Expanded City Zone service/Paycard Entry/Crew Reduction

DogBert wrote:All of this might be very impossible at the moment, but NYC's outgrowing its transportation options (if it hasn't already). Talking about new ideas hurts no one.

I think Mr. DogBert's sentiment is a very important idea to keep in mind--while some of the things being discussed here aren't going to be free to operate, whatever it would cost to increase LIRR service within New York City would likely be orders of magnitudes less than how much it would cost to extend the 7 to Bayside, the F to Queens Village, the A to Cambria Heights, or whatever.

NIMBYkiller wrote:lirr142: The big flaw in your thinking is that you assume this service would absorb existing local bus ridership which won't happen. Parallel routes like the Q12 will not simply vanish and neither will their ridership. This idea, while it could certainly be used for local transportation to a certain degree, is more geared towards Manhattan access. The only bus routes that would be drastically affected by this are the express routes, of which you'd see elimination (QM3 E of Willets Pt) or combinations (QM21 and X64). Private message me if you want a better idea of what I'm thinking on those and other routes since this isn't the appropriate forum for that discussion. Also, I'm suggesting the fare for this be equivalent to the express bus fare ($6.00), not subway fare. Also, stop looking at this like a business. While we need to be conservative with how money is spent, this is a public utility and not a for-profit business, which is why we pay our taxes. The area already suffers from horrible congestion and allowing that to continue (and degrade) will only harm our economy. Any ideas on how to make this cost less though are always welcome

The Flushing-Main Street (7) train station is the busiest subway station outside of Manhattan not for the reason that Flushing is heavily populated, but for the reason that there are so many local bus lines from Eastern Queens that feed into that area, and people take advantage of their free transfer there to get into the subway and on to Manhattan. All of those people are people that could reasonably be accommodated faster and more comfortably on the Port Washington Branch, whether they board in Eastern Queens, or they get on in Flushing. Accommodating these passengers on the LIRR instead of on the subway at Flushing would also take a nontrivial number of riders off of the already very crowded 7 trains, and allow more room for additional riders west of Flushing.

Tommy Meehan wrote:A practical problem with this idea is, I think the Long Island's suburban ridership -- which is the vast majority of LIRR riders -- those people would hate this. Example:

• Having to swipe to enter or leave the platform at Penn Station would drastically slow things down.
• If I ride from Great Neck to Penn Station I'm paying $11.00 peak one-way. Someone boarding at Bayside 3.1 miles down the line is going to pay $6.00?

I have no problem with this as a hypothetical so long as we agree it's not going to happen. The opposition would include labor, most riders and NY City Transit and is probably insurmountable.

It is in no way impossible. There are cities and transportation agencies have figured ways to very successfully integrate their suburban commuter railroads into their city's rapid transit system. If suburbanites in Europe can get over it, I'm sure suburban Long Islanders can figure out a way to accept it as well... We don't need to spend billions to extend the 7 to Bayside when we can spend millions to improve Port Washington Branch service to Little Neck...

The only major obstacle to improved intra-city service right now is in people's minds. None of this is impossible, the only reason people think and say that it is impossible is because they are resistant to any sort of change.

Tommy Meehan wrote:

NIMBYkiller wrote:I mentioned that Penn Station wouldn't have fare gates for that very reason, which is why you swipe both in and out at the neighborhood stations...Thinking about it now though, there'd be a problem of deducting the correct amount if someone is going between neighborhood stations (currently $3.75 for travel within zone 3 I believe, no?) vs the $6 I'm proposing to get to NYP/GCT.

That's what I'm talking about, if you only swiped in and out at the neighborhood stations how would it work?

This is not a significant obstacle. If the MetroCard system is able to determine that it's been less than two hours since you last swiped into the subway or bus system to give you a free transfer, then it can determine that you swiped in at Bayside 10 minutes ago so you don't need an additional fare deducted leaving Murray Hill.

