Surprisingly (or not), @FakeMTA isn't the only agency impersonator. For official, oddly engrossing transit Tweets, try @NYCTSubwayScoop.

We know what you're thinking. As of this writing, @FakeNYCDOT is still available.

In New York political time, four years passes fast. But hey, in Bogotá, Enrique Peñalosa was limited to a single three-year term as mayor, during which he built dozens of new schools and libraries, converted a golf course to a public park, laid down 100 miles of bike paths, and of course, built the Transmilenio, the system against which Bus Rapid Transit aspirants worldwide are measured.

Bogotá built out most of the TransMilenio system during Enrique Peñalosa's single three-year term. Photo of estación Jiménez: Joan Byron.

Transportation policy under Bloomberg 3.0: Money's not the problem

The next set of BRT routes needs to fearlessly go where no bus has gone before.

And real BRT will be transformative. New York City today is home to 758,000 workers who travel over an hour each way to reach their jobs. Two-thirds of these folks are going to jobs where they earn less than $35,000. That's not a coincidence -- look at a map, and you'll quickly see that the places poor and working-class people can afford to live are those least well-served by the subway system.

Click to view full versions of the Pratt Center's maps depicting where NYC jobs are clustered, and where workers in different sectors live.

Jobs in health care, retail, construction, and manufacturing are spread across the city and the region, as opposed to the high-wage sectors concentrated in the Manhattan core. Manufacturing and distribution jobs are especially isolated from the transit network. Talk to workers (or employers) and you'll hear about dollar vans, livery cabs, employer-paid shuttles, and other work-arounds for a transit system that bypasses these vital centers of living-wage, blue-collar employment. The hospital belt in Central Brooklyn -- SUNY Downstate, Kings County, Kingsbrook, and Brookdale -- employs 18,250 New York City residents. More than 35,000 New Yorkers work at JFK airport, but most of them drive there, because the transit connections are expensive and inefficient.

So here's the good news. DOT and the MTA are on the right track, and they're picking up speed. Jay Walder really understands the importance of buses -- with good reason, since much of London is built at densities comparable to Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, with subway coverage to match. In London, buses are now a primary mode, prioritized by street space allocation, enforcement, and technology. DOT and the MTA have stated their mutual commitment to making New York's bus system perform for its 2.3 million daily riders. Last year, DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan announced that the agencies would complete their 5-route "BRT Phase 1" by 2013, and simultaneously develop plans for "BRT Phase 2." These additional 8-10 routes would combine with Phase 1 to create a citywide network connecting underserved residential neighborhoods and employment centers, shortening at least some of the city’s worst commutes. This summer, the agencies launched a workshop series that was a great first step in engaging affected communities in the earliest steps of their planning process for BRT Phase 2.

The key ingredient: Vision

Aside from a relatively modest level of investment, what we need now is vision. There's no shortage of that at either DOT or the MTA. These are the folks who brought us the Bx12, the modestly-named "Select Bus Service" that has chopped 20 minutes off thousands of Bronx commuters' trips, and done so with little more than ingenuity and duct tape.

DOT, the MTA, and advocates need not only to get boots on the ground, but to get listening ears into neighborhoods. Pay attention.

But even the clearest BRT vision will be gridlocked without political support, and the will within the administration to build it. What we also need, and what may be in short supply for Bloomberg 3.0, is more than political capital (this administration is nothing if not savvy about transactional politics). Far-reaching changes to our streets and transit system will require the kind of support you grow from scratch, by getting out there, talking with the people you know you're trying to help, but who may have competing priorities, different perspectives and past experiences with this administration that have fueled their skepticism.

As we learned in working on congestion pricing, you don't surmount those barriers by trying to steamroll legislators with artificial deadlines, or by herding "advocates" (yes, Streetsblog readers and contributors, that would be us) around 250 Broadway and the Capitol to deliver a consultant-crafted message. I only know one way to build the kind of support that both BRT and the transformation of our streets will need. It’s basically Organizing 101: You meet people where they are. If legislators don't have our issues at the top of their list, it may well be that their constituents are more worried about their housing, their jobs, and their kids. Dissing and dismissing electeds who don't put "our" issues at the top of their agenda is not just unhelpful -- it widens the class and racial gap between an "elitist" Livable Streets Movement and everybody else.

New Yorkers have just elected a feisty new class of City Council members -- and re-elected incumbents -- who are likely to be less pliant than their predecessors. This could be the best thing that ever happened for equity in the causes of transportation and livable streets, if we can re-connect with the social and environmental justice roots of our work, and shed some of our elitist baggage.

DOT, the MTA, and advocates need not only to get boots on the ground, but to get listening ears into neighborhoods. Pay attention. If the arguments of pols demagoguing against good initiatives from the agency gain traction, it's coming from someplace. Perhaps it's a response to past failures to deal with pressing neighborhood issues -- like truck traffic, hideously bad local air quality, and so on. Get out there, learn about what people are living with, and meet them where they are. Work with local organizations that are credible because they've been listening to their communities, and don’t treat community-based organizations as messengers to "help us get the word out," but as partners whose input adds value and whose concerns get addressed.

