As we exited the train, these excellent T digital displays (complete with clocks) were just flipping from 11:00 to 11:01, flipping at the same time as my cell phone. Piece of cake. A very short walk to the busway, hop on the bus, and we will be home to see the painful report on the local news of our choice.
However, as we walked through the turnstiles, we could see the 77 bus passing through the busway. The bus was gone before the T-clocks flipped to 11:02. The next bus was 11:16. We were now stuck with a 14 minute wait for a bus.
The 74 bus to Belmont came through the busway. It was scheduled to leave at 11:00, and I am sure the half-dozen people who came off the 11:00 Red Line train and boarded the bus were delighted that their bus was three minutes late.
This gave me some time to stand there and play with the Mass Transit app, and I quickly did a little math. The 77 bus runs at a 13 minute interval, but the Red Line runs at a 12 minute interval. The loudspeakers in the station announced an inbound train, and an Alewife bound train came through at about 11:12. The people on that train wandered up to the bus platform. At 11:17, a 77 bus appeared in the busway and the people on the platform filled the bus.
Here’s my public policy question. If my iPhone can tell me the schedule, and the T technology can send an announcement that a train is entering the station, why can’t we bring the two technologies together to coordinate the buses with the trains?
First, let’s look at the 13 minute headway silliness on the 77 bus. If the trains run every 12 minutes, why do the buses run every 13 minutes? All this does is put the schedules so badly out of sync that some folks might be lucky and wait a minute or two for the bus, but others are condemned to a 12 minute wait.
If we put the bus on the same 12-minute headway, here’s the wonderful thing we can do. We can calculate the time the outbound train is scheduled to arrive at the station, add three minutes for the walk to the platform, and time the buses to provide an easy and convenient transfer.
Meanwhile, up at the bus layover area, the same computer that sends the notification to the passengers on the platform could also send a signal to the bus driver. Train leaves the station, buses are called, and they pick up the passengers who just walked off the train.
For the buses with longer headways, the buses could leave on a multiple of 12 (or the interval between trains). With this kind of coordination, an Arlington passenger could actually calculate whether the best option would be to connect with a 77 at Harvard, an 86 at Davis, or a 79 or 350 at Alewife. A Burlington-bound rider could actually calculate which outbound Red Line train he needed to be on to connect to the 350 at Alewife. A new Green Line station at Route 16 in Medford would be much more useful if buses to Arlington and Medford were coordinated.
And so it goes for the rest of the system. Quincy, Forest Hills, Wellington, Wonderland, all could be more transit-friendly, and less dependent on parking garages, if the buses were aligned to the trains.
It doesn’t seem to be a terribly difficult problem to solve. So why don’t we actually do this?
In Chicago we have a bus tracker and train tracker website and Iphone app, it would be awesome if the MBTA did it. And I agree with Bob, privatization is the way to go, the Gov had some good ideas about it when I spoke to him back in 06′ but he seems to have given up on that (along with most of his good ideas).
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p>The variance with buses is far higher than trains blue, red, orange, and green underground & D lines. You can’t get a bus “on schedule” unless you (a) give it dedicated roadway which it doesn’t have to share with autos, delivery trucks, double parked cars, or turning vehicles, (b) let it control the traffic lights, and (c) have the payment for the bus be off-bus only (or not at all), or alternatively, (d) run the buses with such a padded schedule that you pull up to each bus stop early and wait for a minute or two before departing, to make sure you don’t get behind schedule.
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p>In short, it ain’t happening, and it’s not a matter of technology — it’s a matter of buses sharing road space with other users. The public policy “answer” is to implement (a), (b), and (c) above, and that isn’t happening. The best case scenario is that you make sure that the buses move in sync — that is, that they remain 12 minutes apart, so that a bus rider arrives at the stop and knows that the average wait is 6 minutes and the worst case scenario is 12 minutes.
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p>Irrelevant. Since the schedules of each of them will flex by a few minutes, you simply can’t plan on a very brief layover. You’ve simply got to build in some buffer time for the trip, just like you would if you were driving and you expected any kind of traffic.
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p>So what happens when the train arrives 4 minutes late? Now the bus interarrival is 16 minutes, instead of 12. As a result, there are more people waiting for the bus both at that stop (those who arrive by foot) and at every stop along the route. As a result, the bus does more stopping for boarding and alighting, and each stop takes longer since there are more individuals boarding or alighting. Now, instead of a 16 minute headway, it slips to 17, 18, 19 since the bus ahead had “regular” use and not an extra 33%.
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p>The next train at the station may not also be 4 minutes late. Let’s say its 2 minutes late. Now, instead of 12 minutes between these buses, there’s 10. Only wait — with only 10 minutes worth of passengers waiting at the initial pickup and at each subsequent stop, this bus runs faster — fewer pickups and dropoffs. So, the bus ahead, which started 4 minutes behind, is now 6 or 7 minutes behind and slowing. This bus which started 2 minutes behind is picking up speed, and maybe is “on time”.
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p>See what’s happening? The buses are bunching. If you don’t make sure that the buses depart on schedule, you get bunching. You may get it anyway, but this would guarantee it.