Physical fare gates are not really necessary. Automated or self-performed fare collection could just as well be accomplished with ticket validators on station platforms. No turnstiles, fencing, or any other changes to station access is necessary, you just need to put half a dozen fare validators along the length of each of the platforms (which would be far cheaper than turnstiles and fencing and everything too). Passengers are required to tap in at their boarding station and tap out at their destinations, or time stamp a one way ticket printed from a TVM. Then you can keep one conductor remaining on the train to inspect fares, making sure everyone has validated or stamped tickets. Those that don't are charged a fine of ten times whatever the maximum fare is for that journey, or $100 (whatever is the greatest). When you tap out the fare is calculated and deducted from your stored balance, or timestamped tickets just expire and get tossed in the trash. Those that don't tap out are charged whatever the greatest fare is from their station to any point on the system.

All of this could be done without any significant changes to infrastructure. Having validators scattered every few feet all around Penn Station and GCT would not add any additional hardship to those who pass through there (putting them in places where foot traffic is already pretty slow (staircases, escalators) and then a few on each of the giant columns in the concourse should make it very easy for people to either tap in or tap out as they move through the station). The cost of installing the validators would be trivial compared to the alternatives and the money that could be saved on crew costs (allowing for increased service and more work...).

lirr42 wrote:Flushing is heavily populated, but for the reason that there are so many local bus lines from Eastern Queens that feed into that area, and people take advantage of their free transfer there to get into the subway and on to Manhattan. All of those people are people that could reasonably be accommodated faster and more comfortably on the Port Washington Branch...

This is what I'm suggesting to you. If you went before the MTA board and said that, "All of those people could reasonably be accommodated faster and more comfortably on the Port Washington Branch," they are going to ask you how do you know that? Based on what? How do you know that most of those riders would be better served by a train that will only take them to the Herald Square area? Or Midtown East (in a few more years). The demographic data (link) I saw for Bayside stated that the majority of commuters who reside there report their commute to work is 35 minutes or less. That sounds like the majority of Bayside residents don't work in Midtown Manhattan. If you have different data please present it.

How has ridership increased under the City Ticket program? Has weekend ridership on the 7 decreased by a like amount? That should give you an idea as to how practical this plan is.

The sidebar agreement about conductors on the CE jobs has never been proven. I view it as an urban legend

Ononrclose, believe what you want. The SMART union is not nearly as influential or as smart as they want you to think or better yet think they are. The carrier doesnt give anything away unless it has to and in this case didnt have to give anything. Believe what you want. Its no urban legend.

Datenail, the conductor jobs were a result of engineers becoming dual certified. That is the official reason, not the nonsense about paying for medical being spread by a few disgruntled members of the BLE.

Engineers were always Conductors by default before Conductor certification came about. Why would dual certification cause the RR to give the UTU/SMART jobs?

Conductors don't belong on CE jobs. We are having more problems with CE crews with them on the job verses when they weren't. And FYI - conductors on CE jobs was a gift from the company to A.S.

This thread was flagged because the latest posts were considered off topic. I disagree with that and will allow them to remain posted and the discussion to continue. The title includes 'CREW REDUCTION' and the most recent posts are relevant to crew sizes and other issues.

workextra: Thank you! Glad to see some of the older heads still here. Union Hall St doesn't make much sense to me because you have the subway right there already. Springfield Gardens itself is walking distance to Laurelton, but if you're coming from northeast of the station, it's a hike. And yes, this plan would help reduce the number of stops (and hopefully crowding) for trains going further out into Nassau and Suffolk. Regarding crew reduction; I'd have to see exactly the number of new consists this would add, but it's quite possible that with the increase, all those ticket collectors can be reassigned (retrained?) as conductors on the additional trains. Remember, this service alone means 12 trains per hour in each direction (service every 20 mins on 4 routes) between 5A and 11P, and 8 trains per hour in each direction between 11P and 5A (service every 30 mins of 4 routes), meaning a total of 528 schedules (264 each way). Again, not sure how much of that is just a redistribution of existing service and how much is actually new service.

