Posts about MBTA

Dunn previously made a travel time Metro map, and then when we talked about "spider maps" on Greater Greater Washington, put together one of those for the H Street neighborhood:

Transit maps generally lay out the lines and stations either geographically, based on their actual location, or diagrammatically, which shows the connections in the network and organizes the lines to be simple and straight.

But there is more information which riders need to know. They include service frequency (how often trains or buses come), span of service (is this a rush hour only line? does it run on weekends?) and travel times. Frequent network maps, like Metro's geographic map or Dan Malouff's schematic version for Washington area buses, are one way to highlight frequent routes. This time travel map is a way to give more information about times and distances.

Transit maps shape the way people see a city, and affect people's choices of how and where to travel. Experiments which add new information to maps or present information in a different way enrich our understanding of transit and create ideas which could make it into future generations of maps.

Fare's fair

That's more than any other system with a flat fare, and is significantly higher than the $1.60 off-peak and $1.95 rush hour base fares. What the flat fare really means is that people making shorter trips (often those living in the urban core) will be subsidizing those making longer trips (often those living in the suburbs). And that's simply not equitable.

If you're traveling farther, you should expect to pay more. Can you imagine if all taxis regionwide had a flat fare? Would it be fair to charge the same for a trip by taxi from Woodbridge to Rockville as for a trip from Logan Circle to 12th and K? Of course not.

Everybody else is doing it

As is often the case when subway fares are being discussed, some suggest that WMATA should move to a flat fare because most other subway systems use them. And if all subway systems and regions were the same, perhaps that argument would make some sense. But there are significant differences between our Metro and other subway systems in America.

Part of it is a technology issue. A fare structure like Metro's only works in systems with exit faregates, where a rider swipes the fare media to exit as well as to enter. Only Metro, PATCO in Philadelphia and New Jersey, the San Francisco Bay Area's BART, and Atlanta's MARTA have this technology today. It would not be cheap for systems like those in New York and Chicago to install new equipment to make variable fares possible.

Other systems also have momentum behind the flat fare. It's very difficult to build the will to allow such a change, even if the infrastructure allows it. A few years ago, MARTA installed new gates, new fare vending machines, and even got a new name for the fare system. Even though a distance-based fare is now technologically possible, Atlanta continues to use a flat fare, not necessarily because they've decided it's better policy, but out of momentum.

Metro is commuter rail and urban subway

Technology and history aren't all that separate Metro from many other systems. There's also the structure of the cities and the transit systems themselves. The older subways in the United States generally don't travel as far as the modern heavy rail systems. When all trips are shorter, it's not quite as inequitable to charge the same rate for everyone.

Metro is a hybrid between an urban subway and a suburban commuter rail operation. And as such it makes a good deal of sense to have a fare structure that reflects that.

It's true that all trips on the New York City Subway cost the same. But people traveling the distances that Metro travels might not use the New York Subway. For example, Port Washington is a similar distance from Penn Station as Shady Grove is from Metro Center. But a trip to Port Washington doesn't use the subway, it uses the Long Island Rail Road, and the peak fare is $10.00. The maximum you could possibly pay to go from Metro Center to Shady Grove is only $5.45.

Many people group Metro in with subways in New York and Chicago and Boston simply because they're all subways. But it's important to consider scale. The subway systems in those regions are generally compact and don't reach many places with the kind of suburban settlement patterns at the end of Metrorail lines.

In those cities, separate commuter and regional rail systems, which don't use flat fares, mainly serve suburban areas rather than the urban subway.

Let's compare some Metro lines to similar lines in other cities:

If we compare the Metro Red line in comparison with Boston's Red Line to Alewife and the MBTA Fitchburg Line, we can get a sense of scale.

Alewife is about as far from Downtown Crossing as Friendship Heights is from Metro Center. In Boston you'd pay $1.70 for that trip. Here, the fare would be just $1.60 off-peak or $2.70 during rush hour.

Bethesda is roughly the same distance from Metro Center as Waverly is from North Station. And in this case, Metro's $2.15/$3.15 fare is cheaper than MBTA's $4.25.

We can see similar trends if we compare our Orange Line to Philadelphia's Lansdale/Doylestown Line.

I chose Philadelphia and Boston because their metropolitan regions are about the same size as DC's. (Washington is the 7th largest Metropolitan Statistical Area in the nation, while Philadelphia is 6th and Boston 10th.)

