The MT Position

“Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

I don’t know about you, but I am getting tired of public transit in the United States having to depend on the kindness of strangers. Right now, the strangers who have moved the price of gasoline to $4 a gallon have been very kind to transit, or so it would seem. Did you ever think you would see that many news articles and television spots devoted to the virtues of public transit as we have seen this year? But this season’s combined high-water mark for gas prices, ridership and media attention is already receding. It’s dropped $.25 a gallon since I started this piece! Where it will be by publication date, I do not know. Many in our business think this time is different: that politicians, the public, governments and public interest groups are now firmly behind public transit as a major tool in the battle against foreign oil dependency and high prices. But are they right?

If you’ve been around long enough – about 35 years – you have experienced this several times before. The OPEC oil embargo of 1973 started it all. Gasoline went from $.38 a gallon to – hold on to your seats – $.55 a gallon in less than a year. Then there was the Iranian Revolution of 1979 followed by the Iraq-Iran war, and gas prices spiked again. The war went on for eight years, but from a gasoline-price perspective, things settled down quickly. Transit got another six months of fame when the Kuwaiti invasion by Iraq brought on the first Gulf War in 1990. Gas prices held steady and then dropped during the 90s, and then came the 21st century with the 9/11 attacks, and new wars in the land of OPEC. That pretty much brings us to 2008 where we have had the unprecedented run-up to four bucks a gallon, about 10 times the price of gasoline when the modern era of temporary, but repetitive, media infatuation with public transit began.

It has been nice to be discovered again. And, if you are in the younger half of our industry, maybe your life’s work is being discovered for the first time. We cannot afford not to take advantage of this round of attention. But more than likely, the economy will once again adjust to the new level of energy costs. The emerging decrease or slowdown in the increase of demand will knock the price down a bit, and pretty soon the news articles and television talking heads will forget about public transit until the next time.

As I mentioned, there’s a lot of buzz in the business that this time was different. This time, there was a tipping point. Transit will hold onto those new riders. Ballot issues supportive of transit will appear and be passed. I hope the buzz is right, but must we continue to depend on the kindness of strangers to justify the proper increase in transit investment? Especially when those strangers tend to come in the guise of war, violence and hostile economic strategies aimed at this country?

We have our national and regional associations, lobbying and advocacy groups and our “support groups” from the business side of the business all working to capitalize on the cost of gas. There’s been progress in linking improved transit as a way to reduce the contribution of the transportation sector to climate change and air pollution. We have major trends emerging on sustainable development and a return to city centers for living, working and playing. We have aging baby boomers who will be demanding full mobility, even when they can no longer drive a car. We have a growing weariness with street and highway congestion, which so far is only slightly affected by the price of fuel. So we’ve turned the corner, right? Increased support for transit will be first and foremost on every voters’ mind when they cast their ballot this November, right? Well, not quite.

Transit services are undeniably more popular than a year ago, whether provided by a bus, a rail car or a vanpool 15-seater. But we are also seeing service cutbacks by a large number of providers. Kindness has its limits, and public transit operators are scrambling just as hard as Joe and Judy Six-pack to pay for diesel, natural gas and electricity. At the moment of our highest post-WW II popularity, a lot of us are in retreat. We’re raising fares, eliminating routes and hours of service, and shrinking our coverage area.

Elected officials and citizens in suburbs who want expanded service for the first time in their lives are told there are no extra buses to expand service. And if the transit system can find an extra bus or two, the suburban mayors and wannabe bus riders cannot comprehend that a full bus does not translate into a profit for the bus company! Transit staff, once again, is spending time trying to explain the concept of the farebox operating ratio, and trying to find an audience for the tale of the auto subsidy.

If public transit is ever going to control its own destiny in this country, the industry has to go on a sustained initiative like it has never has before. It helps to be on the right side of a pocketbook issue like gas prices, but we should not let the roller-coaster gas price ride keep us from positioning transit where it should be in local, regional, state and national funding debates. Every manager, every board member, every transit advocate needs to seize the argument about the amount of transit investment in his or her region and in the nation and reshape that argument. It doesn’t matter what the price of gas is. Our cities and citizens need and deserve a higher level of public transit. It doesn’t matter what the current thinking is regarding climate change. Our cities and citizens need and deserve a higher level of public transit.

