A "dog-gone nice" transit story

It's good to see a positive transit story every once in a while. The Boston Globe reported this morning on a near-miraculous story of a pug who chased a commuter train and lived to tell the tale. The little guy was picked up by the engineer who took him home and eventually reunited him with his worried owners. It's a heart warming story that reminds you that not every T employee is a total grump.

MBTA: welcome to the 21st century

The MBTA sold its last brass token last week to a very surprised East Boston woman, the Globe reports. From now, plastic is the T's currency. The system has been heavily advertising its new CharlieCard, a rechargable credit card-like ticket. The big advantage of the CharlieCard is that it can be tapped on a rfid pad at the turnstiles, which should be much faster than feeding your CharlieTicket through the turnstile's reader. The monthly subway passes have been issued as CharlieTickets for a couple of months now, and that has been working fine so far. I'll be interested to see how smoothly the CharlieCard transition goes.

In other growing pains news, the MBTA debuted a new website, which was getting pretty good reviews, but then they had to take it down just a few hours later due to technical difficulties. The features, like mash-up maps of directions using transit and adding credit to your card online, sound really great – let's hope they can make it work...

End of Flat Fare in Montreal?

The three-station extension of the Montreal metro into the northern suburb of Laval continues to be a controversial newsmaker. Not so much for the Lavallois, who are set to begin riding the off-island rail extension in 2007, but for the city government of Montreal.

Throughout 2006, the city, the primary funder of the metro's parent agency, Societe de Transport de Montreal (STM), has moaned in the press over the cost of the extension and accused Laval of not paying its fair share. In early December, municipal pressure led the STM to announce--in a surprisingly unilingual press release--that the Laval extension would not be opened for revenue service without a funding guarantee from the northern suburb. For its part, Laval claims that it promised to pay its fair share for the service when the project was first approved in the early 2000s. You can read both sides of the snipefest in detail, in this report from the English-language Montreal Gazette, or in the French-language daily, La Presse.

The upshot of which is that Montreal may now, unexpectedly, lose its flat metro fare. Currently, a single fare will take riders anywhere in the Montreal metro system, including to the southern suburb of Longueil, the metro's original off-island extension. However, according to new reports in the Gazette and Presse, in an apparent effort to hedge its financial bets, the STM is now exploring fare options (taking advantage of newly installed automated-fare equipment) that may include distance-based fares, zone-based fares, and differential peak-hour fares--all of which would likely result in higher fares for both Montreal and Laval residents. However, more immediately galling for Laval riders is a planned monthly pass priced 58% above the cost of a pass for Montreal riders--or for suburban riders from Longueil.

While regional transit service deserves a regional funding commitment, it's never a good sign when an agency plays out its regional funding negotiations in the press or uses its riders as political pawns. For the past decade, such has been the case in Chicago, where the CTA is again entering 2007 with an unfunded budget deficit, tense suburban funding partners, and a funding wish-list to be submitted to Illinois state lawmakers.

Still, the Province of Quebec takes a more generous eye to transit funding than does the State of Illinois, so chances do exist for a provincial intervention in the Laval dispute. But if all else fails, if firebrand CTA president Frank Kruesi speaks any French at all, at least Chicagoans now know where to send him.

Join the commuter rail pants party!

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm studying to be one. I'm halfway through my studies, and I can't think of a theory of tort law that entitles people to recover for the cost of replacing pants that rip on commuter railcar armrests:

Any way you cut it, $102,009.17 buys an awful lot of pants.

That is how much the Long Island Rail Road and the Metro-North Railroad have paid over the last four years to customers who have torn clothing on the notoriously fabric-snagging armrests in a line of cars known as the M7.

The payments range from $1,405.61 for the new Paul Stuart suit that a man ripped on Metro-North last year, to $10 or $20 for minor damage fixed by a tailor.

[...]

Metro-North (which has 336 M7 cars with about 14,600 armrests) has issued reimbursements on 452 claims of the total of 475 it has received since 2004, according to the railroad.

The Long Island (778 M7 cars, about 33,400 armrests), which was the first to put the cars into service, in late 2002, has made payments on 533 claims. That is only 40 percent of the 1,329 claims the Long Island line has received since 2003.

It might be instructive to see how much the MTA pays subway and bus riders for pants lost to gum and mysterious liquids.

Pole Dancing Busker

A busker in Milan's underground train network is livening up people's evening train rides. The woman, dressed in cat ears, comes onto a train and performs a (fully clothed) "dance routine" against a metro pole. And here you thought the latin dance at the Times Square station in NYC was cool.

Read more: Busking lap dancer gyrates on metro-pole. Courtesy Fark.com.

Bus Stop Cookies

When was the last time a bus stop actually make you hungry? The latest bombardment of our senses with advertising is the smell of cookies from some bus shelters in San Francisco that have milk advertisements on them, part of everybody's favorite "got milk?" advertising campaign.