lirr142: I doubt that you can reassign ALL ticket collector jobs to newly added service. I'm only making an assumption, but I doubt there is a capacity or need to add THAT many extra trains that every ticket collector system wide can be reassigned as conductors. Maybe I'm wrong. How many schedules operate M-F? Weekends? That's the number of trains you'd need to add. With my idea, at least it's not a huge blow to the ticket collector job since it's only city zone trains that won't have them. And yes, a huge number of people ride buses into Flushing and Jamaica to make the train connection, that's why I'm suggesting this. But not all of those lines parallel the LIRR, not all riders on that line are destined for somewhere this service could bring them (or are riding locally and not even getting on the subway) and this won't absorb 100% of those riders who are making the connection because many either can't afford or won't want to pay $6.00 no matter how much faster this is. Hell, I used to take N23->N20/N21->7 to get to the city to save paying the LIRR fare from PW, and that's when it was cheap! Finally, I am HUGELY against POP. Maybe I'm wrong, but I get the feeling that enforcement costs too much compared to the revenue that would be generated from the fines. Either that or you rarely get inspected. That and then who exactly is administrating the fines? What are the consequences for not paying the fine?

Tommy Meehan: If you solve the NJT access problem, you solve the Amtrak access problem since they share the same area of Penn Station. Attached is a quick, minimal thinking solution. Basically, you just section off the corridors leading to LIRR platforms. Again, fare gates will be able to read fare cards and normal LIRR tickets (for those coming from/going to outside of the city zone). Also, not saying that there are loads of similarities, but NJ Transit has fare gates at Secaucus Junction. Also, in response to your other comment about folks having the cheaper option only 3 miles away, what happens if the city ever were to extend the subway to the county line? Then they have an even cheaper option there. Plus, those paying the zone 4 fares will [generally] be getting a faster ride into the city than those on the city zone service since their trains are skipping all those city zone stops (obviously this depends on whether or not the express trains would actually be able to pass the city zone trains during peak hours). Finally, you mention that the majority of Bayside residents report a commute that is doubtfully taking them into Manhattan. Well, the majority of Long Islanders work on Long Island, but the LIRR is still considered of vital importance to the economy of the island because of the access it provides to Manhattan. And CityTicket isn't the best judge of this since it hasn't increased service at any of the stations, just made it cheaper to ride.

NIMBYkiller wrote:lirr142: I doubt that you can reassign ALL ticket collector jobs to newly added service. I'm only making an assumption, but I doubt there is a capacity or need to add THAT many extra trains that every ticket collector system wide can be reassigned as conductors. Maybe I'm wrong. How many schedules operate M-F? Weekends? That's the number of trains you'd need to add. With my idea, at least it's not a huge blow to the ticket collector job since it's only city zone trains that won't have them.

I believe there are some 154 train crew members on collector jobs and some 266 on assistant conductor jobs. A non-negligible number of people to find new jobs for, but it's not an impossible task. Remember that there are likely a significant number of new trains coming once East Side Access is ready, and couple that with additional intra-city service and you'll be able to make a sizable dent in that number.

You likely couldn't assign everyone to new trains, but hiring new engineers from the existing internal conductor pool instead of hiring new engineers off the street can also help reduce the surplus conductor headcount. They also wouldn't have to hire any new conductors off the street.

Even in the event that you still have extra conductors, distributing the trains amongst the number of conductors that remain could also allow for a drastic reduction in overtime since everyone would only have to work eight hours and not more. While giving a conductor one round trip and then having him or her water the plants for the last four hours of their shift isn't the most efficient thing in the world, it will at least make conductor costs easily quantifiable and budgetable since you won't have all that much surprise overtime.

NIMBYkiller wrote:Finally, I am HUGELY against POP. Maybe I'm wrong, but I get the feeling that enforcement costs too much compared to the revenue that would be generated from the fines. Either that or you rarely get inspected. That and then who exactly is administrating the fines? What are the consequences for not paying the fine?