I don't know what the internal budget and management constraints might be, but my fondest hope for BRT, as well as for the expansion of safe space for the vast majority who walk, bike, and take transit, is that NYC DOT will find the means to double, triple, or quadruple the number of field and office staff who work in these essential areas, and deploy these folks in the neighborhoods where most New Yorkers live, where people are being run over by cars and trucks, where kids can’t play for fear of asthma attacks, where workers are waiting for packed buses. In short, where people are literally dying for the kind of attention that’s been paid to high-profile areas in Midtown. When organizations from those neighborhoods step forward with both their problems and their ideas for solutions, they shouldn't be told to wait for their turn, which will be sometime next year.

In short, to NYC DOT under Bloomberg 3.0: Keep doing what you're doing. But do it faster, cover more ground, and devote acute attention and resources to the most underserved communities in the city. If you do it right, you can be assured that those communities will have your back.

An off-set bus lane, which DOT may or may not employ for BRT on the East Side. Image: NYCDOT [PDF]

I checked in with DOT to see if the off-set design has indeed been finalized, and the answer is "No." The agency is still considering different bus lane configurations. "An image we presented to the board on Tuesday night did show an offset lane," said a DOT spokesperson, "but this is a baseline design, one which we've used in presentations for the last six months."

An off-set configuration would give bus riders on the East Side a faster ride, but without a physically-separated busway, there are few certainties. Off-set bus lanes would have to be paired with camera enforcement to deliver the full potential benefits, said Walter Hook, director of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. Hook has advised several global metropolises on the implementation of Bus Rapid Transit.

If everything lines up and Albany does pass a law enabling the use of bus-mounted cameras, then, Hook estimates, total travel time on the M15 corridor could be reduced from 70 minutes to 48 minutes during peak hours using off-set lanes. Hook projects that a physically separated busway would cut that time to 42 minutes. No permission from Albany necessary.

Photo: Gothamist

"Access-A-Ride drivers are instructed to observe all restrictions on parking and standing. However, due to traffic, drivers are often challenged to find safe locations to either pick up or drop off customers."

How many holes in that statement do you count?

Gothamist is taking submissions for an end-of-year photo gallery of egregious bike lane blockers. Here are a couple of recent candidates that leap to mind.

Congestion pricing paired with a significant taxi surcharge would speed cab trips and boost Manhattan's transit funding contribution. Photo: Bill in STL/Flickr.

A side benefit is that the discouragement of taxi use due to the surcharge should cause travel speeds in Manhattan to rise, saving time for car and truck drivers and bus passengers. With some taxi trips switching to subway or bus, transit farebox revenues will go up as well. But the surcharge is so slight -- around 5 percent of a typical fare -- that these gains will barely be perceptible: a mere 0.1-0.2 percent rise in Manhattan travel speeds and a $2-$3 million-per-year rise in transit revenues, according to the BTA. And any increase in taxi cruising to make up for the lost fares would cut into the minuscule improvement in traffic.

While the press bewails the surcharge's impact on taxi users, the people likely to suffer the most are the drivers, who on average can be expected to turn 1½ to 2 fewer fares a week. Losing $20-$25 in weekly revenue may not seem like much, but it's a bitter pill for drivers who can barely pay off their medallion leases as it is. Indeed, the taxi surcharge, enacted by the legislature as an afterthought to the "mobility (payroll) tax" last spring, may do to drivers what the new taxi credit card payment system reportedly has not: drive them to the wall, economically.

Does this mean that surcharging taxi fares to pay for transit is categorically a bad idea? Decidedly not. I'm prepared to argue that a taxi surcharge a good deal larger than 50 cents per ride is essential to the political and logistical success of congestion pricing. At the same time, congestion pricing is essential to making a taxi surcharge fair for taxi drivers and passengers. With, and only with, a cordon toll, will Manhattan traffic improve sufficiently that cabbies can book more fares per shift, not fewer. Moreover, the same speedup will enable users to save valuable time, partially compensating them for the surcharge and ensuring that the taxi sector stays robust.

To grasp these synergies, consider a variable toll to drive into the Manhattan Central Business District of $3 to $9 on weekdays and $2 to $4 on weekends, with the revenues used to cut transit fares roughly in half. Residents of Queens and Brooklyn would pony up 45 cents of every dollar in new toll revenue, because of tolls on the East River bridges. Manhattanites would contribute less than 7 cents of each dollar, less than residents of Nassau County, Staten Island and the Bronx, yet would reap most of the benefits of quieter and safer streets, cleaner air, and faster bus service.

Such a plan would be DOA in Albany. Indeed, I would argue that this very imbalance between beneficiaries and benefactors helped doom the Bloomberg cordon fee in 2008 and the Ravitch bridge tolls this year.

Now take the same toll plan and add a 33 percent taxi surcharge -- yes, a one-third increase in the mileage rate, the waiting time rate and the "drop." Instantly, Manhattan residents -- who comprise an estimated three-fourths of medallion taxi users -- would see their payment share nearly quadruple to 25 percent. Brooklyn and Queens residents' share would shrink from 45 percent without the taxi surcharge to 28 percent with it. The borough-inequity argument largely disappears.

