Y2K10 may be another way of saying the year 2010. How people get from point Fishers to point Indianapolis five years from now may look just as strange as the calendar.
Officials with the Indianapolis Metropolitan Planning Organization foresee the popular route to Indiana’s capital city as following the Nickel Plate rail route instead of the highway. MPO officials held a short meeting and showed proposed routes to Fishers Friday evening at the Fishers Train Station.
MPO officials have been looking at creating an Indianapolis-wide rapid transit system since December 1995. The section from downtown Indianapolis to the Fishers Train Station at 116th Street and Municipal Drive would be the first leg constructed. The exact route has yet to be decided, but the path will follow either the Nickel Plate rail corridor or a newly established route paralleling either Interstate 69 or Allisonville Road.
Light Rail Transit uses passenger only train cars operated by overhead electric lines. Cars would run between 20 and 35 miles per hour and could carry an average of 30,000 to 35,000 people per hour. An MPO report revised in March 2003 indicates that an LRT system would cost between $15 million and $54 million per mile to construct and between $5 and $28 per mile to operate.
The elevated or “El” system in Chicago is an example of a Light Rail Transit system. Though an elevated rail path wouldn’t be needed in Fishers, Hamilton County Commissioner Christine Altman, who is the Hamilton County representative on the MPO’s rapid transit committee, told those attending Friday’s open house that an overhead system will have to be incorporated for the LRT to go around the south side of downtown Indianapolis.
The entire system will be literally up in the air with the Automated Guideway Transit (idea. AGT is a computer-operated monorail similar to the Clarian Health People Mover running between Methodist Hospital and Riley Hospital for Children. MPO figures construction will cost almost twice as much to build n as high as $116 million by some estimates n but around half to operate.
One of handful of those attending Friday’s open house knows a little about planning. Westfield resident Joseph Scott, 80, was an engineer at the Indiana Department of Transportation Greenfield District for 36 years before retiring in 1986. He remembers when 146th Street was a gravel road and Fishers was “barely a wide place in the road.”
“I’m active in the Boy Scouts and I-69 has so much traffic, I’m late getting to Camp Belzer for meeting and activities,” Scott said. “Something like this has definitely been needed for some time. It would sure be the way to go,” he added.
MPO Senior Planner Amy Inman said the earliest construction could begin would be 2007 with operation beginning in 2010 n Y2K10.
Inman said MPO plans on having a more detailed route and cost proposal ready for presentation to Indianapolis, Hamilton County, and Indiana governmental officials sometime in mid- to late May.
Responding to concerns over the independence of the MTA’s audit department, Chief Executive Roger Snoble said this week that the agency would hire outside auditors to review a problem-plagued $29-million computer software project.
The announcement came two weeks after the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s former chief auditor, William Bernsdorf, left his job after issuing a series of stinging reports contending management lapses in developing the so-called M3 information technology system. Bernsdorf alleges he was forced to retire.
The computer system is intended to coordinate the MTA’s bus and rail equipment, order parts, schedule repairs and track work schedules. Portions were implemented at train and bus yards last year. Others are expected to be launched in the coming months.
Workers complained that the new software was causing robots to deliver wrong engine parts, botching simple math and causing workers to waste hours every day correcting its errors.
When the project was approved by the MTA board in 2003, it carried an initial price tag of about $24 million. The project cost now stands at $28.8 million, and MTA chief financial officer Richard Brumbaugh told MTA directors this week that the final tally would probably exceed $30 million.
The MTA inspector general’s office has launched an investigation into Bernsdorf’s claims that he was forced out by his supervisor, Brumbaugh, who also is responsible for the M3 project. “He started interfering with the audits, directing what audits we should do, what audits we shouldn’t do,” said Bernsdorf, the former managing director of audits. “He gave me an ultimatum: ‘Either get in line and follow my directions, or resign.’ “
Brumbaugh said Bernsdorf’s allegations were untrue. “His retirement had nothing to do with the audits. He was free to write whatever he wanted,” Brumbaugh said.
Snoble said he expected an outside accounting firm to complete “a very comprehensive audit” of M3 by spring.
In the last year and a half, Bernsdorf issued four audits criticizing the MTA information technology department for lax supervision over software development. An April 2004 memo warned that M3’s programming code was not being sufficiently tested, risking costly failures.
“These four audits raised some very serious issues,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, an MTA director, said Friday. But some MTA executives have “totally denied the summary of the audits.”
Brumbaugh and other MTA executives say M3’s problems are being successfully worked out. “Every day, we are resolving issues as they come about,” Brumbaugh said. “The project is actually going very well.”
The two subway drivers whose alleged recklessness led to Mondays crash and more than 200 injuries were not sufficiently qualified, police said yesterday.
Questioning of Thanaphol Nithichotiyanont and Thawatchai Kanya showed they had insufficient training, Metropolitan Police commissioner Lt-General Pansiri Prapawat said.
The two drivers and two control room officials were charged yesterday with recklessness leading to serious injury. Thanaphol had said he was just a train driver, so he did not have technical knowledge about the trains braking system, Pansiri said.
A recorded conversation between the two drivers was found that could be used against them in court, he said while declining to give details. The investigation has uncovered a high level of carelessness, Pansiri told a press conference at the offices of Bangkok Metro Plc (BMCL), the subway operator.
On Monday morning, Thanaphol was manually driving an out-of-service train to the depot near the Thailand Cultural Centre station when it got stuck on a sloping curve in the tracks. Another train driven by Thawatchai was sent out from the depot to push the stalled train to a nearby power contact.
But Thanaphol disengaged the emergency brake, allegedly on a suggestion from the control room, letting his train roll down the slope and slam into a train full of riders waiting to leave the station.
More than 200 people were injured in the accident, two of them seriously. Thanaphol and the driver of the passenger train were also injured.
Thanaphol and Thawatchai along with two Bangkok Metro employees who were on duty in the control room during the collision will face criminal charges, Pansiri said.
Chief traffic controller Kulchart Lao-asoke and control room operator Rangsan Sawasdimongkol did not issue a warning when Thanaphol released the emergency brake code-named B09, which is against operating procedures, Pansiri said. They merely gave an acknowledgement, saying OK, got that, when the driver reported his action.
The four suspects could face a maximum three in years jail, Bt6,000 fine, or both, Pansiri said.
Police have questioned more than 130 witnesses, including injured passengers, subway workers and technicians familiar with the subway system. Three of the suspects except Thanaphol, who was still hospitalised turned themselves in to police to face the charges relating to the accident.
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said the subway line would be reopened only after the operator could ensure passenger safety.
The exact date had not yet been set, said Prapat Chongsanguan, governor of the Mass Rapid Transit Authority of Thailand, the state agency overseeing the subway system. We are not in a hurry to resume operations. If all the repair work is done and we can make sure people will be safe, services will be restarted, Prapat said.
What they did that day
Thanaphol, driver of the off-duty train, told investigators that he was just a train driver and was unlikely to have good technical knowledge of the braking system.
Chief traffic controller Kulchart told Thanaphol to disengage the emergency brake though he should have known that it would cancel the automatic braking system.
Thawatchai, driver of the rescue train, pushed the off-duty train without being completely connected. He told police that he had no knowledge about the braking system.
Control room official Rangsan ordered the immobile train to be pushed to the next electricity contact while it was not completely connected to the rescue train. He also ordered that the trains automatic braking system be switched off.
KUALA LUMPUR: A burst tyre, which KL Monorail System Sdn Bhd suspects to be a defective tyre, is the cause of the blast on the train on Friday.
KL Monorail System Sdn Bhd said a tyre burst was experienced on the train, which was carrying 30 passengers, while it was pulling out of the Chow Kit station at 8.50pm resulting in leg injury to a 47-year old passenger and minor injury to another. “The cause of the tyre failure in one of the eight load tyres in the train is still under investigation but it was suspected to be a case of defective tyre.
The operator added in a statement that the incident occurred when the train was moving towards Titiwangsa station. “The tyre burst caused a rubber sidewall to flap and hit the side cover of the seat resulting in the leg injury to a passenger on the seat,” it said, adding that it took all the necessary immediate action after the incident.
It was reported on Saturday that three passengers were injured when a blast occurred under their seat in a monorail coach at the station.
An investigation is being carried out.
MetroRail this month has begun using double-car trains during peak hours for the Main Street light rail.
When light rail systems begin operation, it’s common to use single cars until passenger loads reach capacity, then expand them. MetroRail ran single cars all last year except during special events. Each car seats 72 people and can accommodate about 125 standing people.
Rich Krisak, senior director of rail operations, said two double-car trains are running to alleviate crowding through the Texas Medical Center. Each makes two round-trips during the morning and afternoon rush hours.
Discussing options for intercity trains
Texas Rail Advocates, an interest group that supports development of intercity train service, is holding a conference this week in the Dallas-Fort Worth area to examine the potential for development of the South Central High Speed Rail Corridor.
State and federal government and railroad industry representatives are expected.
TENAFLY - An NJ Transit presentation about extending passenger rail service into the borough left residents with more questions than answers.
Residents and local officials gathered Thursday night hoping to learn details about the agency’s plans to bring the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail farther north to Leonia, Englewood and Tenafly. They were disappointed to hear the light-rail plan needs more study and is not yet funded.
Instead, transit officials touted the agency’s newest plans, which include a tunnel into Manhattan, a Bergen-Passaic light rail line and a junction at Secaucus. Officials said raising funds for the $5 billion to $6 billion tunnel would be one of their top priorities. “Without it, we can’t expand other services,” emphasized Steve Santoro, chief of new rail construction at NJ Transit.
Santoro did say there is still talk of extending the Bergen Northern Branch of the light-rail line from Tonnelle Avenue in North Bergen into Tenafly.
However, transit officials prefer to use “diesel multiple units” - a type of train with a diesel engine that does not need to be pulled by a locomotive - rather than the typical light-rail electric trolleys. DMUs can run on existing freight tracks, saving money for NJ Transit’s other projects. The trains cannot use existing light-rail tracks, so passengers would have to transfer at Tonnelle Avenue to catch a light rail to Weehawken for a ferry or to Hoboken for a PATH train.
Joe McDermott, chairman of Tenafly’s rail committee, criticized needing two transfers to get into Manhattan. “We need reasonably good rail service,” he said.
Meanwhile, residents were concerned about using diesel and unclear about when any of the projects would begin. “I do want the light rail,” said Murray Schwartzberg, adding that diesel engines are louder and require extra transfers. “Who knows how long it’s going to take,” said the Tenafly resident, who has commuted to Manhattan for about 20 years.
NJ Transit spokeswoman Penny Bassett Hackett said the Tenafly extension would be independent of work being done on the tunnel. She stressed that the agency is currently conducting an environmental study on the Northern Branch. “It’s a lot dependent on funding,” she said. The comprehensive rail package is competing with other states for federal dollars.
Some residents reserved judgment until the final plans are in. “Everything is so up in the air, you can’t say whether it’s good or bad,” said James Bergman.
Old Chicago is stocking up on crayons and high chairs.
That might sound strange for a restaurant in the heart of the Warehouse District party zone, but young families are starting to hit Downtown in droves on the weekends, eager to ride light rail.
General Manager Brandon Bramscher said the 508 1st Ave. N. restaurant - which is just steps away from the Warehouse District/Hennepin Avenue platform - has seen an influx of families. “We see families come down Saturday and Sunday days sometimes to just check the train out and come Downtown and have a sandwich,” Bramscher said. “It’s been a challenge for us because we’re a location that’s not used to having a lot of children. So it takes an adjustment for us to be a little bit more family friendly.”
Bramscher said along with its new high chairs and art supplies, the restaurant has recently updated its children’s menu. Despite the broadened customer base, he said he’s confident the restaurant can wear two hats. “I’m more than happy to be a nightclub atmosphere in the evening and a family-friendly establishment in the daytime. That works for us,” he said.
Since the beginning of the Vikings season, Old Chicago and other nearby Warehouse District restaurants have passed out free LRT tickets to customers headed to the games. Bramscher said his restaurant hands out more than 100 passes on game days.
Near the Nicollet Mall LRT platform, nearby businesses are experiencing similar weekend traffic spikes. Lydia Mattison, vice president and general manager at Gaviidae Common’s Nieman Marcus, 505 Nicollet Mall, has noticed a significant increase in customers since light rail’s June 2004 unveiling.
Another surge in foot traffic came after the Mall of America station opened in December. “The light rail has definitely added a level of convenience for our customers who are traveling from the south. They love the fact that it’s next to Nieman Marcus and they’re able to just get on the light rail and walk into the store,” she said. “It’s just really easy for them and they don’t have to worry about parking. I have had customers tell me that.”
Mattison said she has observed more families arrive by train, particularly during the holiday season for the TCF Holidazzle Parade. While she declined to disclose sales figures, Mattison said Nieman’s has seen an increase in sales since LRT’s launch.
Andrea Christensen, a leasing consultant who works with City Center and Gaviidae Common, said light rail is drawing in new customers who might otherwise have been intimidated by Downtown. “I think it’s people who don’t want to park and some people are afraid to drive Downtown, too,” said Christensen, who works for Colliers Turley Martin Tucker. “But I also think it’s helping us bring people who are shopping at the Mall of America who wouldn’t come Downtown before. For kids, it’s fun - it’s a ride.”
