General MBTA Topics (Multi Modal, Budget, MassDOT)

[JeffDowntown]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

The controller was still set in the power mode, if he had moved it to the brake position, even with the deadman deactivated, the train would not have released the brakes and accelerated when the by-pass was cut in. He also could have removed the reverser from the control stand (essentially a forward, neutral, reverse key for a subway car), which would have deactivated the controls before he left the cab. Finally, he could have set the hand brake.

Basically, he fucked up royally.

 

[Roxxma]

Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

Upon taking off, the train struck the operator (who had just stepped out on the platform) who alerted station personnel who contacted the OCC. The OCC knew the train was rogue within 60 seconds of it happening and were tracking it live on the big board. They could not immediately kill power to the 3rd rail because they had to rush & clear trains in front of the rogue train to a safe location before the power could be cut.

A commentator on UHub said that they were in the train that left about three minutes before this one and that it suddenly went express past JFK. They didn't know why, but the reason on the PA was "due to an emergency.

Also, I guess it is nice to know that they have emergency procedures to clear the track and stop the train and that those procedures can be implemented immediately.

 

[mass88]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

How is this guy not already fired?

What kind of work can you f*$% up so badly and in the process endanger people's lives and only get put on admin paid leave while they investigate?

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

How is this guy not already fired?

What kind of work can you f*$% up so badly and in the process endanger people's lives and only get put on admin paid leave while they investigate?

Because that's S.O.P. in most highly-regulated industries when an incident--esp. one involving heavy machinery--triggers a formal investigation. This wouldn't get the NTSB onsite, but they have to file an incident report spelled out to the nines. And that's awfully hard to do unless the dude at the center of the incident is still "captive" under official employment for verifying details. It's both a union reg and a safety regs thing...with a little bit of overlap in the sense that both sides have vested interest for their purposes in keeping the employee from running and hiding.


You better believe, though, when the facts have been all double-checked and the reports filed...he be shitcanned reaaaaal hard and final. And they'll have determined definitively by that point if he broke any laws and gets brought up on charges, too. That bus driver last year who was texting when she crashed trough the fence of a Mass Pike overpass got rung up on an obstruction of justice charge for lying to investigators...after going through the admin leave --> U.R. So Srsly Fired sequence. A firing on the spot wouldn't have uncovered the criminal activity quickly enough and in enough detail to make an indictment.

 

[Jahvon09]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

Kind of reminds me of THIS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAB9B50ouYs

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

This news slipped under the radar. . .

The commuter rail DMU purchase, as you may remember, had its ongoing Request For Proposals, but funding for continuing to next steps of the procurement was stripped out of the fiscal year plan. RFP was allowed to continue with a deadline of last Wednesday.

They quietly canceled the RFP outright in late November. So that's the end of their dalliance with DMU's for foreseeable future.

 

[JeffDowntown]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

This news slipped under the radar. . .

The commuter rail DMU purchase, as you may remember, had its ongoing Request For Proposals, but funding for continuing to next steps of the procurement was stripped out of the fiscal year plan. RFP was allowed to continue with a deadline of last Wednesday.

They quietly canceled the RFP outright in late November. So that's the end of their dalliance with DMU's for foreseeable future.

Great, so no real "Indigo Line"; no frequent Worcester Line inside 128 service...

Yep, we should have a new motto for the T: "The T, where nobody is in the cab"

 

[Arlington]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

We can still get the service pattern--clockface every :30 or :20 mins with the vehicles we have, at least on the two track branches, maybe just Lowell and Worcester and NEC to start. Or do full length only every :30 with short turns at Anderson, Framingham and 128 every :15

Putting more hours on the trains we have is a better deal than buying new.

If we had to add yard space for DMUs I would rather devote a similar amount of land and tracks to turning loops

The real trick is having the will for frequent all day service, not any particular vehicle.

 

[JeffDowntown]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

We can still get the service pattern--clockface every :30 or :20 mins with the vehicles we have, at least on the two track branches, maybe just Lowell and Worcester and NEC to start. Or do full length only every :30 with short turns at Anderson, Framingham and 128 every :15

Putting more hours on the trains we have is a better deal than buying new.

If we had to add yard space for DMUs I would rather devote a similar amount of land and tracks to turning loops

The real trick is having the will for frequent all day service, not any particular vehicle.

