A (rail) transport association for Greater New York City?

I am a big fan of the German "transport association" model (VV) for integrating transit service across regions and states.  The way transit service works in London, Paris, and Melbourne is similar.

--"Verkehrsverbund: The evolution and spread of fully integrated regional public transport in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland," Ralph Buehler, John Pucher & Oliver Dümmler, International Journal of Sustainable Transportation (2018)
-- Transport Alliances - – Promoting Cooperation and Integration to offer a more attractive and efficient Public Transport, VDV, the trade association for German transport associations.  

In the US, the VV model is definitely in order for Boston, DC-Maryland-Virginia, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, where services are balkanized in ways that make transit less effective and competitive.

Chicago, except for the South Shore rail service in Indiana, is mostly integrated through the RTA.  Seattle is pretty integrated through the local services and Sound Transit.  

WRT DC see:

-- "The answer is: Create a single multi-state/regional multi-modal transit planning, management, and operations authority association"
-- "Branding's not all you need for transit"

The Tri-State Transportation Campaign has produced a report, From Here to There: Regional Rail for New York, calling for the integration of three the area's four railroad passenger services, Metro-North, which serves New York State and Connecticut, and the Long Island Railroad, which serves New York, both operated by New York State's MTA, and NJ Transit, which operates in New Jersey, with service to New York City (they run a couple Metro-North lines too).

Instead of a bunch of lines terminating at Penn and Grand Central Stations, lines would merge and become "through running."

Instead of limiting all of the region’s rail commuters to a single destination in Manhattan, through-running will greatly increase the number of places that can be accessed by a single-seat or single-transfer ride.”

They aren't the first to recommend integration.  One of the advantages, speaking of throughput and the required amount of equipment and drivers, is that by merging lines, you can have more service more quickly.  And that would mean less expense at adding platforms to Penn Station, etc.

(A similar example is how New York City Subway, after a bad accident, spent much of its energy on reducing the speed of trains, reducing the reliability of the system.  

The Second Avenue Subway blog pointed out that by restoring reliability by increasing speed again, they wouldn't have had to spend billions of dollars on a Second Avenue Subway, because the existing lines would have worked very well instead--although later phases to extend service into Harlem are worthwhile.) 

Doing it won't be easy.  There are different power standards, and New Jersey and New York State have to agree to the change, and states in general and New York and New Jersey in particular don't have a good history of working together.. But doing it would result in much better service at lower cost.

No place for PATH?  Interestingly, the report doesn't address PATH, the rail service between Newark/Hudson County and Lower Manhattan.  Maybe it's not included because it's treated as form of heavy rail/subway service, but it is in fact a railroad-based service.

 

Are there opportunities to extend PATH deeper into Manhattan (maybe with the post-covid reduction in office work, there's less of a need) and into more of New Jersey? and shouldn't it be included within an integrated rail service.

Not a proposal for a transport association.  The proposal isn't so much for a VV but the creation of an integrated rail passenger system.  But excluding PATH. That's a start.

But there are so many more opportunities for extending transit in NY and NJ, which would be aided by the creation of a transport association:

• extending New York City subways into New Jersey, ("Proposal to extend 7 train into New Jersey revived," NY1 News)
• PATH to Grand Central Station?
  
• creating subway lines in Hudson County that would connect to New York City ("The Sixth Borough Subway," Itinerant Urbanist)
• tending NJ transit service into Staten Island ("Could a light rail connect Staten Island and Bayonne?," Staten Island Advance)
  
• more ferry services ("South Amboy ferries to NYC could start running this fall, making a 30-year dream a reality," Newark Star-Ledger)
• extending the existing subway to LaGuardia Airport
  
• etc.
  

South Jersey and Philadelphia.  Then there is the South Jersey-North Jersey issue.  A report came out last year suggesting NJ Transit be broken up since it's "biased" towards New York City ("South Jersey is left out so we should split up NJ Transit, report suggests," Newark Star-Ledger).  

-- The Road to Equitable Transportation Policy in New Jersey, Garden State Initiative

But the reality is that today's service pattern is based on historic rail service.  When the rail services developed, pre-1920 mostly, service within South Jersey was less important compared to serving Philadelphia, Trenton, and Atlantic City.