Did we get to this point of such a huge modal imbalance by listening to the highway lobby tell us that highways were needed to save the planet? No, it just became part of the national conventional wisdom that more streets and highways equaled more economic development, more satisfaction with where we lived and worked more efficiently. In the first part of the twentieth century, states and cities indicated their progress toward civilization by showing how many miles of unpaved roads were remaining. It was accepted that a region could not really call itself civilized unless all the roads were paved. Then we moved the needle to a higher level, the planning and implementation of the Interstate highway system. We need an equivalent goal for transit, whether that is percent of population within walking distance of a bus or rail line, service hours per capita, or just plain old Levels of Transit Service A,B,C,D,E or F, that we define and award to each metropolitan area.

It is time we show there is a new conventional wisdom. We need to go further than just asking for an increase in the budget allotment, national and local. We need a plan, including detailed funding needs, and we then need to get that plan into the collective wisdom and say, “This is where we are going.” And if some strangers help us out along the way, that will be just fine.

Keith Jones is a regional transit planning manager for URS Inc.

Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit

On Monday 11 former transit employees or their next of kin filed a lawsuit in the New York Supreme Court against the manufacturers of diesel engines and buses citing exposure to diesel fumes as the cause of severe medical problems.

Since then seven more plaintiffs have been added to the suit, and that number could continue to grow, possibly causing a wealth of problems for the diesel bus industry.

Of those who filed on Monday, nine have various forms of cancer and the others have a variety of heart conditions. According to the plaintiff’s claims, they were exposed to undue amounts of diesel fumes while working in unventilated bus depots.

The defendants include General Motors, Detroit Diesel, Cummins Diesel, Northrop Grumman Corp., Orion Bus Industries and other companies. The most telling claim by the plaintiffs is that the defendants manufactured engines in such a way as to pass emissions standards, but that contained “defeat devices” that could be switched off after testing.

First of all, I believe the fact that more than half again as many plaintiffs have been added in less than a week is just the proverbial iceberg’s tip. As the news of this case spreads across the country, I expect a vastly larger number of plaintiffs to come out of the woodwork.

Just think about how many buses were sold over the 40-or-so year period they are discussing here. If the plaintiff’s claims are true, how many of those buses were outfitted with these “defeat devices”?

Now, while I won’t put it past a massive company to cut corners to make money — it’s happened before and, unfortunately, will happen again — I have to wonder about these “defeat devices.” If they were indeed installed on the vehicles (and I’m not saying they weren’t), then someone would have to turn them off. Did someone at the transit agency knowingly do that?

Or were they surreptitiously implanted in engines? That I find harder to believe. I’ve been around enough bus garages to know that the mechanics in there know the engines in their fleet better than the ones in their own cars.

There is much more about this story that is going to come out. I think the truth is going to fall somewhere in the middle between the two parties. What will the end result be? It’s hard to say with anything of this nature, but with the desire for alternative fuels and desire for public transit both at all-time highs, it might just hasten agencies to switch to hybrid or electric vehicles.

Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,

Fred
fred.jandt@cygnusb2b.com

Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit magazine

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) was in court last week getting a temporary restraining order (TRO) against three MIT students who were planning a presentation on how to hack the MBTA’s CharlieTicket and CharlieCard systems at the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas. This week the authority was back in court seeking to extend the TRO while it scrambles to plug the security holes pointed out by the students.

Unfortunately it seems that the MBTA might be a bigger security risk than the defendants in this case.

The students pulled their presentation from the conference and presented MTBA with a more detailed paper on the security flaws entitled “Fare Collection Vulnerability Assessment Report Analysis and Recommendations.” The MBTA took the report and offered it as evidence to the court of how damaging this information would be if the student’s released it to the public. Except when you enter materials into a court case they become a matter of public record — whoops!

Yep, this report that could be so damaging to MBTA is now being spread all across the Internet. A simple Google search got me a story with a link to the offending document. But here’s the thing, I read the document and I realized that while in fact, CharlieTickets and CharlieCards could indeed be hacked, I couldn’t do it.

What the MBTA in its zest to suppress this information failed to realize was that the paper isn’t a blueprint to ripping them off. It states in broad terms how the tickets could be hacked, but it doesn’t give you step-by-step instructions. It even presents ways the students found MBTA could solve these security holes.

I have to wonder whether or not MBTA would have targeted these students with legal ramifications so quickly had their paper been released at APTA’s Fare Collection Workshop or TransITech as a cautionary tale for other agencies with provided solutions. Should the three MIT students (or their professor) have presented the document to MBTA before they planned to present it at Defcon? Yes. Of course, they may have called MBTA and had their calls fall on deaf ears. Earlier this year Dutch researchers showed how the card the CharlieCard is based on could be hacked, but the MBTA stated in court documents that its proprietary encryption made those concerns moot.