Not only that, the taxi surcharge revenue, a cool $400-$500 million according to the BTA, could allow transit officials to eliminate bus fares. Free buses would be a particular boon in distant precincts where subway lines don't reach. As well, the rise in the taxi fare would offset the fall in the "time cost" of taxi service due to the decrease in auto traffic, and keep new taxi trips from inundating the CBD. Total use of medallion cabs would stay roughly constant under this integrated plan, with the reduction in gridlock enabling drivers to handle an extra 15-20 fares per week without booking more hours.

As for the effect on taxi users, the BTA indicates that the integrated plan outlined here would add $2.16 to the price of the average CBD cab trip while shortening the ride by 1.8 minutes. In other words, passengers pay $1.20 per minute saved -- a steep rate, for most of us, and it would be steeper for trips that venture outside the CBD, where the travel time savings would be smaller, percentage-wise. Even with a cordon toll, then, taxi surcharges can't be sold to riders as an unalloyed win-win, although riders could help themselves by cab-pooling and prioritizing their taxi use.

Of course, taxi surcharges are still justified as a means of internalizing the "social delay" costs of vehicle traffic on congested streets. They're most fair and effective, though, when coupled with cordon tolling.

Mr. Bloomberg, tear down this highway. A vision of West Farms Road with housing and shops instead of the Sheridan Expressway. Image: South Bronx River Watershed Alliance.

The headlines after last week's mayoral contest weren't kind to the winner. "NY Voters Seen Wanting More Humble Bloomberg," proclaimed Reuters. "Bloomberg Sweats Out Third Term," wrote the Post. The incumbent's slim margin of victory points to two major takeaways from campaign season in New York City: 1) Mayor Bloomberg is seen as out of touch with everyday New Yorkers, yet 2) was reelected, grudgingly, because the electorate thinks he is doing a decent job.

First up: Publicly support the removal of the Sheridan Expressway as a green jobs program.

First up: Publicly support the removal of the Sheridan Expressway as a green jobs program. This highway is a redundant, little used stub running through the Hunts Point community of the South Bronx. For nearly a decade, advocates in the South Bronx River Watershed Alliance (including the Pratt Center, Nos Quedamos, Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, The Point, Sustainable South Bronx, and my organization, Tri-State Transportation Campaign) have called on the New York State DOT to remove the highway. Doing so would create 700 permanent jobs and hundreds of construction jobs, improve access to the Bronx River, and open up 28 acres for parks and affordable housing.

Bulldozing acres of parks for the new Yankee Stadium gave the impression that the mayor was more willing to help out developers than the average Bronx resident. Removing the Sheridan would help pay back that debt, and fit naturally with the Mayor's long-term sustainability agenda, PlaNYC 2030.

Next, the Mayor should commit to boosting New York City's funding for public transit.

During his campaign, Bloomberg announced an ambitious mass transit proposal. Like any good campaign document, the plan would improve the quality of life in all five boroughs, especially neighborhoods underserved by transit, like eastern Queens. But few of the proposals are under the mayor's control and all of them require money. At a press conference last week, Bloomberg indicated that he doesn't intend to boost city funding for MTA operations. He should reconsider. If the mayor wants support from the MTA, he must increase support to the MTA.

Third is to prioritize space for buses on city streets. The mayor should do all he can to ensure timely implementation of bold Bus Rapid Transit projects, as called for in PlaNYC, and help the Port Authority deal with the rogue buses that are increasingly affecting communities like Chinatown and Hell's Kitchen. Better management will unclog the streets and improve the customer experience. (Believe it or not, those people lined up with their luggage on the sidewalks waiting for the Megabus are voters, too.)

Existing efforts to use city highways in a way that benefits working people in the outer boroughs should be preserved and expanded. Last year, the state DOT caved to politicians and started allowing cars with two or more passengers in the Staten Island Expressway bus lane. This is not only illegal (the lane was approved for buses only, not cars), but also hurt bus riders who are now slowed by greater congestion in the lane. Similar bus lanes should be put in place on highways throughout the city, a boon for New York's car-free households, which make, on average, less than half as much as households with cars.

And finally, the mayor should recognize the work of NYCDOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan by ensuring that she continues in her post for four more years. Sadik-Khan has become one of Bloomberg's key spokespeople for PlaNYC. Her message about greening the planet with small changes to city streets resonates with the young, diverse population struggling to afford life in New York. In two-and-a-half years, Sadik-Khan and her staff have transformed a frustrating city agency whose biggest victory was speeding cars through Midtown into an international model for results-based sustainable transportation policy.

Mayor Bloomberg is already known as a skilled manager who gets things done. With a little effort, he can use transportation to expand his legacy as a leader in sustainability who stood up for the working people of New York.

East Side residents sign on for safer, greener streets.

"We're really hoping to put a finger on the scales, and push for fully-protected bike lanes while the DOT and East Side communities work on improving the M15 corridor," said Transportation Alternatives' Wiley Norvell. "To not address the huge demand for biking on First and Second avenues, something the DOT pledged to do as step number one in its 1997 Bicycle Master Plan, would be a huge missed opportunity."

