Category Transit

Entries 5 Total

Employee Empowerment, Customer Service, and Tantrums

Dec 14, ’06 1:47 PM

I don’t like to use the word ‘empowerment’, because it’s a buzzword. It’s a handy one, though, because the normal English phrase ‘allowing subordinates to make their own decisions and to solve problems themselves’ is cumbersome.

I watch a show called The Tube, an ITV show about the workings of the London Underground. I think that the thing must be underwritten somehow by the London transport workers’ union, because most of the show seems to be about how unbelievably hard everyone works, and how earnest they are. Or maybe they just do this to maintain access. In any case, the recurring theme is that the Underground people do their best, but that they would be able to do their jobs a whole lot better if it weren’t for all these passengers, who are a total nuisance and who just get in the way of the smooth operation of the system. It would be so much easier to keep the stations safe and clean, and to run the trains on time, if it weren’t for all these pesky people who insist on using them.

As such, the whole thing is a wonderful illustration of a libertarian’s feelings about public transport. The LU people are wonderful people, I’m sure: but they have no effective competition, and they’re working in a highly bureaucratic, highly unionized field. All of these factors tend to produce an environment where individual decision-making is strongly discouraged.

With no competition, there’s no special reason to deliver services more efficiently than anyone else. The whole purpose of bureaucracy is to establish Procedures, and to centralize decision-making power. And unions tend to favor limiting their members’ authority to make decisions; if there’s a clearly-defined Procedure, and if the employee is trained in and follows that Procedure, then the employer can’t find his actions at fault.

Add to this the general bureaucratization of modern British society and the general emphases on safety, security, and Not Giving Offence that now take precedence over everything else, and you have something like a perfect storm of customer disservice.

Consider this short clip from the show (MPEG4):

At the King’s Cross station, they’re doing construction and so don’t have room inside the station for the normal number of passengers. LU’s solution for this is to close gates at the entrance to keep the platforms from getting overcrowded. Eminently sensible.

However, after watching the video, consider:

1. The LU employee’s contempt for passengers when talking to the camera: “…they think the platforms are empty. Now, how do they know that? Because I can’t see from here, so how can they see? I think it’s the fact that they’re all in a rush, they all want to get to work.”

Not only does he seem to consider wanting to get to work on time some particularly inconvenient eccentricity, but he considers that the passengers’ frustration at being made to wait on the sidewalk as being due to their belief that the station is empty. There’s no particular evidence to back this up.

2. When a passenger complains, the immediate and sole reaction of the employee is to tell him to put his complaint in writing and to send it to LU at an address he can find on a poster in the station.

Now, ask yourself: is this going to help? No: it’s just going to piss off the customer even more. When a union employee of a monopoly tells you to send a written complaint to the head office, he means: I have adhered to the official procedure and therefore cannot be held at fault; send a letter and maybe get a response in eight weeks, and fuck you very much, sir.

It’s probably not even our intrepid employee’s fault: he’s probably forbidden to do anything other than close and open the gates, and to tell anyone with a complaint to write a letter to HQ. If he had any discretion in his actions, he might do the wrong thing, and neither the union nor London Underground want that.

In the process of relieving them of the burden of — and the ability to — make decisions based on the circumstances of the moment, LU dehumanizes its employees. Is it any wonder that the passengers then tend not to treat them with proper human respect?

Cyberman
Humans must mind the gap or be DELETED!!!

What if the employee had said, “I’m sorry for the delay, but with the construction in the station we don’t have enough room in there, and so have to hold people at the entrance until the previous crowd thins out”, and then told the guy to write a letter if he argued about it?

What if they increased the fare for people getting on at King’s Cross £1 while the construction was underway? If you absolutely had to get on there, you’d pay the surcharge; everyone else would walk down to Euston.

