jim uber

^The "expected" arrival times were supposed to be replaced with "actual" arrival times by end of last week. Hopefully that will happen soon.

Unless you are actually good at it, which is rare, badminton is more fun than tennis. Can be played anywhere, and someone good can play with someone inexperienced and still both have fun.

Cincinnati would essentially be in this group, geographically, due to the NOTL AMC theater just across the river in Newport, KY. It's not exactly on the DT street grid, but it is adjacent to a pedestrian bridge and the Banks/Smale park make the walk there pleasant.

Thank God for John Deatrick. Please don't go anywhere, at least until we have a successful next phase.

^That's good, of course. I've ridden dozens of times, however, and I can assure you that the wait times are highly variable and not at all indicative of a 12-15 minute headway. I think that's been essentially proven. I want to be clear, though, that my particular concern, and I think for many folks, is not the "speed" that the streetcar travels (except inasmuch as that affects headways). Bottom line, once I get on, I'm in a happy place, and I can sit there and daydream or talk to someone (or look at my phone, of course). I just don't like the waiting experience, and particularly the uncertainty/variability of it. I also agree with jmecklenborg[/member] that these problems are all very solvable. The problem is that we don't know if they are being solved, and on what timetable they will be solved. Many people here blame Cranley and I'm certainly no fan. But frankly its SORTA/Transdev that has the operations contract. They need to start acting like its in their best interests to be proactive. You know, like taking part in Council agendas, giving regular updates that are publicized, laying out clear schedules for planned improvements, etc. I mean, go to the SORTA streetcar page; it links to a City site. I'm astonished at that. You'd think that in 2016 part of a basic operations contract would include little details like, you know, maintaining and advertising an active and meaningful web presence.

Yeah I don't want to be alarmist but I am getting concerned. It won't take too much more of this poor operational execution, combined with the inability of SORTA to effectively market and let the public know that "we are aware of these issues and this is our plan", before some people will start repeating the narrative about it being a toy and a crappy way to get around downtown/OTR. I mean buses are really not that bad but a huge fraction of the population thinks they suck without ever riding in one. And they don't change their minds easily. I wonder how much longer SORTA thinks we've got to make a good first impression.

I'm not usually one to subscribe to conspiracy theories - let alone creating one - but ... given the obvious problems with meeting the scheduled 12-15 min headway I'm starting to think SORTA may not want accurate real time arrival info on reader boards and apps, because it would then be obvious the headways are not being met. That's a contractual issue that's been contentious with the city already. At least that fits the data and could explain why a feature available elsewhere isn't part of our brand new state-of-the-art streetcar.

I've been asked to show my ticket twice.

I've bitched about this to everyone I could think of, as well as (related) why it's important to have real time arrival info on the reader boards and on apps. The short answer, I think, is "hey this is a new system and we will have it someday, so quit complaining, be patient, and stop pretending that your time is so valuable that you can't just sit and wait for the next streetcar. Plus we are working on signal preemption and can't really do two things at once." I hope I'm wrong but if I were betting on when this is fixed it would be 6 months.

People have said they are derived from sensors at the doors that I assume are paired with software to count people coming in and leaving, and sum up the number of people entering. At least the intent seems to measure use, not fares collected. But there's also been indications of software problems with these counts.

That's pretty amazing. I don't go there often but it always seems to be packed when I do. Don't know what the folks who drink and have dogs will do now.

I've ridden about 12 times, and I've been asked to show a validated ticket once. They are out there. Folks on board who had a ticket but it was not validated were asked to get off at the next stop and validate it, and then get back on.