TA counted 3,356 cyclists on the First and Second Avenue corridor during a 12-hour stretch last month, a figure that far exceeds the DOT's 2008 screenline count at 59th Street, Norvell said. All those cyclists are a fearless bunch -- braving rivers of traffic and some of the city's most intimidating cycling conditions. Imagine how many more New Yorkers would bike down the avenues if they didn't feel they were risking life and limb.

Norvell says TA staff and volunteers have been gathering letters from East Harlem down to the Lower East Side in support of protected bike infrastructure. Yesterday's delivery put hundreds of letters in the hands of East Side electeds, including City Council Members Rosie Mendez and Daniel Garodnick.

"The meetings were very positive," said Caroline Samponaro, director of TA's bike program. "Their staff agreed that we shouldn't redesign First and Second avenues without including provisions for cyclists and pedestrians."

Active support from East Side representatives will be critical as plans for the corridor advance. "Every project is about political will," said Samponaro. "What these projects need is political leadership from the electeds. They need to be the spokespeople for their constituents."

The optimal re-design of First and Second avenues would give buses and cyclists "space that allows them to travel safely and efficiently without having to compete with each other," she added. "These corridors can serve the non-driving majority and set a standard for how other major avenues will be treated."

-- MTA Chairman Jay Walder, quoted in the New York Times.

These are heartening words for transit advocates. Incoming MTA Chairman Jay Walder clearly wants to make big improvements to the agency's 250 bus routes. But given his time, budget and authority, there is a big gap between what he can do and what he would like to do for buses.

NYPD cruisers parked in the 34th Street bus lane. When it comes to bus route enforcement, Jay Walder has his hands full.

Let's look at the things that Walder and the MTA can realistically do for buses.

First up: contactless or “swipe less” MetroCards, like London's Oyster card, which are waved over a sensor instead of swiped. These contactless cards speed bus boarding and can save a lot of time over the course of a day. They also help reduce bus bunching by making loading times more consistent on every bus. Contactless cards are a mature technology which the MTA has already funded, and which Walder helped pioneer in London. So, there is every reason to think he can hurry its implementation.

Walder can also help with the long-delayed GPS bus locator system and real-time arrival information for passengers. These are also mature technologies which bus systems around the world use to reduce bunching, troubleshoot delays, and keep riders informed. To date, the MTA has bungled GPS tracking, and insisted on trying to solve the canyon effect caused by Manhattan skyscrapers instead of deploying GPS and passenger information on the huge majority of routes that don't go through Midtown, or even enter Manhattan. This is a highly visible and affordable improvement that Walder would get a lot of credit for.

Fortunately for Walder, when it comes to bus improvements, he has a strong ally in the NYCDOT and the mayor, who are leading the effort to institute Select Bus Service. SBS routes include elements of Bus Rapid Transit, including pre-paid boarding, transit signal priority, and painted bus lanes. Planning for SBS is well-advanced, though the initiative has very modest funding by MTA standards. Currently, DOT and the MTA intend to roll out one or two new SBS lines a year. Walder may be able to accelerate SBS through additional planning and funding, and by making the case for more physically protected bus lanes like the one planned for 34th Street in Midtown.

During Walder's tenure at Transport for London, the agency employed express bus lanes and other BRT features to great effect. So Walder is keenly aware of the need to "prioritize" buses on the street. In his interview with the Times, Walder emphasized the compelling reasons to enforce bus lanes and bus stops more vigorously. Bus riders, advocates and transit experts all agree on the desirability of better enforcement. The need is obvious. But increasing enforcement enough to make a difference in bus service will probably be the most difficult thing for Walder to achieve.

In London, more than 1,000 automated enforcement cameras mounted on buses -- and another 50 or so on utility poles -- help keep bus lanes and bus stops clear of other vehicles. Violations caught by these cameras result in steep fines. Unfortunately, in New York City, enforcement cameras and increased fines for lane blockers require the approval of the state legislature.

In 2008, NYCDOT made bus enforcement cameras its highest legislative priority. But the legislature has a long history of resisting enforcement cameras of all types. It took from 1993 to 2009 for the city to win an increase from 50 to 150 red light enforcement cameras. The MTA and transit advocates first started asking for bus enforcement cameras in the 1990s. Without cameras, enforcing bus lanes and stops is very difficult. You can do it on small numbers of specific corridors, like Fordham Road, but overall, it is extremely hard to keep the thousands of bus stops and hundreds of miles of lanes clear using only police and traffic agents. Which is why most modern BRT systems use enforcement cameras or physically separated rights-of-way. Whether Albany will grant legislative approval in the next year for enough cameras to make a visible impact -- or even any cameras at all -- is a question mark.

The specific approaches Walder pursues to improve bus service will probably meet with different degrees of success. But overall, his interest in better buses will give a big boost to efforts to dedicate more street space to transit and surely result in better service.

This is the second of two posts exploring how incoming MTA Chairman Jay Walder can improve New York City's bus system. Read the first part here.

