Metropolitan Transit Authority

It looks like the M.T.A. has finally jumped aboard the Twitter train.

Sewell Chan reports on City Room that the agency's buses and subway arm, New York City Transit, quietly set up the Twitter account NYCTSubwayScoop after the ceiling collapse at the 181st Street No. 1 subway station a few weeks ago.

Initially, the account was used to detail and chronicle repairs and subsequent service restoration at the station. Since then, New York City Transit has used the account to dispatch updates on construction and service disruptions at other stations. Although, it hasn't yet promoted the account, and as of the time of Mr. Chan's posting at 5:25 p.m. yesterday, August 31, it only had 370 followers. (That number had grown to 533 as of this posting.)

From City Room:

via topplabs.org/civichacker

Amid the ongoing controversy over the M.T.A.'s attempt to block a local blogger's iPhone application for Metro North train schedules, members of The Open Planning Project on Tuesday evening held a New York Public Transit Summit to discuss forging "a positive, mutually beneficial relationship between the M.T.A. and the wider New York development community."

We couldn't make it to the event, but TOPP's Civic Hacker blog has a recap. Apparently there were more than two dozen "transit advocates, mobile and web developers, urban planners, lawyers, and open government supporters" in attendance. No M.T.A. reps showed, although they did give the group a statement on the agency's current licensing policies.

If you're curious about some of the specific topics that were addressed, the group has set up a wiki. They've also taken the issue over to Twitter via the #nytransit hash tag.

Flickr via chrisbastian44

A few days ago, at the West 181st Street station of the No. 1 subway line, the roof literally caved in. According to the M.T.A.’s Web site:

“Due to a collapse of the brick façade from the ceiling above the tracks at the 181st Street station, 1 train service will remain suspended throughout the rest of today, Monday, August 17th, 2009. Service through this area will be suspended until further notice.  At approximately 10:30 p.m. Sunday, a section of the brick architectural façade fell 35 feet to the track bed below. A downtown 1 train was in the station, but did not sustain any major damage. No customer injuries were reported. The cause of the ceiling collapse at the 181st Street station is under investigation.”

To anyone who has ever been in that station, the cause of the collapse didn’t hold much mystery—the ceiling has been leaking for years and the collapse was completely predictable.  The station, over a century old, is a landmark that once featured chandeliers and an almost elegant décor that in recent decades has suffered relentless neglect.

Mayor Bloomberg used the ceiling collapse to make the critical political point that the M.T.A. still does not have a capital budget, and that this near tragedy needs to be seen as a warning:

via mta.info

Earlier this week, the M.T.A. released its 2010-2029 Twenty Year Needs and Preliminary 2010-2014 Capital Program plans:

Taken together, these documents identify the MTA's long-term infrastructure needs and a short-term plan to begin addressing them within current budget expectations. The $25.5 billion Proposed Draft 2010-2014 program focuses first and foremost on rebuilding the MTA's core infrastructure, which makes up 73% of the total program. Many of the proposed investments repair and replace fundamental components of the transit system.

Read the full Proposed M.T.A. Capital Program here and the Twenty Year Capital Needs Assessment here.

Also worth checking out is the Regional Plan Association's comments and critique on both documents.

This morning, City Room broke the news that eight city bus shelters on two 34th Street lines are getting real-time bus arrival indicators so riders can know how many minutes of waiting they have left before the next bus shows up.

The installment is part of a pilot program launched by the M.T.A. and the city's transportation department that will be evaluated over the next six months and potentially expanded to include more stops and routes, according to a press release Mayor Bloomberg's office sent out this afternoon.

From the City Room report:

Tracking systems are commonplace in other major cities like London and Washington, where subway straphangers know exactly when the next train will arrive. (The accuracy is high, even if not 100 percent.) In New York, electronic displays are already installed on the L train.

It is not the first time that New York has tried to provide bus customers with a more precise estimate of when their rides will arrive. In fall 2007, the city tested a similar satellite-based system along First and Second Avenues, which also included digital signs that displayed the number of minutes until the next bus.

That system was plagued by technical errors and was abandoned after just four months. Transit officials said the 34th Street pilot program would avoid the same problems.

The announcement of the program comes a week after Mayor Bloomberg announced a wide-ranging campaign platform to improve the city’s mass transit infrastructure.

The mayor pledged to install some form of tracking technology along half of the city’s bus routes by 2013. His plan also noted that buses along 34th Street will use “mesh network technology, similar to that used to track military vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

There's more on 2nd Ave. Sagas and Streetsblog. The full press release is after the jump:

Getty Images

New York state's official transportation and travel service, 511NY, recently debuted Twitter feeds for New York–area subway lines and highways that alert commuters to traffic conditions and emergencies.

