> By the way, the Examiner has been publishing daily Metro stats showing the
> average headway between trains leaving Embarcadero during the afternoon
> commute. The trains are listed by J,K,L,M or N. The Metro seems to be
> running much better. When Muni receives 50 new Breda cars in a few years,
> there might actually be enough room for all the passengers to get on board.
>
I'm happy to see the first publication of something resembling stats on how
Muni is doing (Muni Metro). However, the stats reported are averages. This
is
completely inadequate. If Muni says that L's ran an average headway of
8 minutes during rush hour, this tells us very little. Muni Metro must manage
by the minutes. Though it does not sound like much, if an L car comes at
an interval of 12 minutes versus 8 minutes, and we are already far more
overcrowded than any transit system in the Bay Area, this means that the
L car would have to accomodate 50% more riders than planned. Then if the
next L came just 4 minutes later, it would provide useful service to only 50%
of those planned for. The first is providing terrible service quality. The
second
is wasting precious resources that we continually hear are in such short
supply.
To illustrate further, an average of 8 minutes could as easily mean individual
headways of 15, 1, 12, 4, 8, 4, 12 as it could mean 8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8. It
could
even mean that the headways were 23, 1, 4, 6, 14, 2, 22....utterly
unacceptable.
The stats that Muni must calculate and provide to the media are the standard
deviations by line. The more the variance, the worse the performance and the
less reliable riders find using the service.
Also, Max's comments on how he would use the proposed PCC car service
were interesting. Given that Muni's resources are limited, what he said (that
he would use the PCC car going downtown in the morning but would take
the subway out in the evening and change at Church), if it was the general
response by riders, would mean that Muni should run a far higher number of
PCC cars in the morning than the afternoon. Either the operators would be
part-time workers or they would work split schedules and operate something
other than PCC's on Market St. for the evening commute.
-Ken