General MBTA Topics (Multi Modal, Budget, MassDOT)

Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

Little old non-public operators CSX and Norfolk Southern, which both host a lot of Amtrak service as well as commuter service in DC, also project 2020 as their completion date. The 2020 completion date for the MBTA is for full implementation including Pan Am's frieght units on the north side, there will be partial implementation, not just on the Northeast corridor, before then, but dealing with Pan Am is indeed something unique that the MBTA must consider.

The most recent CIP does allocate $100 million in this fiscal year to award the contract and get the work started. Despite technically being a five year document, the CIP in actual practice usually only allocates funding year-to-year or greatly changes the amounts allocated in later years for multi-year projects. And this year, the Mass Secretary of Transportation specifically stated the FY 2016 CIP is a one year document so that the Control Board can be fully in place and up to speed before large multi-year budgets and plans are brought before them

Since this is a full system integrator contract, of course very little has been spent on construction, they are not doing incremental contracts, they are awarding one large one for everything (except Boston-Framingham cab signals, which will be separate). The money spent so far has been to design the system and issue the RFP. It is simply incorrect to say they have done no planning at all. They have done a very large amount of technical planning and now is the time to award the contract to begin the installation. The Control Board is going to be faced with allocating the full amount required, and will have to make hard decisions about what not to fund to pay for it. This is yet another complication that will impact what to do about GLX, as PTC must take priority. It is certainly possible that the Control Board might not authorize the contract and take a gamble to delay actual construction, but that seems unlikely.

And the MBTA will not be in 100% compliance for vehicles by the end of the year. Installation of ACSES in the Bombardiers is part of the contract to be voted on November 2, even if there is an immediate notice to proceed on the contract, they are not going to have 27 cars equipped in 60 days. Yet another small example of how a guess is presented as fact, and then keeps on getting presented as fact even after being called out.
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

F-Line to Dudley said:
  • There is only one [Geocities-retro-blink-tags] passenger [/Geocities-retro-blink-tags] carrier in the United States that expects that it will not achieve full compliance by the most generous 5-year deadline extension being offered by Congress.
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^in magic marker, scribbled on the outside of the bottle for future generations of ArchBoston members that dare revisit this woefallen discussion and report back "Thar be dragons!" as a warning to other ships.
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

F-Line to Dudley said:
^in magic marker, scribbled on the outside of the bottle for future generations of ArchBoston members that dare revisit this woefallen discussion and report back "Thar be dragons!" as a warning to other ships.
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Correct, you failed to mention freight railroads that are also a big part of the picture, glad to see you now note that.
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

F-Line to Dudley said:
[The MBTA] spent a grand total of $1.7M from 2008-2014 on a project that's carrying a $414M system-wide price tag, have only $23M budgeted in the (post-deadline) 2016 fiscal year, spent only $450K last year and under-spent their budget last year because they did so little, and have allocated no funds for prerequisite installation of cab signals on the Franklin, Needham, and inner Worcester lines. The 5-year extension of the deadline proposed by Congress won't be nearly enough to get them compliant.
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Last winter, one of the complaints dropped on the Baker/Pollack desk was that the T had been slow in spending (something like) $1B in capital budget, such that the backlog of work wasn't just unbudgeted SOGR stuff but, strangely also included budgeted-but-not-spent. I always wondered what that could be. Is PTC "it"?
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

Arlington said:
Is PTC "it"?
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Since there's no possible response formulated from my own lying brain and/or cheating heart and vomited into this website's post submission form that will serve any productive purpose fishing this topic out the same muddy ditch they pulled the Vermonter out of last week, I can only offer the following whimsical philosophical diversion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=063jQAM6N8I

mrgreen.gif
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

Arlington said:
Last winter, one of the complaints dropped on the Baker/Pollack desk was that the T had been slow in spending (something like) $1B in capital budget, such that the backlog of work wasn't just unbudgeted SOGR stuff but, strangely also included budgeted-but-not-spent. I always wondered what that could be. Is PTC "it"?
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They did push the $100 million placeholder from FY15 to FY16, as the review of the two proposals and the dealings with Pan Am have taken over a year. However, they also have not yet placed the full value of the contract in the CIP, only one year's worth, so at most it could only be $100 of the $1 Billion unspent. When the contract goes before the Control Board in a few weeks, there will probably be more background information provided. So far, the Control Board has been placing all presented material online a day or two after each meeting. Stay tuned.
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

MBTA Control Board voted on commuter rail PTC:

http://www.mbta.com/uploadedfiles/About_the_T/Board_Meetings/FMCBPTCAward110215.pdf

Winning bidder is Ansaldo Signals for $338 million.
(Ansaldo is now owned by Hitachi)
http://www.ansaldo-sts.com/en/about-us/ansaldo-around-world/our-companies/ansaldo-sts-usa