The report is vague enough that unless you are dead set on hacking the MBTA’s system and have a moderate level of skill you aren’t going to be able to figure out how from it. And if the document as it stands allows people to start wildly hacking MBTA’s fare collection system, maybe it’s time it took a longer look at its own security. I know three college students from MIT who could probably help them out.

Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,

Fred
fred.jandt@cygnusb2b.com

Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit

Last week was the local fair in where I live. Sure in a small town in Wisconsin the local “fair” is a weekend of the same carnival rides you’ve seen for the past five years, the same games and a few bands (both local and past their prime). Of course over the last few years the local fair has become the family vacation as gas prices rose, making traveling for a vacation less than desirable.

Remember when vacations meant taking a plane to some far-off, but still-familiar location, or the multiday car trip with convenient stops to visit rarely seen relatives. Come to think of it, I guess there may be a benefit to not traveling so much.

I heard that airline tickets are going up again next year with an average around $600. Soon this will eliminate the casual flyer from taking a vacation anywhere they want to go. Of course here in the United States we can always fall back on the classic road trip. Of course, with $4-a-gallon gas, the classic road trip might be more local than long distance.

In Europe should you want to travel and not use a plane or have a car, you can always use the train system. Here in the United States that’s not going to be so easy. I looked into using Amtrak for the summer vacation this year, but there wasn’t a local station (despite trains traveling through my town), the times were difficult to plan around and the tickets weren’t much less than flying.

So we stayed home again this year. And from reports, my family and I weren’t the only ones. The term “staycation” has been coined meaning a vacation spent at home enjoying what you can find locally. This can be a great thing, but it could also isolate us as we lose our ability to quickly travel large distances at a low cost.

This is where transit can be so beneficial for the United States. We need a national rail system. There I said it. We need Amtrak to be nationwide what it is in the Northeast Corridor. We need a high-speed regional rail system around every major population center in the country — Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas. And we need to make it happen soon.

What we need is the game-changing investment into rail that happened with the creation of the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Notice that last little part? The Interstate System was built upon military defense backing. Interestingly enough Eisenhower was inspired by the German autobahn and how it was a necessary component for national defense. Now we are looking at Germany’s rail network with longing as Eisenhower once did with the autobahn.

It’s time we made rail as much of a priority and make staycations mean going anywhere within the United States cheaply again.

Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,

Fred
fred.jandt@cygnusb2b.com

Posted by the SF Muni Ladies

With the cost of fuel at an all-time high, transit systems are experiencing record-breaking ridership. Good news for you transit execs, bad news for gas-guzzling drivers. As these new riders get out of their vehicles and into yours, it’s easy to spot behavior that would make our Mommas blush! Inspired by experiences on our local transit systems BART and Muni, we feel compelled to offer a few etiquette rules…with a modern spin. These sassy “rules of the road” apply to any major city ripe with transit infractions: from the subways of NYC, to the Tube of London, or to future riders of the Bangalore Namma Metro — readers are logging on and spreading the word — 50 states and 129 countries, to be exact.

You’d be surprised (or not) by the number of people that could use a gentle lesson on public decorum. With the advent of technology and the bold, anywhere, anytime world in which we live, we’d like to share a sampling of our simple yet actionable rules:

Top 10 Muni Manners

Muni Manner 1: Always let exiting passengers leave the train before you board.
Muni Manner 2: Anticipate your stop to calmly exit the train or make way for others to do so.
Muni Manner 3: If you are young or able-bodied, give up your seat to someone who isn’t.
Muni Manner 4: Keep cell phone use to a minimum when riding public transport.
Muni Manner 5: Don’t rely on others to pick up after you; always dispose of your waste.
Muni Manner 6: To prevent the spread of germs, cover your mouth when expelling air.
Muni Manner 7: Help save space and avoid jostling others by properly stowing your bags.
Muni Manner 8: Be mindful of the volume of your music, even when wearing headphones.
Muni Manner 9: To prevent fellow passengers from feeling uncomfortable, keep your stare in check.
Muni Manner 10: Stay awake on transit to limit unwanted body contact and avoid blocking fellow passengers.

Transit agencies should be in the know, too. Check out our growing list of rules at http://www.munimanners.com. Our challenge to you? You’re in the driver’s seat so share the word! It’s the safe and courteous thing to do.

SF Muni Ladies
Public Transit Riders Bloggers
sfmunilady01@gmail.com
sfmunilady02@gmail.com

Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit

The Secretary of Transportation, Mary Peters, came out swinging this week, calling the federal gas tax “antiquated” and saying that the federal approach to funding transportation is “broken.” She goes on to say that it’s, “time for a new, a different and a better approach” to funding.