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p>What about bus-bus transfers? You couldn’t possibly align those, and those transfers might be more common than rail-bus transfers, depending on the route. And besides, as I wrote above, it’s all for naught… buses simply can’t run on a tight schedule since they share space with other users.
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p>It may not seem at first blush like a terribly difficult problem, but it is, in fact, terribly difficult.
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p>We could make it better. How?
* tow every damn vehicle which parks in a bus stop, even just a little bit. Those parkers can skew the bus out of schedule just a little bit… increasing variance
* install TSP: transit signal prioritization. This means that the bus can extend a green (or shorten a red) to get a little speed boost when it’s starting to fall behind, helping it to stay on schedule. Super advanced TSP may even slow a bus down an extra 5-10 seconds if it’s getting too close to the bus ahead of it, exacerbating the bunching.
* move bus stops to the far side of intersections. When a bus approaches a near side bus stop, it gets a red light about 1/2 the time. It waits at the red light 6 car lengths back. When the light turns green, the bus moves ahead 100′ to the bus stop, where it stops to let passengers on and off, and by the time it’s done: the light is red again. It took two cycles. If the bus stop is on the far side, this scenario only takes one cycle. It turns out that in almost all cases, far side bus stops are more efficient — and even more so when combined with TSP.
* make the bus free. Yeah, it’s radical. Know how much bus fares contribute to the MBTA budget? Under 10%. You make ’em free, and not only do you have much faster boardings which help the buses stay on schedule, but you also save on the capital expenditures of installing the fare collection boxes and the wages of maintenance of those boxes. It’s a money losing proposition, but it doesn’t lose very much money and it would reduce bus schedule variance dramatically.
stormv wrote:
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p>That’s a nice description of why we can’t do something. I would be sympathetic if we weren’t talking about the initial departure of the bus run. I am also talking about off-hours operations, where bus intervals are relatively long and competing traffic is relatively light.
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p>jconway mentions the CTA – a system with much longer and more complex bus routes than Boston. They seem to do a much better job of integrating between buses and trains.
so my off the cuff response is that morning hours (pre-rush) doesn’t work because it butts into busier times. Nights or weekends though: hmmmm.
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p>Good question. I don’t know how far the variance falls for the bus runs during lighter auto traffic times, and there’s not a bus route that I ride on a regular basis during off-hours.
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p>I guess I’d say I’m skeptical, but certainly open to the possibility that you could tweak the schedule of off-hour buses which depart from stations which share a stop with rail. It’s a small number of routes for a small interval of the day, but why not?
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p>In the mean time, those things I suggest: they require (a) serious cooperation from enforcement agencies, (b) serious money, (c) a serious change in public philosophy which is 180 degrees from Bob Neer’s.
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p>Personally, I think we should work much harder on (a) and (b). Know why most bus stops are precisely where they happen to be? Because they’re near a fire hydrant, so it preserves as much on street parking as possible. Doesn’t matter if the actual physical location is bad for the bus. Want to change it? Yeah, good luck. I’m working on a project to realign bus stops for a portion of Route 66 — the busiest line in the system. However, for every single change we propose, folks come out of the woodwork and oppose it, and suddenly they’re experts. “Oh sure you engineers may have studied this problem carefully and have your equations and your logic, but this bus stop is special. It’s unique. It defies all logic, reason, experience, queueing theory, network theory, hell it defies the laws of thermodynamics. You can’t be allowed to change this bus stop.” Happens every freakin’ time… and politicians are wimps on things like this, so they allow the small number of voices who will be inconvenienced more weight than the large number of riders who’s experience will be slightly improved — which, when multiplied by numerous changes, results in very real reduction in both mean trip time and variance, and therefore tremendously improved QoS.
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p>The public policy infrastructure is not much different than bike lanes, which can be thrown down anywhere just so long as they don’t negatively impact any parking space. Cambridge has gotten past this, but no other community in Boston metro — Boston, Brookline, Newton — which is trying to put down bike lanes has gotten around it.
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p>So yeah, as to your proposal: I’m not sure that it would help a whole lot (given the limitations on off-peak and only certain routes), but it strikes me that it might help.
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p>As for the trackers, the train tracker is coming. I’ve spoken with the gentleman who’s responsible for it, and it’s coming. It got slowed down due to a few factors, including the reality that the guy “driving” the project is leaving the MBTA to attend Harvard Business School right about this week.
You are citing one of the most challenging routes in the system. It passes by several train connections, and wanders through some of the most congested roads in the region.
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p>I would concede that a bus-train sync would be extremely difficult for the 66, but it wouldn’t be for the majority of system routes that start their journeys at train stations.
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p>For example, the starting times of routes 62, 67, 76, 79, 84, 350, and 351, which originate in the Alewife busway, would be tied to outbound train arrivals at Alewife.
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p>The starting times of routes 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, and 96, which originate in the Harvard busway, would be tied to outbound train arrivals at Harvard.
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p>The starting times of routes 210, 211, 212, 214, 215, 216, 217, 220, 221, 222, 225, 230, 236, 238, and 245, which originate in the Quincy Center busway, would be tied to outbound train arrivals at Quincy Center.
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p>This would also have a positive impact on people seeking to make transfers between buses at these hubs.
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p>I agree on the provisions that stormv suggests to expedite the existing lines once they are in the midst of their routes. That, however, is another story.