Photo: cunningsue/Flickr

MTA chief Jay Walder floated the idea of off-peak discounts in an interview in today's New York Times. While Walder didn't offer quantification, the Balanced Transportation Analyzer software model I've developed with Ted Kheel can estimate the effects of time-varied subway fares -- not just how ridership might shift from peak to off-peak periods, but indirect impacts such as the shift of auto trips to transit and the resulting changes to car travel speeds.

The results look promising for this prototype fare structure that I tested with the BTA:

• 1/3-off subway fare from 11:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m.
• 1/6-off subway fare from 5:00 to 7:00 a.m., 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and 7:00 to 11:00 p.m.
• 15 percent higher subway fare from 8:00 to 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. (Although Walder referred only to off-peak discounts, the model suggests that forestalling an increase in ridership during the two peak hours, when the system is strained beyond capacity, could require raising fares at those times.)
• No fare change during the "shoulder" hours of 7:00 to 8:00 a.m., 9:00 to 10:00 a.m., 4:00 to 5:00 p.m., and 6:00 to 7:00 p.m.
• 1/4-off subway fare at all hours on weekends and holidays.
• 1/4-off bus fare at all times (not mentioned by Walder but assumed here to preserve overall fare parity).

Here are the results:

• The average price of a subway ride drops by 23 percent, equivalent to a $210 annual savings for a typical straphanger who takes 12 trains a week.
  
• Notwithstanding the overall discount, however, peak-hour subway users who could not change their commute times would pay $100 a year more in fares.
  
• Annual savings of $230 for bus riders, due to the assumed 25 percent drop in bus fares.
• Subway usage increases 3 percent, even as morning and evening peak hour ridership drops by 1 percent and 3 percent, respectively, slightly easing crowding during those critical times.
  
• Bus usage increases 5 percent.
• 15,000 fewer cars enter the Manhattan CBD on weekdays, raising average speeds there by 2 percent.
• Car and truck drivers save six million hours of travel time worth an estimated $230 million that they now lose to gridlock each year -- with a majority of the savings occurring outside the CBD.
• A rise in cycle and pedestrian commuting due to lower traffic, with the resulting increase in physical activity translating into health and longevity benefits worth an additional $116 million a year.
• Fewer crashes and less pollution, with health and related benefits close to $100 million a year.
  

The downside of this program is an estimated $300 million drop in farebox revenues: $134 million on the subways, $162 million on buses.

The logical place to make up the shortfall, congestion pricing, is a subject Walder will obviously want to avoid until he is on even firmer political footing. The synergies are strong from a technical standpoint, since differential subway pricing would help the subways absorb car drivers whom a cordon toll would induce to switch to transit. The political synergies could be strong as well if differential fares help expand the constituency for congestion pricing.

-- Jay Walder, MTA chairman, as quoted in the New York Times

Improvements like real-time arrival displays led bus ridership to grow significantly during Jay Walder's tenure at Transport for London. Photo: King Huang Chung/Flickr.

While it may seem obvious that the chair of the MTA should devote considerable energy to buses, this is rarely the case. The head of the MTA is typically consumed by planning, funding, and managing mega-projects and the capital plan. Historically, the MTA has been heavily oriented toward subways and commuter rail. On the average weekday, the agency's subways carry 5.2 million trips and its buses 2.4 million.

But these are not normal times at the MTA. Walder has one year to make a big impression. After that he will almost certainly have a new boss as governor, who will have two options: fire Walder or rehire him. Bus improvements can be done relatively quickly and cheaply, and by reducing delays can actually save money while resulting in better service and higher ridership.

Buses are also attractive to Walder because the mayor and DOT are already aggressively pushing bus corridor improvements. DOT and the MTA have launched a successful Select Bus Service route on Fordham Road in the Bronx, with new routes planned and funded for First and Second Avenues in 2010. The mayor is a good friend to have. He controls streets, parking enforcement and seats on the MTA board.

But Select Bus Service only helps a handful of the MTA's 250 bus routes. Also needed are system-wide improvements. Walder has identified three of these as priorities.

First is a swipe-free or "contactless" MetroCard like London's Oyster Card, which is waved over a sensor on buses and subways. This would reduce boarding times.

Second is GPS-based, real-time information for riders waiting at bus stops. This would reduce uncertainty over travel times and help reduce bunching. The MTA has struggled with GPS location for years, while similar technology has been adopted by transit systems around the world and in New York City taxis.

Third, but most emphasized by Walder, is improved enforcement of bus stops and lanes, especially with automated enforcement cameras. Enforcement cameras are in widespread use in London. But here, they will require approval by the state legislature. Given that the legislature is struggling with profound internal dysfunction, massive state budget deficits, and a collapsing MTA capital plan, it will likely be a tough lift for bus lane cameras to win approval. It took DOT decades of effort to win its relatively small number of red light cameras.

Regardless of the exact improvements he undertakes, there is a powerful logic steering Jay Walder toward bus improvements. And that is good news for long-suffering bus riders.