Take note of the wording there. She said the approach to funding transportation was broken, not transit.

So what’s this new, different and better approach to funding transportation? It’s the approach we in the transit industry have heard about and been dreading for some time now — taking of funds from the transit account to the highway account in the Highway Trust Fund.

See here’s where I get confused. Evidently the federal gas tax and its funding of the Highway Trust Fund wasn’t an “antiquated” or “broken” system when gas prices were $2 cheaper and there were 10 billion more miles being driven. When people are driving less and using less gasoline, then suddenly the system is broken? You didn’t see this coming when gas prices surged to $3 a gallon?

And what’s worse is this notion that a gradual shift towards more funding for transit is needed? Is this a political shift … i.e. a gradual one in which the time it takes equates to the natural progression of a political campaign? If the 10 billion fewer miles and the continued drop in gasoline usage while transit business is booming is any indication, then this is the time for a dramatic shift in the funding for transit.

I’m a sports fan. And one of the things you will hear a lot around sports talk shows is the idea of fans voting with their dollars. If fans really don’t like something, you will know by how they spend their money. Right now people are spending their money on transit instead of on their cars. They are making that choice.

So where is the government support? For years transit has gotten short shrift due to our nation having a “car culture,” which is evident by how the Highway Trust Fund is apportioned with a much larger percentage of monies going to the highway account than to the transit account. It’s high time that changed. Actually, how about fixing the system by simply swapping the percentages?

Rather than simply acting like a spoiled kid who wants to change the rules now that they don’t favor them, the federal government should open its eyes to the dramatically changing transportation landscape in front of them and make some equally dramatic decisions when it comes to funding.

Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,

Fred
fred.jandt@cygnusb2b.com

Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit

As I was traveling this week I heard that Midwest Airlines (our local carrier) was cutting flights and laying off personnel citing gas prices as the main culprit. As I checked in at the airport and looked at the new prices being levied on customers — $25 for an extra checked bag, for example — I wondered how bad gas prices had gotten for airlines.

As we laid over to refuel I found out. The pilot informed us that we had just loaded about $11,000 of fuel. This translated to about $168 a passenger. In relation, the cost for the crew taking us to our destination came out to be about $12 a passenger.

That’s a ratio of 14 to 1 for what they spent on fuel versus crew. How much are you spending on fuel? How much in comparison to your operations staff? Of course with the dramatic rise in fuel prices in the last few years, it’s hard to not end up with a ratio like that.

This got me to thinking. What kind of price can we put on good customer service? Many agency directors I speak with tell me that they are (if they haven’t already) switching from hiring people who can drive a bus to people who are good with customers. The logic is that they can teach them to drive a bus — they can’t teach them to be good with customers.

This is true in almost any position. We’ve all had that person at the checkout who really doesn’t want to be there and let’s you know it. You can teach a person to run a register, you can’t teach them how to be good-natured around customers.

Service is key in the transit industry. If riders aren’t happy about their service they will walk — sometimes literally.

Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,

Fred
fred.jandt@cygnusb2b.com

“I am coming, I am coming! Hark you hear my motors humming?
For the trolley’s come to conquer and you cannot keep it back;
And Zip! The sparks are flashing as the car goes onward dashing;
Yes the trolley’s come and conquered so look out and clear the track!”

Thus did a late 19th century author describe the advent of the electric streetcar, an event that literally changed the way Americans went to work and play and moved about the cities. Today we are faced with another major change in individual mobility, $4-a-gallon gasoline is causing many Americans to rethink the way they get around and to look more to public transit to fill the void.

As an industry that is historically underfunded and equipment-hungry, many of us are struggling to meet the demand. How does a small transit operator with a fleet of vintage electric streetcar equipment rise to meet this challenge? In the case of McKinney Avenue Transit Authority (MATA) in Dallas, Texas, we decided to examine just what it was we did and who we were. The answers enabled us to reaffirm our identity as a vintage operator, while plotting a course to meet the demands and expectations of our customers and take advantage of 21st century technologies.

Throughout the past year as we have seen gasoline prices spiral upward we have also noticed steady ridership increases during our regular commute times. Ridership for 2008 is up 20 percent over the same period last year. In particular, we have seen a large increase in the number of passengers transferring to our streetcars from light rail stations of the regional transit authority (DART). These numbers, taken in conjunction with on-car surveys, told us we were experiencing a basic change in our ridership demographics. We took a hard look at what our commuter passengers expected their streetcar system to do for them.

