Don't look over here

Union Pacific Railroad has declared that you cannot take photos of their trains from METRA stations, claiming the ubiquitous and ridiculous "security reasons." How they are going to enforce stopping people from taking pictures of their property from someone else's property is really just the tip of the iceberg. It really does not take much intelligence to make the logical next step to taking pictures from somewhere else where they might have even less jurisdiction and be even less aware of.

Plans advance for Silver Spring transit center

In my own Silver Spring, Maryland, plans advance for a new transit center. The current arrangement combines a bus terminal and a Metro station to make one of the busiest transit centers in the area. The bus bay is quite overloaded, as is apparent to anybody who watches the buses back up there during rush hours. There's also a lot of potential there for air development.

Silver Spring Scene thinks the new transit center is a disaster in the making--unambitious, incohesive, and lacking mixed uses. His writeup is very thorough and worth reading. There is lively debate in the comments too.

North SF Bay commuter rail?

Former US Department of Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta (namesake of the Mineta International Airport in San Jose) was in the North Bay giving his blessing to the most recent (and what seems like the most realized) proposal for commuter rail through Sonoma and Marin counties. Whether or not the sales tax funding for the proposal will pass in November is a good guess, as voters have rejected proposals a couple times before. People in the North Bay say they want more commuting options, to use less oil and all those nice things -- as long as it isn't in their nice green beautiful backyard (and if you have ever been in those two counties, they have some of my favorite places in the country).

If the Bay did not sit between them and San Francisco or Oakland, some sort of rail link probably would have been made a long time ago, but the isolation means any rail link lacks connectivity, except to the very good ferry system on the Bay. We shall see if the increasing price of gas has changed the minds of enough people to think that some alternate form of transportation besides the slow crawl down Highway 101 in the automobile might be worth funding.

Note: maybe a BRT system is a better idea than a fixed rail link. The proposal has rail, stations and feeder buses/shuttles to the stations. A BRT system would have lower capital costs, although they do already have the rail right-of-way. Let's see how this proposal fares.

Bus driver preaches politics

Riders of of the S2 Metrobus, a busy route that travels between Silver Spring, Maryland and downtown Washington, D.C., sometimes get a surprise: a bus driver who preaches politics. The driver, who supports Vincent Orange in the D.C. mayoral race, hands out pamphlets and chats with his passengers about the race. He even stopped his bus at one point along the route, stood in the middle of the aisle, and delivered a speech about the importance of the race. A Metro spokesman thinks the behavior is inappropriate, but the driver says he's not violating any rules. He was, after all, confident enough to cooperate with a Post reporter and photographer.

Update: now the driver has been put on leave, and Metro has circulated a memo to employees warning them that politics on the job violates a Metro policy.

Hybrid Buses, not designed for the freeway

The town of Elk Grove near Sacramento has found that their spiffy hybrid transit buses don't work quite so well (registration required, or PDF
) on the longer regional routes they are using them on. The buses, like regular hybrid automobiles, work much more efficiently in stop and go traffic -- although in a much more pronounced an uncomfortable way for the passengers.

Death of a Train Line

Yesterday, the regional transportation provider for North Carolina's Triangle area announced that it had ceased efforts to receive full federal funding for a rail project that has been in planning for more than a decade. Because of declining ridership estimates, increasing construction costs, and powerful anti-transit opposition, the project, creating a DMU line between Raleigh and Durham, has been brought to its knees. It serves as a case lesson for the mistakes that can be made in the development of a major new transit project, anywhere in the United States.

The Triangle Transit Authority's (TTA) project, which has been in development at least since 1992, had reached the 100% design stage by last year, meaning that construction could begin as soon as financing from the Federal Transit Administration were approved. The TTA had already acquired a large percentage of parcels along the line, and its funding from state and local governments had been lined up. However, because the agency requested a 60% share of total funding from the federal government, the line's development hinged on Washington's approval.

Ridership estimates, made nearer to the turn of the century, envisioned a daily ridership of 25,000 people, but that number has been skimmed down significantly in recent years - to 10,000 - as rules for estimates have changed. Meanwhile, partially because of a high demand in Asia for concrete and steel, construction costs have risen dramatically - from an estimate of around $400 million in 1999 to $800 million in 2006 for an 8-mile shorter line.

Today, TTA faces significant obstacles to the development of its project, even though the federal government has contributed over $100 million to its coffers over the past few years. Not only have more stringent requirements made it more difficult to achieve financing for transit projects under the Bush administration, but competition among cities for transportation dollars has become intense as more and more regions see the value in making investment in mass transit rather than roads.

SF Muni rethinks its routes

You have got to hand it to SF Muni, not many other public transit organizations would be willing to go through with a full-scale analysis of whether or not their current routes makes sense or meet the demands of their current riding population. Of course, they are compelled by a popularly supported city proposition of several years back to improve their service, but bureaucratic inertia is a serious force to be reckoned with. It will be interesting to see if there are any recommendations for rerouting of their light rail/streetcar lines.