New York's LIRR, San Francisco's BART, and D.C.'s Metro plan to install the Maximo software, a program that anticipates and schedules preventive maintenance on rail cars, tracks, buses, and other equipment. Reads an IBM press release:

The LIRR will use IBM technology to manage and maintain approximately 1,180 rail cars, locomotives, and their associated parts to improve operations and passenger safety. As part of a project expected to be completed in 2012, IBM will also be helping the LIRR expand its asset management system to include facilities, bridges, and tunnels.

The move could prove particularly beneficial for D.C., which was urged by federal safety regulators to phase out the older rail car model that was involved in a fatal accident in June but found itself short of cash to fund a full-scale replacement. In a statement on the IBM deal, Metro's deputy information technology chief said a recent meeting with China's Guangzhou Metro, which also uses Maximo, helped pave the way for the agreement.

Transit riders in Portland have dozens of mobile applications at their disposal thanks to Tri-Met's open data. New York's ridership dwarfs Portland's, but the MTA's data policy stifles similar innovations.

If you live in Portland, there are dozens of mobile applications that help fill gaps in transit information. You can check your phone to see when the next bus is supposed to come. You can plan a trip from one unfamiliar part of town to another. You can even have your mobile device buzz if you fall asleep before reaching your destination. For the basic stuff, there's no iPhone necessary (although that certainly helps for information luxuries). Anyone who has a plain old cell phone with text messaging can ride the train or the bus with greater ease thanks to these apps.

"We’re not in the business of selling our schedule info, we've always given out maps for free. This is the same thing."

-- Chris Dempsey, Massachusetts Executive Office of Transportation

New Yorkers are still waiting for the MTA to join the club. Simply put, the MTA makes it difficult to create applications using its data, even for a behemoth like Google with enormous reach. Developers have to acquire information from hard copies -- CDs -- that can quickly become out of date. Google's own online transit tools are riddled with information that went defunct months ago, like bus routes down Broadway's pedestrian plazas.

Licensing agreements get hammered out one by one, and the MTA seeks a 10 percent royalty for any application that's both sold at a profit and uses its maps and symbols. When talks break down, the resulting legal battle can turn ugly. Just ask Chris Schoenfeld, a developer and Metro-North rider who tussled with MTA intellectual property lawyers over the terms for distributing his mobile app, StationStops. A major point of contention: licensing fees and royalties.

Compared to cities leading the way on open transit data, where developers can agree to licenses with a few mouse-clicks, the MTA's current practices stymie innovation. But all it would take is a few policy changes to score a quick and easy public relations victory for the MTA, saving money for the agency and improving the experience for riders.

To start with, the MTA can give developers a clear sense of how to team up with the agency. That's one of the first things the Executive Office of Transportation in Massachusetts set out to do after deciding to open up its transit data earlier this year. "At the end of the day, it’s a symbiotic relationship," said Chris Dempsey, Assistant Secretary for Innovation and Project Development at the EOT, which made its transit data available at no cost to developers. "We thought developers could see it was a good faith effort from us. We’re not in the business of selling our schedule info, we've always given out maps for free. This is the same thing."

Mobile applications, however, are a totally different beast than shower curtains printed with a subway map. When it comes to ensuring the quality of transit apps, nothing beats regularly updated data, posted online in a format developers can easily use. Without those conditions, it's too onerous for developers to spend time crafting applications, and New York will never benefit from the same intense competition and innovation that other cities have fostered.

In Massachusetts, transit officials have embraced open data as a service enhancement for riders. "One of the things we’re excited about is the potential for increasing ridership on bus lines, and getting people excited about riding buses," said Dempsey. "These applications will give people more confidence that buses are reliable."

In New York, a more open policy may be on the way. "In his confirmation hearings, incoming MTA Chairman and CEO Jay H. Walder said technology and transparency were among his top priority areas, so it is likely that there could be changes to our data policy in the relatively near future," the MTA spokesperson said. Walder will take the reins on October 5.

With a $10 billion hole in the MTA capital plan looming, Walder has lots of heavy lifting ahead, and he could use some quick PR victories to build momentum. On that score, open transit data is a triple play: It improves the experience for riders, makes the MTA more transparent, and cuts costs. (Think of all those hours the legal department spends on licensing talks.) Not a bad opening move for the next MTA chief to consider.

At today's hearing, in Mineola on Long Island, Regional Plan Association President Bob Yaro said that Walder's pay is fair (and low, if you compare it based on ridership) and the severance package is justified "given the volatility that is unfortunately associated with the position."

"We are also aware that some have questioned the extra compensation Mr. Walder would receive in the event that his contract were terminated prematurely," Yaro testified. "We would argue that this provision reflects the risk Mr. Walder is taking in coming to the MTA at this time, with little more than a year to go in the current governor's term, and given the volatility that is unfortunately associated with the position. It will also encourage the MTA Board and the governor to think twice before discharging Mr. Walder for frivolous or purely political reasons. Keeping him in place for his whole contract would provide the continuity of leadership that this important agency urgently needs."