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I wonder if you have perhaps overstated your item (d).
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p>Buses in Innsbruck and Vienna share the road with autos, don’t control the signals, and don’t wait (noticeably) at each stop — yet they run on a predictable schedule and they maintain it.
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p>Here’s what I think can be done (if the MBTA has the will to do it): I think a reasonable schedule, based on observed traffic conditions, can be established for each stop on each bus line. I think the system should be monitored to flag early departures from each stop, and should measure late departures. This should all be well within the performance envelope of current GPS technology.
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p>Yes, buses would occasionally wait at a stop until their scheduled departure time. I think that most of the time, most riders would prefer this. Buses currently leave in bunches (I’ve watched them), and each bus then seems to go through its route as fast as possible. The result is that it is essentially impossible to determine whether it makes sense to wait for a specific bus at a specific stop. This as-fast-as-possible behavior is particularly frequent near the end of a shift.
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p>I think this is mostly a labor issue, actually. I think that if measured schedule performance — at each stop — were factored into compensation scales, we could accomplish a noticeable improvement in system performance. I think the key is to intentionally build a culture where drivers actually value, and are rewarded for, driving their routes according to published timetables.
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p>Meanwhile, every stop should have an LED message board that tells riders when the estimated departure times for the next two or three buses, based on current real-time GPS information.
I confess that I didn’t ride a bus when there, just the streetcars and U-bahns.
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p>You’re obligated to purchase a ticket, though it’s been 12 years since I’ve been there so I don’t remember if it’s on the trolley or off. In any case, they have spot inspections, and if you don’t have a fare ticket, you pay a massive fine.
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p>As a result, they don’t have the possibly long boarding times. The streetcars also never have problems with wheelchairs, since they simply exclude the mobility impaired from even getting on — steep steps up to the streetcar. I also seem to recall them driving relatively slow… that is, the gap between the auto in front and the streetcar widening. If you slow down the vehicles, you can actually reduce variance — but also slow down your total mph. I have no idea how they compare to those in tUSA.
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p>As for the bus keeping a precise schedule, it turns out that American bus riders don’t typically value a precise schedule… they typically value fixed interarrival times. As long as you know the bus is coming in 12 minutes or less, it doesn’t much matter when. This is, after all, how the subway lines work.
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p>Finally,
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p>That’s not exactly what will happen. I expect instead that each station will have a phone number and extension. You call it on your cell phone, they give you the info with audio. It’s (a) much cheaper, (b) allows for the blind to use the system reasonably well (braille can tell them the number to call, and if it’s standardized it’s not too tough to use), and (c) doesn’t require running power to all of the stops.
stormv wrote:
You have a point on one fixed interval, but rides that require TWO fixed intervals and TWO waits discourage T ridership. I see that in Arlington every day.
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p>Even with frequent service on the 77 bus, many people who are willing (and happy) to deal with the intervals on the Red Line refuse to do it twice in one trip.
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p>The side streets around East Arlington, and the Arlington residents who pay $7 to park in the Alewife garage, are testimony to the disdain for the lack of coordination between buses and transit. Add to that the people who get in their cars and drive into Boston rather than take the bus and train.
I live in Burlington. It’s real easy to take the bus to the Red Line and Boston. I know when the 350 leaves North Burlington, and I can time my walk to the bus stop so I have a short wait.
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p>Too many times I have just missed the outbound 350, and have had to sit at Alewife for an hour waiting for the next bus.
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p>I’d rather drive to Wellington or park on the street in Somerville or Cambridge, rather than risk that hour wait at Alewife.
like an hour, I think that they ought to build in delays into the bus… have it “run” 15 minutes slower, but do a better job of being on time.
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p>I used to take a bus out of Alewife, and the hour between departures is terrible.
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p>I definitely agree that for a bus like that, it’s not interarrival but staying on the schedule which matters. I was thinking much more about the frequent service case (the 12 minute interarrival).
have a machine on the bus (halfway down the center aisle) where you pay and get a paper receipt. Uniformed monitors board buses frequently enough that it’s much cheaper to just pay the fare. The driver isn’t involved. They also have an LED board at each stop — it works, and it’s reasonably accurate.
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p>The practice, for T buses, is that the arrival/departure times vary all over the place. When three buses, “scheduled” for 12-minute inter-arrival times, arrive back-to-back then the actual interval is at least 36 minutes. If you happen to miss that exciting event, then you simply don’t know when the next bus will come. If a consistent 12-minute interval is the goal, then I think it makes sense to reflect that goal in driver performance metrics. Our experience is that the most frequent schedule disruptor is buses that fly through their route too quickly (and therefore bunching), rather than buses delayed in traffic.
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p>The Red Line/Green Line drill from Central Square to the Photonics center takes at least 25 minutes, often more. The walk from Central Square to the same location is about 20 minutes. The 47 bus can cut that time to 10-15 minutes, but only if it happens to arrive while you’re in the vicinity.
