign promotion and air quality improvement idea. This is the first of several free transit mornings that will happen in the Bay Area.

BART unions, management agree to contract

Looks like BART employees and management will agree to a new contract. The typical train operator or station agent, who makes about $60,000 per year, will get a seven percent raise over the next few years. BART employees also get generous benefits, such as free passes for family members, twelve paid holidays a year, an additional birthday holiday, and up to six weeks annual vacation time. However, health care costs for employees will triple to $75 per month.

Most existing work rules were not changed--for example, a person who cleans inside a station cannot also clean the outside of the station.

Tokyo Earthquake Stops Trains

A 6.0 earthquake hit Tokyo today, killing 23 people and causing a temporary stopage of Shinkasen (bullet train) service and subway lines.

British police killed innocent man

The man that British police gunned down at a tube station was innocent and had nothing to do with the subway bombings. He was an electrician on the way to work.

What a disgrace.

En el autobus

Mexico City is attempting to bring a slight amount of organization to its transportation chaos, with a new Bus Rapid Transit line - the Metrobus. I hope they can get control of the operations and make it work successfully, I have never been there, but it sounds like they could use a system like this.

Bomb on the train? Roll on, baby...

Yesterday aboard a Blue Line train somewhere near the Federal Triangle station, riders saw an unattended bag. Washington Post story. They frantically ran from the car when its doors opened at Federal Triangle, and someone reported the bag to the train operator.

You'd think the operator would offload the train, just as I have been offloaded several times when equipment malfunctions. Naa...the operator closed the doors and proceeded to Metro Center, an extremely busy downtown station.

Hey, why stop the train there? It then proceeded to McPherson Square, where it was removed from service.

Maybe the operator didn't know about the bag? Naa..."the operator announced that there was an unattended bag and that security officials would "hopefully" board the train farther down the line."

Good to see Metro's good at intercepting unattended bags...and the bag's contents? Two baseball hats. A tourist kid lost it.

New Yorkers react to subway searches

Check out Gothamist. Most Gothamist readers seem skeptical of the utility of the bag searches.

Meanwhile, WMATA performed a full search of the 106-route-mile, 86-station system on either Thursday or Friday morning (I can't tell which). Metro is watching the New York experiment to see how it turns out.

NYPD to search straphangers' bags

In the wake of the latest London bombings, NYPD and NYC Mayor Bloomberg have announced that police will now "randomly" search the bags of subway riders.

So the pointless, time-wasting erosion of civil liberties escalates...

London attacked again

London has been hit by another transit attack, with small bombs exploding on one bus and three tubes.

No injuries have been reported.

More details here:
Londonist
Going Underground
CNN

Initial reports say that there were no casulties, although the windows of a #26 bus were blown out.

8.3 miles of subway tunnels

Thanks to Gothamist for picking out of this good New York Times graphic listing all the New York City subway tunnels and their statistics.

Supreme Court nominee involved in WMATA french fry fracas

High court nominee John Roberts upheld the arrest of a 12-year-old who violated the law by eating a french fry within the Metrorail system.

On the one hand, I say arrest the clowns who eat on the Metro. As Metro says, it's the law for a good reason. On the other hand, there would also be a lot less garbage in the Metro if the agency would put trash cans back on the platforms--and this would generate a lot less negative publicity than arresting people for eating does.

It amazes me how terrorism has caused such fear in people that we think it worthwhile to deprive ourselves of something as basic as a garbage can.

Smart cards deter auto theft

WMATA says auto theft is down 40 percent at its parking lots. One purported reason: the SmarTrip card now required for parking fee payment is too much of a hassle for thieves.

How odd that someone would steal a vehicle worth several thousands of dollars, yet be deterred by wooden barriers and payment of a $4 parking fee.

Worth it?

One of the main gripes from the road lobby is that transit is more expensive than driving on government-subsidized (mostly) free roads using gasoline provided by domestic companies that get favorable royalty rates and tax credits for drilling on public lands or from foreign sources protected by the might of the U.S. military. Since farebox recovery rates are much easier to calculate than adding up the many scattered subsidies for cars, roads and sprawl, road travel always looks cheaper.

Then gasoline hit $2.50 per gallon in many places.

In February of 2004, we wrote about a new ferry service between Milwaukee, Wis., and Muskegon, Mich., across Lake Michigan.

For $118 roundtrip per car and $85 roundtrip per individual (pricing schedule), you can take the 5 3/4 hour road trip in about half the time. By road, the trip is 276 miles long. With a 15 mpg SUV and $2.50 gas, your trip will cost $92 assuming your mileage doesn't go down as you crawl all the way through Chicago. If you value your additional time at your destination and on the boat instead of driving at $15 per hour, you get an additional $172.50 in utility for the round trip. Suddenly, the ferry starts becoming competitive. Even if you had to use some sort of Zipcar-like by-the-hour car rental service to get around, you still may be ahead depending on how much you value your time.

Of course, this is a special case. Most destinations do not have large bodies of water between them that you have to drive around, nor are most vacation trips taken alone. But still, the ferry shows how, as gas prices rise, other alternate modes of transportation become economical.

The question that remains is whether American drivers are rational actors.

Subway Games

Loyal reader JS passed along a link to Culture Hole, where they've apparently developed a live-action spy vs spy-type game on the Toronto Transit System. I don't even know what to say. Go read about it there and let us know what you think.

[Editor's note: The author of this entry is amg, who is using zaf's computer and forgot to log her out.]