Financing package results in no MBTA payment required for first 17 months of contract. Phase1, the South Side, to be completed by December 2018; Phase 2 North Side passenger to be completed by March 2020; Phase 3, North Side freight by August 2020.
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

So this is a random question, not particularly germane to the above discussion:

When Daylight Saving Time ended this past weekend at 1:59:59am, and the clocks jumped back to 1:00:00am, did the MBTA late night service continue its service for the extra hour? Or did they stay on EDT for a few extra hours, and begin the EST schedule with the Sunday morning runs?
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

Riverside said:
So this is a random question, not particularly germane to the above discussion:

When Daylight Saving Time ended this past weekend at 1:59:59am, and the clocks jumped back to 1:00:00am, did the MBTA late night service continue its service for the extra hour? Or did they stay on EDT for a few extra hours, and begin the EST schedule with the Sunday morning runs?
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They put out an alert saying they would not run the extra hour.
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

winstonoboogie said:
MBTA Control Board voted on commuter rail PTC:

http://www.mbta.com/uploadedfiles/About_the_T/Board_Meetings/FMCBPTCAward110215.pdf

Winning bidder is Ansaldo Signals for $338 million.
(Ansaldo is now owned by Hitachi)

Financing package results in no MBTA payment required for first 17 months of contract.
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Note Deadline is now --
http://www.arcweb.com/Blog/Post/849...ain-Control-Requirements-(PTC)-by-Three-Years
US Extends Positive Train Control Requirements (PTC) by Three Years

by Chantal Polsonetti in Industrial Internet of Things
​On October 29th US President Obama signed into law H.R.3819 - Surface Transportation Extension Act of 2015, which includes the Positive Train Control Enforcement and Implementation Act of 2015.

This act revises the previous requirements for implementation of Positive Train Control (PTC) for US Class 1 railroads, extending the deadline for implementation by 3 years, from December 31, 2015, to December 31, 2018. [with further extension to 2020 for those railroads with an approved plan by 2018]

This extension gives each Class I railroad carrier, and each entity providing regularly scheduled intercity or commuter rail passenger transportation, an extra three years to submit a revised plan to the US Department of Transporation (DOT) for implementing a positive train control (PTC) system on certain of its tracks.
The Act also permits such carrier or other entity to provide for an alternative schedule and sequence for implementing a PTC system, subject to DOT review.

H.R.3819 also requires the US DOT to amend federal regulations relating to equipping locomotives for Class II and Class III railroads operating in PTC territory to extend each deadline under the regulations by three years.

posted on Friday, October 30, 2015 at 1:20 PM
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T's newly aggressive plan:
  • Phase 1 -- South Side, to be completed by December 2018
  • Phase 2 -- North Side passenger to be completed by March 2020
  • Phase 3 -- North Side freight by August 2020

To all who bashed the Remake of the T by Baker -- Is the plan to finish the key section in advance of the new deadline a sign of improvement and things to come or just an anomaly -- just wondering :cool:
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

No. Southside is physically easier to do, that's why. The Boston-New Haven NEC has had PTC since 2001 when the Acela debuted, and near-bulletproof reliability since then. So they don't have to do anything on all 62 miles of Providence Line out to Wickford or with the 100% compliant southside equipment pool (fleetwide the only car installs left are 2 dozen old Bombardier cab cars currently segregated north). The 3 Old Colony lines, Fairmount, Stoughton, and the Worcester Line from Framingham station all points west have pre-existing cab signals like the rest of the East Coast commuter rail systems, so the PTC is just installed as an extra layer bootstrapped on top of what was already there. Those 110+ route miles are the same rote-standard installation every other agency down the coast is doing, so if their contractors are competent there should be no unusual problems getting that up-and-running. Most of the resources expended south are doing to be for installing brand new cab signals on the 3 places that lack it: Worcester Line from Back Bay to Framingham, all Needham Line, all Franklin Line. That's a fair amount of actual "Dig Safe" re-trenching of cable and weekend outages to get them ready for the PTC install, which puts them under a design-build time crunch and funding crunch on those 50+ route miles.


Northside has a permanent cab signal ban because of Pan Am freight and paper barriers dating back 40 years, so the extra testing and implementation time for the modified PTC that works without the cab signal layer chews up a lot of extra time on the clock. And on the parts of the commuter rail that overlap with the Pan Am freight mainline they have to make that same northside system--and its extra debugging work--interoperate with a whole other freight PTC system. Which adds even more debugging time.


