What's in a Name?

I'm sure that more than a few people have wondered about the title of my blog. Well, here's a link that explains it all: Baltimore - 'Home of 1,000 Slogans'

Update on the Red Line

The MTA has released a survey of the results of the public comment period!  Yes, I actually did put an explanation point behind that.  It's a pretty dry 18-pages, so I'll summarize it for you.

Generally, there were two types of comments:

1.  People who want light rail, mostly 4C

2.  People who live in West Baltimore and don't trust the MTA not to screw up their neighborhood.

You can hear that frustration in the explanation from the MTA that:

"The MTA has repeatedly indicated in the AA/DEIS documentation that there will be no residential displacements with any of the Red Line alternatives.  Twenty‐eight comments, 2 from organizations and 26 from individuals, from the west side of the corridor stated concern about the loss of their home or property from the Red Line."

Anyway, I can see why the MTA seems to have (it seems) delayed a little from what it seemed like their schedule was.  A whole lot of the comments received were critical of the surface alignment on Edmonson Avenue.  A large enough number of these comments expressed concern about the surface alignment that it's hard to just ignore them.

There was another faction that opposed a surface route along Boston Street, but not nearly as many as you'd expect.

Anyway, although the MTA isn't going to announce the chosen configuration until summer, the comments are pretty overwhelmingly in favor of option 4C (which I also support and encouraged people to support).  

The Red Line website says that the MTA will select the "Locally Preferred Alternative (LPA)" in "summer 2009".  Not much of a hard date, but at least it's a goal.  In the end though, I just hope they build something.  You can't please all of the people, but the MTA has to please enough of the people to get this into the design and build phase in time to get federal funding.

Finally, I just wanted to note that there were 499 comments from individuals, including 72 in favor of option 4C.  I'm pretty certain that at least 5 people made comments based on my blog post and Facebook event, so it's totally possible I was responsible for over 1% of individual comments!!  Also interesting is the map with where they received comments from.  I'm definitely responsible for at least one or two of the comments from outside the Baltimore area or state of Maryland (there were only 29 of those).  So I feel pretty happy having contributed to the process - go process, go!

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Also, Sheila Dixon's Red Line website is actually starting to look pretty good.   Although it does still contain the phrase "Baltimore... We Got Next... the Next Generation of Light Rail, that is.  The Red Line... OMG!!!"

MARC Train Policies - I'm Sorry

So a recent comment on my blog post regarding the MTA's policies on MARC trains has shown that I didn't do enough in-depth research on the MARC train website.

The comment refutes my points pretty well.  Yes, I could stand behind the claim of "Well, it's not well publicized if I didn't know this information" - but when you're wrong, you're wrong.

I still believe that there's a better "MARC Train Tracker" that what exists, but I'll give them credit for trying.

The only thing I would really say is that if the MARC fare box recovery rate is 60% at peak travel times does not preclude a profitable weekend train.  I'd just like to see more of the analysis and assumptions that go into the calculations.  It seems like that math should all be published in a report somewhere.  There could be a nice section on the MARC website called "Latest MARC Reports" with summarizes of the information they provide to the MTA and to the State of Maryland.  Why would this information not be published?

So to everyone at the MTA and the MARC train (if you ever stumble upon this post) - I'm sorry, I spoke/blogged before I really had my facts straight.

What a Difference a Couple of Years Make

So a couple years ago I'd been working for nearly 3 years since graduation.  My company has a pension plan, which I considered to be an anachronism of an earlier time.  It's completely beyond my control!  There's nothing I can do to save more or less.  Plus, everyone knows you change jobs too much in the modern economy for a pension to really make any sense.  I wasn't even vested in it and I had much more money in my 401(k).  Besides, what are the odds the pension program will even exist when I retire?

I complained about this to a couple friends who had worked there around 5 years (at the time) and they both said "Well, I figure that the company will have to buy me out eventually, so it doesn't bother me that much that it exists."

Two years and a financial crisis later, the pension plan is looking pretty attractive.  I actually read the plan details this afternoon!  Despite putting a lot more money into my 401(k) it's value by 50% of the money I put in - for every $1.00 I put in, I had $0.50 left.  Meanwhile, over the course of the last two years the cash-benefit value of my pension has doubled (between pay-based credits and interest credits).   Suddenly the idea of a pension isn't so terrible.

I imagine that I'm not the only person in there mid- to late-20's coming to this conclusion.  We heard all the conventional wisdom that the day of the pension was over and it was all about individual retirement saving accounts (401(k)'s, 403(b)'s, IRA's, etc.).  After this financial crisis I wouldn't be surprised to see people actually viewing a pension plan more positively.

One the lessons I've really taken from all of this is that there's a lot more bad advice out there than good advice.  I sort of always ignored the price appreciation in the real estate market because I didn't think that it was sustainable, but I was pretty shocked by how terrible the financial institutions of this country were run.  I can't be the only person that's going to wary of any investment advice for a few years.  Perhaps we'll see a resurgence of lower-return, lower-risk investments and savings.  

It might even be worth re-examining the aversion to defined benefits programs.  Many arguments that I've heard against defined benefits plans rest on the assumptions that the stock market will return 8% every year and that individuals are good at investing their money.  Now that we've had a stark reminder that defined contribution programs (like individually managed 401(k)'s) can lose a lot of money, perhaps we can work on how to make defined benefits plans work more effectively.  They can be costly to companies and governments, no shareholder likes a big earnings hit when the pension fund under-performs, but perhaps that's a price worth paying to allow workers to have some financial safety net for retirement.

It's a thought at least...