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p>I don’t know about the preferences of American riders. I know of one German rider who would very much like to be able to look at her watch as the Red Line approaches Central Square and be able to make a decision about how to minimize her travel time to her office 🙂
and while checking to see if people paid their fares doesn’t double the cost of labor for the bus since you won’t have an inspector on every bus, it is a mighty expensive way to ensure that people pay fares in exchange for faster service. I have no idea what the numbers are, but I’m skeptical. Convince-able, but skeptical. Why does it work in Innsbruck? Perhaps their social schemes mean that the total cost of hiring an employee is cheaper since the transit agency isn’t paying anything/as much for health care, retirement, etc. Perhaps their transit agency is better funded. Dunno.
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p>If your hypothesis is correct, then we should expect to see more buses arrive early than late. I can’t speak for any particular route, but in general I know that this is not the case. Additionally, I have seen detailed data on the 66, and for that route it runs late, all day long, starting at around 7am. How late? Depends on time of day, and they have cool charts which show how late. The problem is that it isn’t the road between the same set of stops which causes the delay. Sometimes it’s between Start and stop1, other times its stop1 & stop2, etc. By the time they’re at stop6, they’re delayed. The solution: admit that you can’t run buses down the route as fast and stretch out the schedule a bit. Then, if you do arrive early (as you claim happens frequently, though I doubt that’s right), you do stop for 20 seconds extra here, 20 seconds extra there to avoid getting ahead of schedule. But there’s another solution: do all the things I’ve mentioned to speed the bus up and reduce variance — proper stop locations, stop elimination when the stops are too close together, traffic signal prioritization. If you do the former, you have slow buses which are on time more instead of slow buses which are late. If you do the former, you have faster buses which are on time more. I’d rather we do the latter.
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p>BTW: it’s really hard for a bus to get ahead of schedule by very much. After all, it can’t drive faster than it can drive, and traffic lights are rarely all green. It’s far easier for a bus to catch a bit of a traffic jam, then deal with a double parked car, then deal with a disabled rider requiring the lift, then deal with a police detail not waving it through a traffic intersection, etc and suddenly it’s quite late. It’s hard to be more than a few minutes early; it’s easy to be much more than a few minutes late. Again, I doubt very much that the problem is that the buses are getting ahead by much, unless the bus ahead of it is already behind, leading to the bunching phenomenon I mentioned earlier… it begins with a bus falling behind, inducing the bus behind it to speed up a bit. When this happens, the dispatcher needs to figure it out and tell the trailing bus to park for a minute or whatever to keep them spread out.
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p>Why that isn’t happening… I don’t know. But look, so long as the MBTA has limited resources, I’d rather that we focus on speeding that first bus up rather than slowing that second one down… although the right answer is to do lots of the former and do the latter whenever helpful.
I enthusiastically agree that the MBTA needs to take the steps you’ve mentioned to both optimize performance and also document it. Your approach (“stop for 20 seconds extra here, 20 seconds extra there to avoid getting ahead of schedule”) is what I mean — supported and documented by GPS data, benchmarked against a realistic schedule for each route.
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p>Surely each stop on those routes should and must be optimized along the lines you are working towards with the 66 (a thankless and heroic task, I might add!), I made the apparently rash assumption that such things are already in place.
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p>It sounds to me as though the “schedule” is simply not grounded in reality. Valerie and I both see, frequently, buses leaving early from Harvard Square (including the 66). Our friends frequently report missing buses that have already departed from stops close enough to the origin that they must have left early to accomplish the feat. If the schedules are unrealistic, I wonder (pure speculation here) if drivers and dispatchers simply leave as soon as possible — and traverse the route as fast as possible — in a futile effort to minimize reported late arrivals. It looks to me as though the absence of a realistic timetable is the fundamental problem.
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p>Regarding the “monitor” approach, the monitors we saw in Innsbruck and Vienna perform, essentially, a random sampling process. Each covers many routes — the monitor boards, rides one stop (checking passengers), then boards another. Presumably they follow an algorithm to maximize (or at least predict) the effective sampling rate across a large number of routes. It sounds to me as though such an approach minimizes the labor cost for ensuring fare compliance, especially in comparison with an approach that in essence uses an expensive resource (a trained driver) to measure the compliance of every rider on every ride.
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p>How do you know that they’re leaving 2 minutes early and not 10 minutes late?
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p>RE monitors: gotta be careful — you optimize the random sampling, and then clever or observant folks know where and when the monitors check. You’ve got to be sub-optimal or else you’re playing a “tell”… like poker.
Well, I guess they’re the same (2 minutes early versus 10 minutes late). Valerie and her friends report seeing three 66 buses leave Harvard Square at the same time. It seems to me that an independent network of observers (some sort of wiki, for example) could record bus numbers and times and get a more definitive answer (if they could do so without harassment from MBTA officials).
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p>I think the trick with the monitors is to frob the monitor strategy, fare, and fine so that the net cash flow is positive (taking into labor expenses of the monitor into account). Interestingly, in talking to folks who live there, there’s no particular value judgment implied — the monitors seemed rather pleased (and friendly) when they got a chance to collect the fine. It really does seem more like a game, where the house (in this case the transit system) wires the game so that it is very much to the rider’s advantage to just buy the ticket. The monitors are perfectly happy to collect the fines, the drivers really don’t care, and — most significantly — the buses depart exactly on schedule (and never more than 5-6 minutes apart).
