Proof-of-Payment (POP) vs. Traditional Ticket Collection

I'm surprised that this created such a lively discussion. I get OPTO is controversial, and freight trains should absolutely NOT be allowed to use OPTO (in fact, I'd say if they're as large as today's DPU monsters they should have a fireman on board too as a third crew member). But POP is widely accepted as the standard for transit fare payment/checking outside of the dinosaurs in the Northeast.

eolesen wrote: ↑Sun Oct 06, 2024 8:22 pmRoaming bands of ticket inspectors simply cannot replace the Conductor. It's a FRA requirement to have the Conductor, presumably it's required to be in the passenger cabin.

There is an FRA requirement to have an engineer. There is an FRA requirement to have a conductor. There is no FRA requirement saying that they have to be two different people. The OPTO operator would have to be qualified as both. Of course, larger/longer trains would still need more than one operator, but OPTO opens up the possibility of much smaller off-peak trains with relatively lower ridership, especially with EMUs (although today's 3rd rail systems impose minimum train lengths for power pickup).

What do you POP proponents think is a fair staffing level for trainmen/conductors? One person for every 3 cars? One person for every 8 cars?.... Should it be a formula based on passenger seats (flight attendants are mandated at 1 per 50 seats or fraction therefore of)????

Trainmen and Assistant Conductors are there for operational and safety purposes first and foremost -- to operate door traps and to assist in the event of an emergency.

Ticket collection/inspection is simply something they're able to do with their downtime

Most trains would be somewhere between OPTO and LIRR's system of an absurd number of conductors. However, OPTO would enable off-peak and lower-ridership routes to be more economical.

lensovet wrote: ↑Mon Oct 07, 2024 12:47 amThe standard across the US was 5% of people commuting to work pre-pandemic (it's 3.5% today). The standard in the NYC metro today, without a full recovery, is 24%. But yeah, we're dinosaurs over here who have no idea how to get people using trains and paying for it.

Those are two unrelated statements. The number of people riding trains in NYC has nothing to do with how archaic the fare/ticketing system is. With POP combined with reforms and service improvements it would enable, what would that 24% be? 25%? 28%? 30%?

Metra collected $4.25 per passenger in 2023. LIRR alone collects double that (don't forget to add MNRR, NJT, and Amtrak to get an even better sense of scale). Not sure how Metra counts their riders if no one is checking tickets, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that LIRR doesn't feel like losing 290M to save 200M. Just a guess.

Huh? You're just throwing random and incorrect numbers out there. Patrick O'Hara has actually done the math out, but it basically boils down to saving $200M a year on conductors and increasing the proportion of farebox recovery. Pricing and ridership is interesting too, demand is pretty elastic, and Long Island in particular has ticket prices that are absurdly high, along with a bus system that parallels parts of the LIRR for riders who can't afford the absurdly high ticket prices instead of being utilized in areas that don't have train tracks capable of moving hundreds of trains a day.

…and have people not bother buying tickets because they know they won't be checked. How much revenue is lost to offset that gain? We have a sense from the numbers I provided above. Plus how much money do you have to spend to now do fare enforcement?

TODAY, many tickets are not taken, so those tickets can be "saved" for another use. With POP, that loss goes away. If you price the fines correctly, you essentially either get 100% of the fare that you should be getting through a combination of fares and fines, or you get a very, very low proportion of cheaters.

Hold up, #1 claimed that we have this excess of conductors that we could eliminate by going to POP. Now we're saying that apparently there's not enough of them that people are managing to save paper tickets to reuse them multiple times? Which is it?

Both things can be true. You're also conflating two different things. Too many conductors for a modern POP system, yes, whether there are enough for today's 1848-era ticket collection system is a different question.

Revenue from people who aren't paying anymore? Sure thing.

Except that they would be paying. So there would be additional revenue.

Randall brings up a great point for occasional riders and tourists. That's not where the majority of LIRR's revenue is coming from.

