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.

CBTC just doesn't work

There has been a fad in the transit and railway world to abandon the conventional signalling technologies that have worked so well for the past hundred years, in favor of "Communication Based Train Control". This is a centralized system wherein, basically, every train constantly tells the central control computer where it is, and the computer tells the train how fast it should be going. Generally, these systems are highly proprietary, and often parts become obsolete soon after they're bought (San Francisco, for example, has a system based on OS/2). And the systems are generally very bad at handling vehicles that either don't communicate, or don't meet the criteria of the often-finicky systems.
As if that wasn't trouble enough, some bright fellows decided that rather than use the proven but expensive inductive loop technology, they'd use radios to communicate with the trains. Inside tunnels. Which tends not to work so well, and almost all of the systems where they've tried that have failed, including the Jubilee Line in London, the BART, and now Philadelphia, where the "more advanced" system has in fact reduced capacity and caused delays. Will they ever learn?

Everyone Loves the Electric (part n)

Amtrak has just posted their ridership and revenue statistics for fiscal 2008, and they're quite detailed and interesting. One thing stands out though: 55% of Amtrak's revenue comes from the Northeast Corridor, which carries 38% of the total ridership. If you do the math, you find that the average Acela customer pays $138, while the average Surfliner customer pays $18. For all that talk of how Amtrak needs to get rid of the NEC, it's still by far their most successful route, and the only one that has attracted large numbers of high-paying customers.

Why one should read EULAs

From the skype EULA:

Skype, in its sole discretion, may modify or discontinue or suspend your ability to use any version of the Skype Software, and/or disable any Skype Software you may already have accessed or installed without any notice to you

What this means is that at any point in time, skype reserves the right to hit the self-destruct switch on the software on your computer, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it, because you allowed them to by using it. Furthermore, they reserve the right to change the rules at any time by posting said changes 30 days in advance on their website, so it's your problem to check their website regularly. And best of all, this whole transaction is subject to Luxembourg law, and if you want to sue Skype, presumably you have to do it in Luxembourg.

The insanity that is VTA

The closer I look at the VTA (the local transit authority), the less I like it. The VTA seems singularly focused on wasting money in the most gratuitous way possible, getting the least bang for the most buck.

The epitome of this wastefulness is the BART extension project, which just never seems to go away. It's one of those things that seems like a good idea... until you think about it and realize that it's $6 billion and a 20 year delay for a subway from Fremont to San Jose,
through the middle of mostly nowhere. It's the same cost as LA's Subway to the Sea, and for two orders of magnitude less money, the VTA could have been running a commuter rail to Fremont or even Oakland, and in fact the VTA almost did before the BART project came along. But BART is still in the future, and only a relatively small amount of planning money has been spent on it.

The VTA has already wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on misguided projects, such as the light rail system. They sold their 15 year old fleet of 50 high-platform cars and bought a brand new fleet of 100 low-floor cars, despite needing at most 61 of them for peak service. And to allow level boarding with these new cars, they have had to raise the platforms at every single station in the system, at great expense, not to mention inconvenience to passengers when the
stations are closed.

And the design of the light rail system as a whole just seems wasteful: it doesn't really go where people want to go, and it takes a long time getting there. Just look at the absurd shape of the line from Downtown to Alum Rock via Milpitas. Or the long, scenic, and slow windings of the Mountain View line through office-park-land. Or the sidewalk running through Downtown at 10 mph, which makes trips through San Jose infeasibly slow. Or how the single busiest transit corridor in the county, along Santa Clara St and Alum Rock Ave, still doesn't
have light rail service.

Trains and scalability

What with the high gas prices, it's not surprising that even in LA, public transit ridership has been setting records this year. What's particularly interesting about this latest set of numbers, though, is that the Gold Line's ridership has finally exceeded that of the Orange Line busway, and the Orange Line's growth is starting to stagnate. There's a very simple explanation: the Orange Line has basically reached capacity, since it's going to be hard to maintain reliable service with headways closer than four minutes. On the Gold Line, they've gone from 12 minute peak headways down to 7.5. Plus, thanks to the ability to couple trains, as well as the higher speed that comes with proper grade crossing protection, the Gold Line requires 11 drivers to operate peak service, while the Orange Line requires about 24, for a roughly comparable number of passenger miles.
And the Gold Line has quite a bright future ahead of it, as higher ridership leads to a more frequent and thus more attractive service. The Eastside extension can only help matters, by linking more destinations with the rail network. With some upgrades to the power system, they will be able to start running three car trains and boost capacity by another 50% with no extra drivers, and I suspect that headways as close as 5 minutes are possible as well, more than doubling the line's capacity.
Meanwhile, the Orange Line is already running a bus every four minutes at peak, and it's not likely that service can increase much beyond that without creating jams at the many grade crossing on the line. So the buses will get increasingly crowded until an equilibrium is reached between people needing to get somewhere, and people not wanting to put up with the crowding. Or until the line is rebuilt as light rail.

Yet another Bush Administration WTF

The Federal Transit Administration recently made a ruling that expands the definition of charter bus service to keep publicly funded transit agencies from competing with charter bus companies when they provide premium fare service, like to football games. However, this isn't really a charter service organized and paid for by one person, rather, it's a special transit service, with the bus company doing the organizing and each rider paying an individual fare into the farebox. And according to California regulations, this makes it legally a transit service, not a charter service, and a license to operate charter service isn't enough to provide it, and it can only be operated by a transit provider. The end result might well be that nobody is allowed to operate this service at all. WTF.