This makes no sense...how are enforcement costs "too much" when implementing PoP will allow you to eliminate conductors, assistant conductors, and collectors from every train? $350 per head per shift adds up very, very, very quickly. Eliminating assistant conductors and collectors would save on the order of a $150,000 dollars per weekday. That's about $50 million over the course of a year. Plus whatever you could save by practically eliminating overtime. Not an insignificant sum. Granted, you won't save that much in the first few years since you will have to wait for attrition or for conductors to take engineer jobs, but you will save a nontrivial sum of money on day one.

Aside from getting the labor unions to cooperate, implementing PoP would likely not be the most difficult thing in the world. Install validators on station platforms and then on a pre-announced date, turn them on and from that point forward passengers would be required to tap or validate their ticket before boarding. At that point, take all assistant conductors and collectors off trains, just leaving the conductor and engineer on the train. The assistant conductors and collectors are either assigned onto new trains, they take on different jobs, retire, or sit around and water the plants. The engineer's carry on as they normally would, the conductors do all of their currently assigned tasks with the exception of going out and lifting tickets between stations. Instead of manually lifting tickets they simply either verify that the passenger has tapped in at their original station or visually inspect paper tickets to make sure that they are validated and within their proper zone.

Those caught without validated tickets are issued fines. Ideally they would be fines that are backed with the force of law and are paid in a manner similarly to a traffic ticket. If you dispute the fine, you go to court and plead your case, and if you fail to pay your fine, you get a visit from the police. If that's completely impossible then using the existing system could be effective enough. If you don't have a validated ticket you get an ADL, only this time instead of writing it for $19, the conductor writes it for $125. Then you receive the letter and pay the fines at a station as you would do now. 3 unpaid ADL's and you get a visit from the MTA police, much like what is done today.

Leaving one conductor on the train doesn't completely turn everyone's worlds upside down, and having a minimum of one person on every train to inspect fares means that you will have an extremely high chance of getting a visit from the fare inspector on your trip and thus people trying to cheat the railroad by boarding without tickets will either be discouraged from doing so, or at least, will have a decent chance of getting caught.

NIMBYkiller wrote:Tommy Meehan: If you solve the NJT access problem, you solve the Amtrak access problem since they share the same area of Penn Station. Attached is a quick, minimal thinking solution. Basically, you just section off the corridors leading to LIRR platforms. Again, fare gates will be able to read fare cards and normal LIRR tickets (for those coming from/going to outside of the city zone). Also, not saying that there are loads of similarities, but NJ Transit has fare gates at Secaucus Junction.

This would be pretty impractical for a couple reasons. First, several NJTransit trains commonly depart from tracks 13 and above, so now these people would have to find a way to climb over LIRR turnstiles. Next, there are staircases down from the Amtrak concourse to tracks 13 through 17 which would allow people to circumvent the turnstiles, the new Monyhian West End concourse extension will also have more NJTransit and Amtrak people floating around in there.

Turnstiles are also large, slow, and expensive. New York Penn isn't the roomiest station in the world, and turnstiles can require a decent amount of space if you want to put them horizontally down the connecting concourse. There are also significant volume throughput problems you'll run into--those few escalators coming down from the 32nd & 7th entrance down into the LIRR concourse carry a huge amount of people and cramming them through what looks like a space that could probably fit half a dozen turnstiles would result in a giant pileup. Also, putting turnstiles in front of specific staircases would add significantly to the amount of time it takes from the mob of people to go form the concourse to the platform when the track is announced.

Putting fare targets and validators all throughout the station allows passengers taking LIRR trains a number of different opportunities to tap in or out as they please, they offer no impediments to passenger flow through the station, NJTransit and Amtrak passengers can mill about the different parts of the station as they please.

lirr142: So you basically want conductors to be police, making it so that they have to demand ID from fare evaders so they can issue these tickets which can lead to further confrontation when they are the only employee on the entire train not otherwise occupied? For the conductor, inspecting that tickets are validated is pretty much going to be the same as punching the tickets (and in the case of monthly tickets, that's already what they do). Not sure though how they'd check to see that a ticket or fare card was tapped without some ability to scan that fare card, so again, you're spending the same amount of time as you would simply punching the ticket. So PoP has provided no time savings that would allow the conductor to move more efficiently throughout the train since he/she still has to go around and ensure they are validated. Fare gates on the other hand instantly mean that everyone on the train has paid their fare so the conductor is able to focus on other tasks such as operating the doors which on a local service especially becomes demanding.