I thought that the crew minimums made that kind of service on full trainsets prohibitively expensive? Or did I misunderstand that different about DMUs?

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

We can still get the service pattern--clockface every :30 or :20 mins with the vehicles we have, at least on the two track branches That means Lowell and Worcester and others. Putting more hours on the trains we have is a better deal than buying new.

If we had to add yard space for DMUs I would rather devote a similar amount of land and tracks to turning loops

The real trick is having the will for frequent all day service, not any particular vehicle.

You're not getting that on Worcester till they spend the kajillion dollars ripping out and rebuilding the signal system. And due to lack of crossovers you can't even access the Riverside spur from the outbound track without running 'wrong-rail' all the way out from New Balance.

The non-ADA stations are also going to be a no-no under those brisk frequencies. So that's 3 expensive total rebuild jobs at the Newtons, an expensive job at Winchester Center modifying the ramps (which are not quite ADA spec) and installing mini-highs, doing the relatively simple but mysteriously deferred mini-high install at West Medford, and fixing the out-of-service mini-highs at Mishawum.

Fairmount's even got issues with a southside bulletin mandating a 5-car minimum consist instead of the usual systemwide generic minimum of 4 cars, because 4-car sets weren't shunting the track circuits properly. Something's got to be fixed there if you don't want to run piggishly long sets carrying the third conductor.



They've got a lot of work to do. It was never about the vehicles. It's them still having a lot of work to do with the on-line physical plant and no programmed funding or source + timetable for programmed funding to do those chores. And the how's and when's of the service plan are still a great big mystery: when it starts to scale up and how many steps it takes to scale, how the fare collection and zone distribution is going to work, whether there's going to be a mechanism for expedited transfers between modes. A mystery that hasn't had any details filled in ever since the 2024 map was introduced with fanfare by Gov. Patrick.

Any service increase is welcome, but they're such a far cry from having a mechanism for delivering service resembling rapid transit lite that the first scale-up to half-hourly service using push-pulls a few years ahead of whatever xMU's they have in mind...might not happen until the next order of replacement locomotives and coaches have been broken in. 7 years from now if we're lucky and they get funded in time before past- expiration -date old stuff starts breaking down all over again.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

I thought that the crew minimums made that kind of service on full trainsets prohibitively expensive? Or did I misunderstand that different about DMUs?

1. The DMU spec they intended to order has an advantage in their internal configuration, which has seating set up more like a subway car and extra set of center doors. Commuter rail riders overwhelmingly plant butts in seat between home stop and terminal, with not a very high percentage of interzone trips. Quasi- rapid transit is going to be a lot more quick-on/quick-off between intermediate stops, meaning you need good interior flow and low dwell times to keep moving through very dense stop spacing.

You can certainly do it with conventional equipment if the procedural mechanics of boarding/alighting are optimal. Since this service is being framed as a gradual grower ridership obviously isn't going to be exploding at the seams most time slots in those initial years. But you'd have to think pretty seriously about things like Charlie tap surfaces at the vestibule doors to streamline the dwells as much as possible. Even a conductor with hand scanner is going to force a little bit of aisle traffic-clogging chasing down the newest boarders.

After enough years of getting by like that you will want an interior and door configuration that's more built to-task. That's where the needs of conventional 495-oriented commuter service and 128-oriented hyper-local service start diverging over time. You certainly wouldn't want to send Indigo-configured DMU's to handle a well-established rush hour service; that's going to fare exceedingly poorly handling the 7:00am out of Franklin that a six-pack with 3x2 seating can already barely contain. And after 10 years of Indigo it's going to start becoming a real constriction to get between Newton Corner, Allston Landing, and/or Back Bay quickly and cleanly in a regular CR coach while tripping through the aisles, jockeying for position around the vestibules, and maneuvering to find or be found by the conductor.



