The MTA disappoints me, again
[Originally published at the now defunct group blog explananda.com]
A few years ago I was on a flight from Toronto to New York. Early in the flight, the pilot came on and spoke for a minute. Practically nothing he said was intelligible, and I turned to the woman seated beside me and made a comment comparing the announcement to the absurd and often impossible-to-hear announcements you hear every day on the subway in New York City. She smiled. Twenty minutes later, we struck up a conversation, and ten minutes into the conversation she told me that her husband was in charge of communications for the whole of the MTA. We both laughed (I felt a bit sheepish, but she was very nice about it), and she promised to bring my comment to his attention.
So you see, I’ve tried to get the MTA to understand how badly it communicates. I’ve gone straight to the top, with a personal appeal, however inadvertent. And yet it seems to me even years after this encounter that they’ve still got a lot of room for improvement.
My experience Monday gives a good example of how crappy communication skills on the part of the MTA leads them to regularly and completely unnecessarily inconvenience hundreds of riders, including me. My brother was in town, visiting from Canada. We arranged to meet in Union Square outside the Barnes and Noble. He was coming from Queens and I was coming from the Newkirk Avenue Station on the B/Q line in Brooklyn.
Now, if you look at the map, you’ll see that someone traveling from Newkirk Avenue Station to Union Square is, all other things being equal, better off taking the Q. True, the Q goes local in Brooklyn, hitting three stops on the way into town from Newkirk that the B will skip. But once you’ve gotten to Prospect Park, the B and Q run on the same paths until Manhattan, and then the Q is actually a bit faster in Manhattan. It also goes directly to Union Square. The B, by contrast, will get you to the 4th St. Station at which point you’ve got a 10 or 15 minute walk to Union Square, or a transfer to the F or V up to 14th St., and a 5 to 8 minute walk to Union Square. So, as I said, all other things being equal, you’re going to want the Q if you’re headed to Union Square.
All other things being equal. But sometimes they’re not equal. If the Q is delayed for some reason, and it’s nice day, and you don’t mind a little exercise, you’re better off just getting the B and then walking in Manhattan. Wouldn’t it be nice, then, for the MTA to tell you when the Q is delayed?
When I got to the subway platform at a little after 8:30am, it was crowded with people. Eventually, a B pulled up. But it pulled up on the local track. This was odd. Was there something wrong with the Q? I scanned the station for signs indicating track work, but there weren’t any. Was a Q shortly behind it? I leaned out over the other side of the platform, looking vainly up the tracks to see if another train had come into view around the corner. But my view was obstructed by dozens of other people attempting the same thing. I know now that I should have gotten on that B. But since the B was running local, it no longer had any advantage over the Q within Brooklyn, and wouldn’t have taken me to the right place in Manhattan anyway. No announcement from the B train itself was forthcoming. So I decided to wait.
Ten or fifteen minutes later another B pulled up on the local tracks. There was no explanation for its unusual behaviour over the intercom in the Newkirk Avenue Station. There was no hint about where the next Q was, which would have helped me to decide between trains. Again, no announcement from the B train itself was forthcoming. Again, I leaned out as far as I could over the tracks, along with dozens of other people, and looked for signs of a Q. At this point I was going to be late, and since my brother doesn’t have a cell phone (?!?$?%?), he would be waiting with no explanation. If I got on the B-going-local and thereby passed up a perfectly good Q, it would make me even later. But if I waiting for a Q took longer than the amount of time the B would add in terms of walking then I would be better off simply taking the B. I let the B go by.
As I waited, I saw hundreds of other people making similar calculations. I heard people pulling out their cell phones to cancel appointments, and watched as people leaned out from time to time to see if anything was coming down the tracks. What made me so angry wasn’t the delay with the Q so much as the entirely avoidable inconvenience to everyone caused by the failure to communicate clearly what was going on, so that people could make informed decisions about how to rout around the delay. Now I know that they can do this. I know that they can do this because once every hundred years, and rarely when it’s needed, the speakers at the Newkirk Avenue Station will come to life and inform us that there’s, say, a Manhattan-bound Q train three stations away. So they know! They fucking know where the trains are, and they can communicate this information when they want to. The problem is that they rarely want to.
