General MBTA Topics (Multi Modal, Budget, MassDOT)

Except for the RTS buses built in 1994-95, every bus that the T operates was built after 2003. Every bus either had GPS from the start or retrofitted more recently. Buses use GPS for the stop annoucements.

Stop announcements on the Green Line are driven by odometer. They have nothing to do with GPS; the stop announcements have been working for over a decade, long before GPS came to the Green LIne. The counter is reset at a few certain points, and thereafter it just records how far the car has gone. It knows to announce Longwood exactly 2000 feet after Fenway, and Brookline Village 3750 feet after that.
 
It tends to mess up at times, and announce wrong stops, especially after having passed the stop that should've been announced while there.

Same thing happens on the Blue Line from time to time.
 
That still doesn't make it GPS. It just means they need to refine the program they are using.
 
CS said:
Curious where you got this from - do you have a source, or is it just an assumption? You may have forgotten the 01800 Red Line cars which use automated stop announcements - they were built in 1994, at a time were GPS was still in development and used only by the military.
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CS -- GPS existed well before 1994 and it was in use by civilians as well as the military -- its just that civilian GPS had to make do with a intentional degrading of accuracy

However, a key breakpoint came in the build-up to Desert Storm when the "Civilian GPS Smearing" was turned off to take advantage of the widely available civilian GPS receivers because of a shortfall in available military receivers

see for example
https://www.army.mil/article/7457/g...-positioning-system-in-operation-desert-storm
GPS Goes to War - The Global Positioning System in Operation Desert Storm.
By Kaleb Dissinger. Army Heritage Museum February 14, 2008

...By 1991, GPS had been utilized for more than ten years by aircraft, Special Operations teams, and in limited training missions. The system was relatively unknown to much of the Army at the time. During Operation Desert Shield, Special Operations teams were inserted behind Iraqi lines with missions that would have been unthinkable without the use of GPS. With a large scale operation against the occupying Iraqi Army on the horizon, Army commanders realized the need to supply frontline units with the GPS devices. The problem was the limited number of devices on hand. In an October 1991 newsletter, the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) noted only 500 demonstration receivers were owned by the Army at the outset of Operation Desert Shield. As a result, commercial receivers were rapidly procured. Still, when operations started on February 24, 1991, only selective units and vehicles were equipped with the new technology. For example, of the VII Corps' 40,000 vehicles in theater, only 3,000 received a GPS unit. Those vehicles needing the devices often included forward and reconnaissance elements, unit commanders, and artillery surveyors. There were instances of troops buying their own GPS devices. Lieutenant General Frederick Franks, the VII Coprs Commander, noted after the war, "They [GPS receivers] were invaluable in avoiding fratricide and allowing accurate navigation and artillery fires."

G-day came on February 24, beginning at 0400. U.S. Army units in both the VII Corps and XVIII Airborne Corps quickly realized the value of the GPS units. With the unexpectedly rapid advance of coalition forces, heavy reliance was placed on these small devices while navigating in a featureless desert landscape.
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Bus countdowns going up on the actual MBTA info boards... (This is how it should be)

MBTA @MBTA
Check it out! #MBTA countdowns now live at #MBTA Dudley Station!

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https://twitter.com/MBTA/status/758723918274322434

The lack of consistency between bus info displays on the T is really jarring & disappointing. It's great to have the data & be aware of when your bus is coming, but the fact that the information appears in so many different places on different types of screens & displays depending on the stations is a problem. At Maverick & Wonderland, you have the vertical Solari UDine LCD screen in the headhouse with the god awful text-to-speech. At Haymarket you have another company's horizontal LCD screen above the stairs with no text-to-speech. At Dudley, you now have the standard MBTA info signage that you see in all the rapid transit stations.

Definitely in need of standardizing for better wayfinding.
 
^ I have the same issue with the quasi-countdown timing on the Green line.

NOTE: I may have these mapped to the wrong stations:

Boylston: Line letter and number of stops

Copley: T attempt at Line Name Abbreviations plus time

Kenmore: Line letter plus time

How about picking a system?
 
There are two different styles of countdown used on the Green Line. It's a fundamental consequence of the geometry and dispatching on the line, not any oversight of laziness on the part of those implementing the signs.

Minute countdowns are used on the D Branch, Kenmore, Hynes, Copley, Arlington, and eastbound from Boylston to Science Park. These work essentially the same as the countdowns on the heavy rail lines. However, they do not start counting down until a train has left Riverside eastbound or Park westbound.

The westbound sides at Boylston through Science Park have the "stops away" system. Because trains often hold in the turnbacks at North Station, Government Center, and Park, and because trains can pass each other at Park - and all of those are manual dispatch decisions - there is no way for an automated system to predict the order and timing of westbound trains until they are past Park. (That may change in a year or two with some different dispatching methods, but no guarantees.) So using stops way gives the best indication to passengers as to what to expect.
 
EGE -- In these kinds of matters with Green Line [Street Running] branches Accuracy and Simplicity of Message are far more important than Precision

So why not just show a few lights illustrating the train's approach to a station:
  • Red -- train is approaching but more than 2 stations away
  • Yellow -- Train is at the station 2 stations away or approaching the station just before your station
  • Green -- train is at the station just before or enroute to your station
These can be set up in a vertical array [stop light style so that color blind folks can see which light is on]

in general -- Extra decimal places prove nothing except a lack of understanding of what is significant
 
Whigh thats the same system that exists now pretty much just with a color coded system instead of using words it provides less information with more chance for a misunderstanding especially for people who don't use the T a lot and so wouldn't know thats what the colors mean. Don't expect people to read a sign explaining the system most people wouldn't so it would be useless.
 