Fare validators vs fare gates:
You will still have congestion at the fare validators as people line up at all of them to validate their ticket. If it's the type where you have to insert the ticket to validate it (like on HBLR), that's going to take longer than it would to tap a card to walk through a fare gate (like they have in Stockholm). And there's only so much space you can utilize at Penn Station for these slow fare validators before there's no more space available (as it is they've already got the TVMs in almost as many available places as possible). You'd actually have to have more fare validators than fare gates to handle the same amount of riders. Even if it's just tapping a fare card to the validator, you'd still need to have just as many machines as you would fare gates. The fare gates will be far less of an impediment to the flow of people moving to/from the platforms than the staircases to them already are. And look at the image I attached again, if you're in any of the LIRR concourses waiting for your train to be posted, you've already passed through the fare gates. These are already the areas where most people congregate while waiting for track assignments. The only place where I agree with you is that escalator coming down by the LIRR waiting area, but that can easily be fixed by pushing the fare gate line another 10-15 ft back so you can add some on the left (ie, you come down the stairs/escalator and there are fare gates either straight ahead of you or to the left of you). NJ Transit trains departing from tracks as high as 16 can still be accessed from the Amtrak section. When it's LIRR trains boarding on those tracks, have the access to them blocked off from the NJT/Amtrak sections. Amtrak already ropes off entrances it isn't using.

None of this is even necessary for the idea of city zone service to work. It was just to bring the operating cost down, but it would work just as well with the current method of collecting tickets. That's primarily what I started this thread for, to discuss the physical possibility of operating this service. Would the PW be able to handle 20 min headways to Bayside without causing problems during rush hour to PW service? Same with the other branches? Is there west end capacity for this? How much of this would actually be newly added service vs simply being reorganized service?

Lots of this doesn't make much sense. Some points in particular:

NIMBYkiller wrote:So you basically want conductors to be police, making it so that they have to demand ID from fare evaders so they can issue these tickets which can lead to further confrontation when they are the only employee on the entire train not otherwise occupied?

What do you think the conductors do now when somebody refuses to pay their fare? They demand ID and issue them an invoice for fare not paid. The only thing different is that the fine would be backed by the force of law from the start. If the fare evader throws a punch at the conductor now, what's going to happen? The other conductor or collector can be more than a half a dozen cars away and isn't going to see or hear any altercation that develops. The engineer is still on the train and most passengers have cell phones to call the police if an issue arises. That's not to mention that those circumstances would likely be incredibly rare. Other cities have converted to PoP systems without employee assaults skyrocketing, so there's no reason to assume something like that might happen here.

At any rate, fines backed by the force of law form the start aren't essential to implementing a PoP system now. Conductors can still write ADL's, just now for higher amounts, and the MTA Police go around and reactively roundup those who are not paying their fines.

NIMBYkiller wrote:For the conductor, inspecting that tickets are validated is pretty much going to be the same as punching the tickets (and in the case of monthly tickets, that's already what they do). Not sure though how they'd check to see that a ticket or fare card was tapped without some ability to scan that fare card, so again, you're spending the same amount of time as you would simply punching the ticket. So PoP has provided no time savings that would allow the conductor to move more efficiently throughout the train since he/she still has to go around and ensure they are validated.

The point of PoP is that not everyone has to get their ticket inspected each and every time. They just have to get their ticket inspected once more than the break-even point would be if they just paid the fines. If you make the penalty for not having a ticket 10 times the maximum fare for that journey, then you only have to get your ticket inspected at most 10% of the time to make it work. Considering most trains have between two and four crew members on-board, even if there was no time savings, reducing that to one means that a conductor would get through between 25% and 50% of the train on any one trip (higher on most trains), well above the 10% threshold you have to meet to make buying and validating tickets worth it.