After a while, I saw co-blogger Brad walking by. I launched into a spirited denunciation of the MTA. After I had waxed apoplectic for a while, Brad laughed and then:
Brad: I hear you, believe me. Hey, I think I sense a blog post coming on! Chris: Ha! That’ll show them. You better believe it. Brad: I’ll comment the shit out of that post.
And then a B express train pulled up, and Brad hopped on. A B express. What did this mean? One reasonable interpretation of the B on the express tracks after two successive Bs on local tracks was that whatever unexplained mess had caused the Q to stop running and the B to go local was now cleared up. If that interpretation was correct, the Q would no doubt be pulling into the station shortly. If it was incorrect, I would be better off hoping on the B. And again, I needed to ask: was the next Q more than 10 minutes away from the station? If more than 10 minutes, then getting on the B would be worth it. If less than 10 minutes, I would be making myself even later by getting on the B. Gosh it would have been nice if the MTA had helped me and hundreds of other riders make an informed decision. I let the B go by.
And then waited. And waited. And waited. And finally a B and a Q pulled up at the station at the same time. Now I don’t want to be a bore, so I won’t relate any more of the story in detail. There were more delays, caused apparently by a malfunctioning train ahead of us that had to be taken out of service, though I’m not sure if that was only an explanation for the slowness of the service on the Q that arrived or whether it actually accounted for all the delays that morning. Once I actually got on the Q, and couldn’t do anything about my situation, I was bombarded by constant updates about the reason for the delays. But this information came too late to be of any use. I ended up arriving at Union Square just before 10am, about an hour more than the trip should normally take during rush hour. My poor brother had been eaten by wolves.
Subways are always going to have malfunctions that cause delays. But you can realize enormous gains in efficiency simply by communicating clearly and effectively so that people can act on good information. This is the case on any subway line. But at a station with more than one train, and a correspondingly complex set of trade-offs involved in picking a route to your destination, it’s absolutely essential.
Comments
Author: OneFatEnglishman
Date: 2008-09-10
Brad: I’ll comment the shit out of that post.
Yes???
Author: a sikkiin
Date: 2008-09-11
This morning while waiting for a subway at the Newkirk B/Q station I heard a loud, clear announcement reminding me to keep an eye on my valuables. Thanks, MTA! Always looking out for ya.
Author: Chris
Date: 2008-09-11
Yeaaaaaaarg! You get so many of those! And always preceded by “Ladies and Gentlemen, this is an important announcement from . . .” Like millions of others, I have learned to stop listening as soon as I hear the words “important announcement.” They trained me to stop listening upon hearing those words. How does that make anyone safer? Fuck them.
Author: a sikkiin
Date: 2008-09-11
They’re idiots.
As for this: “and since my brother doesn’t have a cell phone (?!?$?%?)…”
I have a Canadian friend in town right now, and she doesn’t have a cell phone. In fact, very few of my Canadian friends have cell phones. Support for my observation:
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/07/21/Survey_Canadians_lag_in_cell_phone_use/UPI-70641216657478/
Author: Chris
Date: 2008-09-11
Wow, Canada really needs to pull up its socks on the cell phone issue! Don’t Canadians want brain tumours like the rest of the world?
Author: Spaz
Date: 2008-09-11
actually the simpler reason is that we up here, have very little selection in mobile service providers, making mobile phones rather expensive.
the MTA really does blow. they’d never put up with that crap in london.
Author: OneFatEnglishman
Date: 2008-09-11
Spaz, maybe the London Tube’s improved since I lived there, but I can imagine being in exactly the same situation as Chris in the Metro/District/Circle complex. My rule of thumb used to be “A train in the station is worth two in the tunnel”.
Author: Spaz
Date: 2008-09-11
LOL, admittedly it’s been a decade since I’ve been on the Tube, maybe I’m just imagining not waiting long due to the length of the escalators taking up most of my time.
re. Canadian mobile service: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/09/05/tech-disconnect-main.html
Author: a sikkiin
Date: 2008-09-11
Not to mention that the London Tube has a zone system for fares and closes at 1 am.
Commuting by New York subway is only going to get more hellish as more people move into the city. There’s been talk for years of adding a new line to the east of the 4-5-6, but there doesn’t seem to be any movement on that front. Have you ever taken the 6 train on a Saturday afternoon? It’s more crowded than a rush hour B train.