Traveling along the Broad Street (in Philadelphia) or Route 2 (in Boston) corridors, a traveler going the distance of outside-the-Beltway stops in DC would not take the subway, but would ride commuter rail.

Our residents of places like Vienna, Rockville, Greenbelt, Franconia-Springfield, and soon Tysons Corner pay less than many would pay on commuter rail in those cities. Plus, they enjoy frequent, all-day, 7-day-a-week service. That has enormous benefits to our region, making walkable places like Rockville Town Center feasible and giving the DC region much higher transit ridership per capita than Boston or Philadelphia.

But just because Boston and Philadelphia's much smaller urban subways charge a flat fare doesn't mean it's unfair that a ride from Vienna to Metro Center costs quite a bit more than a ride from Rosslyn.

According to a brief by the Georgetown Climate Center, "ArrivalStar has brought suit against at least ten transit entities, and at least eight more have received demand letters." GCC, which convenes the Transportation Climate Initiative, worries that the suits can create a chilling effect, discouraging agencies from employing vehicle tracking technologies. Real-time bus arrival information has been shown to increase ridership, taking cars off the road and reducing vehicle emissions.

Jones' strategy is not to sue transit agencies for all they're worth, but to offer them a relatively low-cost way to keep these cases out of court. In fact, not one of his lawsuits has gone all the way through trial. They always end up settling, usually for $50,000 to $75,000, though the demands can go as high as $200,000.

"That's $75,000 of taxpayer money that's going into ArrivalStar's pockets without the validity of the patent ever being challenged," said attorney Babak Siavoshy, who represents the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "If they make the settlement amount low enough, where the costs and benefits favor settling, then most municipalities are going to settle, and it costs them a lot of money, because the cost of litigation is a big stick."

Siavoshy and EFF want the US Patent and Trademark Office to review Jones' patents. EFF is looking for what's known as "prior art": examples of real-time vehicle tracking being discussed before Jones took out the patent, to show that he wasn't the first one with the idea. Advocates also think they can prove that the systems Jones patented were too "obvious" or "non-novel"—that they were logical extensions of existing technology. Abstract ideas, with no technology or product attached, are not patentable.

ArrivalStar attorney Anthony Dowell contends that the patents are defensible and that Jones has the right to seek money from the agencies. "Just because an entity is funded with taxpayer dollars doesn't give them the right to steal property," said Dowell in a recent interview with ArsTechnica. "My client now owns 34 patents that are being infringed, and what else is he to do?"

The transit agencies I called couldn't comment, since the case was pending. But the general counsel of the Monterey-Salinas Transit Corporation, David Laredo, said that they're not challenging the validity of the patents. Their strategy is to assert that the vendor who sold the technology to the transit agency (Trapeze, a spinoff of Siemens) does hold a license from ArrivalStar, and if they don't, that's the vendor's problem, not theirs.

To date, ArrivalStar has reached settlements with the city of Fairfax, Virginia; Boston's MBTA; New York City's MTA; Chicago's Metra; and the Maryland Transit Authority. Suits are pending against the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey's PATH; King County, Washington; the Monterey-Salinas Transit Corporation; the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority; and Portland's TriMet.

In the past, transit agencies may not have talked to each other about these lawsuits because Jones reportedly insists on a nondisclosure agreement as part of the settlement. He only brings a few suits at a time, using a divide-and-conquer strategy, taking care not to demand so much from these public entities that they would pursue litigation.

The recent focus of Jones' lawsuits on transit agencies has inspired Georgetown Climate Center and the American Public Transit Association to get these entities to communicate more and to develop a more cohesive strategy. So far, though, Jones' strategy has been working.

But since Jones brought a suit against the U.S. Postal Service last November, the federal government is now affected. His suit charges the post office with violating his patents with its package tracking services.

Since USPS is a federal agency, the Department of Justice is now involved, defending the post office against ArrivalStar's claims by saying the patents are invalid and that no infringement occurred. Advocates and attorneys are trying to persuade the feds to broaden their interest in ArrivalStar from just USPS to all the transit agencies that have been affected.