The solution isn't to break up NJ Transit, but add service within South Jersey.

Which is one of the reasons Greater Philadelphia needs a VV too.

Chicken and egg transit planning: Greater San Francisco and the Clipper Card upgrade

Integrating transportation planning, delivery, and fares: the Germans do it best.  I am on record for promoting the German style transport association model for those regions that have a multiplicity of jurisdictions and transit operators.  Places like New York City, Philadelphia, DC, San Francisco, Los Angeles County definitely.  Places like Boston where the MBTA runs most of the services not so much.

-- "The power "of understandable graphics: a proposal for integrating NYC-area railroad passenger service
-- "One big idea: Getting MARC and Metrorail to integrate fares, stations, and marketing systems, using London Overground as an example

While there are still different agencies and service providers, the association takes on the responsibility for overarching planning, service, routes, and the creation of an integrated fare and fare media program that is not agency-dependent.

-- "The answer is: Create a single multi-state/regional multi-modal transit planning, management, and operations authority association," 2017
-- "Verkehrsverbund: The evolution and spread of fully integrated regional public transport in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland," International Journal of Sustainable Transportation (2018)

Raleigh-Durham's collaborative model suffices.  Although in the Raleigh-Durham region of North Carolina, they have a variant of this model that is more collaborative and a little less integrated compared to the German model (also used in Switzerland and Vienna, Austria).

-- "Will buses ever be cool? Boston versus the Raleigh-Durham's GoTransit Model," 2017

Metropolitan mass transit planning.  This fits in with my "metropolitan mass transit planning" concept, where network breadth, network depth, levels of service, and levels of quality are planned at the regional scale, and then transit operators are contracted to provide service meeting those standards.

-- Metropolitan Mass Transit Planning: Towards a Hierarchical and Conceptual Framework, 2006/2010

This means that instead of planning and operations being satisficed because of budget, budget is appropriated based on meeting the requirements of the network plan.

In the DC area, this isn't how it's done.  The state line boundaries impose big barriers, e.g., Maryland hates to pay for integrated services along corridors linking DC and Maryland.  In Virginia, the various entities do their own things.  With Bus Rapid Transit, there are three different initiatives (WMATA, Fairfax, Montgomery) plus WMATA's Rapid Bus program (MetroExtra).  Etc.

-- "Route 7 BRT proposal communicates the reality that the DC area doesn't adequately conduct transportation planning at the metropolitan-scale," 2016

Clipper fare system in San Francisco.  In San Francisco, CurbedSF has a series of pieces about the next generation of the Clipper fare card system and faults of the process.

-- "Modernization of Clipper card won’t include high-tech features already used in other cities
-- "Multimillion dollar contract to upgrade Clipper biased toward incumbent, say vendors"
-- "Officials fail to simplify convoluted transit fares before costly Clipper upgrade"

The articles key on the idea of "Mobility as a Service" or what I call the "Sustainable Mobility Platform"

-- "Further updates to the sustainable mobility platform," 2018
-- "Integrating payment systems in the Sustainable Mobility Platform," 2018
-- "DC is a market leader in Mobility as a Service (MaaS)," 2018

and integrating payment for various modes in one fare media system.

Integrating payment systems across for profit and nonprofit modes.  I've argued that this is a lot more complicated than "smart mobility" types make out.  Yes there is a need for there to be "one" fare media system in a state or multi-state region, rather than a different one for each provider.

But integrating so called "smart mobility services" is more difficult, especially when they are for profit firms and operating across multiple markets.

For individual providers of non-transit services that operate across multiple markets, like Zipcar, Car2Go, Uber, Lyft, Jump, Getaround, LimeBike, Skip, etc., the cost of maintaining integrated applications for each individual market is greater than the benefit.

Plus, I wonder how much having all the potential services be integrated matters at the end of the day?  How many people use multiple modes each day versus primary modes, so that one or two fare media payment systems--a transit fare card that works across all modes ideally (rail, subway, light rail, streetcar, bus, ferry, water taxi) + car sharing app or bike sharing app or e-scooter app, etc. even if un-integrated suffice just fine.