I’m trying to assess whether it’s a good idea for me to put down more-or-less permanent roots in this city (like eventually buying a place) because I have all these dystopian visions of what NYC might be like in the future. One of the factors contributing to the dystopia is the public transportation system. On many rIoutes they can’t really add many more trains because the tracks can’t accommodate them. And even if there was enough political will to start building entirely new lines, I imagine it would take freaking forever to do. The Cortland St. R station is still a construction zone, 7 years after 9/11.
Author: Nick
Date: 2008-09-11
Random thoughts on the MTA:
I can’t imagine it’s particularly difficult to set a consistent, audible volume for announcements. Some of them are barely audible. Super gluing the volume knob would work.
If your fellow traveler’s husband was the dick who decided to standardize subway announcements, I spit a curse on him. The old, personalized announcements were mad cool.
I don’t understand why there aren’t more benches on the platforms.
There are parts of Queens with I’m sure comparable population densities to the East Village where you have to walk at least fifteen minutes to get to a stop. I’m wholly against the 2nd avenue line until they take care of those parts of Queens that don’t have convenient access to the train. The yuppies can walk at most an extra two blocks. The 14 or 8 bus suffices when it’s cold.
I love the posters advising you not to ride the train by standing outside the door on the ledge. One, I’ve never seen anyone do that. (I seem to remember seeing something similar done in a late 80s movie about NYC, perhaps having to do with breakdancing or graffiti, in which likely a white kid moves to the hood, makes friends with a black kid [dreadlocked] who was subsequently ostracized by his friends [undreadlocked], and who taught each other many valuable things about life and art.) Two, my girl friend who grew up in the hood, where one might imagine that thing would be more commonplace (don’t ask me to justify this, Chris), has never seen anyone do it. Three, I’m quite sure it’s not something you do ignorant of the potential drawbacks.
Of course, I have no idea how efficient it could be, but on the whole I’m quite pleased with the NYC subway. I just mentioned the other day how pleasantly surprised I often am by how few connections are necessary to get from point a to b. It’s quite safe. It’s clean in its own eccentric way. They’re starting to put in the “Next train in x minutes” notices. I’m not sure how commonplace it is, but the policy of the bus stopping wherever you want it to along the route when convenient is enlightened.
Author: Nick
Date: 2008-09-11
Brad, you’ve been served!
Author: a sikkiin
Date: 2008-09-11
It’s clean in its own eccentric way.
Dude.
Author: Nick
Date: 2008-09-11
“the MTA really does blow. they’d never put up with that crap in london.”
No kidding. And to add insult to injury we also put up with a King of New York!
Author: Nick
Date: 2008-09-11
“It’s clean in its own eccentric way.”
“Dude.”
Given the huge numbers of people that use it, I find it remarkably clean. Really, how often have you wanted for clean seat? Sure you step in sticky soda from time-to-time or have to step over puke on a Saturday morning, but that really can’t be helped.
Author: Chris
Date: 2008-09-11
Two, my girl friend who grew up in the hood, where one might imagine that thing would be more commonplace (don’t ask me to justify this, Chris)
Touchy, touchy! Just because I’m a sanctimonious prick doesn’t mean I’ll jump on everything you say.
Author: a sikkiin
Date: 2008-09-11
The presence of hordes of cat-sized rats does not usually signal cleanliness.
Author: Chris
Date: 2008-09-11
I have seen such rats, frolicking all about the system.
Nick, how would you compare the NYC subway to Berlin’s?
Author: Chris
Date: 2008-09-11
Perhaps I misheard Brad. Perhaps he said, “I’ll not comment on that shit post.”
Author: Brad
Date: 2008-09-12
I checked in here for your post for a couple days following our encounter. Finding nothing, figured you weren’t going to post after all. Gotta run now. I’ll be back later.
Author: Brad
Date: 2008-09-14
Well, the long and short of it is, these are sentiments that I’ve shared ever since I’ve come to know and loathe the MTA, and that are pretty much perfectly expressed. I know Chris’s frustration well. Probably most commuters do. So I’ll try to keep from repeating what’s been said and offer a few tangential thoughts.