Christensen took the rail from the Mall of America in December and was surprised by the crowds. “It was packed - you couldn’t get another person on it,” she said. “It’s educated, higher-income people who are on that. That’s been huge, and I’ve seen a lot of families come Downtown.”
Long-time café owner Barry Hamlin, who operates Hamlin’s Coffee Shop, a pint-size diner at 512 Nicollet Mall, said he’s considering opening on Saturdays to draw LRT riders. Currently, Hamlin’s is open 6 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Monday through Friday.
Hamlin said other business owners in the Renaissance Square Building have told him there are many people getting off the train on Saturdays and strolling down Nicollet Mall. “We can see grandparents and kids and they get off the LRT Downtown and we’re the first place they see. So I’m fortunate there,” said Hamlin, who recently made his diner smoke-free, four months ahead of the city’s March 31 ban.
While some Downtown merchants are crediting the train with a spike in sales, not all businesses are seeing an LRT-fueled increase
A staffer at the Trieste Café, a Greek deli in the Lumber Exchange Building at 10 S. 5th St., said business is up among Downtown workers now that LRT construction has ended, but few riders have stopped in for a bite.
Block E General Manager Sue Bonin said the entertainment complex at 600 Hennepin Ave. S. is so busy on the weekends that it’s hard to tell if there’s been a spike in business from the LRT.
As with other Downtown businesses, Block E sees a swell in customers on Dome or Target Center game days, but Bonin hasn’t noticed a dramatic impact from LRT.
Brian Newman, general manager at City Center’s T.G.I. Friday’s, said the restaurant has also noticed a few customers trickle from light rail on game days.
Newman said he expects the increase to be more dramatic in the summer. In the dead of winter, walking just two blocks from the LRT platform can be a powerful deterrent for some customers.
Ever since Phoenix voters overwhelmingly said “yes” to light-rail transit in 2000, the fledgling project has overcome a series of obstacles, any one of which could have derailed the 20-mile starter line.
Today, any lingering doubts about the efficacy of light rail or whether there will be money down the road for the project should be laid to rest.
Jennifer Dorn, administrator of the Federal Transit Administration, is expected to be in Phoenix to sign what is called a full-funding grant agreement. The contract will commit the federal government to $587.2 million over the next five years, or about half of the project’s total cost.
It will be a historic occasion as Phoenix, Tempe and Mesa lead the way to a new mode of travel in the Valley. The initial line is to open in 2008, linking the three cities.
Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon says Valley citizens will quickly see the economic impact of the light-rail project as more contracts are let, 2,000 jobs are created, and businesses and residential units spring up near the light-rail stations.
The light-rail project has passed every test put in its path, ranging from environmental concerns to the final design of the planned route. The system will initially link Phoenix and Tempe and punch about a mile into Mesa.
President Bush included the Valley Metro Rail project in his budget last year, an essential milestone because it put the project firmly in the queue for federal funding.
Congress approved a $75 million down payment, giving light rail the necessary legitimacy to proceed.
If all goes well, planned extensions will push the line to Glendale, out to Paradise Valley Mall, westward along the Interstate 10 and further into Mesa and south Tempe.
Funding for the extensions - about $2.3 billion - was contained in Proposition 400, the 20-year, $15.8 billion transportation plan that Maricopa County voters approved in November.
The prospect of students and professors riding the rails with ease was a major consideration in Arizona State University’s decision to create an urban campus in downtown Phoenix.
With the green light to lay track and build stations, there’s a growing realization that light rail is really going to happen. Meeting with residents at Paradise Valley Mall the other day, Gordon said the first question was: “When are we going to get light rail here?”
Light rail’s success has been well documented in such Western cities as Dallas, Salt Lake City and Denver. They are models of what could happen here: first-year ridership topping projections, routes added and suburbs clamoring for more service.
Today’s signing of the funding agreement caps a long, hard struggle to bring light rail to the Valley. It will be surpassed only by the day that light rail is up and running, on time and on budget.
A fire at a single subway station in lower Manhattan has halted service entirely along the C line and severely limited service along the A, and led officials to warn of persistent problems for up to five years.
The blaze, apparently started by a homeless person seeking warmth and discovered at about 2 p.m. Sunday, destroyed about 600 hard-to-replace electrical relays used to control signals on the Eighth Avenue line at the Chambers Street station.
NYC Transit President Lawrence Reuter told a news conference that a full restoration could take three to five years and cost “several millions of dollars.”
“This is a significant problem and it’s going to go on for quite a while,” Reuter said.
The greatest impact by far was on the C line, which runs from Euclid Avenue in the City Line section of Brooklyn to 168th Street in Washington Heights. “Customers should be aware that there are no plans for the restoration of C service in the near future,” the MTA said in a statement.
The incident also highlighted the transit system’s susceptibility to terrorism, Reuter said. The area where the fire began is easily accessible, by passing through a simple swinging gate. “We said all along the system is extremely vulnerable all the time,” Reuter said. “This obviously wasn’t - we don’t think - terrorism. Clearly, it appears to be a homeless person setting it. But the system has these types of vulnerabilities.”
The incident troubled straphangers at the station, where the acrid smell of the electrical fire still hung yesterday. “If he can do it, anybody else can do it,” said Maggie Marrero, 36, a legal secretary from Ozone Park.
Passengers were urged to use other lines and avoid normal transfers to the A and C lines. Additionally, A trains will run on the F line between Downtown Brooklyn and Greenwich Village, while the V train will continue past its normal terminus at Second Avenue and make C stops between Euclid Avenue and Jay Street in Brooklyn.
Almost a half-million people ride the A on a normal weekday, while 110,000 daily passengers take the C.
Other transit problems lingered from this past weekend’s snowstorm. Some service on the F and G trains remained halted yesterday from frozen elevated track sections at Smith-Ninth streets in Brooklyn.
Delays of up to an hour snarled NJ Transit. Amtrak saw two-hour delays because of frozen train equipment and switch problems.
The AirTrain at Kennedy Airport, which opened in 2003, was also suspended for as much as 14 hours Sunday because of weather-related problems, while the 4-year-old AirTrain at Newark was grounded for more than 24 hours Saturday through Sunday. Free bus shuttles were provided instead, but passengers complained of long lines.
But it was the fire at Chambers Street that will have the most lasting impact. The blaze apparently started after a homeless person entered an off-limits section of track at the station and ignited a shopping cart filled with lumber, Reuter said police told him. The fire spread to a relay room and caused “major, major damage,” he said.
A Fire Department spokesman said yesterday that while marshals were investigating, no arrests had been made.
The fire affected signals and switches in a relatively small area - only within the station and about a quarter-mile south of it. But the damage created a bottleneck along the system’s longest line, the A, which spans 32 miles from the Rockaway Peninsula to Inwood.
Supervisors are to continue manually dispatching trains through tunnels, leaving a safe distance between trains. Crews were meanwhile attempting to create a makeshift electrical system. “Once you’ve crimped the garden hose in any one spot, only so much water can go through,” Reuter said. “It’s the same with the trains. The rest of the signal system is working fine, but it’s limited by the weakest link, and the weakest link is Chambers Street.”
Service Changes
The A train has limited service to two-thirds. Supervisors must flag trains forward. There is limited A service between Broadway-Nassau Street and Canal Street, but service is running with delays. Riders are strongly advised not to transfer from the J , L or Z trains at Broadway Junction in Brooklyn to the A train.
C service is suspended
G service is operating between Court Square and Bedford - Nostrand Ave.
V service is operating normally.
Until tomorrow, A trains will run on the F line between Jay Street in Brooklyn, and West 4th Street in Manhattan, in both directions between the hours of 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.
A costly blaze
Officials say the damage to the subway line at Chambers Street will cost “several millions of dollars” to replace and could take up to five years to fix. A look at how it happened:
At 2 p.m. Sunday, police believe a homeless person set fire to lumber in shopping cart on the Brooklyn-bound track. The blaze engulfs the ceiling and sets fire to the wiring. Through the wiring the fire spreads into the locked relay room destroying the track circuits and signaling system. 600 relays that control the track circuits, and in turn control the signals and switches, were melted in the blaze.
Problems or limitations of the Las Vegas monorail continue to emerge. A report from a correspondent in Calfornia relates what seem to be serious operational and capacity problems, from the perspective of a passenger:
I recently returned from Las Vegas where I rode the monorail from the Convention Center Station to the Flamingo Station. The wait was over an hour, and once you entered the first escalator you could not escape the system.
The trains operated at 8 to 10 minute spacing, I guess due to the computer or lack of cars, but the system was way overtaxed. The system shut down for about 15 minutes — I think due to a door not working properly.
The stations are long enough for 2-car trains, but they were only running single-car trains. They did have attendants to help with the crush crowds. After boarding the train [I noted that] the cars were at maximum capacity. The car cabins are very small — maybe only seating for 20 or so. The ride was very slow and very bumpy. Overall, the experience was very unsatisfactory for me, and I would think most of the other riders.
I will try it again in an off-peak time of the day, but I will not use it again for transportation … which is not much of a problem, since it goes to very few useful places. It is a poor amusement park ride with little ability to provide any kind of real-world transit service. I guess for Disneyland and Las Vegas, the monorail is OK as part of the entertainment. But as a way of moving people for transit, it is a total failure. A 1910 trolley would do much better.
(We note that the Light Rail Now! publication team continue to believe that the monorail is probably suitable and potentially efficient technology for its main function as a casino-to-casino and recreational shuttle. However, as we have noted, there appear to be serious design drawbacks, including capacity limitations, in the specific installation.)
A 13 January 2005 article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal titled “MONORAIL RIDERSHIP: CES numbers cheer officials — Convention was major test for reopened line” reported that the monorail’s management was pleased with ridership of about 150,000 experienced over the four days of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), one of the nation’s largest vendor conventions. However, Las Vegas experienced unusually severe weather during that period, including high levels of rainfall, which apparently affected monorail operations:
The article quotes monorail spokesman Todd Walker, who reportedly “believes last week’s ridership would have been stronger if not for the rain that plagued much of the show and the monorail’s recent restart.” It goes on to report that “Monorail trains must run slower during rainy times, and that in turn cuts into the system’s capacity of 6,400 riders per hour. “
“There’s no question there was a demand for additional capacity” Walker told the newspaper reporter. “We could have handled more capacity” if not for the rain, he asserted.
This astonishes a correspondent from Minneapolis, who raises questions about the limitations of an automated rubber-tired system in what are rather ordinary inclement weather conditions:
A fully-automated, modern transportation method that can’t operate at normal system speeds because it’s raining? That blows me away. I don’t think I’ve ever heard such a statement before, about any form of transportation. … I’m sure that Seattle would like to know about this situation, considering the length of line they are proposing to build, because that would affect a tremendous number of people over much longer distances. As well, it should affect the thinking of others who are proposing such a system. And what about the fact that there is insufficient equipment to handle any more than normal loading, and possibly not even that during wet weather during the wet weather? This raises some serious questions in my mind.
We must note that other “guided” technologies, including standard-rail systems, also have experienced problems in some weather conditions — although even severe rain does not normally slow the operation of steel-wheel systems. Houston’s new MetroRail surface light rail line has
experienced occasional disruption from street flooding.
However, one of the advantages touted for grade-separated systems, including elevated monorails, is that they are immune from such disruptions. The recent Las Vegas Monorail experience does seem to raise issues regarding the technical adequacy of such a rubber-tired transit technology in very wet or otherwise slippery weather conditions.
Last weekend’s road-clogging, parking-pulverizing snowstorm sent 17,000 fans to the Eagles NFC Championship Game on SEPTA, giving the debt-riddled transit agency a rare chance to score a touchdown with the public — but unlike the Birds, it fumbled the ball.
The SEPTA Eagles Express brought fans to the Linc via the Broad Street Line quickly and cheaply as advertised, but after the game and the NFC championship ceremony was over, those same 17,000 fans found themselves trapped in a mass-transit twilight zone.
Moving like a massive cattle herd toward the only two Pattison Avenue station entrances that were open, fans inched forward in a slow, painful crush that lasted 20 minutes or more from parking lot to SEPTA turnstile.
Once inside the station, 20 more minutes elapsed while “Eagles Express” trains stopped halfway down the platform, filled up immediately and departed - leaving thousands of fans behind.
The mass-transit system was obviously overwhelmed. “Because of the snow, we had 17,000 Eagles fans taking SEPTA instead of the usual 10,000, including a lot of first-time users,” assistant operations manager Pat Nowakowski said yesterday.
“That was the most people we ever carried on an Eagles game day. Instead of buying tokens in advance, a lot of first-time users figured they would just pay their [return] fare when they got back on. So the queue of people trying to get to the manned windows, instead of just going through the turnstiles, was tremendous.”
Nowakowski said city police had closed two of Pattison station’s four entrances because they didn’t want fans crossing the avenue and creating traffic gridlock. “So we had 17,000 people trying to get into two entrances that were partly blocked by first-time users queuing up at the manned toll booths to buy tokens,” he said. “It was a mess.”