Yeah but I just saw this a few minutes ago at Findlay and Race

SORTA removed schedule info from reader boards. [emoji106]

I wish that I could have said it so well and succinctly. We have "high enough" frequency for this to be convenient, but not high enough to rest solely on it. 12-15 minute headway is good, because it means 6-7.5 minutes average wait, but it's not nice when you are on the 12-15 minute end, which you will be. And, that's after the traffic light priority / preemption / timing issues are worked out. A few of you seem to imply that when we finally solve the "bunching" problem, then everything will be OK - i.e either that the frequency is then high enough and regular enough, or maybe you're implying that we'll actually achieve "strict adherence to a schedule." Personally, I don't think that the frequency alone will be high enough to meet the demands of the consumers that we're targeting. And thinking that we'll ever run this in the southern loop traffic and achieve "strict adherence to a schedule" is folly. The current situation is made worse than it ever needed to be, because SORTA made the decision to post what I guess is the "schedule" for the next three streetcars on the reader board, and tried really hard to make it look like real time information. I'd have thought they would recognize that people respond differently to flashing / scrolling electronic text compared to, say, a paper schedule in a yellowed piece of plastic tacked to a post. In my experience every single person who is new to the streetcar and looks up at that board assumes it is the word of the streetcar God and is amazed when it turns out to be wrong. The reactions I've observed are totally consistent with "you just lied to me." I personally felt that way, which is probably why I'm spewing vitriol here on this issue, despite being amongst the most fervent streetcar supporters. The good news is that technology is slowly replacing "strict adherence to a schedule" with "I'll tell you the approximate frequency, plus accurate information about when the next car will arrive, at zero cost to you" - i.e. on smartphones, web browsers, and the reader board. Its a better option for both the agency and the customer. Some of you have implied that real time tracking is more-or-less a luxury and that demanding it be done, as a priority item, is being overly "dramatic." You are wrong. Yes, it's true that transit systems all over the world continue to operate without this technology. But when transit systems are invented that are viewed as better, they win. That's why cars reduced our transit systems in the US to miserable systems for people who "have no other option." This is about building and operating a system that competes with cars, and slowly wins over those folks, not one that is "as good as" anything that we had before. Real time tracking is not just some weeny and badly applied software tech, like being able to see inside my refrigerator before I open it - it's fundamental and enabling technology that is an important part of the solution that allows transit to compete with cars. And, nobody has implied that implementing this technology will change things "overnight." That assumption would be about as stupid as any COAST argument against the streetcar that I can remember. People are not computers that integrate over an ensemble of previous trips and calculate that the median wait time is 7.2 minutes and that the risk of being late by 15 minutes is acceptably low; they're emotional beings that are made to sit for 20 minutes one time, are late for lunch with their friends, conflate that experience with everything else about government that they like to bitch about, and then live to tell about it, over and over and over again. And it takes us a long time to get them back. This is about slowly winning these folks back through an unrelenting standard of excellence in design, construction (both already achieved), and operations that shocks them so much, it starts to fracture their (wrong) underlying world view that "everything about transit sucks." That's what I've always thought this streetcar was about, and I know I'm far from alone. So, yeah, I'm all for the hard work to win over DOTE on signaling issues, supporting SORTA with operating rules that try to reduce bunching, cause that's all good and rowing in the right direction. But I won't be convinced that realtime transit tracking is somehow a luxury that comes after these issues. I'll think about all of these as pieces of a bridge where until we achieve each of them we won't get to where we need to be. Practically, I also get that SORTA is resource constrained, and all of this urgent talk about realtime arrivals can end up as a big rope-pushing exercise. Not fun. SORTA probably can't do this alone. We should be lobbying friends at the City to help. Councilman Sittenfeld is chairing a "smart cities workgroup" that would be perfect to take this up, and I'll be suggesting just that. Maybe others can do the same.

Also, the real-time arrival information is borderline irrelevant. When I was a kid, my dad used to catch the bus next to a telephone pole with an orange stripe. Spare me. And how's that transit system been working for ya all this time?

So you don't hire them. You contract with them.