But LU doesn’t do these things: why should they? Are they going to lose customers to a competing system of subterranean trains? Are all these people going to buy cars, find somewhere to park them in central London, and then deal with the traffic? No. They’re totally powerless to do anything, so they assault the employees. And the response to this is measures that make the passengers feel even more powerless. Give ‘em any lip, and they immediately start reaching for the Button that will bring in the Hired Goons. (At LU, they first suggest that you write a letter: so that’s a progressive policy, then.)

Children throw tantrums because they have no control over their lives. Adults don’t throw tantrums often because, to a large degree, they do control their own lives. What’s more, they’re used to controlling their own lives. Deny them any of that control (as on an airplane) and they throw tantrums, just like children. More force, more authority, more procedures, and more hair-trigger hired-goonery can only make things worse.

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Back At Tino Manor

Nov 30, ’04 3:08 PM

We are back for a while now from our travels, and regular ranting should resume here soon. At the moment, though, I am trying to recover from all my aches and pains and am not up to much besides that.

My ribs are all bruised up thanks to Amtrak bouncing me around all last night like a fourth-class parcel. Our sleeping compartment was on the end of the car, right over the truck. There are two things you need to know to fully understand why this is a problem:

  1. The American loading gauge is quite large, and
  2. American railroads’ tracks are maintained for hauling coal, not passengers i.e. they do not give a particularly smooth ride.

1 means that American train cars are, relative to those in other countries, enormous, which in turn means that the cars act as levers to exert a whole lot of force on the trucks at each end. #2 means that most of the track in this country is horribly bumpy. Well, okay, three things you need to know: perhaps because there’s more track in the United States than in most other countries, the American approach has generally been to build fancy suspensions into the railcars rather than to fix the tracks. This contributes to the general wallowing motion of Amtrak trains as their giant springs rebound from absorbing the bumps in the track.

Anyway, all of this means that the compartment over the trailing truck on a Superliner car gets bounced around quite a bit, and it gets whipped back and forth a lot, too. The only respite comes in Florence, SC, where the train stops for fuel and a crew change. Unfortunately, it does this in a middle of a relatively busy freight yard, where CSX spends a lot of time humping cars.

In railroad terms, humping refers to connecting railroad cars together by opening the couplers and sending them down a little hill, at the bottom of which is a partly-assembled train.

You can probably imagine what the collision of empty railroad cars sounds like, but in case you can’t, here’s a representation:

Boom! Boom! Boom! Booooooommmmmm! BoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoom!

That last bit is the train being pushed back to its starting position from where it’s rolled from the impacts. Repeat this for about forever, and in much bigger type, and you get the idea.

So it’s somewhat less restful than it might be, despite the Superliner being the world’s finest sleeping car. A room somewhere in the middle of the car is essential; this way you might be able to sleep through the BOOOOOMMMMing. I didn’t, and so I’m still a bit wrung-out, and I just offer these pictures:

amtk33101.jpg
Amtrak lounge car 33101, still showing evidence of its off-track excursion in April 2002. Four people died in the derailment of the Auto Train due to a track misalignment. Ironically enough, all the fatalities occurred when the walls of the cars twisted and allowed the grommet-retained emergency-exit windows to fall out; the unlucky passengers were thrown from the train, which then fell over on them. Lounge #33101 wound up on its side in the ditch. The fact that Amtrak has not even repaired the scrapes and gouges on this car tells you something about their finances.

amtk_roomette.jpg
The world’s smallest and bounciest room. Actually that’s probably not true, but it is a pretty small room in any case. Also Tino’s knees. Those seats are horribly uncomfortable for sitting in, but they do fold out into a bed.

amtk_coffee_1.jpg amtk_coffee_2.jpg
Two views of the coffee-and-ice area at the top of the stairs in the middle of a Superliner sleeping car. My elbow and/or forearm appears in many of these pictures, for which I offer no apologies. Taking pictures in a moving train is hard enough without having to worry about whether your elbow is in the frame. This lens has a field of view of 180°, so some part of you will almost always be in the frame.

amtk_stairs_1.jpg amtk_stairs_2.jpg
Going down the stairs. What handsome feet I have. In case you haven’t already figured this out, clicking on any of these pictures will cause a larger version to appear in a pop-up window.

amtk_lower_vestibule.jpg amtk_lower_vestibule_2.jpg
At the bottom of the stairs. The bags are full of dirty linen. Down that hallway you can see doors to the shower, a bathroom, and the Family Bedroom.

amtk_shower.jpg
The Amtrak shower. The towels used to say ‘NPRC’ (for National Passenger Railroad Corporation, the True Name of Amtrak), but they don’t any more. I suspect that they were stolen too often. Note the large speaker on the wall, so you can’t escape the smooth jazz even in here.

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Naming Rights, Private Enterprise, and Subsidies

Jul 27, ’04 10:28 PM

There is apparently a plan under discussion in New York over whether the MTA should sell naming rights to subway stations and the like. I wrote about a similar situation a couple of years ago when Bloomberg was publicly suggesting that the city should sell naming rights to things like Central Park.

The article in the New York Times says:

Indeed, the authority’s officials said they could easily imagine the Delta Times Square Shuttle or, say, I.B.M.’s adopting the Tarrytown station on Metro-North’s Hudson rail line.

It is not until the last paragraph of the article that the Times points out that Times Square itself, as well as its subway station, is already named for a corporate entity: The New York Times.

And they don’t mention at all that Grand Central Terminal — apparently one of the things under consideration for a new corporate name — is already named for the New York Central Railroad.

A lot of things are named after corporate entities without anyone minding, or even thinking much about it: Wrigley Field in Chicago is named for the chewing-gum company. The Sears Tower is named for a certain mail-order and department-store company. Ditto the Woolworth Building, the Chrysler Building, and Busch Stadium: they all carry corporate names that are ‘organic’ in that they were named by (and for) the companies that built them.

These companies were also fairly well-respected — they built these buildings and stadiums, after all — and all these names are names rather than brands. Even among today’s sponsored-name stadiums, a few stand out as not setting one’s teeth on edge: Ford Field, Miller Park, Coors Field, and Heinz Field. All are so-named because big companies wrote checks, of course, but they’re also in a way named for the car, beer, and ketchup magnates who helped build their cities into what they are today.

You can even make a guess as to where these things are, so strongly-associated with particular cities are Ford, Miller, Coors, and Heinz. On the other hand, things like ‘U.S. Cellular Field’, ‘Ameriquest Field’, ‘Minute Maid Park’, ‘Citizens Bank Park’ and ‘Petco Park’ could be anywhere, and they just sound idiotic. ‘Citizens Park’ in particular would sound just fine; but then the bank wants to make sure that the people of the city (who of course paid for the stadium) are not under the mistaken impression that the place is named for, you know, them.

What’s the difference, really, between a corporation writing a check to a city (these things are almost always municipal operations now) to name a stadium, and a tycoon personally running the operation and then naming the thing after himself? One of the big ones is that when the tycoon names the stadium after himself, he’s patting himself on the back, recognizing himself for improving the city this way. When a company buys the naming rights so that it can add a giant sign reading ‘Zovuvazz Meat Byproducts Inc. Coliseum’ to the skyline, it’s naked advertising and something of an insult to the taxpayers who build these things.

So back to the MTA. They appear to be making the mistake — pretty common now — of thinking that any kind of advertising is desirable and in demand. To begin with, there’d be a certain reputational cost to anyone who bought the naming rights to something like Grand Central Station. If it was suddenly known as Famous Original Ray’s Station, a lot of people would be so disgusted that they’d start getting their pizza from Original Famous Ray’s instead.

Second, companies buy naming rights for stadiums because nearly everything that happens in a stadium happens on TV. For a few million dollars, you get your corporate name repeated over and over on TV every time there’s a game. Very few subway stations are televised. Aside from a very few things — every one of which would present the backlash problem I mentioned above — most of this stuff is fairly anonymous. Nobody in their right mind would pay money for the name.

Here’s an idea, though. If the MTA really needs the money, they should sell off some of these anonymous stations. The sale would have a few conditions, like that you couldn’t close the station without the consent of the MTA, and, obviously, you had to allow people to use the station to get on the trains. The MTA would maintain the tracks, and you would be in charge of everything else. The MTA would take most of the fares that you collected (what percentage of the fare accounts for running the stations? 10%? Then give that to the station operator, assuming that about as many people leave the system at a given station as board), and you’d keep the rest. You’d have an incentive, as a subway station owner, to attract as many people as possible to your station, and with so many people a day passing through your premises, you could potentially clean up by renting out little shops in the warren of offices, passages, and storage rooms that NYC subway stations seem to be full of.

If you bought an under-used station, you’d have an incentive to get more people to use it, perhaps by financing attractions on the surface. You might refund part of passengers’ fares, cutting into your margin in order to increase volume.

None of this makes the slightest bit of sense, though, not least because the MTA is in a strange position. The MTA wants as many people as possible to use their services, because that is, after all, why the MTA exists. But because the MTA — like all transit systems — does not make a profit (or even attempt to), they’re not really in a position of wanting to do anything that encourages too much use. More use, above a certain level, means less money, not more, because the MTA can’t pay its costs out of the fare money. The only real solution is to sell off the entire system, and thus require it to operate at a profit (or at least to break even) or not operate at all.

But this won’t work! everyone says. The BMT and IRT went bankrupt and were taken over by the city! The subway needs to be subsidized!

Well, it’s true that the BMT and IRT went out of business, but then they charged the same fare — five cents — from 1904 until the city bought them out in 1940. The subway fare — fixed by the city — was an issue in mayoral campaigns and, as railroads don’t vote, successful candidates supported the nickel fare, saying that it was essential to the operation of the city. Unfortunately, enough money to actually pay the bills turned out to be essential to the operation of the subway, and eight years after taking over the system, the city doubled the fare that had remained fixed at five cents for the previous forty-four years. The fare has been increased fourteen more times since then.

The New York subway system would be a good one to privatize because it was originally built with the intention of turning a profit. Publicly-built transit systems were never intended to make money, and so they probably can’t.

It’s not going to happen, but it would be nice if it did, at least as an experiment. In the United States, most things are done by the private sector, and most things here are at least the equal of their counterparts everywhere in the world. Most things get cheaper (in real terms) with time, too.

But mass transit we leave almost entirely to the public sector to run, and then when there’s an enormous cock-up we do nothing but examine how the public sector might get more money to do the same things.

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Headline: Metro Warns of Poor Service

Oct 23, ’03 8:37 AM

In The Washington Post.

Without an infusion of government money, the Metro system will suffer frequent train and bus breakdowns, dangerously crowded platforms and impossibly jammed trains and delayed buses, the transit system’s top manager said yesterday.

A cynic would say that the trains and buses already break down frequently, the platforms and trains are already jammed, and buses are already delayed. In fact, I’ll say it: the trains and buses already break down frequently, the platforms and trains are already jammed, and buses are already delayed. I suppose it could all be worse, though.

Another reason for transit systems to support themselves without subsidies.

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Hazards of Transit Subsidies

Sep 8, ’03 6:52 PM

Last Thursday, the NFL football season kicked off in Washington with a gala concert on the Mall featuring Britney Spears. Or, more properly, it kicked off near Washington, out in the suburbs, with the Redskins playing the Jets. In any event, the football game was preceded by a gala concert on the Mall.

Now, neither the Mall nor the football stadium has enough parking to accommodate all the people who showed up on Thursday. In the case of the Mall, this makes sense; there usually aren’t that many people there. In the case of Fedex Field, the football stadium, it’s a bit sillier. The stadium was built, after all, for events that bring close to 100,000 people together in the same place; it was built in 1995; and it was built miles from the nearest Metro station.

Because there isn’t enough parking at Fedex Field, though, a lot of people take the Metro anyway, and take $5 shuttle buses from the station to the stadium. (Just for comparison, the maximum fare you pay to get from any Metro station to any other Metro station in the Washington area is $3.60 during rush hours, $2.20 all other times.)

You’d think that the gala concert and football game would be good for Metro, the agency that runs Washington’s mass-transit systems. Increased ridership! Thousands upon thousands of people riding the train!

Well, if you think that, you’d be wrong, apparently. Metro is billing the NFL for $64,000 for its trouble on Thursday night.

Anticipating large crowds, Metro ran six-car trains and closed down at 2 a.m., instead of following their usual practice of running four-car trains and closing at midnight. When Metro proposed doing this ahead of time, and asked for $64,000 for the service, the NFL turned them down. Metro did it anyway, and now wants to be paid.

The NFL is telling Metro to get stuffed, and rightly so. I hope that the NFL has the resolve to stick with this, and to not give in to what is nothing more than extortion by Metro.

But that’s not the real problem here. The problem is that Metro quite clearly sees the service that is its entire reason for existence as a burden Keep the trains running to actually handle the demand? Aw, jeez, Edith!

It’s not entirely Metro’s fault, of course: running the trains longer does cost more, and while longer operating hours mean more riders, Metro’s costs are not covered by the fares that passengers pay. The difference is made up by a subsidy, but it’s not a per-passenger subsidy.

So Metro is not particularly anxious to have more demand for its trains. We ordinarily don’t even think about this; more customers mean more revenue, and in a for-profit system, this means more profits. In the world of subsidized transit, though, more customers mean bigger losses.

This might actually explain a lot about the Metro system.

Clearly, this is a broken subsidy. Far from encouraging use of mass transit, it puts the transit agency itself in the position of discouraging wider use. While I’d like to see people pay for their own transportation, the reality is that all forms of transportation are currently rather heavily subsidized. It seems to me that it would be possible to subsidize the Metro in a way that would also lead to the operating agency welcoming more business.

There’s nothing that makes Metrorail particularly expensive to operate. A Metro train has a single employee driving it (and even he’s not really needed; all he actually does in normal operation is make sure that nobody’s caught in the doors before pushing a button that tells the train to drive to the next station); each station has an employee or two in a booth near the entrance(s).

Nobody sets up in the subterranean-railroad business, though, because as a practical matter you just can’t build something like that as a private company. You’d never be allowed to dig the tunnels, to begin with, and even if you got permission, you’d have a very hard time coming up with the billions of dollars of up-front capital investment.

In this case, though, the government has already made that investment, and it’s already subsidizing the operation of the Metro.

If they were to sell off the operating agency lock, stock, and barrel, and lease the use of the tunnels and stations for, say, a 99-year period, there might be hope. The government could still be in charge of supplying capital for the infrastructure, much as it does now for roads. Instead of recouping some of its costs through fuel and vehicle taxes, it would collect lease payments from the mass-transit company.

The company, for its part, would be obliged to maintain the infrastructure and operate trains. It could charge as much or as little, and run as few or as many trains as it liked. It could buy real estate near stations and develop it into housing, shopping, and offices, and make money both on rental property and on train fares.

It would probably be a good idea to initially sign a short lease for the infrastructure, or to have a probationary period during which the whole experiment could be called off in case of poor performance by the operating company. But it would be important not to have too many controls, beyond requiring that they run trains, on what the company could do, and no subsidies other than the effectively discounted access to capital that’s represented by the lease on the tunnels. It’s important that the company be subjected to, and able to respond to, the forces of the market.

I’m under no illusion that any of this is going to happen, of course. Mass transit is seen as a “public service”, not a business. Until that changes, though, out mass-transit systems are going to continue to cost a fortune to operate, and to disappoint us with their apathy.

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