After all, the transit agencies, by and large, bought the GPS tracking devices with federal dollars, in pursuit of federal transportation goals. Publicly available real-time transit information—on smartphone apps, transit agency websites, or on screens in bus stops and train stations—makes transit a more attractive option, with the potential to reduce congestion and pollution. SAFETEA-LU, the transportation authorization the country is still (amazingly) working under, specifically requires states to identify ways to deliver real-time transit information to the public.

Georgetown Climate Center Director Vicki Arroyo told Streetsblog that she's had some "early but hopeful discussions" with senior USDOT officials.

"Earlier, some of the more junior people within the federal government were not keen to take this on, saying they didn't have a dog in the fight. Now they do," she said, referring to the suit against the postal service. "We're hoping they won't just look at this as a one-off matter. There's a much higher public stake here."

A version of this article was originally posted at Streetsblog Capitol Hill.

Editor's note: The MBTA's response brief to ArrivalStar rebuts the company's actions with powerful rhetoric that's unusual for a legal filing:

This lawsuit offends any notion of justice. The mission of Defendant Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority ("MBTA") is to transport its 1.1 million riders safely and on time every day. As a service to the riding public, the MBTA alterts riders via its website, text message or email whether one of its vehicles is running late or has otherwise encountered some difficulty or delay. Though the MBTA is a cash-strapped public entity, its notification service is free of charge to anyone who wishes to subscribe. The MBTA makes no money from this service. The service provides a benefit to the riding public, by whom it has been well received.

Plaintiffs ArrivalStar S.A. and Melvino Technologies Limited (collectively, "Plaintiffs" or "Arrivalstar"), two offshore companies, allege, in a conclusory and unspecified manner, that the technology underpinning the MBTA's alert system infringes on two patents that they claim to own. Plaintiffs do not allege they produce or manufacture anything. They do not allege they sell anything. The primary, if not sole, purpose of Arrivalstar is to exact tribute from any person that Arrivalstar asserts is using inventions claimed in patents that they purport to own, either in the form of royalties or a strike suit such as this one. The Court may take notice of the fifteen suits Plaintiffs, or a related entity, have brought in federal district courts involving the same two patents at issue in this dispute. ...

In any event, the practice of monetizing patents through serial litigation by "non-practicing entities" or "NPEs," as they are euphemistically known, is unseemly and inimical to the fundamental purpose of United States patent laws of encouraging innovation and its introduction into the economy. The business model of Plaintiffs is no less obvious than the patents themselves, and shakedowns such as this one should be outlawed.

The image color-codes bus trips by their average speed. Buses are fastest on freeway segments, slower on most city streets, slowest in the dense neighborhood cores. Some of this is road speed, but buses also move more slowly in areas where there are more stops and more people boarding and alighting.

Since buses only report their location every few minutes and can't report inside tunnels, the bluest lines show up as fuzzier sets of spread-out lines.

WMATA created a similar, but more diagrammatic and less artistic, set of maps for DC buses:

This is just one of the many applications people can create on their own, thanks to having open data publicly available. The more transit agencies provide, the more useful tools people can create, whether very practical mobile apps or beautiful and informative visualizations like this one.

Most of all, such a deal would force the MBTA to keep its parking garages as parking for the life of the contract. If they want to develop mixed-use transit-oriented development (TOD) instead, their hands will be tied.

Though it's not clear the MBTA has much interest in pursuing TOD at all. In my hometown of Acton, which has a commuter rail stop, the MBTA wants to build a parking garage on their current surface parking lot. Residents, understandably, are concerned it will just draw traffic. The MBTA rejected other ideas about making a connection to the nearby bike trail and improving pedestrian accessibility.

Absent from this discussion is anything about possibly putting housing and jobs on the site, which is one of Acton's relatively walkable nodes.

This increase in parking was actually partly environmentalists' idea:

The MBTA must add 1,000 new parking spaces along its commuter rail lines by the end of 2011 under an agreement with environmental groups to mitigate the impact of the Big Dig.

In fairness to the environmental groups, that settlement also includes a number of other, non-car-oriented provisions, like building the Green Line in Somerville. But while adding parking to commuter rail could improve ridership in the short run, it would generate more car trips in the long run as new sprawl farther out would just replace any car trips on the major highways that switch to commuter rail.

Better to pursue housing within walking distance of transit, both in the suburbs and city, which has the added benefit of not making the MBTA add even more money-losing parking facilities and further strain the budgets of the next few decades.