Cross-mode integrated fare media card: Montreal.  Note that Montreal has done some of this with the area's initial local nonprofit car sharing provider operating exclusively in its area, plus with the bike share program. 

But it's not like STM added the for profit Car2Go car sharing program to their fare card system.  Still, they might be the only transit agency around that has integrated car share and bike share into their fare media system.  (LA MTA sort of does it with bike share, but not really.)

Provincial-wide/state-wide fare media systems.  In Ontario, the Presto fare media system developed by the Province of Ontario for Greater Toronto via Metrolinx is now deployed in all but one of the province's transit agencies.  So instead of each agency paying to develop a system on its own, there is one overarching provider.

Two metropolitan areas, one fare card system: DC and Baltimore.  In the US, I only know of one place that does something similar across different regions.  Surprising, it is DC and Baltimore, which use the same system, likely because the operator of transit in Baltimore, the Maryland Mass Transit Administration, is also a funder of the the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), so they ported the SmarTrip system to Baltimore.  A CharmCard in Baltimore is basically just a branded version of the DC SmarTrip card and either works on the other.

Note that PATH uses the NYC Transit fare card system, but this is not the same kind of cross-agency fare card program.

Shouldn't more states take this on?  E.g., in California, it would have been great for the State Department of Transportation to bring the large regional systems--Greater San Francisco, Los Angeles and Greater Los Angeles, San Diego, etc.--to develop one basic system comparable to what Metrolinx did in Ontario.

In the DC-Maryland-Virginia area, the Virginia State Department of Rail and Public Transportation should have "required" other transit agencies elsewhere in the state like Richmond or Hampton Roads to use the SmarTrip system, like in Baltimore with MTA.

This would leverage the investment in the system and make it more worthwhile for independent mode providers to link into the system.

Clipper failings are merely symptoms of bigger failures: the lack of a commitment to an integrated fare system, which in turn derives from not adopting the German transport association model.  The Curbed articles miss the point that the real fault isn't about the Clipper fare media system so much as it is that even though the regional transportation planner, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, is one of the better MPOs in the United States, the various transit agencies don't inter-operate at the scale and depth of integration comparable to a German transport association.  (Even if Clipper works on more modes than any other transit card in the US--two different railroads, BART heavy rail, MUNI's bus, light rail, streetcar, and cable cars, and ferry services.)

Note that in Germany, the model presupposes a preference for optimizing mass mobility and making it less expensive to use (it still isn't cheap), which means providing state subsidies.  One of the reasons that transit agencies are less likely to want to do this in the US is because funding systems are in large part jurisdictionally based.

It wasn't easy to do--after Hamburg figured out and committed to creating a common fare zone and payment system it still took five years to implement the first version. 

Legacy systems are expensive to upgrade.  The articles also miss the point about the problem of legacy systems and the cost of upgrades, and getting all the various entities (including credit/debit card networks) to participate.

-- "The Contactless Wave: A Case Study in Transit Payments," Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

The problem with adopting Apple Pay and other smartphone-enabled payment applications isn't integrating it into a fare card system, it's integrating it into the current fare gate system, likely requiring an upgrade costing many hundreds of millions of dollars.

Although in London, it was done for less than $70 million, although the readers were developed by the fare media system operator, Cubic, the company with the contract in SF.

-- "Redesigning the public transportation experience: London's contactless card system," McKinsey
-- "The rollout of contactless ticketing in Europe," Metro Magazine

Adopting a focus on the quality of the user experience.  The Curbed series makes one particularly excellent point about how transit agencies are falling behind compared to private sector mobility providers like Uber, Lyft, and Chariot in terms of devoting resources to "User Experience."

The sections on:

• The London Underground (Transport System) as a Design Artifact
• Transit Systems and Legibility
• Connectivity and access as questions of usability in mobility planning
• Wayfinding
• Overuse of the subway map concept as a way of representing information

from the entry "World Usability Day," discuss this point in greater depth.

There's more competition for the mobility dollar -- public transit--bus, rail, subway, ferry/water taxi; nonprofit bike share; for profit bus; for profit rail (Brightline); for profit car share; nonprofit bike share (SF, Montreal); for profit scooter share; taxis and ride hailing; collective taxi/microtransit; for profit ferry/water taxi; and delivery.