If Albany weren't such a cesspool of cronyism, in other words, we wouldn't need to slip such a big hedge into the chair's contract to attract top-tier talent. Meanwhile, is the State Senate even aware that the MTA released its draft capital plan a few weeks ago? There's a $10 billion hole, and the agency is still rudderless. If we're going to have a confirmation hearing, you'd think something like the future of the transit system would figure into it at some point, but I suppose that doesn't have anything to do with "transparency and accountability".

Only a handful of people on the planet have the chops to steer an agency as large and complex as the MTA, and Jay Walder is one of them, by all accounts. We'll know if the State Senate is satisfied on September 10, when they render their final decision.

Ed Fay: time-polluter and proud of it. Photo: Daily News.

I decided that I'm not going to give the transicrats another cent to get to and from work. The MTA has stuck it to all of us countless times over the years and now it was time for me to pay them back. I will personally screw them out of $1,000 over the next year.

The ironies are many. For one thing, Fay could offset that toll hike three times over by signing up with E-ZPass, but he swears by cash. For another, since straphangers are a big part of the dwindling market for the daily paper, you could say that Fay’s rebellion undermines his employer by shrinking NYC Transit's take from the toll revenues. There’s also the fact that in stiffing the MTA Fay is paying a stiff price in lost time; by his own estimate, detouring around the tolls adds 15 minutes each way to his commute. As one Streetsblog commenter pointed out, Fay implicitly values his own commuting time at not much more than the minimum wage.

But Fay’s biggest grotesquerie is his obliviousness to the consequences of his commute for other drivers. By my estimation, an average 11-mile rush-hour car trip into the Manhattan Central Business District and back out again creates three to four hours of aggregate delays to all the other people trying to get around in cars, trucks and buses on the same roads at the same time. (With the recessionary drop in traffic, that figure is currently somewhat lower, but it’s also higher in Fay’s case if most of his return trips take place in the p.m. peak.)

By choosing to car-commute daily into the CBD, Mr. Screw-the-MTA is mostly screwing his fellow drivers.

And this is true whether Fay drives on local streets or ponies up the $3 bridge toll ($2.09 with E-ZPass). To be sure, those three to four hours of delay are spread among thousands of drivers, no one of which loses more than 10 or 20 seconds queued behind Fay’s automobile at each stoplight or highway ramp. And his contribution to traffic delays is no greater than that of anyone else who drives in the same places at the same time.

What’s different is Fay’s glee. He’s spewing pollution, not so much from his tailpipe (autos rank relatively low in emissions these days), but "time pollution," by stealing precious minutes and seconds from his fellow New Yorkers. And he’s proud of it:

Each night I add $6 to the pile. And when the pile gets to $1,000 -- about eight months from now -- I'll take my family out for a spectacular dinner and raise a glass toasting the bloated bums at the MTA and the toll increase that sent me over the edge.

Fay's bluster notwithstanding, I’ll wager that after the big blowout he'll tire of rat-running and revert to the toll bridge. After all, even if he makes “just” $100,000 a year at the News and values his commute time at only half his imputed hourly pay, he’s still trading $12.50 worth of time each day to save a measly $6.00. But that return to sanity won’t solve the systemic dysfunction by which anyone choosing to make a single car-trip to and from the CBD can impose $100 in societal delay costs but pay just $5 or $10 in tolls themselves.

What Fay confronts us with is nothing less than the moral imperative of congestion pricing. Decisions that impose large delay costs on others demand commensurate charges. These need not begin at full-price. Congestion fees on the order of one-tenth of the full cost, as Ted Kheel and I propose (with revenues allocated to benefit transit), would be an excellent start. Let Ed Fay, time-polluter, pay.

DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan announces the 34th Street pilot this morning. On the left are MTA Bus president Joseph Smith, Mayor Bloomberg, and acting MTA chief Helena Williams.

Displays counting down the minutes until the next bus arrives have been installed at eight shelters serving the M34 and M16 routes on 34th Street. All eight are live and functional, according to a DOT spokesperson, so if you're taking a late lunch in Midtown, you can walk on over and check them out. You'll find them at the eastbound bus stops at Tenth, Ninth, Eighth and Park, and the westbound stops at First, Second, Third, and Lexington.

The displays are part of a pilot program provided at no cost by a Long Island company called Clever Devices. A report by Michael Grynbaum in the Times' City Room blog notes that Clever Devices installed a similar pilot for Chicago three years ago, a program called Bus Tracker that has since expanded to cover more all of the city's bus network. The Manhattan pilot uses GPS satellite tracking to determine the position of buses. Wait times based on those positions are then transmitted to LED displays mounted at the bus shelters.

Two prior contracts for real-time bus tracking have been scrapped by the MTA, most recently this January, because the systems could not deliver accurate information to riders. Long after cities like London, Paris and Bogota implemented similar technology, New York bus riders still have to guess whether the next bus will arrive when the posted schedule says it will. If this 34th Street pilot pans out, it will mean less exasperation for straphangers, and, perhaps, a little more credibility for the MTA.

We'll post some pics of the new displays soon. If you snap a picture of one, you can email it to tips@streetsblog.org or tag it "streetsblog" on Flickr.

