The importance of frequent transit service

I was flying back into the SFO airport yesterday, and since I live in the South Bay, I needed to find some form of transportation to get me home from the airport. Fortunately, there is a BART station right at the airport, and I live quite close to a Caltrain station. I even had my Translink card with me. Unfortunately, I missed a BART train by 30 seconds. Since BART only runs every 20 minutes, that means that I would miss the connection to Caltrain, which runs once an hour, which would mean that I would get home an hour later than if I had run slightly faster to catch that train. Instead, I took a SuperShuttle, which, with waiting, actually got me home almost exactly when I would have gotten home had I not missed that train, but at considerably greater cos ($40 instead of $8.25). In this case, the reason I did not take transit was not transit's speed, and that is given that a local Caltrain is pretty slow and waiting for the connection takes time too. Rather, it is end to end travel time, which is a function of both travel speed and waiting time, and the latter is largely determined by frequency. And it's a virtuous cycle: increased frequency can increase ridership, and I suspect that the Moscow Metro would not be as popular if headways at 10:30 pm were 20 minutes instead of 4.

Translink on Caltrain: so many frustrations

Here's an email that I recently sent to Translink (soon to be Clipper) customer service to express my frustrations with the implementation of this fare payment system on Caltrain:

I've recently seen flyers stating that Translink will soon be the only form of payment accepted on Caltrain for monthly passes and zone upgrades. I feel that this is premature, and that there are a number of features Translink needs to have before it can match what is offered by the current Caltrain fare system. The main issues are zone upgrades, monthly pass activation, inter-agency transfers, and availability of vending machines.

First off, the availability of Translink vendors in the Caltrain service area is spotty at best. Right now, I can buy a monthly pass or 8-ride at any Caltrain station, whereas I can only do Translink transactions at the San Francisco or San Jose ticket offices during business hours, or at some Walgreens that are not necessarily near the stations, and may not necessarily even be willing to deal with Translink transactions (I'll file a separate complaint about the concrete cases of that). It would be nice to have Translink Add Value Machines installed at Caltrain stations, especially San Jose, but possibly also other popular stations such as Mountain View, Palo Alto, Redwood City, and Hillsdale.

The next issue is monthly pass activation. According to the brochure, when I buy a monthly pass for a given set of zones, such as 3-4, it is not activated until I tag on and off in the respective start and end zones, and that if I tag on and off in different zones, it will instead give me a pass for those zones (and I will be charged accordingly). This works great for someone who always travels between the exact same stations every time and never ventures anywhere else, but is a major inconvenience if I happen to be travelling to a different zone on the first day of the month. It means I either have to jump off the train at an intermediate stop to tag my pass, or else save the tagging of the pass for a different day and pay full fare, which seems incredibly unfair given that I've already paid for the pass.

On a related note, the handling of zone upgrades seems subpar. If I have a monthly pass, and wish to travel outside its zones, I have to buy a paper zone upgrade. If I do the intuitive thing and tag on and off, I get charged full fare, which is effectively charging me for something I already (mostly) paid for. Furthermore, in a comparable situation on AC Transit, it works the opposite way. If I have a local pass and wish to upgrade to a transbay ticket, I must use Translink e-cash to pay, not actual cash. This seems frustratingly inconsistent for a fare system that was supposed to provide some consistency among the Bay Area transit agencies. Also, with Translink, zone upgrades are no longer usable with 8-ride tickets.

Finally, there is the issue of broken interagency transfers. At San Jose, Caltrain connects to express buses operated by Monterey Salinas Transit and Santa Cruz Metro, neither of which are members of the Translink consortium. Both of these agencies provide discounts to holders of Caltrain monthly passes (in fact, MST provides free rides throughout its system). With the switch to exclusive use Translink as the medium for monthly passes, it will be impossible to provide these transfers unless MST and Highway 17 Express operators have the ability to read Translink cards.

I believe these issues need to be resolved before Translink can be made the exclusive form of fare media for monthly passes and 8-rides on Caltrain. I think Translink is a wonderful idea, and can be wonderfully convenient if implemented properly, but very frustrating if the implementation is half-baked. I hope these issues are addresses, because I'd very much like to see the Translink system succeed.

Privatization

From a report made by a rail construction company in the UK:

The move to privatisation resulted in a massive loss of skill and expertise at all levels in the rail industry. In many cases, the people who were lost were the people who set the standards that form the basis of what is in place today. When these people moved on they took with them the
corporate memory which formed the decision making criteria of what was done and why. The corporate memory issue is further compounded by the disaggregation brought about by privatisation with no one body holding all the information.

So much for the idea that privatization always makes things more efficient. And this coming from a company that almost certainly benefited significantly from it. For more on this, see The Navigators, a movie about the impact of privatization on railway workers.

A pleasant surprise from the MBTA

By far the most ill-conceived transportation project in Boston was Phase 3 of the Silver Line, a proposal to link Phase 1 (a silver-painted bus down Washington St) to Phase 2 (the bus tunnel from South Station to the waterfront), for no particular reason that was obvious to anyone other than that these two completely unrelated projects were called "Silver Line". Building a bus tunnel would have cost over a billion dollars required tearing up part of the Boston Common and demolishing an out of service Green Line tunnel that coincidentally goes to the same general place, and has the advantages of being a train tunnel and already being there. And nobody ever made a very convincing case that there would be any significant ridership from Dudley to the South Boston Waterfront (as opposed to, say, Park Street). Well, there's some good news.

The MBTA and the state government have officially endorsed a different extension of the Silver Line, a much cheaper and more useful proposal to extend the Washington St. Silver Line to a surface terminal at South Station and convert the #28 bus into another Silver Line-branded bus rapid transit line. While still not ideal (doing both routes as Green Line branches would have been better), this project is at least both useful and within the means of the MBTA to actually build, and is a huge step in the right direction for the MBTA planning process. Now all they have to do is admit that light rail is in fact sometimes better than a bus :)

Ever wanted to build a railroad?

Have you ever wanted to build your own railroad, but had no idea how to do it? Well, you're in luck, because thanks to the internet, you can now get the design standards from various railroads, including Caltrain and theDenver RTD (which has standards for both Light Rail and Commuter Rail). It's pretty neat to see how it's actually done, although a little bit disturbing that, for example, Caltrain's choice of transition spirals is based on what AutoCAD supports, rather than on the copious research both in the US and elsewhere about what actually works best for reducing track forces and improving ride quality.

Good work, MBTA

A few days ago, I took a ride on the MBTA Blue Line, and I must say, it's changed a lot since I last rode it, and mostly for the better. The collapsing platform at Wood Island is gone, replaced by a shiny new rebuilt one. And, at least on the day when I was there, all the trains were the new ones, with six cars rather than four. The new trains are, on the whole, very good. The ride is fast, comfortable, and relatively quiet, and the interiors are roomy. The only complaints I have are that the seats are hard, and that the drivers' cabs seem rather large, which adds up to a lot of wasted space in a six-car train with very short cars. But that aside, these trains are definitely an improvement on what came before, and are some of the best new rapid transit trains that I've seen.

Casino Express

Looks like the ACES train is finally about to start running. This is a privately funded train, organized by a consortium of Atlantic City casinos, and run by New Jersey Transit. Amtrak is in on this too: they're doing the ticketing. An interesting example of public-private partnership, the opposite of the more common one of public agencies contracting for service from a private company. And this is exactly the sort of service that public bus agencies are currently prohibited from providing.