When our transit workers strike, or when service is disrupted during those rare and totally unexpected occasions when water suddenly pours from the sky (this condition is known as “rain”), the city is quick to calculate the cost of this loss of service to the local economy – it’s usually some vast figure, in the billions, and it usually figures in headlines and ledes of news stories. But what’s the overall cost to productivity when commuters lose 10-15 minutes of their workday once or twice a month, when that loss could have been easily prevented with an appropriately placed transit announcement? Isn’t it far, far greater? Some agency, somewhere, should conduct precisely such a study, and spread the results far and wide. Given that, as Chris notes, disseminating useful information is something the MTA is already capable of doing – we don’t need to commit major sums of capital for major infrastructure improvements and then sit around and wait two decades for the benefits – the pressure would mount on the MTA to commit to a major communications policy overhaul. Little investment and effort required on the MTA’s part; instant, significant, quantifiable results (we’ll count the overall improvement to the average New Yorker’s health and sanity from the removal of this extraneous source of stress and anxiety as a bonus).
But on the subject of improving infrastructure – how hard, and how expensive, would it really be to set up a system-wide network of displays as we now see on the L line? You basically run some more wire, set up a series of switches that get triggered when a train passes, then program and install the signs. They basically already did this when they installed those “Now Arriving” displays you now see in most every station that flash and buzz when a train is approaching. What a waste of resource! What’s the point? If you’re at the top of the stairs and you see that a train has just arrived, if you’re like me, you’ll rush your ass down the stairs and try to get on the train. It’s dangerous and it’s stressful, and most times I wish I just wouldn’t do it, but it’s instinctive and I do. Many people do. So what they’ve now done is simply back up that point in space and time – now I start rushing if I’m approaching the station and can hear the buzzing from outside. So what did that really accomplish? Why not extend this network of signs into streets and neighborhoods, so we can simply run as fast as we can everywhere we go?
But here’s a really good thought: if the information about where trains are and what they’re doing is centralized and readily available – and I think it’s pretty clearly so – then why not simply make that information available to commuters, say, online, as they leave home for the day? I visited my cousin in San Francisco a couple years back, and I swear that he did just that for his neighborhood streetcar. (Though I could be mistaken – he checked his computer quickly and said that we should leave his apartment to catch the streetcar in 3 minutes, or whatever, and we left his place and met the streetcar just as it arrived. It’s possible, though, that the streetcars run according to a schedule, and largely on time, so he could have just been looking at a train schedule.) How hard can this be? The information about where all the trains are is there – just give it to commuters in their homes or at their jobs, via the internet, via cellphone or PDA updates, whatever, and let them leave to catch a train or bus as they see fit. No more waiting for the train! Leave when you need to and meet the train as it arrives! (I’m sure the response to such a proposal would just be so much bullshit about security, that it would empower terrorists with the ability to inflict even greater harm, with greater ease, than they would otherwise have. Bullshit.)
But back to the on-platform displays that tell you when the next train is expected to arrive: couldn’t they just convert or upgrade the system of wiring used for the “Now Arriving” signs, which serve little purpose other than to make you rush even earlier than you would have, so that it can be used instead for the signs that estimate when the next train is going to arrive, and thus enable you to decide, say, to take the local rather than the express, or, say, to splurge for a cab home rather than waiting for that 2am train that’s, in fact, 20 minutes away? Again, seems like something that would be doable, and we’re not talking about the billions of dollars that would be required to dig new tunnels and lay new track and cabling.
Of course, this assumes the MTA could figure out a way to get these signs to work. I don’t take the L very regularly. Can anyone vouch for how reliable these signs are? There was once, about a year ago, when I got down to the platform, looked up at the sign and learned that the next L was something like 10 minutes away, experienced that sudden feeling of disappointment, then, no sooner than that had happened, watched as an L train pulled right in to pick me up. The feeling of disappointment quickly morphed into one of relief, and joy at my good luck, but then again was replaced by the thought, “Wait a minute – why was that sign so off? Can it really be that hard to achieve a reasonable amount of accuracy here?” I quickly plotted out the major points of a blog post in my mind. Then 10 minutes later I was back to not really caring. But the thought was basically the same as what I mention above: the train triggers a switch each time it enters a station; the sign one station down the line interprets this signal to mean that the train will be here in 2 minutes; the sign at the next station down interprets the signal to mean that the train will be there in 3 minutes; and so on. Signs along the line get updated each time the train passes a point that trips a switch. Seems simple. So why was the sign I saw wrong by so much?
