Frumination

Never thought I'd see this in print, but the MTA let NY Times publish a distribution of Metrocard usage for monthly passes (see below).

While the caption of image points out that "some riders use the $81 passes for 40 or fewer rides," it fails to point out that anyone making 46* or fewer trips is losing money on their pass. The calculus of "losing" or "making" money on a monthly pass is of course fraught with nuance (e.g. how much is it worth to me to not have to think about paying on each trip? are any of these passes subsidized?) but the article doesn't touch on it at all.

It's no secret that I love NYC Transit and transit in general, but that doesn't mean people should be buying passes when it's far from beneficial. Don't even ask about the London case...

* 46 trips is the breakeven point when the monthly pass cost $81 and individual trips cost $1.74 (after the bonus)

Someone I know asked me to post this little ditty from a past life career of mine. Judging from the time scale on the graph, I must have made this diagram 200 weeks after November 21, 1998 -- around the fall of 2002 I guess. In fact, if my memory serves me, the whole thing was really Steve's idea.

What the chart below shows to me is that the notion of "climbing the charts" is basically defunct. Albums hit their peak Billboard positions immediately or very shortly after their release dates, and then fade out like like the ego and stature of your high school football team's quarterback.

(click for a full size image)

There are a number of ways I have thought that this particular graphic could be improved -- make it interactive, somehow link albums by the same artist, etc -- but, really, who cares?!?

Q: Mike, how was it that you got to visit the work site of the East Side Access project, hundreds of feet under Manhattan, and check out a real Tunnel Boring Machine?
A: I Know a Guy

I definitely never thought I'd actually get to say that. Fortunately, the guy I know told me to bring a camera. The battery was dying so I didn't get to snap that many pics, but what I got follows. I think these pictures capture, to a degree, how messy the prospect of assembling a TBM way under ground really is.

The overriding feeling I had throughout was of being inside, around, and on top of a Sandworm in the novel Dune. What really impressed me was the number of people necessary just to put one of these things together, and the enthusiasm of all the people working on the project (sweating it out under 200 feet of bedrock).

The entrance to the work site, in Sunnyside, Queens

The 30+ years old but never used LIRR tunnel under the East River

The beast itself:

So, point being, East Side Access is really happening! This visit was in late August, just before the machine was brought on line. Perhaps I'll get to visit again to see it in action.

In many ways London's system for Congestion Pricing should be model for New York, but in other ways it really isn't. The most obvious way that it isn't is in the actual technology proposed to do the job. Yes there are cameras and computers involved, that's sort of where the similarity ends.

Specifically, in the UK tradition, all of the cameras relay a full video feed to some central processing location. Not only is this absurdly costly (think fibre!!) but it allows for plenty of privacy invasion by anyone who has access to the cameras' feeds. The proposition for New York is very different. The proposition is much cheaper and seems to all but eliminate the possibility of using the cameras for anything but looking at license plates. That's because the cameras would be equipped with enough smarts to know when to snap a photo, and only that still image would be sent to be processed. If you don't believe me, read this excerpt from IBM's recently released proposal:

A worst case analysis shows that for a very busy lane, with one thousand vehicles passing the detection equipment every hour and forced to send two 100kB images for each vehicle, the bandwidth requirement is a mere 57kB/s. This is within the capacity of wireless networks today, but is not the optimal solution approach.

A more realistic case, in which 50% of vehicles are equipped with an E-ZPass tag, 90% of the remaining license plates are read with a sufficient confidence at roadside and 80% of charges are paid in a timely manner, leads to a bandwidth requirement of 8kB/s. A very busy, six-lane detection point would thus be well within the capacity of NYCWiN, even without local reinforcement of the wireless network.

We estimate that, with our proposed solution approach to vehicle detection at the edge of the network and given the estimated amount of traffic in the city, the average local bandwidth requirement across the system will be on the order of less than 1kB/s per lane, and the overall load on the backbone of the wireless network will be small.

More generally speaking, I think it suffices to say that Congestion Pricing uses technology, and as we know technology only gets better and cheaper over time, so we can be sure that NYC's Congestion Pricing technology will be much better and cheaper than London's.

Now, if only somebody would only explain this to all the privacy freaks and civil libertarians that are making this process so painful...

In 1969 Norman Mailer ran for Mayor. In 2002 my grandfather (probably the most Mailer-like person I know) gave me an original copy of the campaign poster that he had squirreled away for 30+ years. A week or so ago, Mr. Mailer passed away, so it seems like the appropriate time to put this poster on the web, since I have never been able to find a copy online before. I'm about as far from a knowledgeable design critic as you can get, but this thing is an undeniable work of art, especially in the eye of any native New Yorker.

What a platform:

The boroughs, in order of time I've spent in them:

Some lovely embellishments on the Hudson River:

And my favorite little twist:

Not a bad running mate:

But not a good day either (they came in 4th):

For more info on the campaign itself, check out a recent NYTimes podcast and an interview on WNYC with Jimmy Breslin, Mailer's running mate and another icon of New York realness.