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p>I think the real takeaway here is that the entire culture embraces the concept that public transit is the backbone of how people get around. Nobody fears relying on transit to arrive on-time for a meeting or an airline departure — public transit is viewed as rather more like an elevator or escalator.
Bob Neer wrote:
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p>I suggest we sell every rail, tie, and piece of rolling stock to Japan Rail. Engage in a competitive bid between JR East, JR Central, and JR west. Any bid over $1 would be cause for celebration.
As long as we can import Japanese culture and geography as well.
That sounds like a terrible, terrible idea.
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p>Why not just adequately fund the damn think? Want a safe and efficient MBTA that can run later into the night and expand service? Getting rid of its Big Dig debt would go a long way toward doing that. So would taking some of that $1.2 billion we publicly fund private companies via tax credits and sending it to the MBTA’s way.
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p>The bottom line is, when it comes to the MBTA, we get what we pay for. Poor funding equals poor service. Privatizing it won’t change any of that, all it could serve to do is make it even more expensive for users and destroy any sort of unprofitable services the MBTA provides. We’ve had 30 years of privatization to go a long way toward destroying our country, Bob… why don’t you save this sort of idea for Red Mass Group wet-dream fantasies?
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p>All privatization does for government services is allow the private sector to remove government accountability of needed services. It allows politicians to pass on dirty deeds to others, without taking any of the blame. Enough of that crap. It’s come back to bite us time and time again.
The “T” was bad before the big dig. I was very impressed with the British Intercity Rail – the state owns the tracks and private companies provide the service. The trains are clean and on time.
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p>You can retire after 20 years of working for the “T” – you wonder where the money is going. That’s a pension for 30+ years ?
… because the Commuter Rail is privatized – that doesn’t make it operate any better than a system run by the state. The logic for privatizing essential services is that private business knows how to operate public services better than the government. That’s poppycock and while I normally agree with Bob, on this, he’s dead wrong.
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p>Privatizing services doesn’t equal improved quality but it does mean handing over a vital asset to a private company whose interests and those of the public are often at odds.
Privatization would only be relevant if there was also competitive pressure to provide improved and/or more efficient service. If we turn the MBTA into a private monopoly, we really get nothing in return. Well, maybe we could let them go bankrupt and retire some pension debt, but that’s not very nice.
Is sort of privatized – but I think only the operation. I was very impressed with the quality of the rolling stock and the information systems in the UK. They were all private and the trains left on time to the second.
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p>I don’t have to commute anymore – but the MBTA still hasn’t dealt with the parking lot meter issue, have they? This has been going one for how many years ? You have to shove multiple dollar bills into a slot and then run for a train, then the MBTA sends an employee every day to remove them, I think with a pair of pliers. You better believe a private company would fix this – probably in a week.
You just throw crap out there with reckless abandon. You’re not asking honest questions or making honest mistakes — you’re throwing out FUD to underscore your world view that government (or, in this case, quasi-government) doesn’t work, and you’re doing it with a vague anecdote from years ago and a conjecture that it’s still occurring today.
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p>In the second paragraph:
1. You throw out an anecdote, quite vague, and don’t say when or where it occurred, and ask if it’s fixed
2. You then assume it’s not, and ask how many years this has been going on, again to set up this meme that there’s terrible incompetence (or worse). Given that we don’t know which lot this problem supposedly existed, or when, how could anyone possibly answer this question which isn’t really a question at all, just used for your narrative.
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p>When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you’re a Randian, everything government does looks inefficient or inappropriate, even if the best example you’ve got is vague, years old, and relies on an incredible amount of conjecture.
You just throw crap out there with reckless abandon. You’re not asking honest questions or making honest mistakes — you’re throwing out FUD to underscore your world view that government (or, in this case, quasi-government) doesn’t work, and you’re doing it with a vague anecdote from years ago and a conjecture that it’s still occurring today.
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p>In the second paragraph:
1. You throw out an anecdote, quite vague, and don’t say when or where it occurred, and ask if it’s fixed
2. You then assume it’s not, and ask how many years this has been going on, again to set up this meme that there’s terrible incompetence (or worse). Given that we don’t know which lot this problem supposedly existed, or when, how could anyone possibly answer this question which isn’t really a question at all, just used for your narrative.
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p>When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you’re a Randian, everything government does looks inefficient or inappropriate, even if the best example you’ve got is vague, years old, and relies on an incredible amount of conjecture.
Actually, most parking facilities in the MBTA system, to my knowledge, are owned by private companies, specifically not the MBTA nor MBCR. Or, if not owned, certainly operated/managed by. Just take a look at, e.g., West Natick‘s page at MBTA.com, which says it’s managed by Central Parking.
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p>So it’s not the MBTA sending an employee “with a pair of pliers”. It’s a private company. And it’s taken them a lot longer than a week to change this, dontcha think?
but if you want to retire from the MBTA with full benefits, you must have worked there 25 years and be 55 years old. The former policy was 23 years on the job, no minimum age. The change was passed what, 9 months ago, and extending the 23-and-out was a key part of Governor Patrick’s transportation reform. The lege deserves credit too; they passed the law that Patrick lobbied for and eventually signed.
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p>You’re welcome to claim that the 25/55 is still too generous. I’d agree with you, though I’d note that sometimes we’ve got to make changes a little at a time, and that 25/55 is clearly better than 23 w.r.t. the cost of operating the T.