It's probably not that easy because the guys have to be taken off of other jobs which might have deadlines or are otherwise deemed more imprortant. I have never worked at a company where there weren't nagging, and sometimes disastrous problems with the business software, and owners or senior management who simply Do Not Understand Computers. I'm a partner in a software company that provides data integration services for the water industry. We don't do this particular thing, but I know enough to say that the problem usually lies with not having the right people on the bus. Government agencies are notoriously bad in this regard, when it comes to moving data around. This is a new and wonderful software world. Have a look at the above Google link - it's readable. This is a huge technology base, and you are reaping benefits from it every single day, whether you know it or not. There are people who know how to do this.

Pretty sure Metro has a rule against that They don't even need to call each other, if each driver just placed a cell phone somewhere in the streetcar it could be tracked using many apps. We are acting like this real time location services is some rare technology when literally every smart phone already has had it for 6+ years. Yep, funny. I can buy a little battery powered coin-sized thingy with a GPS / cell chip and map/track whatever I decide to stick it on. Now there's obvious important details about an industrial system, but its the availability of cheap versions of this that make not having it so maddening. And Google has tons of resources and community pages about writing to their live transit API https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs-realtime/. SORTA is obviously just not very resourceful in this area. They are flailing with their own personnel and legacy systems. They probably should kick their IT staff in the butt and hire someone who knows cloud platforms, modern web languages and interfaces, and build this.

Ryan, I sent a note to Grether. He thinks your idea of getting rid of scheduled arrival time on the reader boards and just reporting out when the next three streetcars will arrive has merit. Also, someone else suggested putting route maps in the head liner above each door. No answer on that yet. Since you guys are "in the know" and talking to these folks, I just have to press on some details here. What do you mean by reporting "when the next three streetcars will arrive"? Do you mean using the eventual RT arrival data (after those problems are solved)? Since we don't have that information now, I'd also ask that Grether be requested to eliminate the scheduled times entirely from the board, until the RT data is online.

No, but we can and should squarely blame SORTA, as loudly as possible, for a failure to deliver a realtime arrival data system, and for displaying lies on the station displays.

We probably should focus on signal timing, and maybe even zero in on it as the main problem. But it isn't the first problem we should solve, because it's going to take a little while. The core of this complaint, the same one I've had and I'm sure many others, isn't about streetcar frequency -- it's about the expectation of frequency. If there was real time arrival information made available to Googles API, then when joshknut[/member] checked his phone, he would have seen he had time to finish that beer before going to the station. And when he got to that station he would have seen a quick update on actual arrival on the displays. He might not have been happy that the next car was 20 minutes out, but he would have probably taken it in stride, called someone to say he'd be late, etc. So again, I fully agree that signal timing is important. But until we have a system where streetcars are reliably running every 10 minutes or so, I'd say that reliable RT arrival information is an equally important near term objective. The thing is, this doesn't involve lots of money, or shouldn't. And it doesn't involve the ornery DOTE. It involves SORTA hiring a company who has done this before and making it a priority to get it done. And that should have happened during the testing phase. I'm still incredulous and frankly rather incensed that it did not. That's because, like joshknut[/member] I'm a big supporter of this and I absolutely hate seeing any negative opinion be created by things that just should've been nailed down.

^YES. I can't believe that SORTA couldn't figure that out by now

^^that doesn't address my concern about selling to the region. You aren't going to get to the point of selling to the Feds without selling the region/city first. The problem as I see it is that the city, John Deatrick, the prime and subs did a great job designing and installing the infrastructure. Operating it will, however, ultimately be where the sell is made in the hearts and minds of the public. I do not get a feeling of confidence that SORTA is up to this task. I hope I'm wrong but I also think they need to be pressured by everyone to hold to a high standard. I mean this crap with octoberfest is just the latest and what terrible marketing it is. It's as if they do not take as job #1 the efficient movement of people and the expansion of their ability to do so throughout our region.

I'm concerned that SORTA is the agency we need to put our faith in to sell greater investments in transit to the city and the region.