A Construction and Transport Ministry panel on Monday called on the four Japan Railway companies to take urgent measures to minimize potential damage from a derailment of Shinkansen trains caused by an earthquake.
The proposal was made in an interim report submitted to Construction and Transport Minister Kazuo Kitagawa on the derailment of a Joetsu Shinkansen train following the Oct. 23 Niigata Prefecture Chuetsu Earthquake.
According to sources, it is unusual for a ministry panel to issue such a proposal.
The interim report, compiled by the Aircraft and Railway Accidents Investigation Commission, unveiled details of damage to tracks, bridges and train carriages after the Joetsu Shinkansen Toki 325 derailed. The accident was unprecedented in that it took place while the superexpress train was running at more than 200 kph.
The commission found that the width of the rails had expanded about 1 centimeter about 200 meters ahead of the derailment site. The expansion was likely caused by the train’s horizontal shaking as the earthquake hit. It was also found that a bridge over the Jodogawa river near the derailment site had subsided by up to seven centimeters and sheared in a westward direction by four centimeters.
About 500 meters away from the derailment site, track joints, which are designed to bear more than 200 tons, were destroyed. The rails were distorted and had come away from the sleepers for nearly 100 meters.
As for the rearmost carriage of the 10-car Niigata-bound train, which was pushed to the side of the track for Tokyo-bound trains, the interim report said a collision would have occurred if another train had been on the opposite side.
It is believed that the train did not roll over or overturn because the front carriage continued to run along the track even after the derailment as its wheels and undercarriage were on either side of the rails.
The commission plans to further examine data obtained at the accident site and from the derailed train and to compile a final report on the cause of the derailment by the end of the year.
The ministry also expects that another panel comprising chief engineers of East Japan Railway Co., West Japan Railway Co., Central Japan Railway Co. and Kyushu Railway Co. will start discussing measures to handle derailments, the sources said.
The derailment took place at 5:56 p.m. on Oct. 23. The train’s right wheels derailed due to strong temblors at a site near Nagaoka Station in Niigata Prefecture immediately after the train passed through a tunnel. The track joints were destroyed, but the train carried on a further 1.6 kilometers, where it stopped with its rearmost car leaning toward the opposite track.
None of 154 passengers and crew members aboard the train was hurt in the accident.
The steel covers over the load wheels of KL Monorail trains will be strengthened to ensure the burst tyre incident last Friday does not recur.
In that mishap, two passengers were hurt when the impact from the burst tyre caused a rubber sidewall panel above it to flip, smashing the steel cover into the side of the passenger seat.
KL Monorail System Sdn Bhd director Datuk Ahmad Rejal Arbee said although the design of the latches holding the steel covers had met safety standards, the company felt a minor modification was needed. “Our engineers will look into reinforcing the latches to make the component stronger,” he said at a Press conference at the company’s head office here.
Chia Choy Fong, 47, injured her calf and ankle while her daughter’s friend, Kee Wan Joe, 18, suffered minor leg injuries. Chia’s daughter was not injured.
On Deputy Human Resources Minister Datuk Abdul Rahman Bakar’s statement yesterday that the KL Monorail service would be suspended if the pneumatic tyre system was found to be unstable, Rejal said the tyres were equipped with temperature sensors that would trigger an alarm in the event the temperature exceeded the permissible level. “But during last Friday’s incident, no alarm was triggered,” he said.
He said the tyre system also had a mechanism to ensure the train would not lean to one side after a burst tyre and could continue to run safely at low speed to the next station. The manufacturer of the tyre, Michelin, had been informed of the incident and the burst tyre would be sent to it soon.
Rejal said the incident had not resulted in any drop in passenger volume.
Transit officials said yesterday that service on the A and C lines could be restored to full capacity in six to nine months, substantially revising their earlier prognosis that a fire in a Lower Manhattan signaling room would disrupt service on the lines for as long as three to five years.
The new time frame for repairs will still mean months of confusion and inconvenience on two lines that have an average weekday ridership of 580,000, and hardly diminishes how the fire underscored the vulnerability of a signaling system based on electromechanical switches that were first developed in the 1870’s.
Several former transit officials said yesterday that the agency has repeatedly acknowledged over the past 20 years that the signaling system was obsolete or unreliable, but nonetheless chose to devote the vast majority of its limited capital funds to other projects. Reports after two fatal crashes, in 1991 and 1995, recommended improvements in the signal system, though neither blamed the system for the deaths.
The limits of the system were brought into focus on Sunday afternoon when a Depression-era signal relay room, one of dozens distributed throughout the 722-mile subway network, was destroyed in an underground fire north of the station on Chambers Street that serves the A and C lines.
Lawrence G. Reuter, the president of New York City Transit, said at a news conference yesterday that replacing the custom-made signal relays, switches and circuits would take less time than expected. “We were just this morning able to come to the determination that we could actually do this in six to nine months,” Mr. Reuter said. “We were actually able to find enough relays left over in our system that we could salvage out of other jobs we had to do this work,” he said.
About 90 relays were found to begin replacing the 600 that he said had been “totally destroyed” in the signaling room. About 4,000 feet of signal lines were damaged in the blaze.
The transit agency, an arm of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said that it would take a series of three stopgap measures to restore partial service.
Mr. Reuter said the A line - with an average weekday ridership of 470,000 - would be running at 50 percent to 60 percent of its regular frequency by early February and at 80 percent by the middle of April. It will take a full nine months to restore regular service on the C line, which has a ridership of 110,000. “We could do it faster but we’d have to shut the system down,” Mr. Reuter said.
Full functionality on both lines, including the ability to run trains in reverse, will still take three to five years to restore at a cost of $25 million to $60 million, Mr. Reuter said. He noted that repairs to the station at Bergen Street in Brooklyn, which was ravaged by a March 1999 fire, were not yet complete. But even when A and C service is revived, the restored signals will be only a refurbishment of the signaling system upon which the agency has relied since 1904. Upgrading and computerizing the entire signal system - as is already being done on one line - would cost billions, Mr. Reuter said.
For decades, transit officials have been aware that the system was obsolete, but updating it - both logistically and financially - has been seen as impractical.
“The issue of the signal system was always the same,” said David Z. Plavin, the transportation authority’s executive director from 1981 to 1985. “Everybody knew it needed to be replaced, but nobody could figure out how you could do it without shutting down majors parts of the system for extended periods of time.” Mr. Plavin, now president of a trade association, the Airports Council International-North America, added: “It was a system that was very clearly not state of the art, and most people understood that it needed to be replaced. In effect, most people ultimately resigned themselves to the fact that there was no way to do this and keep the system functioning.”
Fixed-block signaling uses track circuits to detect the location of trains, wayside signals -which have three colored lights that are similar to traffic lights - to communicate authorized train movements to train operators, and mechanical trips to stop a train if it passes a red signal. “It remains a 19th-century technology operating in a 21st-century environment,” the subway system’s chief transportation officer, Kevin T. O’Connell, said at a City Council hearing this month.
The agency estimates that it has made more than $40 billion worth of capital improvements since 1982, when the system began to reverse a decades-long decline. Many New Yorkers remember graffiti-scarred subway cars, decrepit stations, brittle track and frequent derailments that were emblematic of the subways at their nadir.
Immediate safety needs like faulty tracks and higher-profile projects like station rehabilitation took priority over the signaling system. And most of the capital spending on the signaling system has gone toward equipment replacements rather than upgrades. “Everything had been underinvested in, literally everything: the stations, the platforms, the track, the signals, the right-of-way and the tunnels and bridge structure, the rolling stock,” Mr. Plavin recalled.
The disastrous signal-room fire on Sunday came just as the transit agency was finally making progress on upgrading the signaling system, on a much smaller line. Since 1992, the transit agency has been planning a $288 million system known as communication-based train operation on the L line in Brooklyn and Manhattan. In April, the agency plans to start using the system on a trial basis and by July plans to use the system to operate the trains.
The push for the new system came from two fatal crashes - one at Union Square in August 1991, the other on the Williamsburg Bridge in June 1995 - that exposed weaknesses in the existing signaling system. Reports by the agency recommended improvements in the signaling system, but neither crash was attributed directly to signal failure.
The authority’s latest five-year capital plan, which has not been approved by Albany, calls for two additional computerized signaling projects: $266 million for the No. 7 line in Manhattan and Queens and $350 million for the portion of the F line between Bergen Street and West Eighth Street in Brooklyn.
The proposal also requests $247 million to rehabilitate complex train switches, known as interlockings, in preparation for eventual computerized train operation of the E, R and V lines in Queens and the G line in Brooklyn and Queens.
The new system would permit transit engineers to track the precise position and speed of each train. It would also allow trains to operate at higher speeds, reduce wait times and, eventually, tell passengers when the subway will arrive.
The computerization of the L line’s signals will be only the start of a process that is expected to take decades. “I can’t resignal the system in a few years,” Nabil N. Ghaly, the transit agency’s chief signal engineer, said in an interview last year. “It’s going to take a lifetime.”
David L. Gunn, who was the president of New York City Transit from 1984 to 1990, said that few advancements were made in signaling over the years compared with other areas. “We were basically trying to bring all the systems to a state of good repair as quickly as possible,” said Mr. Gunn, now the president of Amtrak. “But there was no great leap forward on signals. We weren’t trying to revolutionize the system. We were trying to get reliability and modern equipment so we could get replacement parts easily.”
Not all of the signaling equipment is outmoded. Train control has been consolidated from a system of hundreds of local towers to about a dozen or so master towers, and eventually, signal engineers will be able to monitor train operations from a centralized rail control center. On the former IRT division, 95 percent of its 241 miles of signal systems have been modernized; on the IND and BMT divisions, with 480 miles, 59 percent are modernized.
“Remember, the signal system 20 years ago still had people who sat in towers throwing switches,” said Mortimer L. Downey, who was the authority’s executive director from 1986 to 1993. “It was like being out in the Wild West. All of that was replaced. So that was a significant improvement. But it was not a jump to new technology or a new form of signaling, which is ultimately the direction you want to go in.”
Transit veterans disagree on the extent to which upgrades have been hobbled by a lack of funding. “It’s a question of money,” said Seymour Dornfeld, a former signal engineer, who worked for the transit agency from 1946 until he retired in 1983. “This is not an engineering decision, but a policy decision.”
Mr. Gunn, however, said: “The issue was not dumping more money on it, but doing the rebuilding in an orderly, phased manner, which we did.”
Seattle’s new monorail is behind schedule. That’s not news, but a perusal of the calendar makes it easy now to envision an actual opening date sometime in 2010, instead of the present official target of 2009–and well after the original goal of late 2007. A groundbreaking once planned for last fall is now about four months behind schedule, and a delay in hiring a builder and getting needed City Hall approval of financing seems nowhere near resolution. Negotiations over a lone construction bid by Cascadia Monorail have been under way since September, and SMP board Chair Tom Weeks promises a decision on the builder “soon.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean an agreement, says SMP Executive Director Joel Horn. “If we can’t finish these construction negotiations,” Horn says, “the bidding eventually could be reopened, yes.” Weeks adds that a rebid “is not in my expectations.” But even if the process gets moving again soon, it’s hard to imagine completion of the $1.6 billion monorail line before the decade is out.
Horn says he won’t confirm or deny talk of $200 million separating SMP and Cascadia in their negotiations over the price of building the 13.7-mile Green Line from Ballard to West Seattle. Horn says those involved in negotiations have sworn a legal oath of secrecy, “so all you’re hearing is rumor.” An erstwhile prospective bidder, Team Monorail, withdrew from the competition last year but is apparently buoyed by the indecision and recently notified SMP it would like to submit a proposal.
That would be just fine with the Downtown Seattle Association, which has long been critical of the designs of monorail stations and bulky columns and guideways. DSA has asked the monorail to delay start of downtown construction until 2007, after the reopening of the Bus Tunnel. The tunnel will be closed later this year to prepare for Sound Transit’s light-rail line, sending scores of Metro buses back to surface streets for two years. DSA says delaying monorail construction would ease traffic headaches. “We just want to lessen the congestion impact,” says DSA spokesperson Anita Woo. “We’re still waiting to see a construction timeline, but our goal is to delay the monorail start downtown.”
That could push SMP’s opening date somewhere into, what, 2012 or so? Not likely to happen, says Weeks. Remember, there’s more congestion coming from another urgent project. “We’re very interested in getting monorail work done before they start on replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct,” says Weeks. The DSA’s suggestion, he says, is DOA.
LAS VEGAS (AP) - Plans to extend the Las Vegas monorail to the downtown area have been scrapped because the federal government won’t provide money for the nearly $400 million project.
Ingrid Reisman, a spokeswoman for the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada, said Wednesday that low ridership on the troubled first phase of the monorail was a factor.
The monorail began running a 3.9-mile, Z-shaped route in July behind some of the Las Vegas Strip’s largest hotels and plans called for a 2.3-mile extension.
Organizers had hoped the $650 million monorail would cover its debts and operating budget by attracting 19 million to 20 million people riders a year. But mechanical problems shut down the monorail for nearly four months before it finally reopened in late December.
Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman said he’s been looking at cheaper, alternative funding for a light-rail system or high-tech buses.
Cam Walker, head of Transit Systems Management, the private company that operates the monorail for the nonprofit Las Vegas Monorail Co., said his company has no immediate plans to extend the monorail in any direction.
It started with a very cold night and, probably, a homeless person - one of hundreds hiding in the subway. A fire was lighted somehow and spread, incinerating a small control room. That loss of wires, cables and connections doomed almost 600,000 New Yorkers to various levels of commuter hell for months and possibly years.
The New York City Transit obviously has to make repairs fast, while also shoring up other similar control rooms - there are perhaps a dozen - throughout the city’s antiquated subway system. Obviously, the first estimate of up to five years to fully restore the A and C lines was unacceptable. After a storm of criticism, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and city transit officials shortened that estimate yesterday to six to nine months for returning to the old schedule, a vast improvement. But that had better just be the start.
The subway is also no place for the homeless, and it’s a sign of the system’s shaky state that hundreds of people have been allowed to live in its grapevine of tunnels and passageways. It is not safe for them and, as Sunday’s fire makes clear, it is not safe for the millions who ride through those tunnels every single day. The city’s police and homeless outreach programs need to be mobilized right away.
Infuriated riders who need to vent their anger should understand that neither the station manager nor City Hall is the right target. The buck really stops at Gov. George Pataki’s office. He appoints the people who run the M.T.A., and his proposed budget skimps on the kind of maintenance and infrastructure upgrading that could help prevent the disruptions subway riders are seeing this week.
Mr. Pataki could start getting involved by contacting Lawrence Reuter, president of New York City Transit, and his team to make sure they work harder to communicate with commuters. Garbled announcements and bad advice from transportation workers have added to riders’ frustrations in recent days. If the delays are inevitable, the confusion about how to cope with them is not.
Shifting technological demands and years of consolidation in the transportation industry have left only two manufacturers in the country that make the kind of subway switches destroyed by a fire on Sunday in Lower Manhattan, a company official said yesterday.
The two companies - Alstom Signaling Inc., based in Rochester, and Union Switch and Signal, based in Pittsburgh - have been manufacturing the electromechanical switches, known as vital relays, for at least as long as New York City has had a subway.
The relays control signal lights, track switchers and other machinery throughout New York City’s 722 miles of subway track. But in recent years, most major metropolitan transit systems have been converting to computer-controlled switching systems, leaving transportation manufacturers with little incentive to get into the business.
“Not many companies are going to invest their money into old technology,” said Ulisses D. Camilo, the managing director of Alstom Signaling. “New York is in the process of upgrading its system,” Mr. Camilo said. “But that takes a while, because it’s the biggest subway in the U.S., and they have a lot of legacy technology.” The switch design itself, he said, is at least 50 years old.
The fire, in a relay room at the Chambers Street station, affected the A and C lines, and city officials initially said that it could take three to five years for service to be restored to full capacity.
Yesterday, officials substantially revised their time frame, saying service might be back to normal in only six to nine months. However, it could still take years to restore the signal machinery to full operations, city officials said.
Mr. Camilo said it would take three to six months to manufacture replacements for the destroyed switches, which are designed and built to exacting standards. Most of the delay in repairing the destroyed signal room, Mr. Camilo said, would come from the time needed to install, wire and test the replacement switches.
Alstom Signaling was founded a century ago as General Railway Signal and purchased in 1998 by Alstom Corporation, an industrial conglomerate based in Paris. Union Switch and Signal was founded in 1881 by George Westinghouse, the inventor and railroad entrepreneur, and acquired in 1988 by Ansaldo Signal N.V., a global transport company based in the Netherlands.
Alstom sells 10,000 to 15,000 of the switches a year, mostly to subway systems in New York, Chicago and Toronto. (A sister business, Alstom Transport Inc., manufactures train cars, and is under contract with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to deliver hundreds of new cars to the New York subway system beginning next year.)
The parent company, Alstom Corporation, reported about $2.2 billion in losses in fiscal year 2004, and has struggled to avoid bankruptcy.Union Switch and Signal has supplied signaling equipment to transit systems in Montreal, Dallas, and Miami as well as New York. Company officials were unavailable to comment yesterday.
At long last, we’re getting to the goodies. After two decades of radical revisions and agonizing delays, plans for a makeover of Euclid Avenue as a bus rapid-transit corridor are nearly finished. The designs include amenities that will bring a fresh look to a once-grand thoroughfare, which now symbolizes civic decline.
Last week, the Greater Regional Transit Authority and its design consultants unveiled the latest versions of plans for everything from landscaping to public art. Watching the presentations in meetings of the city’s Design Review Committee and City Planning Commission was like seeing presents unwrapped at a party.
Bus stations along the 5?-mile route from Public Square to University Circle will be glassy, with bone-thin steel frameworks and elegantly curved roofs. The public art installations, including tree grates inspired by the patterns of beaded American Indian wampum belts, will add visual and historical richness.
The 1,400 new trees RTA will plant in irrigated beds will add shade and spatial definition to an avenue that needs all the help it can get.
All of this should be cause for jubilation. Alas, it’s hard not to feel a certain queasiness about the $200 million project, which will be under construction for the next three years. Euclid Corridor started out more than two decades ago as a proposed light-rail line between Public Square and University Circle and beyond to East Cleveland. Now it’s two dedicated bus lanes flanking a median.
The Federal Transit Administration, which is underwriting roughly half of the cost, describes the project glowingly as one of a half-dozen pilot programs intended to demonstrate how bus rapid transit can work just as well as light rail, at far less cost. Other efforts like it are under way or planned for cities including Los Angeles, Boston and Eugene, Ore.
But Cleveland’s venture, like the others, is an experiment. Its ability to increase ridership on the already busy Euclid Avenue route won’t be known for years. Also uncertain is whether it will encourage revitalization along Euclid Avenue, outside the relatively energetic zones around East Fourth Street, Playhouse Square and the Cleveland Clinic Foundation.
For now, Euclid Corridor’s main value is that it represents a big investment in the physical fabric of the city, with a total makeover of the street, sidewalks and landscaping in a 100-foot-wide right-of-way. This always has seemed more important to the city than shaving minutes off the travel time on Euclid Avenue.
From the days when the avenue was home to Millionaire’s Row, it has fallen long and hard, with much of its length now a faded industrial zone. Happily, the primary impression created by the latest version of the RTA design is that the new Euclid Avenue will be fresher, greener, more friendly to pedestrians, more intimate in scale and, at least in spots, decorated with public art that’s witty and custom-tailored to the locale.
Plantings, benches and paving for streets and sidewalks, designed by Sasaki and Associates of Watertown, Mass., have a simple, crisp, contemporary look, without theme-park nostalgia. These elements, plus the 1,400 trees Sasaki wants to plant, should improve the street’s appearance dramatically.
The bus stops, designed by Robert P. Madison International of Cleveland, look particularly elegant. They’ll be made of glass and stainless steel with canopies configured in graceful arcs held in place by slender diagonal struts.
The only problem here — and it’s significant — is that at 8 feet wide, the shelters look stingy in size. This is a consequence of the dimensions of the street itself; at 100 feet, the right-of-way is too tight to accommodate everything RTA wants to include, without a squeeze.
That tightness is visible also in a last-minute glitch over the design for bike paths along the street. In response to demands by the city and bicycle riders over the past three years, RTA has included 5-foot-wide lanes for cyclists between University Circle and Cleveland State University. Unfortunately, the narrow dimensions of the street forced RTA to squeeze the bike paths to 3 feet in 18 locations at intersections. RTA officials say this means they can’t designate the paths as official bike lanes with signs on the pavement warning motorists not to encroach.
Bike enthusiasts naturally want the official signage on the pavement. And members of the planning commission, who otherwise loved most of what they saw in the latest RTA designs, withheld their approval on the latest phase of the designs, pending further discussions on the technicalities of the bike lanes with RTA and the Ohio Department of Transportation. Mike Schipper, RTA’s chief engineer on the project, expects a resolution within a month.
If proportions of some amenities are tight, the creativity applied to public art throughout the corridor is generous. The nonprofit organization Cleveland Public Art is making the most of a $1 million budget — an amount that’s hardly lavish, given the scale of the entire project.
Pleasant surprises include tree grates designed by Cleveland artist Mark Howard, which evoke wampum-bead images of corn and eagles. In a more general way, the designs recall how wampum functioned as currency along trading routes that crisscrossed Cleveland before the arrival of whites.
Artist Cliff Garten of Marina del Rey, Calif., also evokes American Indian symbolism with his pavement designs for large hands, to be made of flat panels of granite inserted into concrete sidewalks in several places along the corridor. One of the hands was inspired by ancient artworks of the Hopewell Indians, a pre-Columbian tribe that traveled the Great Lakes region.
Signs, graphics and video displays on local history, designed by Arlene Watson of Cleveland and Joan Brigham of Cambridge, Mass., have potential to look snappy and to give Euclid Avenue a visual cohesion it lacks today.
Finally, several large benches by New York artist Nancy Dwyer are shaped like words that can be read as, “Change Things,” or “Things Change.” The message can be an exhortation either to reclaim Cleveland’s manufacturing heritage or to adapt to the new, knowledge-based industries of the future.
The only major caveat about the entire design is that if the street isn’t properly maintained by the city and RTA in decades to come, it quickly will revert to eyesore status.
It’s crucial that RTA lives up to its promise to plant fresh flowers every summer at downtown bus stations and that the city maintain the irrigation system for trees. After getting pounded by blizzards, plows and salt trucks every winter, the new Euclid Avenue will need tender loving care. If it fails to receive it, the avenue will be even more visible as a symbol of neglect, which is the last thing Cleveland needs.
Lance Haver, the mayor’s consumer advocate, yesterday angrily denounced SEPTA’s public fare-hike hearings as a “sham” and a “lie.”
“These hearings are a farce!” Haver shouted at the hearing examiners, because, he said, the SEPTA board already approved the enormous 38 percent fare hikes and 20 percent service cuts at its Dec. 2 meeting. Holding public hearings now on fare hikes and service cuts that were approved two months ago is a sham, Haver said, and violates SEPTA’s enabling legislation.
The scene was surreal yesterday in cold, cavernous Room 113 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. Only a couple of dozen people were scattered on a sea of hundreds of empty seats.
First Haver attacked two of the examiners for being so closely tied to the transit agency (one stated he’s a SEPTA retiree collecting a pension) that they couldn’t possibly judge public testimony impartially.
He accused the chief hearing examiner of lacking the “backbone” to force SEPTA to reveal the value of its towering Center City headquarters on 12th near Market, so Haver can calculate how much SEPTA could borrow on it instead of raising fares to pay off its $ 62 million debt.
Then Haver focused on the hypocrisy of holding public hearings on a done deal.
When SEPTA revenue manager John McGee insisted that the board’s public vote in December had not been on the 38 percent fare hike but on another, privately drafted resolution, Haver went ballistic, shouting, “Are you suggesting they violated the Sunshine Act” by voting secretly?
Haver then rushed up to the dais and slammed down two fat bound volumes of SEPTA board-meeting transcripts in front of McGee, daring him to find any mention of the private “resolution” to which he was referring.
McGee flung the books off the dais onto the carpeted floor, where they landed with a thud.
Retired Judge Murray Goldman, the chief hearing examiner whom Haver had earlier accused of lacking a backbone, advised the riled-up consumer advocate to “try and contain yourself.”
“You can throw all the books at me you desire to,” McGee said, but it won’t change his insistence that the SEPTA board had not yet approved the fare hikes up for discussion at this week’s hearings.
Clearly outraged by what he later described as the debt-riddled transit agency’s “bait and switch” tactics, Haver produced a copy of the drastic fare-hikes/service-cuts plan that was handed out to SEPTA board members, the public and the media at that December meeting before it was voted on and approved. He also read from the section of the meeting’s transcript in which board members voted to approve the plan on which SEPTA is now holding public hearings.
Afterwards, Haver said that SEPTA’s holding hearings on already-approved fare hikes and service cuts was “like pouring water down my neck, telling me it’s raining, then asking for my help. “They are misrepresenting themselves to the very public that they are asking to ride to their rescue. These hearings mean nothing.”
WASHINGTON – Suicide on the railroad tracks is a growing concern in the United States, safety advocates say, but as yet there are no firm numbers on the extent or severity of the problem.
“We hear about it, and we hear that it’s like the tip of the iceberg, but we do not yet collect statistics federally,” said Gerri Hall, president of Operation Lifesaver, a Virginia-based group that promotes railroad crossing safety. “It’s an emerging concern.”
Researchers from the U.S. Transportation Department and its counterpart Transport Canada are planning a joint study to determine the scope of railroad suicides in the U.S. and Canada, said Brian Mishara, director of a center for the study of suicide at the University of Quebec in Montreal.
U.S. data will be particularly difficult to gather, since they will have to be gleaned from thousands of local coroners’ offices. Some suicide cases may be classified as accidental deaths. “We believe it is time to look to see if there is a problem here,” Hall said.
More than half the suicides in the U.S. are carried out using guns. Suffocation and poisoning are the next most common methods. “All other causes,” which include stepping into the path of a train, account for fewer than 10% of the deaths.