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p>Here’s the catch: you’re not entitled to claim things that are false in this reality-based community. The MBTA never allowed full retirement bennies after 20 years of work, not ever.
and i hope your phd thing went well.
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p>but
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p>your “entitled to claim” standard – in bold no less – seems to be very selectively applied by you, and over the top.
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p>guy says 20, you correctly note it was 23, now 25. is your standard is “you’re not allowed to make a mistake in this community?” or is there some history i’m unaware of, like you’d corrected him on this point before so now you think it’s willful?
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when you constantly err on the side of exaggerating to make your point seem more relevant, that’s not a mistake. That’s just plain being wrong.
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p>Given that the “23 and out” has been discussed constantly here, in the Globe, in the Herald, on the radio, etc., there’s just no reason to simply claim 20 unless your meme is that government sucks and you want to make things sound then they are.
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p>It’s not hard to get facts like that one right. Not doing so, repeatedly, suggests using nonsense anecdotes to frame a debate because the facts just aren’t so helpful in making one’s view corroborate with reality.
without a difference. This fix made marginal improvement to big problem, such that the problem is now marginally less big.
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p>I don’t see how that changes the point, though.
although he might want to target the administration 4 ago… and 3 ago… and 2 ago… and 1 ago for not even improving it. He might then want to say a “kudos for the improvement, but it ain’t enough” to the current administration.
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p>I agree: the 25/55 isn’t good enough. But it’s 2 years better than 23, clearly an improvement; also, the 55 portion is actually pretty strong. My bet (with no data) is that more than half of new MBTA employees are under 30, thereby making the 25 actually something larger.
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p>Look, here’s the deal. When you criticize a process, event, or situation, you don’t exaggerate to make your point stronger. It only undermines you. 25 is not 20. It’s just not. This isn’t a nuance — there’s been literally dozens of newspaper articles in Boston over the past few years about it, and it’s been discussed here plenty.
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p>And, to top it all off, Few MBTA employees retired after 23, or even 25 years. Most work into their 60s, because they just can’t afford to retire sooner, even with a full pension. By the time you’ve been at the T 23 years, you’ve got a good shift, a good route, whatever. The last few years are easier, not harder. Your pension is based on your three best paying years, so unless you’re going to be demoted, you probably can’t afford to retire after 23 or 25 years, or at age 55. Furthermore, the total contribution of the MBTA into pensions this past year? $8M. Total wages and bennies paid? Over a half bil. The pension just isn’t a big expense, it’s fully funded, and few employees retire as early as they can. I’m not arguing that there were no abuses — but the fact is that it’s small potatoes, and the MBTA has far bigger problems in their budget (their CIP, their operations/capital split, and especially their debt services).
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p>But, you find one guy who retired early and it makes for a great headline. Even better if you claim it’s 20 instead of 25.
Except that the present governor was only able to get this embarrassingly modest improvement with the grudging acceptance of the legislature, which has been passing legislation over a veto frequently in recent decades, but has never been willing to bestir itself to end this patronage haven.
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p>So, it improved a little bit. Better than it was, but nothing to brag about at all, IMO.
the thing is, very few employees were retiring at 23 years; most were working into their 60s and well over 23 years of service. That number was the minimum, but most worked substantially more. So, in fact, this is kind of a red herring or distraction. The MBTA pension contribution is quite small, the pension is fully funded, and the percentage of labor cost (or overall cost) represented by the pension at 23 or 25/55 vs. ?/65 is really, really, really small. The current pension costs are about 1-2% of labor costs. If it was ?/65 instead of 25/55, it would be what, closer to 1% even? Big whoop. I mean, savings are savings, but when you’ve got water coming in the boat from holes the size of softballs, don’t focus on the hole that’s the size of a pinprick, despite what the Herald and Howie Carr are screaming about.
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p>Moving a union benefit by about 10% in a strong labor state is indeed something to brag about, especially since over a decade of governors prior couldn’t move it an inch. Same goes for police details vs. flagmen — sure, Patrick didn’t solve the problem outright, but he found progress where his predecessors found none. Incremental, to be sure, but it is movement in the right direction. Far more important — and more difficult given the state’s budgetary situation and opposition to taxation — is to get the MBTA’s capital expenditures and debt financing on firmer footing.
I can’t find them in the operating budget – but I do see that for 2011 Labor + Benefits is 1/2 of the operating budget. You can’t keep asking communities and commuters to pay more when the MBTA employees have some benefits that exceed anything in the private sector.
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p>http://www.mbta.com/about_the_…
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p>Privatizing the “T” is not a practical proposition. But maybe some leadership could improve it. Not to harp back to my previous comment – but the “T” (and I verified this today) still requires you to stuff (4) one dollars bills into a little slot and then a “T” employee takes them out with pliers. This has been going on for a least a few years. It reminds me of the the RMV – just torture the clients.
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First of all, using just the Operating Expense portion of the budget is nonsense. The rail ties don’t magically replace themselves, the new cars don’t magically appear every few decades, the stations don’t modernized themselves automagically. Labor ends up being about 1/3 of the total expenses of the MBTA: roughly $550M out of $1.5B.