The EGE said:
There are two different styles of countdown used on the Green Line. It's a fundamental consequence of the geometry and dispatching on the line, not any oversight of laziness on the part of those implementing the signs.

Minute countdowns are used on the D Branch, Kenmore, Hynes, Copley, Arlington, and eastbound from Boylston to Science Park. These work essentially the same as the countdowns on the heavy rail lines. However, they do not start counting down until a train has left Riverside eastbound or Park westbound.

The westbound sides at Boylston through Science Park have the "stops away" system. Because trains often hold in the turnbacks at North Station, Government Center, and Park, and because trains can pass each other at Park - and all of those are manual dispatch decisions - there is no way for an automated system to predict the order and timing of westbound trains until they are past Park. (That may change in a year or two with some different dispatching methods, but no guarantees.) So using stops way gives the best indication to passengers as to what to expect.
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That still does not explain the sloppiness of the train naming systems. Either use the letters or use the terminus; but don't change the nomenclature station by station. That is just crappy wayfinding.
 
Are there issues with the Orange Line signals between Back Bay and Tufts Medical? For the last couple weeks, it's been taking significantly longer than usual to get between these stations.

Today it was ridiculous. The train stopped several times on the above ground stretch next to the Pike despite the fact that the next train ahead was at DTX. It seemed like the operator was trying to accelerate as slowly as she could to avoid tripping the emergency brake.
 
Revenue from the parking operation is up now that the T and LAZ are investigating discrepancies between revenue collected and parking counts: http://commonwealthmagazine.org/transportation/t-parking-revenue-is-up-but-why/

Considering that a lot of these lots are full or near full I highly doubt that many more people have decided to start driving and paying at the lots. But the investigation continues and is now in the hands of the state Attorney General.
 
oyhimylm said:
Are there issues with the Orange Line signals between Back Bay and Tufts Medical? For the last couple weeks, it's been taking significantly longer than usual to get between these stations.

Today it was ridiculous. The train stopped several times on the above ground stretch next to the Pike despite the fact that the next train ahead was at DTX. It seemed like the operator was trying to accelerate as slowly as she could to avoid tripping the emergency brake.
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There has been something wrong with the signals exiting Tufts Medical Center toward Back Bay for years. Trains have the brakes come on multiple times and jerk to a stop as an operator tries to leave the station. Happens virtually every train. No clue why the T cannot fix the issue.
 
Scipio said:
Revenue from the parking operation is up now that the T and LAZ are investigating discrepancies between revenue collected and parking counts: http://commonwealthmagazine.org/transportation/t-parking-revenue-is-up-but-why/

Considering that a lot of these lots are full or near full I highly doubt that many more people have decided to start driving and paying at the lots. But the investigation continues and is now in the hands of the state Attorney General.
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Did the private operators realize the jig was up and so are actually reporting the real numbers? If so, it's just more ammo against them in court.
 
That's what it smells like. Several of the LAZ employees have been removed from their jobs.
 
http://commonwealthmagazine.org/transportation/t-parking-revenue-is-up-but-why/
T parking revenue is up, but why?
Two possibilities: More customers or less leakage

The numbers for the first six months of the year indicate revenues at the T’s eight biggest parking lots jumped 35 percent. Revenues were flat in January and February, with collections totaling $543,127 in February. Revenue at the eight lots jumped 25 percent to $678,665 in March, and jumped another 9 percent to $741,659 in June.

The initial increase in revenues came after MBTA officials began investigating revenue discrepancies at a couple of parking lots and LAZ Parking, the T’s parking lot operator, fired two of its employees.
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This would be hilarious if it weren't so tragic
 
BussesAin'tTrains said:
Did the private operators realize the jig was up and so are actually reporting the real numbers? If so, it's just more ammo against them in court.
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Its all a question of how high up the chain the problem went.

If the front-line cash-collections staff were skimming the $ and faking the parking numbers It'd have been up to LAZ to do some basic parking counts to audit their employees. It'd be up to LAZ to keep the audit people as separate as possible from the cash people, but $100k/mo to $200k/mo can grease a lot of palms.

At some point up the chain of command at LAZ, there's going to be a guy who claims that all the $ he saw matched all the parking audit counts he saw. When that guy wants to claim he was no longer complicit or negligent, yeah, the numbers can get corrected real quick.

Frankly, every office building / property owner in town that doesn't have a gate metering entries and exits should be conducting an audit of their parking operator with random parking counts scattered across the year.
 
Arlington said:
Its all a question of how high up the chain the problem went.

If the front-line cash-collections staff were skimming the $ and faking the parking numbers It'd have been up to LAZ to do some basic parking counts to audit their employees. It'd be up to LAZ to keep the audit people as separate as possible from the cash people, but $100k/mo to $200k/mo can grease a lot of palms.

At some point up the chain of command at LAZ, there's going to be a guy who claims that all the $ he saw matched all the parking audit counts he saw. When that guy wants to claim he was no longer complicit or negligent, yeah, the numbers can get corrected real quick.

Frankly, every office building / property owner in town that doesn't have a gate metering entries and exits should be conducting an audit of their parking operator with random parking counts scattered across the year.
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LAZ is a vast parking management conglomerate with hundreds of big contracts nationwide. They're the "too big to fail" of their industry. The T would only be tip of the iceberg if they got nailed for large sums of funny math in this audit.
 
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