People will use the services that are easier and more comfortable to use.  That doesn't necessarily mean that the cheapest service is the preferred service. 

Public agencies will need devote more resources to "product design" and the user experience in order to remain competitive in the more complex and convoluted environment of "Mobility as a Service."

-- "Further updates to the sustainable mobility platform," 2018

Train service in Greater Manchester needs to be reorganized?

Twitter photo of Northern Railway train on "Meltdown Monday."

1.  Massive failures in train services in Northern England ("Think London’s trains are bad? Look at the great northern train fail," Guardian) is another reminder that privatization of certain kinds of services that need ongoing investment and significant coordination isn't always the right strategy if high quality service is supposed to be a routine outcome.

But at the same time it is another illustration of how a discrete massive change, in this case introduction of a new schedule with hundreds of changes--can act as a kind of exogenous shock to a system at equilibrium--can make evident all the latent problems and bring them to a head.

With Boston's transit system it was massive snows. With DC's system it was the addition of a new train line without making serious capacity improvements to the existing core system along with failure to spend enough on maintenance. In NYC's system it has to do with an increase in ridership, the cost to upgrade the core system, and impacts from Superstorm Sandy.

In Manchester it has to do with lack of investment in equipment, not enough equipment, probably the failure to rearticulate the system generally (see below re: Southern Railway), and too few train drivers.  The Manchester Evening News reports that in the last two weeks, over 900 trains were cancelled and in the last month, 600 trains were dispatched with an inadequate number of train cars.

It will only get worse later in the week when the union goes out on a planned two-day strike to protest conditions.

2.  An angry rail user created an iPhone phone app called NorthernFail that keeps track of train cancellations and other problems with the system ("'Unacceptable
#NorthernFail' - the travel chaos passengers faced on first working day of new Northern timetable," Manchester Evening News).

The Mayor of Greater Manchester is calling for an inquiry, etc.

-- "Grayling: Improving Northern rail 'number one priority'," BBC
-- "Dozens more Northern train services cancelled this morning - full list," Manchester Evening News

While much of railroad privatization has gone awry in the UK, at least they require the collection and availability of information on train service, delays, and cancellations.

3.  It reminds me of reading about the failure of the Southern train services in Greater London.  I wrote about it last year, intending to follow up with a longer piece.  The situation there and in Manchester now is strikingly similar.

======
The issues of the DC and NYC subway transit systems, and the Southern Rail system in Greater London, and Penn Station in NYC are different, but too often conflated (e.g., "Call it Metro schadenfreude: As New York's subway woes worsen Washingtonians offer sympathy," Washington Post).

The problem with the NYC transit system is popularity reaching the system's breaking point, while in DC it's about failure to maintain the system and the addition of a new line stretching the system beyond equilibrium.

Anyway, as part of the review of the problems with the London railroad system, the British Government commissioned a review by rail executive Chris Gibb.  Reading the report I was struck by what a difference in seriousness, rigor and thoroughness compared to the recent announcement of a million dollar prize "to fix" the NYC transit system by Gov. Cuomo ("Subway upgrade contest from Cuomo to pay $3M to anyone who can fix signals," AM New York).

It's obvious what the problems are with the NYC Subway--they need new signal systems capable of supporting more trains, and continued investment in tracks and equipment.  Instead, lack of budget means it will take decades with the current capital program before the signals are upgraded.

The Gibb report made some amazing recommendations ("Gibb report into improving Southern performance published," Railway Gazette), recognizing that when creating the franchise by merging three different railroads, the "program" on offer was not seriously evaluated or "rationalized," and the reality is that the lines compete, even today, so that the timetable is not optimized for efficient operation.

Given that the system (Southern Railway, Thameslink, Gatwick Express) is the busiest in Britain, the various changes put on the franchise, including new equipment and moving to single engineer operation which is opposed by the Union and led to labor action, along with unnecessary duplication stresses the system.