Verifying whether or not smart cards have been tapped in at their origin station can be done through the use of handheld validators. Touch the card to the sensor on the validator, you see within seconds whether the card had been taped in or not. Again, this is nothing new or revolutionary, similar systems have been functioning in other cities and on other railroads for years without issues.

NIMBYkiller wrote:Fare gates on the other hand instantly mean that everyone on the train has paid their fare so the conductor is able to focus on other tasks such as operating the doors which on a local service especially becomes demanding.

Assuming that just because there are fare gates everyone would have paid their fare is ridiculous. People jump over or duck under subway turnstiles hundreds of times a day. If they'll dodge the turnstile to beat a $2.38 fare, they'll do it to beat a $3, $5, $10, or $30 commuter rail fare in a heartbeat.

I hope nobody gets extraordinarily upset about this, but operating the doors is not an incredibly difficult task. We're past the days were doors have to be manually opened and the LIRR doesn't have any low platforms so it's not like train crew members have to run up and down the train raising and lowering traps. If it was, how come conductors manage to both collect fares and operate the doors now? If you're going to keep conductors around to push a button, you might as well have the engineer operate the doors (like what is done hundreds of times a day, even right here in New York City, with OTPO) and eliminate conductors all together. That would probably be the one and only advantage of fare gates over validators: a 100% reduction in conductors and collectors on trains.

NIMBYkiller wrote:You will still have congestion at the fare validators as people line up at all of them to validate their ticket. If it's the type where you have to insert the ticket to validate it (like on HBLR), that's going to take longer than it would to tap a card to walk through a fare gate (like they have in Stockholm).

Citation needed. Having used the HBLR quite a lot in the past few months, I can say that validating one's ticket at their validators takes less than two seconds and I have never once had to wait in a line, or even more than a few seconds, to validate my ticket. Even when an inbound train at Hoboken sends a swarm of people towards the light rail platforms there's virtually zero delay.

And fare gates would be no faster. All you're doing is taking the fare validator off the wall, putting it on a turnstile, and adding a barrier that the person has to get through. If anything, they take longer since you have to push through a turnstile or wait for a gate to open in front of you.

And I'm not sure if you've ever tried to use subway turnstiles right when another train arrives at the station, but amount of people you have to fight with trying to exit the turnstiles when you're trying to get in is several times any delay that you would encounter with people moving freely around the station.

And, again, for the third time, PoP is not a new concept. Other railroads in other cities have gotten along with fare validators in busy stations without everything coming to a standstill.

NIMBYkiller wrote:And there's only so much space you can utilize at Penn Station for these slow fare validators before there's no more space available (as it is they've already got the TVMs in almost as many available places as possible). You'd actually have to have more fare validators than fare gates to handle the same amount of riders. Even if it's just tapping a fare card to the validator, you'd still need to have just as many machines as you would fare gates.

There's by no means a TVM covering every flat surface in New York Penn, and, if anything, TVM's have two flat sides showing with nothing on them, so they would increase the surface area that you would be able to use for validators.

The quantity of validators is trivial. You could have twice as many validators as fare gates--heck, you could have three times as many fare validators as fare gates, and it would still cost a fraction of the cost to purchase dozens upon dozens of turnstiles and secure the boundaries of outlying stations so people don't just walk around them.

NIMBYkiller wrote:The fare gates will be far less of an impediment to the flow of people moving to/from the platforms than the staircases to them already are.

This makes no sense...how exactly are fare gates that are large and bulky less of an impediment to the flow of people than a fare validator, which has a size that is smaller than a sheet of paper, that is on a wall or column, not blocking traffic at all? Lines forming at validators has already proven to not be an issue (unless you can produce a source that says the opposite).

NIMBYkiller wrote:None of this is even necessary for the idea of city zone service to work. It was just to bring the operating cost down, but it would work just as well with the current method of collecting tickets.

It absolutely does...expanding service and reducing operating costs go hand in hand. The powers at be are going to be very reluctant to entertain any measurable increase in service without operating costs reductions to balance it out.