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p>Second of all, without knowing the pension contribution portion of the fringe benefits line item, it’s impossible for you to know how big a role the pension plays…
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p>I called and found out. The MBTA contribution to pensions in the recent FY was $8M. Yeah, note the “M”. Out of roughly $550M in total employee wages, benefits, and taxes, a whopping $8M went to pensions from the MBTA (and roughly $16M went to pensions from the employees themselves). Note that the pension trust fund is 100% funded, completely solvent, and private and separate from the MBTA budget.
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p>So, to recap, the MBTA contribution to the pension is roughly one half of one percent of their annual budget. It’s just not where the actuarial problems are — but man does it sell Heralds.
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p>PS: where is this parking lot of famed $1 bill stuffings? I’ll call my contacts who work for the MBTA and find out what the scoop is. Maybe it’s a real problem, and I’ll confirm it for the good folks here and see if we can’t find out why it hasn’t been resolved. Maybe we’ll team up to help get the problem solved. Maybe we’ll be heroes!
The Watertown Yard parking lot and West Natick lot both have these types of payment systems.
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p>Here’s roarkarchitect’s complaint,
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p>Apparently, because the employee uses pliers its a problem… or maybe the thought is it’s a waste of time for an employee to pull the money every day when it could be done less frequently… I’m not sure, but the cure is likely to be worse than the disease.
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p>The alternative would be an electronic version of this machine, which isn’t an improvement because a) it would be costly to install and maintain and b) it could only take money from one person at a time. In the current system unless the person who’s in front of you parked right next to you, two, three or even more people can deposit money at the same time, plus, since it’s literally, just a metal box, it never breaks down. With an electronic version, only one person could pay at a time and electronic boxes are guaranteed to break down more frequently than empty metal boxes.
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p>I guess you could also install a gate where people pay, but that’s going to cause a backup onto heavily traveled roads and deny entry for cars that are just picking up passengers.
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p>I appreciate roarkarchitect’s bringing this up again, however. It’s a perfect example of the benefits of privatization, come up with a complex, inferior fix for something that’s working fine that ensures revenue streams for private consultants.
No having an employee collect funds every day is expensive, and bad cash management. This has got to be parking meter 101 I’m sure it’s been done 100’s of times.
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p>Even the town of Amherst has implemented an electronic system. The idea of technology done right – is to make it cheaper not more expensive.
Something not correct here, or the “T” retirement board should be running everyone’s pensions. Very attractive retirement benefits and total contributions of 4%. Sounds like the “T” retirement board has done very well, or it was initially well funded. I wish other public sector pensions were in the same position.
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p>For the majority of the private sector – retirement contributions are 12.4% and the standard retirement age is 67.
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my hunch is that they’ve been managed well for a long time, and that the funds did very well during the good times.
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p>The other way to look at it is that the non-pension compensation is too high… thereby making the pension component look small in comparison.
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p>I don’t know the history and I haven’t seen a full accounting over time. In the mean time…
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p>I dug around a bit and now I’m finding conflicting accounting for how much pensions cost the MBTA. I’ll dig more and let you know what I find out.
Sorry this has been right-margined. I hate having to come and correct my previous numbers, but right is right and I was incorrect.
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p>I poked around some more, and here are numbers which I now believe to be correct:
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p>Total contribution to MBTA pension in recent FY: $80M
Percent share covered by MBTA: 73%
Percent share covered by employees: 27%
MBTA dollars in pension in recent FY: roughly $55M
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p>So that’s more like 10-11% of total compensation, not the 2% I reported earlier. Miscommunication between me and another; I take full responsibility for posting incorrect information earlier.
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p>Thanks roark for questioning it — you’re right, it was too good to be true.
It’s very good the pension system is being fully funded. We are just on the start of a crisis with public defined pensions plans – it’s great that the “T” has got this under control.
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Something not correct here, or the “T” retirement board should be running everyone’s pensions. Very attractive retirement benefits and total contributions of 4%. Sounds like the “T” retirement board has done very well, or it was initially well funded. I wish other public sector pensions were in the same position.
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p>For the majority of the private sector – retirement contributions are 12.4% and the standard retirement age is 67.
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Correct pension numbers are here: roughly $55M from MBTA and $25M from employees in recent FY.
I think your premise might work well (for national rail service and commuter rail, if not the MBTA), and it’s a huge stretch to describe it as “privatized”.
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p>In my view, it does make sense for the infrastructure — rails, right-of-way, signals, stations, etc. — to be owned and maintained by government entities, and for private operators to compete in owning and operating private equipment upon that infrastructure. This is essentially the way we do highways (at least, when we actually funded the maintenance of our highways) and air travel. The UK is, after all, one of of those dreaded “socialist” economies who happen to do a far better job of transportation infrastructure than we do.
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p>Aside from your erroneous and unsupported cheap shot about retirement, and aside from your apparently mistaken idea that you are proposing to “privatize” the T, I think the concept you describe is fundamentally interesting.
After the Big Dig, you want to privatize? Really?
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p>Or how about the terrible services provided troops in Iraq during the earlier days of the Occupation?
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p>To be successful, privatization requires good regulation and a solid corps of good, committed regulators and overseers not subject to regulatory capture.