Given the usage--not unlike the problems experienced in NYC both on the subway and at Penn Station--extra normal shocks to the system like derailments bring everything to a standstill, although in the case of Southern Rail, Gibb argued it was the labor union strikes and other actions that pushed the system to the edge ("Southern rail strike causes worst disruption in 20 years," Guardian).

Five recommendations stuck out to me:

1.  Rightsizing the schedule between the services, focusing on the Thameslink brand
2.  Retroceding the Southern Metro train line, which functions more as transit for London, to Transport for London, to provide more resources
3.  Electrifying the one diesel line, to make common operation possible, and releasing the diesel equipment to other areas, and eliminating the need for investment in diesel-specific storage and maintenance facilities**
4.  Possibly selling the Gatwick station to the airport, because it matters more to the airport to invest in the station than it does to the rail system
5.  Changing the way hiring and depots are organized, distributing staff around the system in ways that mean more time is spent moving active trains rather than on off-schedule equipment moves

This kind of detailed analysis seems to be out of the scope of similar processes in the US.  Instead, there is political grandstanding.

**  Similarly, when David Gunn ran Amtrak, he changed the home depot for the Cardinal--the only train Amtrak created on its own--from ending in DC, to NYC.  He did this because NYC had the maintenance equipment already in place for servicing that kind of train and DC did not.  Rather than pay for and install such equipment in DC, he routed the train to NYC.  Interestingly, not only did it save money, it increased ridership of that train by 40%.

4. There needs to be a "Gibb Report" on Northern Railway too. Probably similar reports could be done for all of the UK's major metropolitan services. The reality is that although privatization was likely the wrong move, at the same time, like with the Thameslink-Gatwick-Southern rail services, there could have been rearticulation and "rationalization" to yield a better service.

Service disruption notices, Meltdown Monday.

5. More places, not just Manchester, need to consciously reorganize their regional passenger rail services to function more like the S-bahn commuter railway systems in German cities, which complement and extend local transit services, but are run by the national railroad.

-- "Verkehrsverbund: The evolution and spread of fully integrated regional public transport in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland," Ralph Buehler, John Pucher & Oliver Dümmler, International Journal of Sustainable Transportation (2018)

From the abstract:

Unlike regional PT organizations in most other countries, VVs include both PT operators and government representatives in the process of making policy decisions about services and fares. Moreover, the overall degree of integration provided by a Verkehrsverbund (singular) is greater, offering one unified route network (all modes, all lines), fully coordinated schedules, and one fare structure and ticketing system. Although there is variation among VVs in the details of their organizational structure and decision-making process, all VVs offer their customers fully integrated regional PT.

The enhanced quality of service VVs provide is crucial forPT to compete effectively with the private car in European andNorth American metropolitan areas, which are increasinglyspreading out into formerly rural areas ...

(Transit service in Paris functions in the same manner with tight integration between rail and subway service.  In London, only some railroad services are integrated into the "local system.")

In the US, train systems in Boston, Chicago, New Jersey, Greater New York City, and Philadelphia function more like S-Bahn services, but usually without the tight integration with local transit, and when services cross state lines, such as from NY to NJ or CT to MA, at least between NJ and NY there are many system failures and lack of coordination.

6.  Using Germany and the London Overground as a model, I've written about how the train services could be integrated and made more S-Bahn like in the DC area.

-- "A new backbone for the regional transit system: merging the MARC Penn and VRE Fredericksburg Lines,"2017
-- "One big idea: Getting MARC and Metrorail to integrate fares, stations, and marketing systems, using London Overground as an example," 2015

7.  Separately I've argued that the DC area doesn't do true integrated transportation planning and once I learned about the "German Transport Association" model which was first developed in Hamburg, make the case that the DC area needs to create a Verkehrsverbund of our own.

-- "Without the right transportation planning framework, metropolitan areas are screwed, and that includes the DC area," 2011
-- "Route 7 BRT proposal communicates the reality that the DC area doesn't adequately conduct transportation planning at the metropolitan-scale," 2016
-- "The answer is: Create a single multi-state/regional multi-modal transit planning, management, and operations authority association," 2017

It's telling that the first big major report from the new Greater Washington Partnership is on highway tolls, not transit ("Is the solution to the region's awful congestion more tolls? This group of CEOs thinks so," Washington Business Journal).