Subway service e-mails

New York City Transit has been running a weekend subway service e-mail advisory pilot for a month or two now, and it is pretty good. They have actually been listening to comments and modifying the e-mail format and timing. I find it much more useful then walking to the station and finding an out of service advisory... or trying to remember the notices from my last visit.

CTA worker charged in bomb threat

Oh great: a CTA worker has been charged in a bomb threat made against the Brown Line. Several CTA employees heard recordings of the threat and say they recognize the caller's voice, and the call was made from a phone at the target of the threat, the Kimball Brown Line terminal.

WMATA to create riders' panel

The panel will advise Metro on issues of the day. Though the panel's creation addresses a long-standing gripe, the Washington Post easily found people to gripe about the proposal for various reasons. Also, Metro press release.

Update: Dennis Jaffe of the Sierra Club sent me a statement explaining why the Sierra Club now opposes the Riders Advisory Council, a proposal it helped to create. The Sierra Club is concerned that the CEO (currently Richard White) will select the RAC's staff, making the RAC beholden to the CEO.

At least the Sierra Club got Metro staff to remove one component of the RAC proposal: originally Metro staff wanted a provision reading "No member of the RAC shall represent any position of WMATA to the general public, including the media, without first having been so authorized by the WMATA Board of Directors." That definitely would have turned the RAC into a bunch of stooges.

BART security & strike news

BART wants $215 million for security upgrades, including for "chemical sniffers." A BART director was dismayed by Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff's comment that "A fully loaded airplane with jet fuel has the capacity to kill 3,000 people. A bomb in a subway may kill 30 people."

Meanwhile, a train rider had problems using BART's intercom system to contact an employee about an odd passenger.

A BART strike is still a possibility; workers might not ratify their contract.

Acela is back, if anyone noticed...

Amtrak got their Acela service running again on Monday (very limited, but still running). With all the recent craziness, I'm not sure that anyone noticed -- well, the people who were crammed into the Metroliners probably did -- but good for them for finally getting it running again.

WMATA needs escalator permits; a staff member is "sensitive" about photos

You would think WMATA, which has 593 escalators, would know how to get the necessary permits when it needs to fix them. Apparently not, though: these "STOP WORK" signs at the F Street entrance to the Judiciary Square Station seem to indicate that Metro did not obtain the necessary permit to rehab the escalator. The escalator has sat partially disassembled, but without any workers, for days now. I took these photos this morning as people trudged up the stairs on the other, stopped escalator.

As I snapped a few photos at the top of the escalator, a middle-aged woman in a suit and with a Metro ID on a lanyard stopped to talk to me. Apparently she was on her way to work at Metro headquarters, which is near this station exit. "Excuse me, sir, why are you taking pictures?" I explained that I am a blogger who writes about transit and I was wondering why the escalator was out of service. We're rehabbing it, she said. Yes, I said, but what is this "STOP WORK" sign about? You understand that we're sensitive about people taking pictures of our work, she said. "No, I don't understand that," I said. "I can take pictures of whatever I want." Yes, you can, she said. But we're sensitive about people taking pictures of our work. With that she walked off, and I continued taking photos.

Also: Metro is considering random bag searches aboard transit vehicles. If a cop ever demands that he search my bag, I'd be dumb to refuse. But if they ask if they can search (as is often the case with these sorts of searches) I will refuse.

Transit terrorism, expanded

Randolph gave us a summary of recent transit disasters the other day, but the New York Times had a good graphic accompanying an article in their Sunday paper on terrorist attacks on transit systems from 1920 up to the present, world-wide. They used data from a San Jose State University Mineta Transportation Institute research report (HTML, PDF). It is interesting to see some of the patterns - in places where terrorism is a problem, transit systems unfortunately are often targets.

CTA false alarms demonstrate how the terrorists have won

CTA has suffered several false terror alarms--four in the past week. In the latest incident, a caller claimed there were four bombs aboard a Purple Line train. Earlier disruptions involved unattended baggage and another bomb threat.

This is yet another example of how we have lost the war on terror. We have allowed our lives to be changed for the worse. Barricades all over the national capital stand as barriers to freedom and are a disgrace to what this country stands for. Officers with yard-long machine guns patrol our transit systems, bringing us one step closer to being a totalitarian police state. We scatter in fear whenever a poor soul claims to have a bomb (while forgetting that the London bombers and the 9/11 hijackers did not call Scotland Yard or the NYPD before launching their assaults.)

Pushing my rant aside to return to the topic at hand--transit--I hope the bosses at my system, WMATA, don't continue to shutter the system whenever a random bomb threat comes in. Not only do I hate being delayed on the train, but closures for silly bomb threats add nothing to our security. Real terrorists want bodies. Anonymous bomb threat callers want attention.

BART expands cell phone service

Now it will be a little harder to escape your boss' or spouse's entreaties: BART is expanding the number of wireless carriers that provide service in the system. Previously only Nextel was underground; now several more carriers will have service too.

New D.C. Circulator bus to get bus-only lanes?

I saw the new D.C. Circulator buses zipping around the District over the weekend, with many folks aboard. Not everyone thinks they're a fantastic idea, though: see wayan's comment on an old post.

It seems crews are creating new dedicated bus lanes for the Circulator. Interesting. I don't know if that's a good or bad idea.

WMATA reports details on rail service disruptions

A new page on the WMATA website reports details of a day's rail service disruptions. On Sunday, July 10, for example, there were nine reported disruptions.

In non-depressing transit news...

Space.Cadet has uploaded pictures of the new DC Circulator bus, which we encourage you to check out. Though I haven't seen them in person yet, the buses look rather British from the photos.

Update: More pictures from the fantastic BeyondDC are here.