Jay Walder's Smart New World

Public transportation in the New York region desperately needs the new technologies Walder is highlighting. In the information age, smartphone-toting riders rightfully expect accurate, immediate information about their trips. Century-old signal and electrical installations go begging for replacement parts, as vendors abandon manufacture of products obsolete everywhere else in the world. Electronic systems can run trains more frequently, speed buses through lights turned green just for them, and enable drivers to pay tolls without slowing down.

But the hard truth is that spiffy new computers and sophisticated software are not enough to deliver service efficiently and well. An organization can throw all the best technology in the world at a problem, but if its people and culture are not in sync with the hoped-for functionality and service, technology won't fix the situation.

MECHANIC: WHERE'S MY PART?

In the report he had promised to issue at the end of his first 100 days on the job - Making Every Dollar Count, released last week - Walder demonstrates that he knows the MTA culture - or actually, cultures - must change, observing that the "MTA is essentially the product of a merger among several companies, but it never took the first step that is always taken by management in any private sector merger - eliminating redundancy by taking the best from each asset and using those building blocks to transform the newly merged company." The report proposes leveraging major capital investments, such as railcar maintenance facilities to serve New York City Transit, LIRR, and MetroNorth trains. It notes that separate inventory systems for the different operating companies result in an 18% internal handling premium and nearly 100 storerooms for parts and equipment dotting the region.

These and other examples that cut across the MTA family of companies probably add up to nine or even ten figures annually of waste and inefficiency, but Every Dollar doesn't even begin to grapple with the silos and redundancies within each of those companies - where historic rivalries and separate hierarchies result in poor service as well as wasted money.

RIDER: WHERE'S MY TRAIN?

The MTA's new CEO is right that transit riders deserve to know when to expect their train to show up. Every Dollar predicts that this year, 75 subway stations will join the two dozen L line stations equipped with electronic arrival signs, and by the end of 2011, riders will see such signs at all stations along subway lines #1-#6. But until then - and beyond then for stations along the lettered lines - NYC Transit should be using its vast human network to keep customers informed.

Why doesn't the station agent (formerly the token booth clerk) know about line disruptions affecting the station? Why doesn't the conductor know anything about the PA announcement customers on the platform just heard? Because train crews and station personnel are in completely different chains of command, with separate command centers. Traditionally, a train operator or conductor has reported a problem (stuck door, sick passenger, smoke in tunnel) by radio to the management hierarchy in the rail command (now control) center. In many cases, the supervisor there must alert the power control center to shut off the third rail. But it simply has not been standard operating procedure to inform the stations' command center that an incident could be relevant to customers waiting for a train.

Nor, for that matter, has it been expected that management of historically IRT (numbered), BMT (N, Q, R, W), and IND (the other lettered) lines let one another know of issues and incidents - although there are transfer points among all of these. Certainly customers think of the system as a single, integrated network and wonder why #2 riders can't be told, for example, that the Borough Hall station is closed, but they can switch at Fulton Street to the A or C to Jay Street and walk a few blocks.

Yes, the right information could be broadcast on electronic signs. But even a whiteboard would do - if the procedures and expectations were in place to ensure that human beings communicated with each other with existing technologies. Like established radio systems. Or corded telephones. Moreover, having the electronic signs in place doesn't guarantee they'll display the right information. People have to figure out what to tell the signs to show - whether they're typing incident news in as it happens, or designing the software that routes it automatically from onboard the train.

RIDER: WHERE'S MY BUS?

If anything, the situation has been worse for bus riders. The bus command center is even further outside the loop, operationally and even physically - with bus department honchos insisting on domiciling miles away from subways management.

Automated bus location has been tested over and over again since the mid-1990s, to no avail. Most recently, New Yorkers have wondered how it's possible for the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission to equip yellow cabs with GPS navigation, when the MTA's various bus companies (Long Island Bus, MTA Bus - comprised of the seven private lines absorbed in 2005-6, in a deal arranged by Mayor Michael Bloomberg - and the one within NYC Transit) can't track their buses. "But they're so much bigger than taxis," customers marvel. "And somehow the GPS on my cellphone and on my sports watch seem able to find me..."

In its early days, GPS really wasn't up to the job in the canyons of Manhattan. So NYC Transit required that companies competing to provide the system include a secondary locator technology to supplement GPS. The preferred solution counted rotations of the bus wheel. It required a device to be installed on the wheel. The bus mechanics' union refused to service wheels with the device. The pilot failed.

From the start, NYC Transit's bus locator was envisioned as an upgrade to the bus department's sophisticated radio system, so it was managed by radio engineers. By the late 1990s, more flexible, less expensive communications technologies - like cellphones - were available to all. But there was no way within NYC Transit's management and contracting structure to reconceive the locator pilot as something other than a radio-engineering project. So it got immensely more costly. And ultimately failed again. Now NYC Transit and New York City's Department of Transportation are working together to test a new solution along Manhattan's 34th Street.

Riders rightly want the system for the arrival signs. But the actual value of an effective bus locator is in getting real-time information to dispatchers, who can use it to optimize service operations, by rerouting, staggering, holding, and speeding buses on their way. Thus dismantling the union work rules and management silos that have impeded this project for over a decade is key to Walder's goal of improving service significantly enough to promote bus transit as a peer to rail in the MTA region.

WHAT'S NEXT

Along with the timetable for electronic arrival signs in the subway, Making Every Dollar Count promises non-stop electronic tolls at the Henry Hudson Bridge, strict enforcement of bus-only lanes, and a program of regular station maintenance to match the scheduled maintenance program for subway equipment.

Perhaps most notably, coming from the father of the Oyster card, the report announces that this year the MTA, New Jersey Transit, and the Port Authority will partner to pilot a new smart farecard usable across rapid transit, bus, and commuter rail services throughout the region. In arguing for overhauling fare collection, Every Dollar explains that the MetroCard system is reaching the end of its useful life, and that MTA spends 15 cents of every fare dollar to sell or collect the fare. Left unstated are the difficulties of implementing such a regional system - technological challenges (especially in dirty, underpowered, overheated subway environments), but even more so, interagency rivalries and contradictory union contracts and work rules. Uber-consolidated TFL had authority over all the players in the London transportation universe. Here, Jay Walder will have to use power, persuasion, and passion to drag New York into his smart new world.