No Metro in Georgetown: a myth refuted?

There is no Metrorail service to Washington, D.C.'s Georgetown neighborhood, which is home to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a busy shopping district, and a selective private university. The neighborhood is certainly dominated by the wealthy. There are certainly street stories about why there is no Metro service to Georgetown, but Zachary Schrag seeks to put them to rest in his book, The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro:

Now, as in the 1970s, there is a legend about Metro among the people of Washington. Many believe that WMATA planned a station for Georgetown, then withdrew its plans in response to opposition from politically influential residents who feared that the subway would bring undesirables--the poor, the criminal, the nonwhite, and the tacky--to their exclusive neighborhood. In fact, although Georgetown residents did oppose a transit station, their attitude was essentially irrelevant, for a Georgetown station was never seriously considered.

While it would have been possible to build a subway line to Georgetown, it would have been difficult. Georgetown's commercial center, the busy intersection of Wisconsin Avenue and M Street, lies quite close to the Potomac River. Any tunnel under the Potomac (such as the one that today connects Foggy Bottom and Rosslyn) would have been so deep at the river's edge as to render a station there impractical. Thus, the most serious proposal to put a station in Georgetown, a 1963 sketch by [National Capital Transportation Agency] planner John Insco Williams, depended on a combined highway-transit bridge across the river. According to Williams, highway planners, not Georgetown residents, vetoed this option. Moreover, Williams's map shows that the curve up to Georgetown could not have followed the street grid, but would have to be buried under private property. And "if you get under buildings," planner Thomas Deen recalled, "you get into all kinds of problems, digging under foundations, and settlement, and liability, and lawsuits."

These technical problems could have been overcome had planners felt a compelling need to serve Georgetown. They did not. They intended to serve as many rush-hour commuters as possible, which meant connecting suburban parking lots, bus nodes, and clusters of apartment buildings with dense collections of office buildings in downtown Washington and Arlington. Under this logic, Woodley Park, with its hotels, apartment blocks, and bus routes, was one obvious site for a station, as was the Pentagon, with its 20,000 employees. Georgetown lacked apartments or office buildings or parking, and much of the area within walking distance of Wisconsin and M is under water. "We were building the system for the commuters," William Herman recalled, "and there were not many people commuting to Georgetown. So why spend money on something that didn't meet our goals?"

Still, the Georgetown legend has a kernel of truth. Residents of many neighborhoods did protest planned Metro stations, and WMATA was forced to respond, even canceling one station. But residential protests lacked the clear-cut class and racial connotations of the Georgetown story, for the protests were common to black neighborhoods and white, to poor neighborhoods as well as to rich ones.

Schrag's explanation has been met with deep skepticism among the few people whom I have discussed it with. But after reading his book, his explanation makes perfect sense. Most Metro lines were laid out just as Schrag suggests: to bring suburban commuters to the city. Even the few routes that deviated from original plans--such as the mid-city Green Line's routing between Fort Totten and downtown, or the Arlington Orange Line's shift from Interstate 66 to Wilson Boulevard--fit within this larger scheme of bringing suburban commuters into the city. A Georgetown station would not have assisted with this goal. Of course in some cases, such as with the Green and Orange mentioned above, lines were rerouted to serve other purposes, such as commercial development. So it is interesting to wonder whether Georgetown would have received rail service if there had been a constituency advocating for it. But Schrag's explanation does refute the common story about why there is no Metro in Georgetown.

How many metros have you been on?

Got at b3co.com!

Here's a fun, little diversion: Map your progress around the world by counting metro systems that you have riden on. The collection above is my personal talley. Click on the link to make your own. (via Urban Planning Blog)

On WMATA escalators and lighting...

You'd think that Metro could put elevator technicians on double shifts to speed up the rehabilitation of critical units. But the head of Metro's elevator and escalator office says this would be unsafe.

On this past Wednesday, August 9, David Lacosse, Metro's chief vertical movement man, addressed the rail subcommittee of Metro's Riders Advisory Council. Metro is currently rehabilitating many of its escalators, which involves replacing pretty much anything in the escalator that moves. This process typically takes about eighteen weeks. At many stations, three escalators operate side by side, allowing riders to use the other two while the third is being rehabbed. However in other locations, there are only two escalators side by side. This requires one escalator to be halted and used for two-way traffic while the other is being rehabbed. In those situations, Lacosse says, the rehab can be accelerated to twelve weeks rather than eighteen.