2. There are ops savings on fuel, turnaround time, and acceleration with the DMU's. But--caveat--it's not anything revolutionary, and default schedule padding for the terminal district makes total trip time on the clock within the margin of error. EMU's are the ones that leave diesel P-P's in the dust, not DMU's. Where the advantage starts to diverge is in frequencies. Run them at a dizzying rate--those all-day 15-20 min. frequencies to/from 128, day-in and day-out--and the accumulated efficiency gets very pronounced and makes them a good deal (Note: that value proposition is a lot different for a small or startup operator vs. a Top 6 legacy operator trying to adopt a niche fleet). But...there actually has to be real Indigo frequencies to open up that advantage. They'd be lighting money on fire with a gruesome new loss leader buying a specialty fleet to run on conventional peak/off-peak schedules that are sometimes 25 minutes, sometimes 45 to an hour.

So...uh...gotta pin that true-blue Indigo service plan to a firm calendar rollout before taking that plunge. The evaporation in enthusiasm for continuing is no doubt influenced by the continued radio silence on how/when/where/to what extent that service plan happens.



3. Staffing regs are 1 conductor per 2 cars, so that depends on how you define a married-triplet DMU. The rule doesn't differ for single-levels vs. bi-levels despite the big difference in seating per conductor and having to work two levels, so by all logic you should be able to get by with 1 conductor per 3-car unit. The seating configuration is a less-dense for freer movements getting on and off mid-trip. But I doubt that bureaucracy around that has been codified yet; after all, the RFP wasn't even completed so we don't know how that configuration fared with the potential builders.

Other thing to consider is what ops practice is going to end up being. Are these things truly going to run as singlets most of the time? Or do things like that 5-car bulletin on Fairmount (if the signal system isn't tweaked or PTC doesn't make it go away) going to make 2-DMU lash-ups S.O.P. Or will there be some inflexible rule about running double so one can push if the other craps out; Metro North won't let M7's or M8's run as deuces for that reason (caution: apples-oranges since those are EMU's). What's that going to do for efficiency, and how many staffers do you need for that? We don't know...that's unanswerable because there won't be a next step to drill down to those details until if/when they decide to try this again in several years. And Keolis's contract will have been up by that point so it's also unanswerable who's going to be making and enforcing the house rules if/when they pick this back up.

 

[Justin7]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

This was a 25-year veteran operator and not some newbie. So...wow. It's almost unfathomable somebody with that level of experience could fuck up this badly. If he were habitually that reckless he would've washed out years ago because they don't tolerate slip-ups, and if this was even an occasional habit of his there are way too many eyes on the operators on a daily basis for a supervising inspector to not immediately gain notice and ring him up for something as blatantly against the rules as a frickin' cord tied around the throttle. Competition for rapid transit operator jobs within the agency is stiff...they get bumped to assignment Siberia in favor of somebody young and hungry if they're lackadaisical on the job.

This guy must've developed sudden-onset laziness or really learned to hate his job to have that much experience but go down for something this moronic.

There is no telling how long he had been rigging the switch.

 

[George_Apley]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

There is no telling how long he had been rigging the switch.

If he's been doing this for a while (and if it's a wider problem among drivers) then that points to a much wider systemic problem with the T's inspection regime. That said, until the investigation is complete, I'm hesitant to throw the T's inspector's under the train (so to speak).

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

If he's been doing this for a while (and if it's a wider problem among drivers) then that points to a much wider systemic problem with the T's inspection regime. That said, until the investigation is complete, I'm hesitant to throw the T's inspector's under the train (so to speak).

Well...but this wasn't middle management protecting middle management's ass like an inspector demurring from ratting out another inspector. Veteran operator or not, it was an operator...and operators are below inspectors on the food chain. If the glut of inspectors didn't find something all the new station security cams that were installed for the One-Person Train Ops rollout would surely picked up something like a foreign object tied to the throttle if that was a widely-used cheat.


It's possible, sure. But not all that probable there was some 'blue wall' of management looking the other way. As a cheat this seems more like the "I saw this old-timer do this once many years ago, so I'll save this trick for a special occasion when I gotta make up for lost time" type thing...a practice that only persisted because its rarity evaded detection, and because it took a vet knowing the inspectors' and cameras' blind spots to pull it off those rare occasions without detection.

 

[jass]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

Universal Hub saying late night service has been eliminated?

Fucking hell.

 

[bigeman312]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

Late-night T service, Green Line project could get cut

The MBTA appears poised to end late-night bus and subway service next year, after the fiscal control board overseeing the agency on Monday asked staff to begin the process of canceling it.