^^ That last bit is one of the inanities Congress has sacked the RR's with on this short deadline with too little material funding to design half this from scratch. Interoperability between the various PTC systems ends up chewing up a lot of overhead because of the hodgepodge of tech the RR's had to quickly grab for in the race for the deadline. So you have all this extra kludging to make them work together in the territories where they transition or overlap. Amtrak's 15-year-old system, which all the East Coast CR's have all adopted, is optimized for passenger train braking distances and not braking those huge honking 100-car intermodal trains. So there has to be a double installation with the freights' system and translation layer shivved in to make them work in tandem. Thankfully CSX relocating out of Beacon Park means the heaviest of their traffic on the B&A stops at Worcester without crossing into T territory, while north does have some true heavy Norfolk Southern/Pan Am freight traffic overlap to square (traffic that's going to explode in 3-5 years when the ongoing Patriot Corridor clearance upgrades wrap and they start moving double-stack containers to Ayer just like CSX does to Worcester).
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

On a different note, fare hikes! Crappy service? Pay more!

Straus says MBTA can raise fares 10 percent

Advocates say law only allows 5 percent hike

One of the leaders of the Legislature’s transportation committee said Tuesday that state law allows the MBTA to raise fares 10 percent next year, twice the level that transit advocates say is permitted.

“I think the language permits it, yes,” said Rep. William Straus, the House chairman.

Transportation advocates claim that two provisions in the 2013 transportation finance law are inconsistent and do not reflect what state lawmakers intended at the time, which, they say, was a 5 percent increase every two years.
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There should be more demand-based pricing. Why not target peak trips for raises, or peak-time in peak-direction trips on CR? As of now, there are a lot of nearly empty trips on off-peak trains that will see no benefit to raising prices and further discouraging ridership. Target overcrowded trips for far raises! C'mon! This is the 21st century! We all know they won't do that, though.

EDIT: Upon closer examination, this ass-hat represents a rural/suburban district on the South Coast (Rochester, Mattapoiset, Marion, Fairhaven) with no MBTA service, so no wonder he would say something so asinine.
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

bigeman312 said:
On a different note, fare hikes! Crappy service? Pay more!

Straus says MBTA can raise fares 10 percent



There should be more demand-based pricing. Why not target peak trips for raises, or peak-time in peak-direction trips on CR? As of now, there are a lot of nearly empty trips on off-peak trains that will see no benefit to raising prices and further discouraging ridership. Target overcrowded trips for far raises! C'mon! This is the 21st century! We all know they won't do that, though.

EDIT: Upon closer examination, this ass-hat represents a rural/suburban district on the South Coast (Rochester, Mattapoiset, Marion, Fairhaven) with no MBTA service, so no wonder he would say something so asinine.
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Heh. Rochester's the only one of those towns that's actually a tax assessment-paying district member. The only MassDOT maintenance roads in the huge geographical area of his district are I-195, US 6, MA 105, a half-mile slice of MA 28, and about 1000+ feet of I-495 and the southbound Exit 2 offramp. All of it low-traffic a good dozen miles away from the outermost extent of the Cape/Bourne Bridge backups. Exactly 1 bus route, poking just out of New Bedford into Fairhaven. Nobody else pays dues to an RTA district. The only rail line clipping the district is about 3/4 mile of the Old Colony south of Middleboro where it passes the big trash-to-energy plant with its freight yard where the Cape trash train drops off loads.


Yeah, easy for him to be lobbing bombs. Wonder how sympatico his special interests are with DeLeo's to get that committe chairmanship despite having one of the least-relevant districts in the whole state for such a plum assignment. He won't even have skin in the transit fares game if Middleboro-Buzzards Bay or SCR get built. Marion and Mattapoisett are don't-give-a-shit NIMBY enough that they might even reject joining the district despite using the stops 1-2 towns over.
 
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Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

The T is holding a survey to see what apps people are using from the open feed to developers and what they like about them. You can link to the survey from the MBTA.com
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

Semass said:
The T is holding a survey to see what apps people are using from the open feed to developers and what they like about them. You can link to the survey from the MBTA.com
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Here is the link: MBTA Rider Census.

I just filled it out and it's pretty quick and basic. Age, Charlie Card Number, How many automobiles, yadda yadda yadda.

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EDIT:

Also, here's a great take on the proposed far hikes by James Aloisi (former Mass. Transportation Secretary):

No MBTA fare hike until service improves

There are other ways to fund transit agency

IF YOU DOUBT FOR A MINUTE that we continue to be mired in a mid-20th Century way of thinking about transportation, consider this: in a state that recently went to the ballot box to say “no!” to a simple inflation adjustment to the gas tax, we are now having a serious debate about whether MBTA fares can be increased by 5 or 10 percent. A law enacted in 2013 attempted to establish what was considered an important principle of fairness: T fares could only be increased every other year, and not more than 5 percent at a time. Here’s the language:

“The authority shall not increase fares at intervals of less than 24 months or at an annual rate greater than 5 per cent.”