I'm not sure how Lacosse can accelerate those rehabs, though, because he says that he won't ask the elevator technicians to work double shifts. First of all, he says, union work rules limit how much the technicians can work. This is apparently for good reason: the work is quite dangerous. Also not an option is having two different crews work on a single escalator: the equipment is quite complex and if two teams worked on a single escalator, miscommunications between the two teams could lead to mishaps. There is also a shortage of elevator technicians, especially with all the construction underway in the Washington region.

When one of those accelerated rehabs is done, it's time to turn the other escalator back on. That escalator will have been used as a stairway for twelve weeks, and by then it will look pretty disgusting with layers of caked-in dirt. Metro actually has a cleaning machine with strong brushes that it uses to clean up these escalators before returning them to service.

How about putting more fixed staircases in the system so there would be alternatives to escalators? Well, Lacosse doesn't know anything about that--it's not his department. You may notice that some newer stations, such as New York Avenue and Greenbelt, put the escalators next to a stairway so that a unit that's out of service for rehab need not lead to shutting down an adjacent escalator for two-way traffic. (Other newer stations, such as Glenmont, are not so designed. Is this an above-ground/underground station split?) I did hear informal chatter at a meeting a few months ago about removing a large part of Metro's escalator fleet and replacing it with stairways. Presumably this would involve ripping out not long street escalators, but would instead remove some of the shorter platform escalators. This could reduce maintenance costs tremendously. I haven't heard anything about this recently though.

Metro contracts out its escalator rehab work. Routine elevator and escalator repairs, on the other hand, are done by in-house staff. Currently Metro has 90 technicians, with 60 more in apprenticeship.

More, greener lighting

After Lacosse's escalator presentation was Akima Cornell, of the Sierra Club's Cool Cities Campaign. She told the committee about how much energy, money, and (ultimately) air pollution Metro could save by switching to compact fluorescent bulbs. These bulbs burn a lot less power and they also last a lot longer (and it wouldn't shock me if the labor to replace a bulb is much more expensive than the electricity to light it!) Though much of the lighting in stations is fluorescent already, there are still quite a few incandescent bulbs left in the system.

Replacing a lot of those incandescents might not be too hard, but there are some lights that present special challenges: the flashing warning lights at the edge of the platform. Each station has hundreds of them, and they can only be changed when trains aren't running. Putting compact fluorescent bulbs in there isn't an option because those bulbs can't flash the way the current incandescent lights do. LEDs can flash, though, and indeed many traffic signals already use LEDs. Metro is testing LED flashing lights at Rosslyn and they're trying to negotiate lower prices so they can be rolled out to the rest of the system: right now they cost over $100 each. Apparently this is an unusual application for LEDs as Metro had to get the Rosslyn bulbs custom made.

In other RAC news: in an earlier post about Metro's budget process, I mentioned the importance of the board's "guidance" on the budget. Well, RAC chairman Dennis Jaffe says the board is considering getting rid of guidance. How would the budget process work without guidance? Nobody seems to know just yet.

Great photo featuring both lighting and escalators from TotallyAverage via Flickr.

MTBA's Growing Pains

The switch from tokens to pre-paid cards on the MBTA subway system isn't going that smoothly. Cards (the new system is very similar to the one in use in DC) issued by vending machines are not accepted by turnstiles at stations that have not been updated yet, often requiring that riders buy another fare. The T has been posting signs that point out which stations are Charlie Card compatible. But for some reason, they have been unable to keep these signs up to date, causing all kinds of confusion. The T has now asked for additional money (apparently they didn't have enough to begin with) from it's Board in order to buy additional equipment needed to complete the switchover. The saga will continue to play over the fall – the switch is expected to be complete by the end of year. One can only imagine that more complaints will follow.

David Gunn speaks out

A couple of weeks ago the Philadelphia Inquirer sent one of its reporters up to Nova Scotia to interview David Gunn (July 16, business section - PDF), the former president of Amtrak until he was fired by the administration-sympathetic board last year for not pursuing the wrong headed reforms they wanted. This is the first time he has openly talked about his disagreements with the Amtrak board, and the article makes interesting reading for those following the topic.

And You Thought Heat-Related Delays Were Bad?

Just when you thought WMATA's "we can't run trains that often because the tracks are too hot" delays were bad, the rest of the world arrives with a much more dire threat -- monkeys on trains. According to Reuters, the New metro in New Delhi has a problem with monkeys taking the train:

In June, a monkey boarded a train at the underground Chawri Bazaar station and reportedly scared passengers by scowling at them for three stops. It then alighted at Civil Lines station.

Their solution? Hire a monkey, of course. They've hired a specially-trained langur monkey to patrol stations and scare off other monkeys.

Reuters Article

...and in Southeast Asia

The Thailand Cabinet approved a 140 billion baht plan to construct three extension lines to the Bangkok Mass Transit System today. Maybe by the time I finally go to Thailand, they will be finished and I can see them in all their brand-new glory.