This logic is broken. If LIRR implemented POP, OPTO (for off-peak and low-ridership trains), fixed their service patterns, did much better event service, and provided more intra-island service, then they would have far more of those occasional riders. The cost to add such services is much lower, as the physical plant is built for about 4 hours a day of the Ronkonkoma & Manhattan Railroad's mainline. It's severely underutilized much of the rest of the time.

No matter how you want to make an academic argument for OPTO, it simply will not happen without the unions agreeing to it.

I suspect you'll see the ILA agree to automated cranes before any of the Class 1 railroad unions agree to one-man operations other than perhaps ground based conductors.

While the letter of the law might not specify that the conductor and engineer can't be the same human, 100+ years of practice do, and past practice is a strong factor in both union grievances and Federal regulation.

eolesen wrote: ↑Tue Oct 08, 2024 7:52 pmNo matter how you want to make an academic argument for OPTO, it simply will not happen without the unions agreeing to it.

I'm generally pretty pro-union, but the LIRR union is utterly ridiculous.

I suspect you'll see the ILA agree to automated cranes before any of the Class 1 railroad unions agree to one-man operations other than perhaps ground based conductors.

Class Is shouldn't be OPTO other than *maybe* yard to yard transfer runs over a short distance. Commuter rail on off-peak or lightly traveled lines with PTC makes a lot more sense.

While the letter of the law might not specify that the conductor and engineer can't be the same human, 100+ years of practice do, and past practice is a strong factor in both union grievances and Federal regulation.

Nothing says that they can't be the same person. Also, at least on sections without grade crossings, FRA heavy rail should be able to implement a version of CBTC. The systems have all been in place for close to 25 years with PTC, it's just a matter of programming the trains to run automatically. So then the one person could walk around, do some of whatever conductors do, and let the train drive itself.

Although it would be completely unsafe due to the tunnels to have no crew, NYCTA's 7 train today doesn't need human operators to do... anything. It's all controlled via CBTC. You wouldn't see the same insane capacity of FRA heavy rail, as it would still use fixed blocks, but the automation part of it is entirely feasible.

As far as rolling-block CBTC, if the LIRR wasn't so archaic and inefficient, they would be the perfect railroad to partially convert to moving-block CBTC on the Main Line since they are essentially an isolated railroad, and don't have the pesky problem of having to have other railroad's locomotives running over them (other than the already highly bespoke locomotives operated by NY&A).

Shore Line East and the New Haven Line would be great candidates for automated running, as they have no grade crossings. With upgraded sensor systems tied to PTC and quad gates with a center divider, maybe automated running could even handle grade crossings.

ElectricTraction wrote: ↑Tue Oct 08, 2024 9:24 pm Also, at least on sections without grade crossings, FRA heavy rail should be able to implement a version of CBTC. The systems have all been in place for close to 25 years with PTC, it's just a matter of programming the trains to run automatically. So then the one person could walk around, do some of whatever conductors do, and let the train drive itself.
As far as rolling-block CBTC, if the LIRR wasn't so archaic and inefficient, they would be the perfect railroad to partially convert to moving-block CBTC on the Main Line since they are essentially an isolated railroad, and don't have the pesky problem of having to have other railroad's locomotives running over them (other than the already highly bespoke locomotives operated by NY&A).

Shore Line East and the New Haven Line would be great candidates for automated running, as they have no grade crossings. With upgraded sensor systems tied to PTC and quad gates with a center divider, maybe automated running could even handle grade crossings.

Automation operations requires more than advanced signals and computerize controls. They also require active, effective, platform gates at every door to a passenger train. As long as you have different model trains, M8's, M7's, Siemen Ventures, Kawaski BiLevels, Bombardier MultiLevels, Comets, and other passengers cars that probably do not have doors at the same exact place, platform doors that do not match train doors will be very difficult to design a solution for. Easy to do if all the rolling stock is built to a unified designed, but are they, really?
Additionally, there are grade crossings on the Shore Line East. There are grade crossings on the LIRR. There are grade crossing on the MTA North lines.