Some researchers believe that as few as 200 to 300 suicides a year are train-related. There are more than 30,000 suicides annually.
Although rail suicides account for a small part of the national total, they affect more than those personally involved.
The railroad industry is seriously concerned about the problem, said Karen Marshall, a Michigan-based suicide prevention expert who has worked with railroad groups, even if the companies have only anecdotal data about its extent. “Railroad employees are just traumatized when this happens,” Marshall said. “They want to see an end to the carnage.”
Some of the examples are particularly disturbing.
In the early months of 2003, for example, three suicides involving Metrolink trains occurred in Southern California within 10 days.
That Jan. 27, a 52-year-old man drove an SUV into the path of a train in Glendale. Three days later, a 37-year-old man with a history of depression parked his car at a City of Industry rail crossing and was killed.
And on Feb. 6 that year, a 15-year-old carrying a suicide note in his backpack stepped into the path of a train in Covina. The train struck the boy, a student at Charter Oak High School, at 53 mph, authorities said.
In Europe, where the rail network is more extensive and handgun ownership is restricted, suicide on the tracks is a recognized social problem, academic experts say.
Although many of those who attempt suicide by rail are acting on the assumption that a train will kill them instantly, they can survive with devastating injuries. “One of the curious phenomena in studies of survivors is that most of them believed they would die certainly and painlessly, but the reality is completely different,” Mishara said.
Even in Germany, whose high-speed rail network has the most serious suicide problem, about 10% of those who make the attempt survive, he said. In Germany, there were 5,731 railway suicides from 1997 to 2002, an average of more than 1,100 a year, Mishara said. Men were more likely to take their lives than women, and a disproportionate share of the deaths occurred in the vicinity of psychiatric treatment facilities.
On the Montreal subway, about two-thirds of those who jump on the tracks survive, he added. “The people who survive are often extremely handicapped, and those who die don’t necessarily die painlessly and immediately,” Mishara said. “It’s not a certain way of ending one’s life.”
Another part appears to have dropped from the troubled Las Vegas Monorail: the rail line’s proposed downtown extension.
Federal authorities have told local transit officials that they won’t help fund a downtown leg now, if ever, putting the 2.3-mile extension’s fate in serious doubt. “Hopefully, someday the monorail will come downtown,” Mayor Oscar Goodman said Wednesday. “Unfortunately, because of the breaks they’ve had in the beginning, they haven’t been able to demonstrate reliability to justify funding.”
Regional Transportation Commission officials were counting on more than $321 million in federal grants and loans to cover the cost of the $450 million extension. “In the president’s ‘06 (fiscal year) budget, we do not have funds,” said Ingrid Reisman, a Transportation Commission spokeswoman. “Does that mean there’s absolutely no project? Not necessarily.”
Monorail officials say they’ll leave it up to the commission to decide whether they want to later revive the downtown leg, which would have run northward from the existing monorail’s Sahara station to Main Street and then to Fremont Street. “Nothing is finalized until it’s finalized,” said Todd Walker, a monorail spokesman. “You can’t rule anything in and anything out.”
Walker said the downtown plan was never key to the monorail’s future. It was being done, he said, at the behest of commission members. “Our focus is and always has been on the successful operation of the phase that’s been built privately and is in operation today,” Walker said. “We’ll continue to work with the RTC on any future expansion, whenever that may occur.”
Commission officials were informally told of the funding rejection in recent days by the Federal Transit Administration. A formal written denial, along with reasons for the denial, is expected sometime next month.
Officials said it appears that the rejection was spurred by the existing monorail’s inability to prove its financial viability.
The monorail’s original 4-mile line, located behind the east side of the Strip, was closed for most of last year due to mechanical problems.
On three occasions in 2004, moving trains shed metal parts onto the ground below. No one was hurt by the falling parts, but each resulted in lengthy system shutdowns, the last of which — a 107-day closure — ended Dec. 24.
That kept monorail backers from proving the line could draw the projected daily ridership of around 50,000 passengers. And strong ridership is needed to repay most of the privately funded segment’s $650 million construction costs.
That segment was completed using private grants and more than $400 million in bonds, the latter of which are to be repaid mostly from farebox revenue. “Before there could be any expansion of the system, it would certainly be expected that there needs to be sustained operations over a period of time,” Walker said.
The original line’s problems also postponed work on the extension, which was scheduled to begin in late 2004 in hopes of opening the new leg in 2008.
For the downtown extension, farebox revenue was slated to repay a $143 million taxpayer-backed loan to be used for construction, along with a $178 million federal grant. “What we need to focus on right now are addressing the concerns of the federal government, and that the current monorail is working on making itself financially feasible,” Reisman said.
The Transportation Commission has already received — and mostly spent — a $22 million federal grant earmarked for preparatory work on the extension.
Reisman said there are still several options for a downtown extension. The commission could reapply for federal dollars later this year as part of an annual aid request. Officials could also begin working on other ways to link the existing monorail line to downtown using other means, such as express buses or light rail. Another option is to walk away from an extension altogether. “All those options are possibilities,” Reisman said.
If officials reapply for federal funding, a decision may not come before early 2006, and money may not be in hand until later that year at the earliest.
One option that is highly unlikely is finding immediate replacement dollars for the federal funds from private sources. Various financial rating firms put the bonds used to fund the existing monorail on watch status due to the system’s failings, making more bonds a tough sell.
The prospects of scrounging up other federal dollars in Washington appears equally iffy. Federal transit officials could not be reached for comment Wednesday afternoon.
Officials with the offices of U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. and U.S. Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Las Vegas, who had been helping shepherd federal aid to the monorail, did not immediately return calls seeking comment.
The monorail extension had been touted by city officials as a potential shot in the arm for their downtown redevelopment efforts.
Goodman said he may prefer an express bus link as a replacement. “It gives us much more malleability than a monorail,” he said. But the mayor doesn’t see the monorail extension as forever dead. “I see it happening in the not-too-distant future. It’s a natural. It definitely should take place sometime, but they have to prove themselves,” Goodman said. “I wish the monorail well. In the meantime, we’ll go another route.”
The planned 2.3-mile extension of the Las Vegas Monorail seems in grave doubt, following a decision by the Federal Transportation Administration (FTA) to pull the plug on requested funding for the project. According to a TV report, a spokeswoman for the Regional Transportation Commission (RTC) of Southern Nevada (the agency which oversees transit development in Las Vegas) explained that “a major factor in failing to get federal money turned out to be poor ridership numbers in the first phase of the monorail.” In addition to lower-than-expected ridership, the FTA cited the system’s “mechanical failures” that resulted in major shutdowns. As a result, “Plans to build a downtown extension of the Las Vegas monorail have been scrapped …” reported the KLAS-TV.
“Hopefully, someday the monorail will come downtown” Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman told a local newspaper reporter. “Unfortunately, because of the breaks they’ve had in the beginning, they haven’t been able to demonstrate reliability to justify funding.”
The spate of technical problems — mainly, several incidents of parts dropping off the trains and onto the ground below — did not help the system’s performance, especially after it had to be shut down for several months for investigations and extensive rehabilitation. However, even before the service interruptions, ridership was well below the forecast needed for the supposedly profit-making operation promoters had promised. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, daily ridership of “around 50,000 [passenger-trips] was the target — “And strong ridership is needed to repay most of the privately funded segment’s $650 million construction costs.”
While monorail management officials had hailed ridership of about 150,000 over a period of four days during some of the resort city’s heaviest conventions, including the Consumer Electronics Show, local columnist George Knapp pointed out that, in terms of average ridership, the monorail’s performance still falls short. “While we’re all happy that the train has ceased its nasty habit of dropping errant parts onto unsuspecting sidewalks,” Knapp writes, “those passenger numbers don’t seem like anything to get excited about. So the monorail averaged about 37,500 passengers during the four days of CES, eh? Didn’t they tell us in the beginning that 40,000 passengers per day would be the break-even point for the train? So the monorail drew less than its break-even point during one of the biggest conventions of the year, and we’re all supposed to stop the presses and throw a party?”
Mayor Goodman told the Las Vegas Sun he “wasn’t surprised” by the FTA’s decision, given the system’s previous problems. He pointded out that he had already begun reviewing “cheaper alternatives”. “As far as I’m concerned, I wish the monorail well … but we are not going to mourn it” Goodman added.
The RTC may revisit the monorail extension plan in the future, and could reapply for federal dollars later this year as part of the city’s annual aid request. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, another option open to the RTC is to “begin working on other ways to link the existing monorail line to downtown using other means, such as express buses or light rail.” And yet another option is “to walk away from an extension altogether.”
The latest travails of the Las Vegas Monorail seem to represent an object lesson in the need for realistic expectations in public transport projects. While the monorail’s current average ridership of 37,500 per day would be considered excellent for almost any new North American rail or guideway transit service, the problem in the Las Vegas monorail case seems to be unrealistically high expectations — the Las Vegas monorail has consistently been portrayed as something of a “miracle”, supposedly poised to break the “norm” of subsidized transit operations by attracting so many riders (with automated operation at an unusually high fare level) that it would make a “profit” and pay for its ongoing operational costs, plus paying back its private investors. This ambitious scenario, however, required ongoing revenues from ridership of over 53,000 per day (the monorail’s management has lately been citing a lower figure of 40,000, but it’s unclear what exactly this would cover).
In their crusade to disparage light rail and other forms of standard-rail public transit — especially modes operating on the surface — monorail enthusiasts have repeatedly brandished the Las Vegas monorail as an example of a technology with some kind of miraculous capability. Meanwhile, many experienced transportation professionals have consistently voiced skepticism. Now, it appears, what would otherwise be regarded as, indeed, a phenomenal success in terms of ridership and high revenue, is being branded a failure. This is unfortunate, but it seems to represent an example of what happens when enthusiasm eclipses reality.
NOTE: Some material for this report was adapted, in part, from postings of the Public Transport Progress E-mail distribution list and the Austin-Bikes online discussion list.
A Bayonne, New Jersey private company is making plans to launch a small streetcar system in that community (located on New York Bay, across from New York City — and, yes. it’s one of the major New Jersey mini-cities also served by the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail Transit, or HBLRT, system). According to Doug Bowen of the New Jersey Association of Railroad Passengers (NJ-ARP — a Light Rail Now! Project underwriter), Twenty First Century Rail Corp. is planning the streetcar system as part of its Peninsula at Bayonne Harbor real estate development project. This project, as reported in the Jersey Journal of 13 November 2004, involves a 299-acre site heralded as “a framework for one of the largest mixed-use development in the metropolitan New York area.”
According to the Jersey Journal, the streetcar system “would run up and down the Peninsula and connect back to the 34th Street and 45th Street light rail stations.” Doug Bowen reports that Twenty First Century “already has moved several ex-Newark City Subway PCC vehicles [streetcars] to its HBLRT shops at Communipaw Junction in Jersey City.” Doug further recounts that “The company will take at least 6 of the cars, possibly as many as 8. The cars remain owned by NJ Transit.”
In addition, Doug reports, Twenty First Century is interested in some of the eleven 59-year-old PCC streetcars now available from the defunct Brooklyn Historical Railway Association project, headed by trolley fan Bob Diamond. Diamond’s project to restore streetcar service in parts of Brooklyn went bust because of lack of funding, and the PCC cars up fopr donation are among the rolling stock his group had accumulated for the venture. Doug relates that the Twenty First Century firm “will attempt to obtain at least a few of these Brooklyn PCC cars for use in Bayonne, as part of the Peninsula at Bayonne Harbor project.”
According to Doug, Twenty First Century General Manager Al Fazio told him the streetcars “will be used in streetcar style on the peninsula, with stations spaced more closely together than HBLRT (the line itself is only 1 1/2 miles or so in length, give or take). Depending on how the actual layout plays out, this could truly be New Jersey’s first streetcar revival”, Doug points out.
Beijing will conclude an assessment of the controversial maglev link proposal between Shanghai and Hangzhou by Monday and decide whether to approve the project.
Official news portal eastday.com denied reports that the project had already obtained the green light, quoting a spokesman from the Communications Bureau of Shanghai.
It was responding to a report in yesterday’s Hangzhou Daily which said state planning authorities had given final approval for the project. The Hangzhou Daily report cited a city government source.
If approved, the 30 billion yuan project would be funded by the central government, Zhejiang province and the city of Shanghai. Construction would start this year and was estimated to be completed by 2009, according to the Hangzhou Daily report.
The provincial and municipal authorities of Zhejiang, Hangzhou and Shanghai have been mulling the idea of building a high-speed railway for a long time. They want better connections between Yangtze River Delta cities in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces.
A maglev link between Shanghai and Hangzhou would reduce the current two-hour trip by train to 26 minutes - 14 minutes faster than a conventional high-speed rail would be.
When Shanghai announced its 2010 World Expo plan last November, it included the extension of the city’s maglev train line to the site, and possibly onward to Hangzhou.