Also on Monday, state transportation board officials indicated they would proceed with the troubled Green Line extension only under certain conditions — if they continue at all. They want to make the project cheaper, find new management and contracting processes, and secure additional funding from local and private sources, rather than call on state government to pitch in even more.

The decisions come as transit officials are grappling with ways to balance the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority budget and shrink the ballooning cost of the extension, after officials said the project could cost nearly $1 billion more than estimates from last year.

...

 

[The EGE]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

The following is the full text of a public letter that the Ridership Oversight Council sent the MBTA today:

December 14, 2015

To Whom It May Concern,

The MBTA Rider Oversight Committee (ROC) believes that, due to Federal Transit Administration (FTA)regulations, the MBTA cannot eliminate late-night service without conducting separate disparate impact analyses for each of the affected routes. Also, in eliminating late-night service on certain routes at the end of June 2015, the MBTA may have violated these same FTA regulations.

According to FTA Circular 4702.1B, late-night service was considered a permanent service addition as of March 2015, twelve months after being launched in March of 2014. The following is an excerpt from that circular (specifically, FTA C 47021B, Chapter IV, Section 7.a, Paragraph 1.a):

"If a temporary service addition or change lasts longer than twelve months, then FTA considers the service addition or change permanent and the transit provider must conduct a service equity analysis if the service otherwise qualifies as a major service change."

As for what constitutes a major service change on an individual route level, the proceeding bullet-points describe what the MBTA considers major service changes according to the MBTA Title VI Report (page 7-13, under the section heading “MBTA Service Change Policies”):

 Implementation of new routes or services

 Elimination of a route or service

 Elimination of part of a route

 Span of service changes greater than one hour

 Route extension of greater than 1 mile

Since cutting late-night service would effectively reduce permanent service on the affected routes by approximately 1.5 hours on Fridays and Saturdays, the ROC believes that the MBTA cannot actually cut late-night service outright on any route. Furthermore, when the MBTA cut service on certain routes back in June 2015, although practical, those cuts appear to have violated FTA regulations. Each affected bus route had its permanent schedule altered by more than 1 hour (which is considered a major service change for that route) without a disparate impact analysis being completed.

The ROC requests a written explanation from the MBTA regarding the concerns mentioned in this letter, delivered to our next meeting on Monday, December 21, 2015. The meeting will take place between 5:00pm and 7:00pm here at 10 Park Plaza, within Conference Rooms 1, 2, and 3. In the interim, the ROC is proceeding to file complaints with both the MBTA Title Specialist and the FTA.

Respectfully,

The MBTA Rider Oversight Committee

 

[CantabAmager]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

I've broken down, or tried to approximate, the cost breakdown of late-night service by mode. I used the data from the summary report of the Fri/Sat 3am pilot program, so not everything is exactly on point, and I only reference costs incurred in direct operation of service. There are about 3 million in general background costs that can be applied across all modes.

Ridership Trends Late-night ridership is microcosm, albeit with more acute differences, of normal ops: heavy on rail-transit, light on bus. All told, the MBTA roughly 1.4 million late night entries over a year (March 2014 - March 2015) (about 27,000 per weekend). Ridership varies over the year: Sept-Nov and Feb-June are higher than average; highest single weekend: April 11 and 12th was the highest at almost 35,000 recorded entries (30% increase over average).

84% of late-night trips occurred on the subway, Green (33%), Red (23%), Orange (20%), and Blue (8%). 16% used the bus. Park St was, easily, the most trafficked station (1,700 per wknd, 6.3% of total entries). The top six is rounded out by State (1,050), Haymarket (975), Harvard (950), Kenmore (920), and Central (900). (note: using the top six because fuck the base-ten numeral system - but really because there's a steep drop-off between #6 Central and #7 Boylston, 900-700 respectively).

About 6,500 entered at a top-six station, that's 24% of total late-night ridership. The Silver Line copped about 590 riders per wknd - the most for any bus and more than the aboveground portion of the B (the highest grossing surface trolley route). Granted, the surface GL entry numbers, by and large, reflect inbounds, not outbounds - makes sense people are heading in prior to 12:30 and not heading back into Boston late at night. The 66, 1, 57, and 28, in that order, are the only bus lines to cop over 300 riders per wknd.

