[Transit] Bus and Transit Service (BATS) Workgroup meeting reminder

[amy]

Hey folks,



I'm really sorry I won't be able to join today due to a conflict. During
our last meeting, I took an action to see if I could uncover any data that
would help us understand national or worldwide baseline uptime for
conveyance systems like the elevators and escalators in Seattle's downtown
transit tunnel.



My research wasn't super successful, but here's the steps I took to find
the info:



My first step was to try to identify any centralized source of the data,
hopefully validated and benchmarked.



COMET <https://communityofmetros.org/> (Community of Metros) and GOAL
<https://goalbenchmarking.org/> (Benchmarking Group of North American Light
Rail Systems): COMET describes itself as "an international benchmarking
system of subways." Both programs are run by the Imperial College of
London. They survey large and medium metro systems worldwide (Sound Transit
is a member) across a variety of measurements and compile the
results….except they only share them with the participating transit
agencies, not with the public. I emailed the GOAL program manager last week
to explain what I was looking for and ask if they could share any data,
even summarized or de-identified, or point me in the right direction. I
haven't heard back.



Federal Transit Administration: This USDOT agency links to some interesting
transit data resources (such as the National Transit Database
<https://www.transit.dot.gov/ntd/what-national-transit-database-ntd-program>
and Public Transportation Infrastructure Database
<https://www.apta.com/research-technical-resources/transit-statistics/transit-infrastructure-database/>
) but I couldn't find any that tracked conveyance equipment uptime - just
#s of escalators and escalators per station. Also, the data is kind of
stale (2 - 4 years old) and in the case of the Transit Database, the data
is only shared with transit agencies.



In all cases the data collected by these organizations is self-reported by
transit agencies and only minimally validated by error checking.



Ok fine gatekeepers, I guess if you want something you have to do it
yourself. So my second step was to go to a few websites for major systems
that have subways/transit tunnels like New York's MTA and Chicago's CTA.



I didn't find much summarized elevator/escalator uptime data, which I
assume is because


   - Agencies are not required to report it to the Feds as far as I can
   tell and;
   - the agencies all seem pretty self-conscious about it in ways that
   sound similar to Sound Transit's presentations on the issue.

I suspect there's probably some relevant data in board meeting minutes…but
I'm going to need a lot more time to manually comb through all that.



Questions to the group:


   - Are you aware of any resources or strategies for finding this
   information that I missed?
   - Do you think it's a worthwhile use of my time to keep digging in with
   the various transit systems to try to find data?

Hope this is helpful, thanks! Again, very sorry I won't be able to join
tonight. Feel free to assign me some action items.



Best regards,

Amy

On Fri, Sep 23, 2022 at 12:04 PM Jo Claxton <msjoclaxton at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello BATS,
> Our monthly meeting is on Monday at 6:30pm.
> Here is the meeting link:
> https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87231952291?pwd=NVpGS0NoOTIvTDcxcjBHREc3cFphdz09
> <https://www.google.com/url?q=https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87231952291?pwd%3DNVpGS0NoOTIvTDcxcjBHREc3cFphdz09&sa=D&source=calendar&usd=2&usg=AOvVaw087GaNybgx5b_ue0FCJHzw>
>
> Saunatina and I will update you on the meeting we had with the Port
> Commissioners regarding the skybridge and airport transit.
> AND, we can discuss more about our next project, vertical conveyances!
> Thanks,
> Jo
>
> _______________________________________________
> Transit mailing list
> Transit at transitriders.org
> http://lists.transitriders.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/transit
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.transitriders.org/pipermail/transit/attachments/20220926/3b2b0f0b/attachment.html>