A genius I know once wrote an article that some say brought the distinction between packet-switched and circuit-switched networks into the popular consciousness. In the decade or so since, we have seen packet-switched networks take over the world, and unfortunately some people find themselves tempted to abuse this bit of history in arguing related points. The gist of it will always be something to the effect of: "the thing I support is like Packets, the other thing is like Circuits, and since we all know that Packets beat Circuits, I must be right." (This is not unlike how many in my extended family will take anything they think is sufficiently bad and compare it to Hitler.)

For example, a recent piece (of what I don't know) by Stephen Fleming of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, entitled In Transportation and in Technology, Packets Beat Circuits, starts off "Why are so many mass transit policies doomed to failure? Because packets beat circuits. Let's explore an analogy."

You can imagine where it goes from there ("cars are like packets, mass transit is like circuits, so cars are better"). The guy claims to have worked in digital communications for 10 years; I wonder if he's just bitter because he was on the wrong side of the packets vs circuits debate.

For the sake of all 6 people likely to read this, I hereby debunk this terrible analogy:

The fundamental aspect of a circuit-switched network, as stated in the first sentence of the Wikipedia article on Circuit Switching is that it "establishes a dedicated circuit (or channel) between nodes and terminals." That is, the bandwidth for the flow is reserved end-to-end for the life of the circuit. Traditionally, when I make a phone call, part of the 'space' on a bunch of copper wires connecting where I'm calling from to where I'm calling to is reserved even if no one is saying anything over the line.

Clearly a road network is not circuit-switched -- when you start out from your house you don't have a dedicated lane all the way to your destination (if you did, I might just own a car). In a circuit-switched transit network, not only would I have a seat on one R train from Union Street to Union Square, I would have a seat on every R train over the same route for the duration of my trip. Realizing this, the analogy breaks down completely.

Fleming's main argument as to why Transit is like Circuits is that the bandwidth hierarchy, in traveling by train, then bus, then feet, is like the digital transmission hierarchy of telephone (i.e. circuit-switched) networks. Perhaps he lives and works directly on top of an interstate and has never driven by highway, then arterial, then local street in his car. Or never noticed that the bandwidth on his home broadband connection is orders of magnitude smaller than the trans-Atlantic fiber lines that connected me in London to his web server in Georgia.

In a circuit-switched network, I only use as much bandwidth as I need at that moment, and only on the single link I'm currently traversing. When I get to the end of that link, I am put in a queue until the next link on my path is ready to receive me. It's true that it's a bit more obvious to see a road/auto network as analogous to a packet-switched network, but only because of the apparent simplicity of the rules of the system. Transit networks are of the same nature, it's just that the way packets (i.e. people!) are queued and switched where links connect is more complicated and constrained than on roads.

Speaking in data-network terms that we are all familiar with, transit mops up auto when it comes to bandwidth (total bits, or people, per unit time). The problem with transit is, in some circumstances, higher end-to-end latency (the time it takes for the first bit, or person, to get where they're going). But once you get the flow started, we all know that one track of even light rail service can carry the same number of passengers per hour (or was it bits per second) as 7 lanes of freeway or 17 lanes of street (see here).

Unfortunately, people actually read and believe this kind of proof-by-bad-analogy thinking. In a recent newsletter from the Reason Foundation, Robert Poole, Reason's Director of Transportation Studies, claims to have had his "Aha!" moment when reading Fleming's piece. Too bad for him the "Aha!" wasn't a realization to be much more careful with his analogies.

Or at least, the capacity?

The first strategy for adding additional housing outlined in Mayor Bloomberg's 2030 plan is to pursue transit oriented development. In simple terms, dense development around transit stations and hubs. However, the plan also describes capacity issues that our transit system faces today and will face in the future. So, we should build all our new housing clustered around a transit system already reaching capacity? Hrmmm...

Looking at subway ridership in a long term context, it's pretty clear however that while some lines may be quite crowded today, the system as a whole is substantially below the highest usage levels it has supported historically. On the whole, we have recovered from a nadir of 915 million trips in 1977 to 1.5 billion trips in 2006 -- about the same as in 1952.

We all know that commuters from Williamsburg and the Upper East Side are suffering, but the question remains -- are there parts of the city where subway usage is substantially below levels that have been supported in the past? Comparing each station's 2006 annual ridership to levels in 1952 yields the following map, where red indicates a net decrease over the last 54 years (and thus, theoretically, excess capacity):

This analysis of course doesn't account for the fact that bringing the South Bronx back to historical levels would make the problems on the Lexington line even worse than they are today, but it at least gives a sense of what areas could accept housing growth around subway stations if the most pressing line-level capacity issues were resolved.

What if we want to look at each station's or line segment's pattern over time? As they say here in London -- "watch this space" (and think sparklines).

[Technology Shoutout: most of the work for making the above map was done by the ever-more-brilliant open source PostGIS and GeoServer packages.]

[err, so now NY may get it together on congestion pricing, but the train of thought is relevant nonetheless]

While usually calling something a zero-sum game is a bad thing, in this case I mean it positively. The $500M for a congestion pricing pilot that New York has lost may still lose would go to somewhere else like Dallas, San Diego, Atlanta, San Francisco, Denver, Miami, Seattle or Minneapolis. I am a New Yorker born and bred, and am as disappointed as anyone about this, but I think in this case we all may be suffering from a slight case of New-York-is-the-center-of-the-world-itis.