I was in London about 3 years ago, and absolutely marveled at how extensive the system was that they had. It was all over the tube, and I even saw it at neighborhood bus stops! Basically exactly the same as what you see on the L. Don’t want to wait 25 minutes for that bus home? Flag a cab. So it’s true – they certainly wouldn’t put up with that crap in London. (They also wouldn’t put up with it in DC – those signs are on every train platform.)
Another thought: Straphangers could build into its research methodology a weighted adjustment for quality of in-station announcements. Shockingly, they currently have none – whether commuters feel that they are getting useful information, clearly announced, on platforms as they wait for trains (as opposed to in the trains themselves) does not figure into their analysis. Even the MTA’s “Rider Report Cards” include a ranking for this. (Though their research, I’m sure, is a total joke. Check out the Q line report card: “Over 3,481 of you responded to the Rider Report Card survey.” Really! I wonder what number over 3,481 it was! Or even better, if my hunch is right about how the programmers might have set up these pages of the MTA’s site, I might just guess that the number is not over 3,481 at all! And it’s not under 3,481 either!) Straphangers currently weights their feedback on “interior cleanliness” at 10% in figuring their overall opinion ratings. I’d trade a bit of cleanliness for better dissemination of information in stations – Straphangers should solicit these opinions from people and build it into its overall picture of people’s satisfaction with their subway service.
Bottom line is: this is a no brainer. Five years ago you never even heard the kind of announcements you hear now. The MTA obviously started sharing this information for a reason. The reason? It helps riders to make decisions that help them to get where they’re going. It reduces the stress associated with using the transit system, and improves riders’ overall satisfaction with the system. And it costs the MTA virtually nothing. Finish the job you started.
Author: Chris
Date: 2008-09-15
Brad speaks!
Apparently, one of the issues hampering the L train announcement service was theft. That was a while back, and I’m not sure if they’ve made any progress on it. You’d think, wouldn’t you? I mean, it’s not like NYC is uniquely crime-ridden.
I very much agree with you that if you tell them you want information about where all the trains in the system are, you would hear something like “Mwor mwor mrow terrorism mrowr mrowr mrwor terrorists!” It’s bullshit, as you say, but it’s an excuse with plenty of traction, and up until the moment they feel like doing it, I’m sure that’s the excuse we’ll hear.
I think your point about research methodologies is really good. Suppose the B is down. Now, looking at the system as a whole, you have a loss of efficiency in the B and no corresponding loss in the Q. If you’re only measuring lost time in schedules, there’s no gain at all in announcing the delay, even if you allow riders to make a decision to switch to the Q, saving with one announcement thousands of hours of commuting time for people on the line who would otherwise have waited for the B. It makes a huge difference whether you measure the efficiency of the subways on the line or the efficiency of riders choosing a course over multiple lines.
Author: Nick
Date: 2008-09-15
The L train announcements are quite accurate.
If commuters are 15 minutes late twice a month, that means they lose half-an-hour a month of TPM reading and fantasy sports checking.
Author: alif sikkiin
Date: 2008-09-17
After bitching (justifiably) about the trains, I feel I should put in a good word for the buses. Last summer I lived in an area of Clinton Hill that was nowhere near a subway and the buses were very much on time. You could set your watch by them. Pretty comfortable, too.
Another cheap improvement to the trains though would be signage. Signage is terrible in a lot of stations.
Author: alif sikkiin
Date: 2008-09-17
If commuters are 15 minutes late twice a month, that means they lose half-an-hour a month of TPM reading and fantasy sports checking.
That 15 minutes can make the difference between peeing your pants and not peeing your pants. Not that I’ve ever peed myself on the subway, mind you; I’m just sayin’.
Author: Chris
Date: 2008-09-17
I hear you on the signage. I forgot to mention that my brother was pointing out how confusing it could be to an outsider to figure out what station he was pulling into.
