Talking to the Director of the MBTA Commuter Rail

On March 4, Alexander and I had an opportunity to take part in the MWRTA meeting where Mr. Bob Stoetzel, the director of the MBTA Commuter Rail, was the main speaker. Below are some notes we took at the meeting, which I thought maybe of interest.

Things we learned:

• According to the MBTA CIP, the Commonwealth is providing funding for station improvements at the Yawkey Station.
• MBTA, not CSX, owns the tracks between Framingham and South Station
• MBTA does conference calls with CSX 3 times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, to go over every train delay and determine the cause of the problem
• Most of the problems now are caused by mechanical failure
• There is no spare equipment. In other words, in cases of a mechanical failure, there are no spare locomotives, coaches, etc to put in place of broken ones. According to Mr. Stoetzel, the industry norm is to have a 10-15% equipment surplus. However, MBTA has historically chosen to operate under a "if we own it, we use it" policy, with virtually no excess equipment.
• The train crew, including conductors, has to know the reason for a delay. It is the conductors’ responsibility to report the delay to the dispatch and provide the reason. The conductors are supposed to make announcements every 5 minutes on the status of the delay.
• Since December, it is now inappropriate for MBCR to blame a delay on CSX
• The P517/P526 occasional rescheduling is driven by MBTA’s snow policy, which in turn depends whether the mayor’s office declares a snow emergency in the city. Normally there are no outbound trains going past Framingham between noon and 4pm. Mr. Stoetzel made no comment about P517/P526 schedule changes made on the day before Thanksgiving and Christmas.
• ROC—Riders Oversight Committee—allows MBTA riders to be heard. ROC consists of 14 members, 7 of whom are general public. Currently none of the 7 general public members are commuter rail riders.
• New passenger information system is coming in approximately 2 years, that will be utilizing GPS and satellite technology to provide updates in real time. The current electronic display boards are updated via a series of phone calls initiated by the engineer of a delayed train. This system fails often.
• Customer Service emails submitted via the MBTA website are handled by MBCR, not by MBTA staff. Mr. Stoeztel does not have routine access to either the complaints or the MBCR responses. Up until 2 or 3 years ago these emails were handled by MBTA directly.

On the recent schedule changes:

• A study was conducted starting in December, pushed by State Representative, Alice Peisch, to help determine where the problems are
• The latest schedule was built from scratch (and by hand—no software)
• Many delays were caused by what is usually referred to as “residual delay”: if one train is delayed, the train following it has to travel with decreased speed, because it catches up with red signals left behind the delayed train
• To avoid the residual delay, the new schedules increased the time between trains to be at least 20-25 minutes. [I think this may be more relevant to peak direction trains].
• Mr. Stoetzel acknowledges that the schedule changes were geared towards peak direction commuters. Historically, the schedules are arranged with only the peak direction commuters in mind. The reverse direction train schedule is determined on the basis of how best to get the equipment, i.e. the trains, in the strategically correct locations at the proper time to better serve the peak direction commuters. Mr. Stoetzel also said that the reverse commuter volume has been steadily growing, and that MBTA may start looking into how to change the schedules in order to serve the reverse direction commuters better.
• Mr. Stoetzel granted that if the P526 can stop at Yawkey on game nights, it should be possible to make this stop on non-game nights as well. He did not have an explanation for this inconsistency.