Now we have some who would like to interpret this language to mean that you can raise fares by as much as 10 percent every other year. The transportation leader of the House says “yes, of course, we meant 10 percent”. His Senate counterpart, and the senators who actually offered the amendment that became the final language, say, “No, that’s not what we meant.” That is the debate we are having in the aftermath of the great winter meltdown of our public transportation system.

...
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I love that he juxtaposes the absurdity of the proposed fare hike with the fact that:

a) the T is saddled with Big Dig debt from automobile infrastructure projects.
b) drivers just voted against tying the gas tax to inflation, and the gas tax remains un-raised for over 20 years.

A common rhetoric that I hear from non-transit users out in the 'burbs is that the T needs a fare hike "just because it's fair to pay for the service" or some bs like that. I will absolutely always respond with, "so you voted yes on tying the gas tax to inflation?"
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

bigeman312 said:
Here is the link: MBTA Rider Census.

I just filled it out and it's pretty quick and basic. Age, Charlie Card Number, How many automobiles, yadda yadda yadda.

----------

EDIT:

Also, here's a great take on the proposed far hikes by James Aloisi (former Mass. Transportation Secretary):

No MBTA fare hike until service improves



I love that he juxtaposes the absurdity of the proposed fare hike with the fact that:

a) the T is saddled with Big Dig debt from automobile infrastructure projects.
b) drivers just voted against tying the gas tax to inflation, and the gas tax remains un-raised for over 20 years.

A common rhetoric that I hear from non-transit users out in the 'burbs is that the T needs a fare hike "just because it's fair to pay for the service" or some bs like that. I will absolutely always respond with, "so you voted yes on tying the gas tax to inflation?"
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Jim also makes an amazing analogy:

"Imagine a company that sells sour milk thinking that the first step toward rebuilding its business is to charge more for the sour milk. We all know that it wouldn’t dare do that. Instead, it would focus its efforts on selling fresh milk. A fare hike now simply flies in the face of good business practice."
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

datadyne007 said:
Jim also makes an amazing analogy:

"Imagine a company that sells sour milk thinking that the first step toward rebuilding its business is to charge more for the sour milk. We all know that it wouldn’t dare do that. Instead, it would focus its efforts on selling fresh milk. A fare hike now simply flies in the face of good business practice."
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Deliberately underpricing your milk and starving your cows to death also flies in the face of good business practice.

You can make a half-assed analogy to prove any point you want. Good thing the T isn't actually a business or this amazing paradox would tear the fabric of reality and destroy the space-time continuum.
 
Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos

fattony said:
Deliberately underpricing your milk and starving your cows to death also flies in the face of good business practice.

You can make a half-assed analogy to prove any point you want. Good thing the T isn't actually a business or this amazing paradox would tear the fabric of reality and destroy the space-time continuum.
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Read the piece. Jim addresses that:

"Hiking T fares now is also not justified by the T’s massive re-investment needs. Think of it: the T admits that its state-of-good repair needs total something in excess of $7 billion. A 5 percent hike in T fares might generate an additional $20-23 million. A 10 percent hike might raise something less than double that, while also driving away many riders who are either unable to afford the new rates, or who decide to shift to micro-transit alternatives such as Bridj and Uber. The problem won’t be solved – indeed, it possibly will be exacerbated – if we move to a means-tested fare system. Once the T loses customers of choice, and serves only those who use it of necessity, it is doomed."

He goes on to lay out his alternative:
I propose a five-year plan to improve the MBTA. During those five years, the following would take place:

  • The T would transfer all of its so-called legacy and Big Dig debt to the Commonwealth.
  • MassDOT would shift up to 10 percent of highway dollars to transit each year for five years.
  • We would commit the freed-up revenue emanating from items 1 and 2 above to an accelerated state-of-good- repair program, on a pay-as-you-go basis, without additional bonding.
  • Fare hikes would take place only when certain clearly stated performance metrics were met.
  • The state would enact into law a Transit Improvement District (TID) program empowering municipalities to assess a daily carbon impact fee on non-residential parking, and requiring that those revenues be dedicated to improve cycling lanes, Complete Streets, and transit.
  • The state would commence a purely voluntary pilot program to test the efficacy of a user-fee approach to raising transportation revenue. This approach (referred to as “VMT” for “Vehicle Miles Traveled”) can become a fair, transparent way to raise significant revenue for both our highway and transit needs. A purely voluntary pilot program should offend no one and might well prove to be a pathway toward deploying a technology-driven 21st Century revenue replacement for the gas tax.
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