Got your attention? The Metropolitan Area Planning Council got mine earlier this week with their finding that implementation of the MBTA’s two deficit reduction scenarios would cause “roughly 10 avoidable” to “about 15 avoidable deaths per year”. That’s right, 10-15 deaths per year. Continue reading “Fund the MBTA, or People Will Die!” »

Taking a break from the MBTA finance wars, we look at that little Venn diagram overlap between transit enthusiasts and infographic fans: the world of subway map redesign.

Designing a subway map takes real skill and requires a series of choices — how to balance geographic accuracy with clean visuals; how much system detail to communicate, etc.

There’s an audience of people out there critiquing map designs. In London, the Underground system map opts for a grid-based system to organize its very complex system. But that organization comes at the price of distorting the geographic relationships between stations, as a critical redesign points out.

New York redesigned its subway map several years ago, opting for a more geographical accurate design. And a critic’s redesign was made to show a more abstract, cleaner design.

Now, we’ve got an entrant for our own MBTA. The T map recently had layers of data added as part of a redesign, in effort to better include key bus routes and offer the subway up as part of a larger system. That redesign has been criticized as too cluttered by some:

Click for full version from the MBTA. Continue reading “Revising the MBTA” »

I had the pleasure of doing Bradley Jay’s radio show on WBZ a few weeks ago. We talked about the MBTA, but what really lit up the phone lines was our discussion of potential savings from reform of the T’s RIDE paratransit program. Most of the callers were concerned that eligibility reforms would take away their transportation.

But it appears that the MBTA could save a lot of money just by restructuring the service, before even dealing with eligibility issues. The state’s Inspector General has come out with a report that analyzes the RIDE alongside other paratransit programs operating within in the state and determined that a key difference in business practices between the Ride and other paratransit providers results in very different costs per trip. The report concludes that the cost gap between the two results in $60 million in excess costs per year for the MBTA (on a program budget of approximately $90 million).

The T has responded noting that they are held to a higher service standard and that their data is more systematic. But tellingly, they also note that they are bound to their current contracts until 2014 and then will be exploring these reforms.

Crossposted at Pioneer Institute’s blog.