The Rosa Parks station on the Blue Line. Photo by Sean_Marshall, via Flickr creative commons.
It’s kind of an obvious statement: rail and busway stations are the gateway for the tens of thousands of passengers entering the Metro system each day. And since most people have to spend at least a few of minutes at stations, the quality of time spent there is crucial to the overall transit experience.
In that vein, a motion by Metro Board Chair and L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa seeks to improve rail and bus stations across the Metro system with specific mention of Blue Line stations. The motion would also put aside $10 million in the Metro budget to pay for upgrades.
The Metro Board of Directors will consider the motion at tomorrow’s Board meeting at 9 a.m. at Metro headquarters.
I think there’s a lot of interesting things in this motion and I encourage you to read it. Among the issues tackled in the motion are wayfinding and signage, network connections to stations, noise at Green Line stations (most are in the middle of the 105 freeway) and expanding a Metro grant program to help cities zone and plan transit-oriented developments.
We’ll have more tomorrow after the Board considers the motion.
@ Steven Pon
While there may be demand, what portion of public transit users are asking for it? A majority? Probably not. I am making the argument that the average ride is too short to necessitate entertainment with a snack from a vending machine.
I went to LA metro’s website for ridership statistics:
http://isotp.metro.net/MetroRidership/Index.aspx
Note that the website doesn’t track data for ridership on metro rail.
In 2011, Over all metro lines (buses including the Metro Silver and Orange Line), there were a total of 1,082,631 boardings per weekend day for an average of 4,534,095 miles per weekend day. That means that the average daily ride (the common case) in LA on public transit is a little over 4 miles.
I realize that many people use metro to commute and often need to utilize the extra time in a better way, especially if they can catch up on a missed breakfast or simply refresh themselves. I have the opinion that people can do better if they simply take better care of themselves at home or at work, if possible.
I board the Gold Line daily to get to work, from the Fillmore station, where a cafe built into the ground floor of the metro parking structure has gone out of business. A Starbucks opened up across the tracks. The station is far from dirty (actually, I feel many stations are very clean, and not just on the Gold Line).
How can we measure whether the food ban has any effect on leaving waste on the train? We can’t just say “OK, it’s cool to eat on the train”, measure whether the trains are dirtier, and then reinforce the ban. Personally, the voice reminders on the train reinforce the idea that the rail cars are not a place to eat (or place feet on the seats).
For every city that offers vending machines at every station, I can name two that don’t. And for most people, I think it is convenient enough to have vending at Union Station (including a Subway, Starbucks, pretzels, well-stocked convenience store, and snack kiosks) on at least one end of many people’s itineraries.
Since I worked in the restaurant business, I know very well how restaurants keep their businesses clean. My point is that Metro is a transportation service first and foremost, not a food entertainment enterprise. It’s kind of nonsensical to talk about restaurants banning food – restaurants are in the food entertainment enterprise. The limited money is better spent on ways to maximize ridership revenue and improving quality of transportation. In my humble opinion, this has nothing to do with the digestive tract.
@Snack Time
Yeah right, 4 miles per passenger. I ride the Orange Line everyday from Canoga and most of the people ride that far more than 4 miles. By the time the bus reaches Reseda, it’s so full that they have a tough time getting passengers onboard from thereon and no one gets off until North Hollywood. That’s way more than 4 miles per passenger.
Besides, I have to ask how Metro gets its info for “average passenger miles.” For starts, how are they supposed to know how far each passenger that boarded the bus traveled? You could count how many passengers got on board from the number of paid fares, but how are they suppose to figure out where a passenger boarded the bus and where they got off the bus? What do they do, scan an invisible light upon everyone as they board the bus and track where you got on and off based on GPS data? I doubt bus drivers keeps a board to write “white guy in red shirt got on board at Canoga, got off at North Hollywood” either. Or do we all have some kind of implanted chips in our bodies so Metro can figure out where I got on and where I got off to calculate the average passenger miles?
Where’s the accountability that this number is even correct? It’s technologically impossible to figure this out.
Actually it shouldn’t be too difficult to find out when people get off since the sensors can tell, by the sequence of when they are crossed, where people get off. It is an average, so it is really irrelevant as to when a particular passenger gets off, since they are just averaging ons and offs, and the number of passengers on the bus at any given time is known. That should be a “how do they do it” feature.
I would suspend the ban on eating at outdoor platforms, but not inside the subway or inside transit vehicles. The sillier thing is banning eating on transitway platforms, where there are no intercoms to yell at people, or on freeway platforms when there is no way you can hear any announcement made anyway.
@calwatch
I highly doubt it. When I get on the Orange Line, I tap my monthly pass at the reader upon boarding. That’s how as far as Metro knows that I got on the Orange Line. When I get off the bus, I just step off the bus. I don’t go through any sensors upon exiting the bus.