MARC Train Policies - The Opposite of a Good Idea

(Update 8/8/09: I definitely wrote this after a bad experience on the MARC. After many more good experiences, I've written a new post on the system usage. Yes, there are frustrating commutes sometimes, but in general don't listen to my post below, just enjoy the train.)

(Update 4/21/09: Apparently some of the features that I wish the MARC system had already exist - mea culpa)

It's been a long, cold winter, but recently the weather has gotten nice enough for me to think, "Perhaps I should start taking the train to work again." From where I live I have the opportunity to walk to Penn Station, then take the MARC train, then walk 15 minutes to my office.

This morning, after not having ridden the train in some time, I was quite confused that I could not purchase a "10-trip pass" at the kiosk. These passes were mildly discounted from the normal fare, but not as cheap as a weekly pass. It turns out that the MTA eliminated 10-trip passes on January 9th, 2009. So what are your options?

Single trip ticket - $4.00

Weekly Pass - $30.00

10-trip pass - $32.00 ELIMINATED!

Monthly Pass - $100.00

That's it! You can buy a weekly pass, but unless you commute round-trip 4 days a week, you lose money. Or you can buy single trip tickets. As other bloggers have pointed out, all this is going to do is convince occasional riders to drive instead. Even with expensive gas, the ten-trip pass was more expensive than driving. Now that gas is cheaper, the MTA has decided that the train should be more expensive.

I'd go even further. Even if I decided to suck it up because I wanted to keep from putting miles on my car (and avoid an expensive repair for awhile), I'm going to have a buy a ticket for every trip. Either every time I walk into the train station or I'll have to buy a stack of them and hope I use them all before they expire. Also, I'll need a stack for each direction. I mean, eliminating or reducing the discount on the ten-trip pass sort of makes sense, I know the state budget is strained, but why does it make sense eliminate the existence of a multi-trip pass?

It seems like the MTA treats the MARC trains as a luxury service offered to the people of Maryland. Newsflash: people who ride the trains are part of the solution for congestion and sprawl!

The other thing that doesn't seem to register in the minds of the MTA - if the service is more flexible, people on the fence will use the service more often. And why is there still no weekend MARC service? In the morning, run a train from north to south, then back up. In the evening, repeat. I bet MARC weekend service would be pretty overwhelmingly popular. Sure, if you have a weekly or monthly pass you can ride Amtrak on the weekends, but I'm talking about making the train work for occasional users. Basically every person I know in Baltimore who has friends in DC has wished that there was some sort of weekend MARC service. I bet you could actually turn a profit on weekend service!

I am definitely a big proponent of realism and understanding that there's only so much money to go around. But mass transit is more than just a service, it's a way to reduce pollution and congestion. Better, more consistent, rail connections within Maryland should be a priority - not an afterthought in the state budget.

So I was just talking with my girlfriend about questions that I have about MARC train service that don't have real answers:

1. Why don't we know the on-time percentage of MARC trains? It's not rocket science, this is the year 2009. Surely someone could record when a train arrived at a station and then have that information put into some sort of database. If this isn't already done, seriously, why not? If it is, then why isn't this information public?

2. Seriously, what does it cost to run a train from Baltimore to Washington, DC and back? Why is this not public information? If it's so expensive that you can't offer this service, prove it! Or at least experiment with it.

3. Why can't we put a damn GPS receiver on every train? Stick with me here, this is a pretty advanced concept. Put a GPS receiver on the trains, have it transmit data back to some main server every 60 seconds or so, make this data publicly available for anyone to view. Sound difficult? It's not, you could do this with an iPhone and a free app. Maybe with something a little more advanced people could see where their train was while waiting in their nice warm car instead of freezing to death on the platform.

Here's a proposal. How about we tie the incentive pay structure in the MTA to on-time percentage? I mean, why not expand this to figuring out if the Light Rail runs on time or even the buses? GPS units are not that expensive and if you don't go wild and hire too expensive of a contractor to implement the software it wouldn't kill you to even outfit the buses.

I think the reason that MARC train riders are always so frustrated with the MTA is just the lack of transparency. For me, it's the lack of vision. The Baltimore-Washington metro area is not going to get any less urbanized. If the suburban park-and-rides are already overcrowded, it's not going to get any better. It's time for some real leadership and vision. I'm talking about an elected official willing to stand up and say "Hey, this costs money, but we're going to need this in 25 years, so we have to spend the money now." Then, they'd actually have to think about how to re-design public transit to lay the infrastructure for the next 50 years instead of just tacking on bus routes after the people are already there!

Impulse Buying in the 21st Century

So I was listening to a Podcast from NPR's "All Songs Considered" (for those of you doubting my yuppie-cred, QED) this evening and I hear host Bob Boilen say, "Our next artist is a Canadian rapper by way of Somalia..."  I reacted as you'd expect - "Of course NPR is playing Somali-Canadian rapper, it's just too damn quirky to leave alone."  But then the guy was GOOD.

You might not believe me, so here's K'naan's music video for Dreamer:

How can you not get behind someone with lyrics as creative as "We're from the only place worse than Kandahar; yeah that's kinda hard" in the midst of a song about how there's nothing wrong with having a good time.  So I've decided to put my money where my mouth is and make that impulse purchase.  I've just downloaded K'naan's second album Troubadour.  It's only $8 on iTunes and it's definitely something different to listen to.

Overall, I have to say that I'm surprised by how much I enjoy All Songs Considered.  It's not all necessarily stuff I'd pick out to listen to a lot, but for the variety of styles Bob Boilen chooses, I like an awful lot of it.  I guess having good taste in music is his job after all.