None of these other cities have nearly the mass transit system that New York has. Probably combined their mass transit systems don’t carry half the passengers ours does, and most people living in those places think of cars as an absolute necessity for practically everything they do. In a broader sense, it could very well be an overall net positive that the congestion pricing pilots happen in other cities. Perhaps those places will make incremental progress in shifting people out of cars and more importantly, changing peoples' value systems when it comes to cars vs. other modes.

If we are really lucky, this could be the first wave in a national shift towards more rational thinking about transportation, which would definitely benefit NYC in the long term. In truth, I'm a lot less worried about NYC than I am about other cities and the country/world as a whole, so I wonder if it doesn't hurt to at least imagine the possibility of some greater good coming from Albany's (seeming) ineptitude.

In its 1996 Third Regional Plan, the Regional Plan Association describes a rapid transit line in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx that could be built almost entirely on pre-existing rail rights of way and would connect with at least twenty existing subway lines. The so-called ''Triboro RX'' (''TRX'' for short) presents a unique opportunity to provide mobility and accessibility to New Yorkers living or working within these three boroughs, at a fraction of the cost of most transit projects of similar size. In my part-time internship at the RPA, which ends today, the lion's share of the work I have done has focused on fleshing out the idea of this line.

Working with the singular Jeff Zupan and his former sidekick Alexis Perrotta, I helped to develop a possible alignment for the Triboro RX, and a crude estimate of what levels of initial commuter ridership one could expect to see if it were built. The fruits of this labor can be seen on the web at http://transit.frumin.net/trx/TriboroRX (including sections on the alignment, our data sources, the demand model, and detailed results). There I describe in detail how the line and its stations are laid out and how we made our estimates. At the end of the day, we can comfortably say that at least 76,000 New Yorkers (including 32,000 diverting from other modes of transportation) would use the Triboro RX to get to and from their jobs every day. This number that is quite competitive with many existing lines, and without ever touching the island of Manhattan.

At the heart of our ability to make this estimate is the Journey-to-Work data published by the census -- counts of commuters between every census tract and every other census tract in the city. Given these flow data, the shape of the subway network with and without the Triboro RX, and a rough model of how people make travel decisions on public transportation, it's not so hard to guess which subway riders would use a new transit line if it were built. Estimating new transit riders is more nuanced, but we did our best with limited resources.

This study of the Triboro RX has, for me, been much more than a semi-traditional transportation modeling exercise. I took it as an opportunity to get intimately familiar with the state of the art in Open Source mapping and GIS software, including PostGIS, GeoServer, and OpenLayers. These pieces represent a full network-enabled stack for, respectively, storing and manipulating, mapping and presenting, and client-side interfacing of spatial data. I don't think they are quite yet usable by the non-hacker, but I wouldn't be doing this work if I didn't think that my computing skills brought something special to the table. That said, I encourage you to check out the following:

• Interactive map of New York City, its subway system, and the Triboro RX (don't forget to try changing the background map and various overlays)
• Subway and Triboro RX in Google Earth
• The whole enchilada in Google Earth

Now, it wouldn't be a perfect project to do, for free, when I should be saving money for school, if it didn't also involve getting my hands dirtier than they already do from all the crumbs in my keyboard. It seems absurd to talk about planning a transit line without actually having visited the areas it would connect. Having synced the clocks on my GPS device and digital camera, I twice explored the Triboro RX right-of-way and its environs from Flatbush to Bay Ridge, in Brooklyn. The results are viewable either in Google Earth or directly on the web. What really struck me was the diversity of neighborhoods -- Flatbush, Ocean Parkway, Borough Park, Sunset Park, Bay Ridge -- traversed by the Triboro RX in less than a third of its length. Continuing on, it runs through East New York, Brownsville, Cypress Hills, Middle Village, Jackson Heights, Astoria, and Mott Haven. You could eat your heart out while getting from Brooklyn to the Bronx, skipping "the city" entirely.

Finally, no contemporary New York transportation project is complete if it doesn't some how tie into Congestion Pricing. In terms of providing mass transit to unserved communities in the outer boroughs, methinks this graphic speaks for itself:

PS Please forgive me, I know these maps need legends for the quantitative parts. It's all a big hack, trust me!

PPS The interactive web maps work much better in FireFox than Internet Explorer. Save your soul and get a real browser.

Instead of relying purely on viral marketing or mass media marketing alone, big-seed marketing combines the two approaches so that a large initial audience spreads the marketing message to a secondary audience, yielding more overall interest than either approach would have by itself, even if the message isn't that contagious. "Because big-seed marketing harnesses the power of large numbers of ordinary people, its success does not depend on influentials or on any other special individuals; thus, managers can dispense with the probably fruitless exercise of predicting how, or through whom, contagious ideas will spread."

While I was not listed as an author in the HBR paper, I am listed on the as yet unpublished version on Dr. Watts' web site (abstract).