But yesterday’s reports added further uncertainty to the fate of the maglev proposal. Last week another Hangzhou newspaper said a plan to build a passenger-only, conventional rail link connecting Shanghai, Nanjing and Hangzhou had been finalised, and construction would start this year. It quoted an official with the Ministry of Railway’s organising group for the new venture - the Yangtze River Delta Inter-city Railway Company.
If that railway is built, it could mean an even longer suspension of the maglev plan. Officials at the Shanghai Maglev Transportation Development Company could not be reached for comment yesterday.
Shanghai has the world’s only commercial maglev train in operation. The line between the international airport and a subway station in Pudong carries passengers at 430km/h, covering the 30km in eight minutes.
The existing 7.9 billion yuan Shanghai maglev line initially operated at less than 20 per cent capacity after it started full services last April. The Shanghai Maglev Transportation Development Company had to cut the ticket price from 75 to 50 yuan to attract more passengers.
He arrived with a fanfare but, in the week thousands of Londoners suffered more Tube chaos, an Evening Standard investigation into transport boss Bob Kiley highlights concerns for every commuter
IT WAS late afternoon and Bob Kiley was alone in his office, shortly before an important meeting. As the minutes ticked away, his staff listened at the door — silence. They debated among themselves — was he asleep? Who should rouse him? No one volunteered. The meeting was about to start and Kiley’s aides were becoming desperate, but not one of them dared call him.
So they decided to telephone one of his former colleagues in New York and asked her to ring him, on his direct line, in London. The call was duly made; Kiley was roused.
In a week that has seen commuters demand an inquiry after 100,000 passengers-were stranded on the Central-Line, the threat of yet another increase in fares and the unveiling of plans to expand the congestion charge into the suburbs, the question has to be asked: is Kiley the right man to grapple with London’s transport problems?
Mayor Ken Livingstone has just given him a new £2.4 million, four year contract. He is, Livingstone assures us, the best in the world and that’s why Londoners will continue to provide him with a £2.1 million house in Belgravia, and other valuable perks.
Kiley is among the highest-paid public servants in any western democracy — but is he worth the money? An Evening Standard investigation into Bob Kiley’s stewardship of London’s transport system reveals a picture that, in an era of soaring fares and troubled services, may be disturbing.
From his 14th-floor office in Victoria, Kiley presides over a regime that is spending London’s money on a scale never before seen: in one year, the number of Transport for London staff earning more than £100,000 increased from 12 to 22. The number of those earning more than £50,000 doubled, to 154. Many have benefits undreamed of by most public servants. In Kiley’s office, women executives had regular deliveries of fresh orchids.
Kiley himself was paid more than £700,000 last year. At that time, his salary was £250,000 — where did the rest come from? When TfL was asked to show how the figure breaks down, no answer was forthcoming. As we shall see, this lack of information gives rise to serious concern.
It might be imagined that with rewards at this level, Bob Kiley would be among the most happy of TfL’s staff. The evidence of those who have worked with him suggests the opposite. Indeed, they say he can be angry and unpredictable. Inside TfL, there is a belief that some executives avoid him if they can.
One executive, who worked closely with Kiley before resigning, told the Evening Standard: “Bob’s style is actually quite irrational. We had stopped using him for meetings.
Frankly, if you have the choice of using someone who verges on i r r a t i o n a l behaviour, but who is in with politicians, it can be very difficult.”
In one incident, the executive recalled, Kiley screamed at a bewildered official who came to talk to him about emergency procedures for London. “Who’s in control? Who’s in control?” Kiley shouted repeatedly. There was embarrassment among people who attended the meeting and, inevitably, it led to questions being asked.
For months, staff at TfL have heard a story that has Kiley slipping out of his office at lunchtimes, popping across the road to the Threshers off-licence in Victoria Street and returning with a small bottle of vodka. Could it be true? Shown a photograph of Kiley, staff at the shop said they recognised him as a customer who came in often. He always bought a quarter-bottle of Smirnoff, they said. No doubt, Kiley adds the vodka to his amply-stocked drinks cabinet at home in Belgravia.
He has had recent health problems and took a short leave of absence last summer to undergo what his staff said was prostate surgery. He will be 70 this year and although he is described as being fit, many have noticed that he appears to have aged considerably since losing the gruelling legal battle with the government over the PPP, in which Kiley and Livingstone were forced to accept private companies in a partnership on the Tube.
According to one source, the PPP affair still obsesses Kiley and whenever anything goes wrong with the Tube he has a tendency to snap: “I told them this is what would happen!”
WHEN he first arrived in London his energy was breathtaking. It was the late summer of 2000 and London was still aglow from millennium celebrations and the historic election of Ken Livingstone as Mayor. There was a sense of a new beginning, a feeling that London was about to enter a brighter, better era. Livingstone encouraged these hopes, with his implicit promise that Kiley would turn around the capital’s creaking transport system.
He was the only man for the job, Livingstone said, not least because he had transformed New York’s crime-ridden, failing subway. Kiley, it emerged, had been a CIA agent who turned, later in life, to transport. He had been head of New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and it had been his tough, uncompromising leadership that reversed the subway’s decline and turned it into the transport success story of the age. Well, that was Livingstone’s version.
It emerged later that it didn’t quite happen like that. Kiley took over the subway in 1983, just after his predecessor, Richard Ravitch, had secured approval for a $ 6.6 billion improvement programme. Kiley used the money to buy new trains, clean up the system and encourage passengers to use it.
But the record shows that as the impact of the massive spending faded, things began to slip. By the time Kiley left, in 1990, muggings on the subway were worse than ever; passenger numbers were beginning to fall and appalling financial management was driving the authority deep into debt.
Significantly, the thing many New Yorkers might remember most about Kiley is that the then governor, Mario Cuomo, ordered his operation to be investigated over allegations of cronyism and fat-cat pay. Similar allegations have dogged him here in London.
Livingstone told Kiley to spend whatever was necessary to get results. Kiley took him at his word. Within weeks of arriving in London he began recruiting from among his old friends in the US. One of his first signings was Jay Walder, his former chief of staff in New York, who was brought over as director of finance at TfL.
Mr Walder’s salary was set at £200,000 a year, plus benefits including £1,500 a week for accommodation. Mr Walder combines his job with a lucrative career as a public speaker. This takes him on frequent trips back to the US and New York where, by coincidence, controversy has raged recently over salaries at the city’s transport authority, Mr Walder’s former employer.
Walder was followed into Windsor House, TfL’s headquarters, by a procession of Americans hired by Kiley. There was financial researcher Tom Amenta, paid £100,000 a year, Charles Monheim, director of marketing, on £120,000, Eric Rothman, head of business planning, on £100,000 and Steve Polan, a very savvy lawyer hired to fight the PPP, who was estimated to be on around £250,000 a year.
Other Americans were hired. Kiley’s old pal Robert Wasserman, a former White House adviser on drugs policy and the man who headed the UN’s international police force in Kosovo, was brought in to help sort out — wait for it — bus lanes. Wasserman supervised a firm called PA Consulting — again, from the US — as they constructed a model for bus lane enforcement.
THE five-month contract paid £375,000 to Wasserman’s firm, PsComm based in Maryland. PA Consulting received £150,000 for eight weeks’ work. Wasserman separately worked on a report for Kiley on bus lanes, for which he was paid just under £2,000 a day. His researcher, an American student, was paid around £1,000 a day.
As the transatlantic arrivals began to displace long-serving London Transport and TfL staff, a sense of despondency began to set in. Indeed, it persists to this day.
A former TfL staffer — bound, like everyone else sacked by Kiley, by a confidentiality clause in their severance-package — said: “It was totally demoralising. People were being paid off for no real reason and jobs were being filled without proper advertising. The Americans, while perfectly nice as individuals, formed their own clique. There was a sense of Them and Us. I once overheard them talking as a group, describing London as a Third World city. It made me sick.”
Kiley himself once compared government in Britain to that of North Korea.
The cost of running Kiley’s office was budgeted at £8 million last year. The actual cost was £10 million. In the current year, the cost is budgeted at £16 million. Informed observers say it will probably go over £20 million.
At this price, Londoners who have seen huge council-tax increases and rocketing fares, have a right to ask what Kiley is achieving. Bus services have improved — although critics say the decision to throw money at the bus network has led to clogged streets and a subsidy that will reach £1 billion by 2007-2008.
TfL’s fares policy is considered, by at least one transport users’ group, to be deeply flawed. The congestion charge has been hailed a success by the Mayor and some transport groups, although others have condemned it as simply another tax on cars which has led to a slump in trade for many West End businesses. There are serious concerns about plans to extend it to Kensington and Chelsea and Kiley’s revelation this week that his plans for the suburbs could see Londoners paying £30 or more a week to drive on the busiest roads caused widespread dismay, not least in the boroughs.
As Kiley’s responsibility for the Underground approaches the twoyear mark, there is little sign of improvement, although reports from inside TfL indicate that the man with day-to-day responsibility for running the Tube, Tim O’Toole, is beginning to make his mark. One source disclosed: “O’Toole is a first- class act. But he tells his team that he ‘runs interference’ for them. Apparently, it’s an American football term that means he keeps people off their backs so they can get on with the job.” Kiley’s critics say he appears to be reluctant to engage with those who are crucial to the running of London’s transport system. When London teetered on the brink of a potentially damaging Underground strike recently, Kiley was nowhere to be seen.
Livingstone said on 15 December: “I cannot get involved in these negotiations,” adding, “otherwise every negotiation will just come straight to me.” It was for Kiley and O’Toole to sort out, he said.
The Tube unions agreed, but they complained they could not get access to Kiley. The Tube strike was averted when TfL resorted to an old-fashioned, homegrown remedy — the unions were bought off with a pay rise.
Kiley’s invisibility reached the level of farce recently, when he declined to attend a meeting of the London Assembly’s budget committee, the body which has to approve TfL’s spending.
Andrew Pelling, the Conservative chair of the committee, was so incensed by Kiley’s refusal to discuss with members TfL’s spending of £4.6 billion, he scathingly offered him a video-conferencing facility.
This was declined. It would have been a risible affair, but there were very serious implications for London democracy. Kiley sent TfL’s chief finance officer, Stephen Critchley, to talk to the assembly’s elected members in his place. Mr Critchley was asked — quite reasonably, one might say — what TfL expected the impact of recent fare increases to have on its budget in the coming year. Mr Critchley said he did not have that information. He was asked further questions about expenditure, but again no meaningful replies were forthcoming. Jay Walder was eventually dispatched to provide answers.
This episode reinforced a perception that Kiley and TfL are proceeding without the scrutiny and safeguards envisaged by the legislation that created the assembly, TfL and the Mayor’s office. There was further evidence of this when Livingstone admitted to the budget committee, under questioning last month, that when he hired Kiley he agreed to give him a veto over appointments to TfL’s board, the very body set up to oversee Kiley’s operation.
THE authority’s board has suffered a degree of criticism for not exercising more control over TfL and there was astonishment when Livingstone admitted he had agreed that Kiley should have the last word over who sits on it. Budget committee member Bob Neill, leader of the Conservative group, asked the Mayor: “Are you prepared to make public the agreements and undertakings you entered into with Bob Kiley?”
Livingstone replied: “They’ve never been put in written format.” This was taken to mean “No”. The Evening Standard asked Bob Kiley if he would reveal his arrangement with the Mayor. He did not.
The Mayor’s reluctance to make public his deals with Kiley has created serious concern at City Hall. Only Livingstone knows whether Kiley should be paid his bonuses, because the criteria have never been revealed.
But how do Londoners know Kiley has earned the money, if we don’t know what the targets were? Why, on a contract said to pay him — including bonuses — a potential maximum of £580,000 a year, did he earn more than £700,000? Again, Kiley and the Mayor are silent. It is a measure of Livingstone’s attitude to corporate governance that the new freedom of information legislation is being used to try to extract this information from him.
The Liberal Democrats used the new Act to ask, on 12 January, what performance measures Kiley has to reach to earn his bonuses. The Mayor has 20 working days to make his response.
When Livingstone announced last month that he was renewing Kiley’s four-year contract there was a suspicion in some circles that the Mayor was running scared. He helped create the myth of invincibility that accompanied Kiley when he first arrived in London and, it was argued, he could not demolish it by admitting a mistake and getting rid of him.
Rather, it is felt that Livingstone will allow Bob Kiley to simply fade away. This view was reinforced this week after Kiley revealed his plan for congestion charging in the suburbs. Asked about the scheme at his weekly press conference, Livingstone distanced himself. “Bob was talking about his own views,” the Mayor said, rather chillingly. Such a scheme would not be countenanced within the next five years, he added.
It was a slap-down that produced sage nods and winks around City Hall. At Windsor House, TfL’s headquarters, the odds shortened on Bob Kiley being the occupant of the Transport Commissioner’s 14th-floor office for very much longer.
Seoul City on Wednesday announced its plan to construct a new subway line in the northern part of the city to ease the chronic traffic congestion.
The new line will run from Ui-dong in Kangbuk-ku to Sinsol-dong Station on lines No. 1 and 2, covering a total of 10.7 kilometers within some 22 minutes.
