A week of MBTA Observations

[Scrabbleship]

Special case?  Old?  These sound like excuses to me so you can make the point you want to make about WMATA and the MBTA.  I'm not buying this.  Why aren't you blaming the people who designed the Green Line tunnel for not knowing over 100 years ago that the trolleys would be overcrowded and prone to the same bunching delays that caused them to get moved underground in the first place?  Why didn't they know that high level boarding is superior to low level boarding?

I'd love to go back in time to see how the tunnel accommodated far more trolley lines in its early years and to see how things were handled then. Even back then, I think there'd have been some problems.

High-level boarding would have helped, but every organization leading into the MBTA saw it as being too much of a nuisance considering the technology of the time. Had it been considered in the early MTA years, the Blue Line could have been converted to all-overhead and patched into the Green Line. 

Jason just wants a reason to constantly bash WMATA.  Yeah they are having problems right now, but he'd rather have a flat fare so things could be 'fair' and similar to other systems than do things that they should be doing.  When WMATA can carry 10 times the amount of passengers they do now, they can talk about a flat fare.

If WMATA ever carried 10x the passengers they do now, the system would be eternally gridlocked.

As for cost, to paraphrase what people I know in Boston have said vis a vis about MBTA vs. WMATA, "it's a lot easier to complain when you're paying a lot more for [crappy] service".

[Scrabbleship]

Compare the distances from the stations you chose to the center of town in those cases, and then compare it to DC.  I think you'll find that the extreme ends of the line in DC are further from downtown than they are in most other cities.

Thanks to some Google Maps tools, I did some calculations of as-the-crow-flies distances between centers of town. For DC, I picked a spot between Metro Center and Gallery Place. For Boston, I picked the halfway point on Winter Street between Downtown Crossing and Park Street for the Red/Green/Orange, Government Center for the Blue. I rounded numbers to the nearest half-mile.

WMATA
Shady Grove: 17
Glenmont: 11.5

Greenbelt: 10
Branch Avenue: 8

New Carrollton: 9
Vienna: 13.5

Largo: 9.5
Franconia: 12

Huntington: 8

MBTA
Wonderland: 5

Oak Grove: 5.5
Forest Hills: 5

Alewife: 5
Ashmont: 5 (+ Mattapan: 7)
Braintree: 10.5

Boston College: 5.5
Cleveland Circle: 4.5
Riverside: 10
Heath Street: 3 (if ever reextended to Arborway, would be 5)

Average distance to terminal for WMATA: 11 miles
Average distance to terminal for MBTA (discounting Mattapan): 6 miles

The verdict: In Boston, the farther-out riders on subway lines get veritable bargains at the expense of other riders in the name of keeping a single fare. In DC, the farther-out riders pay a cost-per-ride which is a bit out of whack for what many people see as a urban subway first. Add MBCR into the equation and Metro looks a lot better as their fares into Boston are far higher. That $1.70 to Braintree via subway is $4.75 on commuter rail. Under a WMATA metric, it'd be about a dollar cheaper than the MBCR fare but still a bit over 2x the MBTA fare.

[WMATAGMOAGH]

Actually, the composite distances from Metro Center to the ends of the lines are up to 2 miles further away than you have them, I'm fairly certain the Boston distances would go up too if you followed the actual routes.

So when Boston went to a flat fare, riders on two branches got a big break if the riders were traveling all the way into town (if they didn't, their fare didn't really change much).  Without ridership statistics at hand for MBTA, I'm going to make an assumption that the overall percentage of riders who saw their fare go down as a result of the single fare is pretty small.  OTOH, if WMATA went to flat fare, lots of riders would see lower fares, and it is unclear to me where you would generate revenue to make up for that loss.  Also, the WMATA fare for the first 3 miles peak and the first 7 miles off peak is highly comprable to that of the MBTA since the WMATA base fare is charged up until those distances are traveled!!!

So next time you ask why do BART and WMATA have distance based fares, maybe the oft-repeated answer of those riders are traveling farther and pay comprable amounts for trips of a similar distance in other cities will actually resonate.  MBTA (and I won't run the mileages now, but CTA and even NYCT) generally can't take you as far as WMATA can.

[Scrabbleship]

If memory serves me right, there were massive complaints when CharlieCard went live because of - GASP- a "massive fare increase". Save for those two isolated, long-distance cases (Red Line south of Quincy Center, Green D west of Reservoir), the average fare increase was 36% for CharlieCard users, 62% for non-Card users on the rail end. For people heading from an above-ground station to another above-ground station on the same branch, it went up higher as prior to that all outbound outdoor boarding was free! And this was only a few years after another hike so in three years subway fares went up as much as double for many riders as it was $1 in 2004!

Just looking at some crude CTA figures, their max distances seem to be in-between WMATA's and MBTA's. Just counting air mileage, it's a good 15 miles to O'Hare (more by rail and road), Linden is a little shorter. Since CTA has yearly Doomsday threats, they might be another system that should look at higher rush hour fares and/or surcharges at farther-out stations.

[WMATAGMOAGH]

If memory serves me right, there were massive complaints when CharlieCard went live because of - GASP- a "massive fare increase". Save for those two isolated, long-distance cases (Red Line south of Quincy Center, Green D west of Reservoir), the average fare increase was 36% for CharlieCard users, 62% for non-Card users on the rail end. For people heading from an above-ground station to another above-ground station on the same branch, it went up higher as prior to that all outbound outdoor boarding was free! And this was only a few years after another hike so in three years subway fares went up as much as double for many riders as it was $1 in 2004!

So do you still want WMATA to go flat fare, because the same thing will happen in DC.  Without knowing how much revenue WMATA gets in fares each day on the rail side of things, my guess is the flat fare would need to be well over 2 dollars, and quite possibly in the 3-4 dollar range to not have revenue losses.

Just looking at some crude CTA figures, their max distances seem to be in-between WMATA's and MBTA's. Just counting air mileage, it's a good 15 miles to O'Hare (more by rail and road), Linden is a little shorter. Since CTA has yearly Doomsday threats, they might be another system that should look at higher rush hour fares and/or surcharges at farther-out stations.

Wait a moment, so you want flat fares in DC IIRC, but Chicago doesn't need them?  And if you want distance based fares, shouldn't you insist they be "fair" by charging people the way WMATA does, based on the actual mileage for a trip and not for crossing arbitrary zone lines?  Because if that is the case, IMO, you seem to be going back on your own opinions entirely.

[RailBus63]

I can never think of one time I've ever had a major Red Line delay in Boston and it wasn't a delay for me. Due to delays, a train I was on was offloaded at Davis so it could go back in service at Alewife.

You need to spend a week commuting on the Red Line - it's been delay-prone for years thanks to a cab-signal system that has never worked right from day one.  The line operated much more smoothly when wayside signals were used from Columbia Junction northward.