Must be nice to live in lala land…

lensovet wrote: ↑Tue Oct 08, 2024 10:18 pm Must be nice to live in lala land…

The shinkensan was built from ground up to be automated, the driver is there in case of emergency.
I'm not sure one could retrofit a 150+ year old NEC, with various gear, to be that way.

electricron wrote: ↑Tue Oct 08, 2024 10:02 pmAutomation operations requires more than advanced signals and computerize controls.

Why? ACSES has known where every train on the New Haven Shore Line has been within 33 feet since around 2000 when it was first activated. Most of the logic required for automation is already in place for PTC.

They also require active, effective, platform gates at every door to a passenger train. As long as you have different model trains, M8's, M7's, Siemen Ventures, Kawaski BiLevels, Bombardier MultiLevels, Comets, and other passengers cars that probably do not have doors at the same exact place, platform doors that do not match train doors will be very difficult to design a solution for. Easy to do if all the rolling stock is built to a unified designed, but are they, really?

Huh? None of them have platform gates today. Nor does the 7 train, which currently runs under CBTC. Platform gates have nothing to do with automation.

Additionally, there are grade crossings on the Shore Line East. There are grade crossings on the LIRR. There are grade crossing on the MTA North lines.

Only in Waterford-New London. And the Waterford crossing should have been eliminated a long time ago. True, much of LIRR does have a lot of crossings.

scratchyX1 wrote: ↑Wed Oct 09, 2024 12:33 pmThe shinkensan was built from ground up to be automated, the driver is there in case of emergency.
I'm not sure one could retrofit a 150+ year old NEC, with various gear, to be that way.

Why not? The PTC equipment has to know exactly where the train is, exactly how fast it is going, exactly when it needs to slow down to stop for a signal. At that point, all you need is some code and potentially a little bit more powerful computer on the train to run it automatically. Program in the stopping points, the system can already figure all that out, make normal braking curves that are softer than a penalty brake application, and then program in the go part.

We've got self driving cars, which is several orders of magnitude more complicated, we actually have self-operating subways and other transit train things, and yet somehow, once it falls under FRA heavy rail regulation, that just magically becomes completely impossible. No way, no how. Fantasy. Dream. La-la land.

Also, while rolling block CBTC would have the biggest capacity benefit, there is nothing stopping automation from working on today's fixed-block CTC/PTC systems. Realistically, only a few sections here and there with capacity constraints would be retrofitted with rolling block CBTC, while other areas would retain the fixed block system.

This topic was already split up once... is the discussion about automated train operations now instead of payment/ticket collection?....

Back on the threads subject of how fares are collected. Why argue the point? This decision is made by the transit agency board of directors upon recommendation by the chief operating officer, or whatever that office is called. That's why we have local transit agencies and boards. I would hazard to suggest that the local transit agency did a survey and asked thousands of passengers what their opinions were, and reported the study's results back to the board. That's democracy at work. Live with it.

Wonder why the British system of purchase a ticket at boarding station.?. You cannot exit at destination without showing ticket to that station? can our British posters comment?

France has something similar – gates and pop. or at least did when i was there some 15 years ago.

At the end of the day it comes down to who wants to spend the money how and the volume, presumably.

The advantage of gates is that it's more or less a sunk cost once you've installed them.

Minus the whole maintenance thing, sure.

electricron wrote: ↑Wed Oct 09, 2024 10:08 pmBack on the threads subject of how fares are collected. Why argue the point? This decision is made by the transit agency board of directors upon recommendation by the chief operating officer, or whatever that office is called. That's why we have local transit agencies and boards. I would hazard to suggest that the local transit agency did a survey and asked thousands of passengers what their opinions were, and reported the study's results back to the board. That's democracy at work. Live with it.

What? The MTA is a corrupt, bureaucratic mess. If they were even marginally competent, they would be using POP and not collecting tickets. There's no democracy, you think they care what their riders want? The MTA would look a heck of a lot different if they did. Although to be fair, the MTA occasionally pretends to listen to the riders, unlike SEPTA that just hates them.