COSTS Fare recovery rations are a bit difficult because students with student passes pay less...but I don't have numbers on just how many use student cards, so I'll just use the full fares that were assessed during the pilot ($2.10 RT, $1.60 for bus), but keep in mind that doing so will produce accurate, but not precise, estimates of cost-effectiveness and doesn't include transfers at this point.

The total cost of the year-long pilot was $13 million (which has since been revised upwards I believe - I'm using $13 mil for the calculations at the time being), the service recovered $2 mil in fare revenue (15% recovery ratio, average subsidy of $7.84 per rider).

Bus ops costs were $3.1 mil, subways ops costs were $4.3 mil with $1.4 mil in additional subway-specific maint costs - total of $5.7 mil. Assuming 1.175 million subway riders paying $2.10 (see note above), that'd be in theory 2.5 million in fares, and a fare recovery ratio of 44% and a net subsidy of $2.70 per pax. About 225,000 rode the bus, assuming $1.60 per rider, they'd accrue $360,000 in fares - that's a fare recovery ratio of 12% and a net subsidy of $12.2 per bus pax.

Those numbers aren't precise and do't reflect the actual intake, but they do give a ballpark as to the relative cost-effectiveness of late-night service modes. There's something else to be said in lumping in student rebates, which are a separate subsidy, with the late-night cost-per-rider numbers.

The issue that irks me most is that late-night service, and the resultant subsidy costs, are thrown as one lump sum. The FMCB is too smart to ignore that bus ops are the main driver in higher late-night subsidy levels; I'm more annoyed that instead of looking for a solution in perhaps canceling student rebates (idk if that's even possible) for late-night service, looking for Uber, Our Lord and Savior, Blessed be Their Name (that's sarcasm folks) to partner on just rubber-tire service while keeping the rail lines open, or raising late-night fares isn't the objective, blanket cancelation appears to be.

I'm sure there's internal protocols that makes solutions that we, or I, might view as easy, more difficult, but there's certainly some pretty good numbers in theory from the last pilot. The color lines did pretty decent I think, I think it'd be a shame to cut them.

 

[datadyne007]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

^ Where did the 116/117 rank? Combined do they equal over 300 a weekend? Curious because this is not a "drunk bus" corridor, but a crucial blue collar worker corridor. Often, the 116/117 late at night (around 11) looks like just like the evening peak.

Thank you for crunching these numbers btw.

 

[whighlander]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

The following is the full text of a public letter that the Ridership Oversight Council sent the MBTA today:

Hey ROC -- What part of $242M don't you understand -- the T is in a DEEP HOLE -- the first thing that you do when you find yourself in a deep hole is to stop digging out the soil under your feet

from the story in the Herald 12/14/2015

Rail watchdog says MBTA ‘being crushed by a mountain of debt’
Jack Encarnacao Monday, December 14, 2015

The debt-plagued MBTA is entering a crucial two days when it must tackle the daunting task of cutting costs, raising revenue and ridership, while keeping its operations on track — even as the transit agency juggles crises ranging from last week’s runaway train to avoiding a repeat of last winter’s shutdowns.

The T’s Fiscal and Management Control Board meets today to decide on a range of revenue-boosting ideas including overturning a ban on alcohol ads, and by tomorrow must submit a report to the Legislature detailing how it will separate its commingled operating and capital budgets....

The T says its operating expenses have grown at 5 percent for the past 15 years, while ridership is nearly flat. If nothing changes, the T projects its deficit will reach $427 million by 2020. The agency projects it will run a $242 million structural deficit next year. It will have to commit $462 million to 
service its debt next year, and $540 million in 2020.

Paul Regan, executive 
director of the MBTA Advisory Board, said early retirement 
incentives for employees, 
unfilled vacancies, and other personnel moves will be unavoidable — as will fare hikes.

“The T’s going to have to figure out what is the number that they can safely and 
efficiently operate their service,” Regan said. “You can’t get all the way there with personnel savings, but you can’t get anywhere without them. It’s a brutal situation to be in.”

Just wondering if the "Runaway Red Line Train" -- might it have been a preemptive strike by the Carmen's Union arguing that not only can't their membership be cut -- but that for safety the 1 person rule needs to be reset to 2 persons