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.