There are 12 traffic accounts for regions all over the state, including the New York City area (a recent tweet: "Accident on FDR Drive North at 79th St (Manhattan) left lane closed"). There are also accounts for nine subway lines, categorized by color (a recent 4-5-6 line alert: "Due to Track fire at Atlantic Ave Sta, Southbnd # 2, 3, 4 & 5 Lines local service only...").

Todd Westhuis, project director for 511 and the state's department of transportation, told The Observer that Port Authority PATH feeds might soon be on the way, too.

There have been unofficial M.T.A. subway Twitter feeds, but these are the state's first official accounts alerting commuters to emergency advisories. Currently, the M.T.A. has four official Twitter accounts, MetroCardDiane, MetroCardMatt, NYCTChantal, and MetroCardLisa, which were created in April so MetroCard employees could promote events and deals.

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On Wednesday evening, July 15, a day after Gov. David Paterson nominated former London transit chief Jay Walder to head the Metropolitan Transit Authority, a panel was convened at the Museum of the City of New York to discuss the future of the beleaguered agency.

Of course, much of the conversation, which was moderated by Henry Stern—a former councilman and parks commissioner who leads the museum’s Civic Talk series—centered, given the M.T.A.'s problems, necessarily on the past. For example: the lack of city tax revenues devoted to transit, how years of underfunding and subsequent borrowing put the M.T.A. tens of billions of dollars in debt, and—as the most vocal of the panelists put it—the failure of past leaders to “stand up” to the people who gave them their jobs.

“One of the things we need to consider as the new C.E.O. of the M.T.A. takes his position is: What are the fiduciary obligations—that is the duty to the system—of the leadership of the M.T.A.? As opposed to their duty to the people who appoint them—the mayor and the governor,” said Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, a Westchester Democrat who was perhaps the most fiery political opponent of the mayor’s congestion pricing plan in 2007.

“That independence will be at the heart of whether Mr. Walder is able to succeed in bringing reform to the M.T.A.,” Mr. Brodsky said. “The law gives Mr. Walder a clear defense for the next time the mayor says, ‘Go build me a subway line to nowhere.’ Whether he will use that defense will become the chief measurement of his success or his failure.”

M.T.A.

New York City commuters take note: It looks like Metro North and the Long Island Rail Road are becoming broadband-friendly.

MuniWireless reports that the M.T.A. and L.I.R.R. have issued a Request for Expressions of Interest for wireless broadband deployment in trains and stations, a move, the Web site notes, that is consistent with an increase in public transport companies providing Wi-Fi to passengers to entice them away from car commuting. (Sounds like Mayor Bloomberg would love that.)

They have the full document embedded in PdF form here, but scroll down for an excerpt.

The R.F.E.I. is dated July 1, although M.T.A. officials mentioned it back in June after Sen. Chuck Schumer criticized L.I.R.R. for lagging on providing Wi-Fi for riders.

Dana Spiegel of NYCWireless weighs in with some context:

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Ratner.

In the world of public-private real estate deals, the word “renegotiation” has been popping up a lot lately.

The latest installment came early Monday afternoon, when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced a revised plan for the Atlantic Yards project on M.T.A. land in Brooklyn, for which the agency was once promised $100 million upfront and a $250 million new rail yard.

Developer Forest City Ratner, which intends to build a basketball arena for the Nets and thousands of apartments at the site, has renegotiated a deal with the agency to the point where it pays about $180 million less, at least at first.

Forest City would build a new rail yard for about $150 million with one-fourth less capacity than planned, and pay $20 million upfront. Over the next 22 years, according to the agreement, the developer would give payments worth $80 million in today’s dollars to the M.T.A.

Photo via NYCDOT

Last week, the city's Department of Transportation and the M.T.A. concluded a series of eight public workshops on the expansion of New York's bus rapid transit system, an express bus service the two agencies plan on implementing across the five boroughs over the next 10 years.

For anyone who wasn't able to attend, the D.O.T. is now seeking input online via a survey that's accessible through its Web site.

For some background on bus rapid transit, read this item we posted back in May. But here's a quick roundup of coverage from the recent workshops.

The Daily News was at the June 3 workshop in Jamaica Queens. (Nine of the 31 proposed new bus rapid transit routes are located in Queens, but when the city was rolling out its initial BRT program a few years ago, Queens residents came out against a proposed pilot route on Merrick Blvd.) From the meeting: