A few months ago, I paid a visit to Boston and spent some quality time with the MBTA’s bus service. After spending a while digging through T’s (excellent) open data, I had some thoughts to share about the experience—and bus operations in general. https://t.co/83IWloDlx6

Continuing my series of posts on the railroad industry's immense challenges managing complexity and market alignment, I have (finally) finished some thoughts on the trajectory of railroading's growth engine: intermodal https://t.co/tkVlSjlMIj

posting mostly on the other site now. see profile.

see: https://t.co/G1dFEtdmFZ https://t.co/qB1UcwXziO

Something I think about a lot: >30% of LA metro rail trips involve a bus transfer; bus connectivity is about as predictive of station-level ridership as is TOD in LA. Meanwhile, less than 20% of BART trips involve transfers to another operator (and that's including Muni xfers)

Such limits are eventually downstream of railroads' general refusal to grow ( https://t.co/ZJlGL8uw8H) but the point remains: if we want freight railroads to serve climate goals, we're going to need a second great era of intermodal experimentation

This model provides the cost-efficiency railroads desire, but it inherently limits intermodal's markets and reach. This model's logic is self perpetuating: its cost structure inhibits growth in smaller/faster/shorter-haul markets

As rail intermodal has matured, its services have coalesced around: - Domestic/international containers - Moving in double stack railcars - Assembled into long and generally dedicated trains - Which move over distances of 500 mi or more - And serve highly mechanized terminals

In the 1980s, American railroads experimented with a whole range of intermodal technologies/services that were designed to help railroads compete with trucks in short haul or service-sensitive markets. The last of these experiments dies this month: https://t.co/ziXOHFTJdY

Obviously the real answer here is to aggressively prioritize transit over traffic to reduce the chances of this sort of delay happening in the first place, but [things] do happen and good service management is key to managing those impacts--esp. on a rail line of the A's length

What you should consider doing in a situation like that is: > having the delayed train behind the gap skip lower-ridership stops to recover some of the gap (light blue) and/or > holding the train ahead of the gap to even out service (dark blue)

A great case study in the importance of service management--and variability control--on long rail lines. Looks like the trains (the lines) behind this gap got caught up in what I presume were street traffic delays (black circle), opening up a huge gap in service (red annotation)

The quote above is from https://t.co/RKlhyx8Kts

We should obviously build for effective ops, but we shld also work to minimize capital requirements driven by latent ops issues.

These design choices are entirely understandable efforts to mitigate the consequences of a ROW maintenance/construction regime that continues to require not-insignificant levels of disruption to daytime service.

LAMTA does a fairly good job with maintenance by American standards--we don't see the LRT network falling to 10mph as in Denver or the subway melting down as at WMATA. But there's still work to be done!

As others have pointed out, maintenance should be confined to outages during: - the first/last few hours of svc - overnight shutdowns - weekends/low ridership summer weeks, for a limited number of high-productivity initiatives

LAMTA's design standards ask for projects to provide sufficient crossovers to maintain a 10-min headway while single tracking. It's good to see ops-driven design, but from an intl perspective it's unusual to be single tracking 10 min service!

I talk a lot about how the American transit industry's seeming inability to efficiently conduct maintenance activities without disruption to weekday/weekend daytime service compromises its effectiveness. This is how it compromises its construction costs:

Faced with the choice between zero emission buses and providing good service, Austin’s transit agency is choosing good service. Expect this debate in many US cities. Battery electric technology just does not seem to be delivering on range and reliability.