Besides, averaging out on and offs is rather, a poor way of figuring out the average statistics to use as a solid claim. How do you tell that the person who got off was a person who traveled only 4 miles as opposed to 15 miles? You can’t do this unless there’s a distinguishing feature to identify the person who got off here was the same person who got on 4 miles ago as opposed to another person who got off here was the same person who got on 15 miles ago.
My guess is that Metro has no way of knowing that the person who got on at Canoga was the same person who got off at North Hollywood so as to come up with a figure that this person traveled 4 or 15 miles on the Orange Line. Their claims of average miles people travel on their buses and rails are as good as their ungrounded basis that fare evasion was only 3%. Pfft, yeah right. With that data busted, it casts big credibility issues to claims made by Metro.
Same with the people riding on their rail lines, if not the data has to be far less reliable because of the problem of using the honor system for so many years and was riddled with so many freeloaders. How are they supposed to keep track of the number of boarding when people aren’t tapping or even paying for tickets in the first place? Did Metro somehow invest our tax dollars in military grade body heat sensor technology to count the number of body heat in the trains that we don’t know about? Is there some kind of ultra high frequency motion detector technology that it can count hundreds of people going in and out of their light rails at any given time with pin point accuracy?
Metro has no way of doing this for thousands of daily riders in all of their buses and rail lines to come up with an average distance that travelers ride on their public transit system. Somehow I doubt the bus drivers and rail operators have an excellent photographic memory to memorize who got on where and who got off where, times that with the huge number of on and off that occur simultaneously either.
@ Steve Pon
The average passenger miles number probably doesn’t capture what you have in mind. It is the average cumulative distance covered by all routes over a single day. That is quite easy to measure by looking at the odometer at the beginning and end of day, for every line. These numbers are summed up over all lines. Next, the number is probably multiplied by some average number of passengers (probably close to average capacity of a bus) and you arrive at “average passenger miles per day”. Modern fleet systems are equipped with GPS tracking on all vehicles, so the tracking software can count the miles travelled automatically. The figures probably take Metro a couple mouse clicks to generate.
Have a look at this website in the definitions section:
http://www.bts.gov/programs/statistical_policy_and_research/source_and_accuracy_compendium/FTA_national_transit.html
While it’s not going to describe how Metro comes up with the number, it is certainly not technologically impossible to come up with such a number. The bureau also indicates that transit authorities seldom record trip length. That’s hard for the reasons you alluded to above. Instead, it’s estimated using average figures.
@calwatch I do have to agree, banning eating/drinking on the platforms would be pointless, especially because these areas have several trash cans, are routinely cleaned by Metro staff, and as you pointed out, are hard to remotely enforce in an audible manner.
That’s not the correct way to get “an average number of passengers per mile.”
Dividing the number of passengers on board to the bus to the bus’ total distance traveled only gives an estimate of how a passenger are on the bus per every X miles, NOT the average distance of what people travel.
Think closely about this. If ten people take the bus for 10 miles, what’s the average distance traveled per person? 1 mi? No, 10 people made the trip for 10 miles, the average of is 10 miles.
Use an Excel spreadsheet; column A noting each person (1 each), column B noting each person’s travel distance (10 each). Highlight all the data sets in column B, and the at the bottom you see that the average is 10 mi for all 10 individual people.
The claims and data figures that Metro provide is misleading, there is no way to figure out the actual average of distance traveled by every passenger.
The Advanced Transportation Management System does cover both ons and offs, through sensors placed in the doorway (and does not rely on the farebox).
“Automatic Passenger Counting (APC) is used to quantitatively monitor passenger use of Metro’s bus network and provide the agency with a critical component of the information needed to enhance and improve its bus services.
Sensors mounted in bus doorways count passengers boarding and exiting at the same time the corresponding information on bus stop location and time is acquired from the AVL system.
At the end of every day, the WAN is used to transfer the accumulated data from each bus to Metro’s central computer system for processing and reporting.”
http://www.metro.net/projects/atms/
If you know who is getting off and on, you now have the average number of passengers on a bus. Now you can get average trip length through some math.
How does the sensor know if the person is boarding or getting off? I see many people exiting through both the front and rear depending on how crowded the bus is or which doorway is closer. Sometimes I even see people sneak in through the back! The only thing a sensor can do is to count passengers, but the whether that data are ons or offs is indistinguishable.
A person using an old-fashioned tally counter I can understand because the person doing the counting can visually see which way the rider is going; on or off.
But a sensor is just a device that logs and counts what passes through their area. It has no rational thinking capability like humans do to distinguish that a person heading out the door is getting off, person going into the bus is getting onboard.