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p>Let me break the news to you: that’s one thing this country is very short on. (See BP disaster, mining disasters, salmonella outbreaks, Ponzi schemes, and derivative trading.)
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p>Until we can find, hire, and retain that important kind of bureaucrat, a privatized MBTA is guaranteed to be slow, dangerous, and expensive. It would under-serve anyone it can get away with.
I agree. For every successful example of privatization, there are five examples of privatized companies that raised fees, cut service, and then went whining to the voters demanding loans.
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p>There’s nothing special about private business, no magic management formula that makes things suddenly work better just because somebody’s working for faceless share-holders instead of faceless voters. We’ve had successful government-operated public transit in the past, and we can have it again if we want it badly enough. And government public transit has the distinct advantage that, if government screws up, we can vote people out of office.
For every Bolt Bus, there’s a Fung Wah.
Rail passenger service is, in fact, an excellent example of a service that government should do because the free market literally cannot do it (profitably) itself (public education being another). American railroads lost money providing passenger service in their heyday, and did so anyway because of enormous marketing and advertising value it brought during that era — an era when there was effectively no competition from other technologies.
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p>American freight railroads today are actually doing reasonably well, financially, even in a down economy. Rail is far more fuel-efficient for hauling freight than any of the alternatives, and multi-modal freight (containers that move by air, ship and truck as well as by rail) is particularly profitable. Trucks solve the “last mile” problem very effectively for freight shipments, much better than rail ever did on its own (local truck delivery is far more cost-efficient than, for example, horse-drawn wagons or small local branch lines).
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p>Neither automobile nor air travel would be competitive in the absence of enormous mostly-hidden subsidies to support them. There is a long list of reasons why affordable, reliable and convenient rail passenger service is vital to a modern society. The fact that it cannot be operated profitably is why it is so important for government to support it.
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p>Total privatization of rail passenger service is a terrible, terrible idea.
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p>It makes far more sense, in my opinion, for governments (state and federal) to build passenger-only rail lines using existing right-of-way wherever possible, build state-of-the-art communication and signaling systems to support them, and then encourage private operators to compete in using that infrastructure to deliver passenger service at a range of price points.
It is my pleasure to add to the dialogue on BMG. In particular, I want to follow up on Pablo’s weekend post and invite those interested to an exciting event on Thursday. The MBTA is constantly working to improve services for our riders. Safety and customer service are the top transportation priorities of Governor Patrick and MassDOT Secretary Jeff Mullan. I focus on it every day at the T. To boost service coordination, we are currently in the midst of a major upgrade to our scheduling software. This upgrade will allow data collected using GPS technology and other tools to be more seamlessly used to adjust schedules. While we work to do this today, the sheer number of different transfer options makes it a significant challenge. This new technology should help.
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p>This summer, we will also roll out a pilot program to equip officials on six key bus routes with handheld computers to monitor buses in real-time. This program, funded by the federal stimulus American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, will provide customers with better information but also allow operating personnel to make real-time service adjustments.
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p>In addition to these initiatives, the MBTA is working to use technology better while harnessing the minds of the tech community in greater Boston.
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p>In his post, Pablo mentions the MassTransit app, one of more than a dozen apps created as a result of the MassDOT/MBTA Developers Initiative. All of these apps were created at virtually no cost to the T because the at the insistence of Governor Patrick MassDOt and the MBTA decided to unlock our basic route and schedule data- the information we have handed out as paper maps and schedules for 100 years. By opening the data, smart software developers like the team at SparkFish Creative are able to build apps like MassTransit.
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p>Developers and more importantly riders were happy to have trip planning apps but they came back to us with a question, “How do we know when the bus is actually going to arrive?”
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p>For the past few years, the MBTA has installed GPS devices on our buses to improve operations. In our bus operations center, our operators see every single MBTA bus on a screen. Last November, we decided to open MBTA bus location data for five MBTA bus routes to software developers. In less than one hour, the first app was built. In two months, there were more than a dozen apps. For more on what happened, check out the YouTube Video below:
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p>If software developers built more than one dozen apps in two months for five bus routes, what is possible if we open the data for the rest of our buses? This Thursday the MBTA and MassDOT will host an event called “Where’s the Bus 2.0: The Wait is Over,” at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development center. The event is open to the public and designed for a general audience; we would love to see you there!
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That talk is TED quality, once it gets cleaned up a bit.
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p>Really, really great stuff — you get a better product, faster, and cheaper.
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p>Well done, MBTA. Keep it up!
Josh IS an excellent presenter!
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p>Here’s a link to more background on the great things MassDOT is doing with data and developers.
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p>As I just posted in response to the Pioneer Apps for Transparency thread…On behalf of my ITD colleagues, Kate Geyer and Tim Vaverchak, I’d like to follow up on this post, and piggyback on T GM’s response, and suggest anyone interested in improving government service with technology and data (and interested in transparency and open government) visit the Massachusetts Open Data Initiative at mass.gov/data, where we’re developing a growing catalog of public data. We welcome requests for new datasets as well – please email opendata@massmail.state.ma.us.
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p>The Open Data Initiative connects citizens to information they need and provides support to agencies in releasing data in open formats. Better access to information gives citizens the tools they need to engage with government, and enables government to make better use of resources. With open access to information, citizens will create great applications with state data.