Amount of space that would be needed for cars if subway-riding New Yorkers thought like, say, a certain assemblyman from Westchester.

Parsing data derived from 2008 subway passenger counts and the NYMTC 2007 Hub Bound Report [PDF], Frumin writes:

Just to get warmed up, chew on this -- from 8:00AM to 8:59 AM on an average Fall day in 2007 the NYC Subway carried 388,802 passengers into the CBD on 370 trains over 22 tracks. In other words, a train carrying 1,050 people crossed into the CBD every 6 seconds. Breathtaking if you ask me.

Over this same period, the average number of passengers in a vehicle crossing any of the East River crossings was 1.20. This means that, lacking the subway, we would need to move 324,000 additional vehicles into the CBD (never mind where they would all park).

At best, it would take 167 inbound lanes, or 84 copies of the Queens Midtown Tunnel, to carry what the NYC Subway carries over 22 inbound tracks through 12 tunnels and 2 (partial) bridges. At worst, 200 new copies of 5th Avenue. Somewhere in the middle would be 67 West Side Highways or 76 Brooklyn Bridges. And this neglects the Long Island Railroad, Metro North, NJ Transit, and PATH systems entirely.

Take a gander at the map above to get an idea of the real estate that would be taken up by all those cars. Think such a proposition would lead John Liu to base his stances on congestion pricing and bridge tolls on principle, rather than wind direction? Could Deborah Glick overlook her personal hatred for the billionaire mayor long enough to save her constituents from carmaggedon? Would the prospect of seeing his district literally transformed into a parking lot prompt Sheldon Silver to finally take an unequivocal stand favoring transit over car commuting?

Right. Probably not.

Following another revision to the Second Avenue Subway construction timetable, the first phase of the mega-project remains, as ever, about seven or eight years away from completion. Pete Donohue reports in the Daily News:

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has finished an in-depth analysis of the work schedule, budget and potential hurdles for the long-awaited addition to the system, sources told the News.

The conclusion: the official completion date for phase one of the project should be pushed from June 2015 to December 2016, with possible future delays placing the opening in the summer of 2017, the sources said...

The original schedule for the first phase projected a 2012 completion date but MTA officials have pushed the date back several times over the years -- most recently in March 2008.

I'm lucky. I don't have to put up with sardine-style rush-hour commuting on the Lexington Avenue line. But if I did, I'd want relief as soon as possible. Eight years is a long time to ask people to wait, especially when a viable alternative like physically separated Bus Rapid Transit can be provided much sooner, at much less expense. And if experience is any guide, this won't be the last time the Second Avenue Subway gets pushed back, either.

ITDP director Walter Hook said it well in an interview with Streetsblog this February:

I don't know why Japanese and Chinese cities can roll out 10 miles of new subway line a year, and the richest city in the world has been trying and failing to build the Second Avenue Subway since the 1960s. But I've lived in this town a long time, and I am skeptical. The optimists are telling us that we will have a Second Avenue Subway between 125th Street and 63rd Street by 2015 and only after we spend $4 to $5 billion. So this means we are probably talking about 2018 or 2020, and $10 billion. The Second Avenue Subway would be great, it’s needed, it would have higher demand than almost any other metro line in the country. At those volumes, metros are often a good investment. But will it happen?

The MTA has a huge hole in its next capital program, with billions in funding for core maintenance still unaccounted for. That comes first, no matter what. If our legislative goons in Albany can't muster the will to fund mega-projects, too, we can still expand the system: On the east side of Manhattan, the right BRT configuration would carry almost as many commuters as the Second Avenue Subway, for a fraction of the cost.

"We'll look at it over the course of the next couple of months," said Kruger. ... "After that, we'll finish our vetting process, which hasn't even begun yet, and we'll have a better idea about the timetable (for a confirmation vote)."

When Liz Benjamin informed Kruger that Walder has already spoken of restoring public trust in the agency -- a task that will be much more difficult thanks to shameless hucksters like Kruger himself, the senator replied:

"I come from Missouri; don't show me, tell me. I mean, everybody says they're for oversight and accountability. What does that mean? What does it mean?"

I swear, this blog just writes itself sometimes.

While in London, Walder earned praise for putting the transit system on sound financial footing. (Note that the city's congestion charge took effect in 2003, while he was finance director at TfL.) To do the same for the MTA, he has his work cut out for him. He assumes the chairmanship at a perilous time for the agency's finances. The state legislature's latest transit funding package left a huge hole in the MTA's capital program, a shortfall of at least $20 billion which Albany will have to address very soon.

"Jay Walder has the experience and credibility that the MTA will require to survive these challenging fiscal times," said RPA President Robert Yaro in a statement. "He'll need all of his many skills to navigate the roiled political waters in Albany."

Transit riders will be well-served if Walder can manage to drive the media narrative about the MTA more successfully than his predecessor, Lee Sander. It's a tall order. Casting aspersions on the MTA is a favored tactic for legislators looking to deflect blame for their own lack of leadership on transit policy, and the press corps often appears to serve as a willing accomplice. The riding public needs someone who not only manages the agency capably, but also shapes the MTA's public image as deftly as possible.