‘’We have decided to introduce the new mass-transit system to Kangbuk-ku and Songbuk-ku by 2011,’’ Seoul City Mayor Lee Myung-bak said in a news conference. ‘’We found it was hard to build new roads as the area has been fully developed and crowded. As an alternative solution to the chronic traffic jams, we’ve come up with a mini-subway line made up of 13 stations.’’
The last three stops, which are Sungshin Women’s University, Pomun and Sinsol-dong Station, will be connected to other subway lines so that passengers can transfer with ease.
Seoul City said some 370,000 citizens in the area have not been able to take the subway or public transportation conveniently as there was no subway station within 1 kilometer of their residence.
The initial plan for the project was proposed by Posco, the nation’s largest steel producer and also one of major construction firms, in June 2003. However, the city government plans to hold a public tender to choose a contract winner through a fair competition between July 2005 and June 2006.
City officials expected some 730 billion won will be required for completion of the project. As the new project will be carried out by a civilian construction company, the city will have to pay some 30 percent, or 228 billion won, of the total cost.
‘’The new mini-subway system is likely to have small unmanned subway trains. Each train will have two to three train cars, which can hold up to 300 passengers total,’’ Kim Ki-hyun of the city’s transportation facility bureau told The Korea Times. ‘’During rush hour, the subway trains will run every one to two minutes, improving the overall flow of traffic in the area.’’ Kim added that the 13 new subway stations will be required to have screen doors to guarantee the safety of passengers.
As officials of the neighboring area of Tobong-gu, northern Seoul, have requested the city government extend the lines to the upper northern area, possibilities still exist for the line to be extended in the near future.
According to documents for National Assembly inspection last year, subway line No. 4, near Sungshin Women’s Univ. Station, was found to the second most crowded subway line in the city during the morning rush hour. Subway line No. 2, between Sadang and Pangbae Station, was the most crowded line.
The Sound Transit board voted yesterday to build a future light-rail station in Roosevelt under the heart of the North Seattle neighborhood’s business district.
Less than a year ago, the board was torn over whether to pick that site, under 12th Avenue Northeast between Northeast 65th and 67th streets, or build a cheaper, elevated station several blocks away, at Interstate 5 and 65th.
Yesterday’s vote, however, was unanimous. At least two things changed over the past few months:
- The cost differential between the two alternatives shrank.
- Roosevelt neighborhood leaders waged a sophisticated grassroots campaign for the 12th Avenue site. They adopted the slogan “Yes in my front yard,” a play on the “Not in my back yard” sentiments that neighbors often voice when confronted with big projects.
“In this case, we have a community clamoring for a light-rail station and embracing the density that comes with it,” said Metropolitan King County Councilman Dwight Pelz, a Sound Transit board member.
Jim O’Halloran, president of the Roosevelt Neighborhood Association, called the vote “a legacy decision with 100-year implications.” But he said the community now must face the “sober reality” that Sound Transit lacks money to extend light rail north from downtown through Roosevelt to Northgate.
Sound Transit officials have acknowledged it will cost more than the $2.44 billion the agency is spending on the 14-mile line now under construction between downtown and Tukwila.
A new tax proposal could be on the ballot next year. Sound Transit originally estimated an underground station at 12th would cost $60 million to $80 million more in 2002 dollars than an elevated station at I-5. But recent changes in both station proposals dropped the difference to $35 million to $40 million.
And Pierce County Executive John Ladenburg, Sound Transit’s board chairman, said the agency could sell some of the 12th Avenue property after construction to recoup part of the additional expense.
The only less-than-enthusiastic remarks about 12th came from QFC, which operates a grocery in Roosevelt, and Tacoma City Councilman Kevin Phelps, perhaps the Sound Transit board’s biggest budget hawk. William Low, QFC’s real-estate director, said the station would force the company to vacate the store it has occupied for 50 years. He asked for help relocating.
While Phelps supported the 12th Avenue plan, he said he feared the public would see the more expensive choice as a return to the way Sound Transit operated four or five years ago, when cost overruns forced it to mothball its original light-rail plan.
Forty million dollars is half of what Sound Transit spent for its Tacoma light-rail line, he noted.
In other action, the board approved a fare increase for Sound Transit’s 18 express-bus routes, to take effect in June. Most one-way adult fares will increase 50 cents.
Metropolitan King County Councilwoman Julia Patterson said the boost is needed to keep pace with inflation. But agency critics John Niles and Will Knedlik said higher fares will depress ridership and worsen congestion.
Under a new Metro real estate initiative, owners of land within a 1,500-foot radius of a light rail station could stand a higher chance of having their property condemned by the transit agency.
The power of eminent domain first granted by the Texas Legislature and approved by local voters in 1978 authorized Metro to seize vacant land, homes and businesses following payment of a “fair market price.” Thirty years later, use of eminent domain in construction of the initial 7.5- mile segment of rail followed the original intent of the state legislation by keeping private property interests from blocking public rail.
Now, Metro is taking a more active role in stimulating real estate development along rail corridors (see related story). As a result, development activity within the 1,500-foot limit could extend the transit agency’s influence far beyond the actual tracks.
Metro’s eminent domain reach covers a span of five football fields in any direction. The surroundings of a single urban rail station can encompass several square blocks occupied by scores of buildings.
The potential for more property condemnations not directly related to rail has some local property rights groups concerned. While Metro prepares to implement the plan with an inaugural project in the Texas Medical Center, opponents of the new policy argue that properties blocks away from the rail stations could be potential targets of speculative real estate deals transacted by transit officials.
Metro Board Chairman and real estate developer David Wolff says there is no set policy in place regarding the condemnation of land for development purposes. “I feel it’s a discussion that would be best for the Metro board of directors and management — and just for land around stations,” Wolff says.
He sees the use of eminent domain as a last resort. “If you have a large tract of land around a station and one piece is needed, then it might happen that it could go to condemnation,” Wolff says. “But we would try to negotiate first.”
Todd Mason is equally cautious on the issue of condemnation. The principal of McDade Smith Gould Johnston Mason + Co., who was recently hired to handle Metro’s real estate portfolio, says he encourages development on property already owned by the transit agency, but could make additional purchases as needed.
“We are considering buying additional land where it’s appropriate,” Mason explains. “It’s sort of ‘in the eye of the beholder’ as to what’s appropriate,” he adds. “I’m going to be very conservative with the public’s money here in the beginning.”
Like Wolff, Mason emphasizes that condemnation should be directly related to Metro operations. “Philosophically, I’d have a little bit of a hard time condemning somebody’s property to put it in some private developer’s hands,” Mason says. “I don’t have any problem condemning a property if we need it for Metro operations.”
But Mason says he can imagine an exception to the rule, for instance, if the owner of a small parcel of land was holding up a larger development. “I could conceive that that would happen, but we’re really going to try and avoid that type of situation,” Mason says. “It’s not my intention to condemn somebody for development purposes.”
Metro’s emphasis on widening the scope of a 30-year-old condemnation power to stimulate new development raises even more red flags than usual for veteran anti-rail crusader Barry Klein.
The president of the Houston Property Rights Association argues that the concept can’t be economically justified. “There is no real evidence that rail enhances development,” says Klein.
On Dec. 6, the executive committee of the Harris County Republican Party adopted a resolution pushed by Klein claiming voters should have a say in Metro’s decision-making process regarding real estate development. Klein and his organization are now hoping the issue will be pushed by like-minded legislators in Austin during the current session of the Texas Legislature.
The condemnation pendulum Condemnation was confined to the proposed rail route when Metro mapped out the initial 7.5-mile line now up and running between downtown and the Texas Medical Center area.
Property owners in the path of the first rail segment were represented by Houston-based Lewis Realty Advisors.
Lewis Realty consultant Matthew Deal says the property owners were less angry over the fact that Metro wanted to condemn their property than they were with what they considered to be too low of a price for their land — a common argument in eminent domain cases.
Lewis Realty has worked both sides of the track in public projects involving the use of eminent domain. The firm represented Metro in the transit agency’s acquisition of property for the West Park Tollroad, and negotiated on behalf of the Harris County Sports Authority in acquiring property through condemnation for the downtown baseball stadium.
Deal says, as a whole, more public entities are pushing the limits on their ability to use condemnation. “If you are going outside of pure transit and you want to condemn land to do some mixed-use development, that’s something that the court would have to decide whether you have the power to do that,” says Deal.
Several current cases before the U.S. Supreme Court deal with the right of public agencies to buy property for real estate development.
But the tides are always turning on the issue of eminent domain, Deal says, sometimes in favor of public agencies and sometimes against. “The pendulum is always swinging,” he says.
The president of New York City Transit apologized yesterday for misleading riders when he said Sunday’s subway fire would cripple A and C train service for as long as five years.
Lawrence Reuter said he was initially referring to the time it would take to completely refurbish the underground room that once housed the relays, wires, and switches needed to control the safe flow of trains. Stopgap repairs will allow full rush-hour service on the A line to be restored within nine months, at which time the C train, which has been canceled, will also return to service.
The prospect of years of delays had enraged riders. “I must have misspoken or didn’t clarify myself very well, and for that I’m sorry,” Mr. Reuter said yesterday during the monthly board meeting of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the agency that oversees New York City Transit.
At the meeting, the subway fire took center stage. The board’s chairman, Peter Kalikow, appointed a task force to investigate major issues raised by the fire, which revealed that critical but extremely antiquated equipment was highly susceptible to mishap. That probe will be one of several.
Besides the continuing investigations into the cause of the fire by the police and fire departments, the City Council’s transportation committee has scheduled a hearing on the matter for Thursday.
Mr. Kalikow appointed an engineering consultant, Carter & Burgess, a firm the MTA has used for its capital programs, to head the independent task force, which is to investigate how to make the subway system less vulnerable. “They will not be influenced by what’s happening internally and will be looking at it with a new face,” Mr. Kalikow said. “The more sunlight, the better things are.”
For now, much of the investigation into the cause of the fire remains unknown. Officials first suspected that a homeless man may have started the blaze by lighting a fire in a shopping cart to warm up in a tunnel just off the northern end of the platform.
Mr. Reuter discounted speculation that transit workers, who use similar upright shopping carts, may be to blame. “We don’t know for a fact, but initial reports showed that it was not Transit Authority workers,” Mr. Reuter said.The reports, he said, came from investigators at the scene.
The relay room, which housed a cobbled-together system of wires and circuits made from 1930s-era materials, had no heat-detecting device or system that, unlike newer rooms, would cause electricity flowing through the equipment to shut down. Also, the older wires, unlike newer wiring, were not made with fire-retardant materials designed to make a fire smolder.
It was only when motormen from two subway trains passed through the station, at 1:59 p.m. Sunday, that the debris burning in a shopping cart was spotted. Within 15 minutes, scores of firefighters arrived, but before they could put out the blaze they had to request that the electricity be shut off. By then, the fire had spread to the maze of cables inside the locked room, and the damage - which officials said will cost as much as $60 million to repair - had been done.
There remain 41 other antiquated relay rooms that contain the same kind of highly flammable web of wires and cables that so quickly gutted the room at the Chambers Street subway station.
Since 1982, when the MTA embarked on its capital-improvement program, 158 of the 200 relay rooms in the subway system have been refurbished. Had the fire occurred at a room that contained fire-retardant wires and heat-detection systems that shut off electricity to the wiring, then the damage would have been less severe and the disruption to service less protracted, Mr. Reuter said.
The new room at Chambers Street, which will take between three and five years to be built, will not be constructed using equipment from the 1930s, since that equipment no longer exists. Mr. Reuter said the already refurbished relay rooms may also be upgraded with fire-suppressant systems, such as misting equipment that can tamp fires without flooding the room.
Mr. Kalikow said he plans installation of surveillance equipment in sensitive areas. The MTA chairman also said the weekend fire was covered by insurance, though a spokesman, Tom Kelly, said the MTA expects to get back whatever the current monetary value of the system is - and, given its age, that may be little.
The MTA is insured though a state entity, the First Mutual Transportation Assurance Company, which was created in 1998 and is managed by a firm called Willis Coroon. A spokesman for Willis Coroon, Dan Prince, would not comment on how much the value of the 1930s-era relay room would be.
According to the Insurance Information Institute, an industry group, each policy differs but the cost of insuring such antiquated equipment for its replacement value might have been prohibitive. Meanwhile, transit officials said they will increase the number of B trains for the Upper West Side.
A state Court of Appeal has overturned a $30-million verdict against public works giant Tutor-Saliba, ruling that the builder did not receive a fair trial in its long-running dispute with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority over subway construction costs.
A three-judge panel, in an opinion issued Tuesday, said Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Joseph Kalin had abused his discretion by cutting short the firm’s presentation of evidence in a 2001 trial.
The appellate court sent the case back to the Superior Court for what it acknowledged would be an expensive retrial. “Now we have an opportunity for our real claims to be heard,” said Ronald N. Tutor, the firm’s owner. “We expect to go back to trial and get a fair trial and win a great deal of money” which he contends his company is still due.
Steve Carnevale, the MTA’s chief counsel, said that agency officials were considering an appeal to the state Supreme Court but regarded that as a longshot. “The plan is to retry the case,” he said.
Tutor initiated the litigation in 1995, contending that the MTA owed Tutor-Saliba $16 million for unanticipated expenses incurred while building Red Line subway stations along Wilshire Boulevard.