Early in the year it was decided to air condition our fleet of vintage streetcars. A grant from the Sue Pope Foundation enabled MATA to begin addressing this issue, and in May the first air-conditioned 1920 Birney safety car in the world rolled out of the shops to the delight of our riding public. Four other cars will follow during the course of the summer, and the further addition of AC traction motors, solid-state controllers and resilient wheels over the next two years will enable us to increase safe operating speeds, decrease headways and provide a higher level of comfort and service to the riding public while maintaining the ambiance and look of the antique cars.

Greenhouse gases, NOC emissions, global warming and, on a more visceral level, the cost of gas at the pump has caused Americans to re-ask the question of the World War II generation, “Is this trip really necessary?” It should cause each of us, as transit executives, to ask some important questions about what kind of organization we are and how our agencies can re-equip ourselves to do the job ahead of us.

Roll up your sleeves folks, it’s a big job and there’s work to do!

John Landrum
Chief Operating Officer
McKinney Avenue Transit Authority

Post by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit

As we do every year, we poll our readers to get a snapshot of what they are looking for in a magazine and how they see the current state of the transportation industry. What’s interesting is that security has been one of the lowest-rated issues for our readers for several years now. Granted, if you are running a small rural agency, you probably don’t have to worry about terrorists.

Of course, now with the amount of technological integration in public transit, you have to keep an eye on the people working for you more than ever. Quis custo diet ipsos custodes indeed.

For those not familiar with that Latin quote, it roughly translates to, “Who watches the watchmen.” Who is watching the people that are watching your system?

Sunday a network administrator for San Francisco’s municipal computer network was arrested for giving himself unfettered access to the city’s network, purportedly creating an über-password for his use only, and locking out other administrators in the process.

From reports this situation stemmed from a conflict between the administrator and his supervisor, and other than the time and trouble needed to rectify the password situation, no harm was done. Of course, that’s not the point. This isn’t a matter of what was done, but what could have been done.

Now think about this in a transit sense. How many transit authorities are installing remote viewing capabilities for their video systems? AVL is commonplace and almost required in many systems. What about Wi-Fi access to video recorders? Or Wi-Fi downloads of technical information from a vehicle. Farebox totals?

I know, I know, every one of these systems is protected from tampering. But most of them are protected from tampering from someone outside of the system. If a clever IT guy decides to start messing around with your system, will anyone notice?

Of course, this is a slippery slope towards paranoia, but it pays to be safe. And if transit systems are safer than ever before due to better security systems, it’s worth a second look to make sure the security system is just as safe as the transit system itself.

Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,

Fred
fred.jandt@cygnusb2b.com

Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit

When you are participating in anything, it’s difficult to take a step back and look at it as a whole in comparison to the world around it. Are you a sports fan? Take a step back and look at sports fandom some time in relation to the rest of the world.

Now, we really need to step back and take a look at transit on a broader scope while tuning out the rhetoric (good or bad) for just a bit.

Every year Mass Transit piles everyone involved in the magazine into a room and we discuss the past year, what we liked, what we didn’t like, and discusses what we want to change in the next year (not without our fair share of arguing). We purposely step back from the daily grind of publishing to look at the magazine as a whole in the perspective of the industry and world around it.

This led me to think whether or not transit needs to do that as an industry. There was a good story posted on the Mass Transit Web site earlier this week. You can read it here. The story discusses whether or not transit is at a tipping point and looks at it from an outside perspective.

One interesting point stuck with me. In the story, transportation consultant Alan Pisarski is quoted as saying that mass transit only accounts for 1 percent of travel in the United States. So with a 20 percent increase in travel, that would jump to 1.2 percent. Transit isn’t at a tipping point when you look at it in that scale. Really, it’s not even close.

Of course public transportation in the United States is on an entirely different slope than the rest of the world. Let’s take a look at Europe, which gets compared to the United States in terms of public transit so often.

The distance between London and Paris is 212 miles. The distance between Paris and Berlin is 545 miles. The distance between London and Moscow is 1,552 miles.

The distance between New York City and Chicago is 711 miles. The distance between Chicago and Los Angeles is 1,740 miles. The distance between New York City and Los Angeles is 2,444 miles.

It’s further to cross half of the United States than most of Europe. That’s a big difference in scale.

While we’re comparing the public transit offering in Madrid to that in Los Angeles, we need to remember that Madrid is the center of an entire country, while Los Angeles isn’t even the capital of the state of California. The public has a way of talking about transit as something for the “big cities,” but we need to remember that on a comparison scale to the rest of the world, the United States (3,794,066 square miles) needs to be compared with continents (Europe – 3,930,000 square miles), not countries.

Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,

Fred
fred.jandt@cygnusb2b.com