Four years later, as the case neared trial, the MTA countersued, contending that Tutor’s firm, which was the low bidder for the stations, submitted false claims in pursuit of extra payments.
Jurors never got a clear opportunity to decide who was right.
Instead, during the trial, Kalin punished Tutor-Saliba in the harshest possible way for what he said were repeated failures to share documents with the MTA in the discovery process. “There has been intentional withholding, concealment and destruction of documents by [Tutor-Saliba] and its attorneys,” Kalin observed at the time.
Tutor says he intentionally hid or destroyed nothing.
But Kalin imposed “terminating sanctions,” ruling that Tutor-Saliba could no longer contend that the MTA owed it money and that jurors had to assume that Tutor-Saliba owed the MTA. The only question Kalin left for jurors was how much.
The judge tied Tutor-Saliba’s hands further by ruling that the firm could no longer use documents to try to persuade jurors that damages should be limited. The jurors ultimately imposed damages of $30 million against Tutor-Saliba.
In a 31-page opinion, the appellate panel found unanimously that Kalin’s sanctions were too severe for Tutor-Saliba’s offenses and deprived the firm of its right to a fair trial.
The panel, consisting of Justices Dennis Perluss, Earl Johnson and Fred Woods, overturned both the $30-million verdict against Tutor-Saliba and an order that the firm pay another $30 million in attorneys’ fees and costs, mostly to a group of outside lawyers that the MTA hired to press its case.
The panel also found that Kalin had abused his discretion in imposing some discovery sanctions on Tutor’s lawyers at the firm Castle & Lax. Kalin declined to comment through a spokesman, saying he could not speak about a pending case.
The $30-million verdict returned against Tutor-Saliba at the end of the 2001 trial made it difficult for the firm to get more work from the city of Los Angeles. That changed after James K. Hahn was elected mayor with Tutor’s support. Hahn appointees and advisors cleared roadblocks to hiring the firm.
In early 2003, Tutor-Saliba won low-bid contracts to build a $36.5-million high school in the San Fernando Valley, a $33-million park-and-ride facility at Van Nuys Airport and an $18-million sewer plant.
Last summer, Los Angeles officials threatened to remove Tutor-Saliba from the park-and-ride project over alleged construction defects.
The Van Nuys FlyAway is partly open. City officials thanked Tutor-Saliba at its dedication. “I said at the time it was all hysteria,” Ron Tutor said, adding that the FlyAway project is safe, “without even a question of a doubt.”
Will the people of Seattle still be paying monorail tax in the year 2045?
State lawmakers are considering a bill to let the Seattle Monorail Project (SMP) sell bonds that last 40 years – or longer if permitted by the Internal Revenue Service, which bases its regulations on the life span of a project.
The proposal illustrates how challenging it may be to issue $1.6 billion in debt needed to build the 14-mile Green Line through the western side of the city.
The monorail depends on a car-tab tax that is collecting less cash than expected. Already, SMP has drawn $92 million in low-interest loans to help cover costs and buy station property.
Anne Levinson, the agency’s deputy director, insists the project remains affordable. By spreading the debt to 40 years or more, SMP could attract lower interest rates, she said. “The best practices in finance are, you try to match your debt to the useful life of your asset,” she said.
Opponent Richard Borkowski said, “It’s like paying $5 a month on your credit card when you’ve got a $50,000 bill,” because interest will accumulate.
Levinson said there was no constraint previously on the term of the bonds, but the agency wanted to spell out the situation in law. “You don’t want to spend money debating this in the future,” she said.
When voters approved the line in 2002, the original plan envisioned 30- year bonds. A cash surplus might have paid off the Green Line in 23 to 27 years. But when the tax took effect, the agency found it had overestimated how many taxable cars were in the city.
Skeptics think the monorail will be chronically underfunded. Its true financial picture remains unknown because the agency and a construction team are still negotiating the price and design in private.
Ben Porter, a Seattle analyst who reviews federally approved transit projects, said the monorail’s ability to support $1.6 billion in debt is uncertain. “The strongest test is going to be the market, not what authority the Legislature gives them,” said Porter, who has advised the critics’ group OnTrack.
SMP has explored several ways to stretch dollars – including “contractor financing” aid, such as having the suppliers issue their own debt.
The agency is also considering a pledge of the entire car-tab tax to pay off bond investors, leaving no cushion in case of operating subsidies. Most transit lines need a subsidy, but monorail leaders say they’ll break even with help from advertising and “entrepreneurial” features, such as special tourist trains.
TAMPA - It’s been more than 65 years since an open-air streetcar rolled through Tampa. Once the city had a fleet of 50 such cars.
In an attempt to bring back that nostalgic design, HARTline will unveil a new open-air streetcar today, called the Breezer. First passengers can board at 11 a.m. “We wanted historic looking streetcars with today’s safety standards,” said Jill Cappadoro, a HARTline spokeswoman.
While the Breezer isn’t enclosed, it has blinds that can be rolled down in poor weather.
On a demonstration ride Thursday, the wind blew across the open, airy seats, and the eye-catching car attracted curious stares from people on the sidewalk. Riders enter at the end of each row, rather than a single entrance. Fares are $1.50 one way or $3 for a day unlimited. Once on board, the conductor and motorman lower a wooden safety barriers along the sides. Then, the conductor rings the bell twice to signal that all is clear.
Currently, the Breezer is on loan from the streetcar’s maker, Gomaco Trolley Co. HARTline expects to buy the car for $225,000. Built in 1984 by Gomaco Trolley Co., the Breezer is constructed of oak and cherry seats, paneling and ceilings. The car’s operating gear was salvaged from streetcars in Milan, Italy.
The Breezer will be the ninth of HARTline’s streetcar fleet. Gomaco is the maker of the other eight streetcars, which cost $600,000 each.
Generally four cars run at any one time. More are added for special events. HARTline set a new record New Year’s Eve with 9,037 riders.
HARTline also plans to buy another open-air car currently being constructed. It will be called the Tampa car.
Federal railroad regulators will examine whether Wednesday’s deadly derailment in California was made worse because passenger cars, pushed from behind by the train’s locomotive, took the brunt of the crash.
Passenger coaches weigh much less than locomotives and aren’t usually as sturdy. The force of initial impact, plus the weight of a rear-driving locomotive pushing from behind, can cause trains to jack-knife in a derailment.
Warren Flatau, a spokesman for the Federal Railroad Administration, which writes safety rules for train operations, says there is no conclusive evidence that pushing a train is any more hazardous or risky than pulling it.
“Each method of operation poses a unique potential risk,” he says. But Flatau adds that his agency will consider “whether or not changes need to be made on Metrolink or any other property” involving the push-from-behind method. Metrolink is the operator of the commuter train that derailed Wednesday.
The train was operating in “push-pull” mode, a decades-old practice in which a passenger train moves back and forth between destinations but the locomotive remains attached to the same end. The locomotive pulls the cars in one direction, then pushes them back on the return trip. The car at the other end has a control cab for the operator.
Most of the USA’s 21 commuter railroads, which carry 1.5 million people a day, operate in push-pull mode on some or all of their routes. The practice saves time and money because locomotives don’t have to be disconnected or turned around at each end.
The National Association of Rail Passengers, a Washington advocacy group, has recommended that when possible, the lead car of a train in “push” mode not carry passengers. But David Johnson, assistant director of the National Association of Railroad Passengers, notes that Wednesday’s crash also was an “absolutely bizarre, horrible set of circumstances” that don’t reflect a typical collision.
The Metrolink train struck a vehicle wedged in the tracks, not merely stalled on the smooth surface of an auto crossing. When the train derailed, it also struck an idle locomotive nearby. The jack-knifing passenger cars then hit a Metrolink train coming the other way on another track.
The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, a national railroad union, has lobbied for years to have all commuter locomotive trains pulled from the front. (Electrified systems don’t use locomotives.)
Tim Smith, the union’s California lobbyist, says a cab car has a blunt front end that cannot shove away obstacles with the strength of a locomotive. In push mode, he adds, a locomotive can create “an accordion effect” in a derailment.
Tom Rubin, a Los Angeles transportation consultant, calls it “pushing the rope. If you are pulling from the front, the stuff behind you tends to follow,” Rubin says. “When you are pushing from the rear, everything gets off track and will go in strange places.”
Rubin says, though, that a locomotive “may not have made a difference” in Wednesday’s wreck.
Guatemala’s communications and transport ministry (CIV) is considering adding a light rail system in capital Guatemala City’s northeast to join with the Transmetro urban transport bus system, CIV official Edgar de Leon told BNamericas.
“We are in the preliminary stages, but we are studying the possibility of using the old national railway tracks [in disuse] for use of an urban train - obviously equipped for urban transport services,” he said.
System operations would run at the municipal level, while the CIV would take responsibility for related infrastructure, he added.
The 10km line would form part of the US$100mn Transmetro system, of which the CIV is providing some 65% of the funding from the national government, while the remaining 35% will come from local capital city coffers.
South Line
Works have wrapped up for the two-tiered, US$10mn Transmetro transfer terminal that local construction company Consulta built. The terminal will receive rural and suburban buses that transport workers coming into the city.
The next step is to purchase some 45 articulated buses, and tenders will be called “within weeks,” the director of Guatemala city’s municipal transport company Jorge Palacios told BNamericas. Companies such as Mercedes Benz and Scania have already expressed interest in the competition.
At the same time, the municipality is within one month of finalizing designs to build 22km of exclusive lanes for those articulated buses, the head of municipal planning department Oliver Obregon told BNamericas. “We are planning 13 stops along an 11km route both ways, with the buses traveling an average of 25km/h and stopping for 45 seconds every 800m or so,” he said. The department plans to call for bids on this construction effort, with work to wrap up by November.
Finally, the system will have an “intelligent” prepay card to charge passengers during their trip, Palacios said. Each bus also will have a tracking system for central control of the routes.
Bids for this system are due January 31, and so far there are more than 30 companies interested, including local businesses and others from Korea, Taiwan, Austria, Spain, Germany, France, England, Italy, Canada, US, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and Argentina, he added.
Plans also include building a transfer station in the western part of the city, which may be done in 2006.
The overall idea behind the Transmetro is to reduce traffic congestion and pollution by transporting some 120,000 passengers/d once completed. More than 1 million people commute into the capital city every day.
Transmetro also will help transport capital city residents. “In covering the northeastern, western and southern parts of the city, we are covering over 70% of the inhabitants,” de Leon said.
During fire drills in Bangkoks subway at Lat Phrao Station yesterday, the rescue operation proved rather slower than targeted.
Executives and workers from Bangkok Metro Plc (BMCL) joined with over 500 policemen, fire-fighters and rescue volunteers conducting two fire drills to prepare for the reopening of the subway on February 1. The subway operator has been conducting drills in various emergency situations bomb threats, derailings, engine malfunctions and fires since Tuesday and will be carrying on until tomorrow.
The drills are in response to the crash on January 17 in which over 200 passengers were injured just six months after the subway started operation. Two subway drivers and two controllers have been charged with reckless endangering of passengers.
During the drill yesterday, officials simulated a fire caused by an electrical short circuit at one of the escalators of Lat Phrao Station. According to the scenario, passengers blacked out from breathing in smoke, and because train station officials could not extinguish the fire immediately they had to notify the command centre to request rescue support from the Mass Rapid Transit Authority of Thai-land, from police, and from the Health Ministrys Narenthorn Centre. All gates to the station were closed except one for allowing rescuers to enter.
Rescuers and officials took a full 10 minutes to contain the fire four minutes longer than the desired upper limit for such an operation.
Bangkok Governor Apirak Ko-sayodhin, who inspected the morning drill, said breakdowns in coordination had hampered the teams from acting moreffectively. He said that officials failed to provide adequate answers to his questions about the sluggishness of the rescue effort.
Witoon Hatairatana, operation director of Bangkok Metro Plc, argued that the morning session Apirak witnessed had been merely a practice session and that the real drill took place in the afternoon. Nonetheless, rescuers took the same amount of time about 10 minutes then as well.
Transport Minister Suriya Jungrungreankit conceded that fire trucks dispatched to Lat Phrao Station had arrived at the scene belatedly. Had it been a real-life situation, he stressed, many passengers would have been injured and the fire would have gone out of control. I do hope the subway people can get themselves up to scratch and solve emergencies by themselves, because outside support may be delayed.
Suriya ordered the BMCL to orchestrate clear emergency systems for all foreseeable eventualities. He insisted, though, that after a week of drills the subway was ready to resume operation on February 1. Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his Cabinet will have a test ride on Monday to restore the confidence of subway commuters.
MRTA governor Prapat Chongsanguan said that the system might offer free test rides for the public to ease traffic congestion between Bang Sue Station and Ratchadaphisek Station and between Hua Lamphong Station and Rama IX Station. The projected free rides would not run through the Thailand Cultural Centre station, which is in the middle of the line and where the accident happened.
BMCL managing director Sombat Kijjalak said that repairs on subway carriages and rails damaged in the accident would be completed today. Tests ride will be conducted today, tomorrow and Monday while the training of staff will continue unabated to ensure increased safety for future commuters.