Tag Archives: 7000 series

More charts from my obsessive Metro trip tracking

After fiddling with my spreadsheet full of tracking the individual metro railcars I’ve ridden, I’ve got a few more charts to show my year-plus worth of Metro trips.

Part of the reason I didn’t have these charts before is that dealing with time as a field in Excel/Google sheets is kinda a pain. It’s not always a clear number, but I was nevertheless able to sort it out.

So, some charts:

Trip Distribution: What does my overall trip distribution look like? Surprise, surprise! It’s peak-heavy.

The red lines indicate the break points for WMATA’s fare changes. A few obvious trends emerge:

  • Most of my rides are during the peak, right around peak commuting times.
  • Most of my off-peak riders are mid-day, using Metro to attend out of office work meetings, etc.
  • My PM commute is bi-modal, often due to two separate trips as I usually do day-care pickup.
  • Very few evening trips (again, likely thanks to that day-care pickup)

Railcar Distribution: One of the other observations was the unequal distribution of railcars across the system, particularly for the 3000 series.

I made these distribution charts for each rail car series. For example, here is the 6000 series:

You can see I’ve ridden cars across the entire 6000 series fleet. I’ve ridden in two of those cars five times each. As of the creation of this chart, I’ve ridden in 97 of the 192 cars in the 6000 series.

The distribution of my rides in the 7000 series is different:

The pattern is different, due to the continual expansion of the 7000 series fleet. The lower number cars are older and have this been around longer, and with more chances for me to ride them. And the distribution reflects that (note that this chart goes up to the eventual size of the 7000 fleet, which is not yet in full service).

But if you look at the 3000 series, the pattern is different:

As you can see, I haven’t ridden many cars above number ~3150. The reason is that I seldom ride the Red Line, and most of those cars appear to be isolated on the Red Line:

(Apologies for the automatically adjusting vertical scale) Obviously, this is not a huge sample, but the only Red Line 3000-series trips I’ve taken are on the older half of the fleet.

The Red Line is the most isolated line on the system. Also, I ride it the least (and therefore am unlikely to pick up small changes to the fleet management practices).

The next big fleet milestone will be the arrival of the full set of 7000 series railcars, along with the retirement of the 5000 series. That will probably trigger the last round of shifting yard assignments for a given fleet until the arrival of the proposed 8000 series.

More train doors and wider doors will help WMATA capacity

It’s always fun to stumble across official analysis that mirrors your own – even if some of the conclusions differ.

With a hat tip to Kurt Raschke, I came across this document outlining WMATA’s challenges in providing capacity in the core of the system. Most of the white paper focuses on potential increases in rail capacity from changing WMATA’s signalling system from the current fixed-block system to a CBTC-based moving block system (they do not find a large practical boost in capacity from such a change).

The document is part of making the long-term case for additional rail tunnels through downtown. In order to justify that expense, they are addressing some of the preliminary alternatives to squeeze more capacity out of the existing system (organization before electronics before concrete). From the executive summary:

As train and station congestion worsens, a question logically posed by stakeholders and the public is” “Why can’t Metrorail add more trains to relieve the crowding?” The fundamental purpose of this White Paper is to present the root causes of Metrorail capacity constraints that limit service expansion in the core.

One thing that jumped out at me was the suggestion of procuring new rail cars with more doors and wider doors – a suggestion I’ve made before.  More doors can better handle boarding and alighting, reducing station dwell times, and thereby improving both capacity and reliability. The benefits are substantial (emphasis added):

[T]he benefits in terms of reduced dwell times for a 60 second dwell time would likely be in the range of 8-12 seconds (a 20-30% reduction in that portion of the dwell associated with passenger alighting/boarding with no effect on the base door cycle time dwell component of about 20 seconds). Assuming all cars of all trains have four doors per side, this is equivalent to a throughput gain of about 2 trains per hour.

The white paper also includes this table (which bears a striking resemblance to one I put together several years ago):

WMATA Capacity Analysis, comparison of ingress/egress for rail cars in peer systems.

WMATA Capacity Analysis, comparison of ingress/egress for rail cars in peer systems.

Despite the obvious benefits of this change, the white paper downplays the potential for increasing the system’s overall capacity. Addressing them one by one:

As shown in Table 9, relative to car length, the boarding and alighting capacity of Metrorail vehicles closely matches the capabilities of peer systems’’ vehicles. WMATA’s rolling stock matches the median of those sampled for both the number of doors per unit car length, and the total door width per unit car length, though both of these values are slightly below the mean. While procuring or modifying vehicles to increase the number and size of doors may conceivably increase the rate at which passengers could board and alight, it would be an unconventional method for increasing total passenger carrying capacity.

I wouldn’t agree with the statement that all of these railcars closely match. In the rightmost column (inches of door width per foot of car length), you’ll see that the busiest of WMATA’s peers have a door capacity 50% greater than WMATA, or more.  The difference between WMATA’s 2 in/foot and Toronto’s 3.2 in/foot is huge.

Second, the major benefit to adding more doors isn’t an increase in absolute capacity, but to improve reliability and the passenger experience. More doors means a smoother flow of passengers on and off trains. Faster station dwells, particularly at crowded transfer points, reduces the likelihood of passengers holding doors or missing a train because of a lack of time to board.

Next: the time required to make this change.

Although this rolling stock change could be implemented incrementally as each Metrorail fleet type is retired, full implementation would require over 40 years due to the life cycles of the multiple Metrorail fleets.

All the more reason to get started with a four-door design for the next rail car series! And another reason to consider the design of the 7000 series a missed opportunity.

What about lost seating?

Second, implementing a new railcar design with four doors per side would result in a net seat reduction of approximately 28 percent, requiring more customers to stand.

I’m not sure where this calculation comes from; a cab car (A-car) from WMATA’s 7000 series seats 64 with the current arrangement and 58 with a longitudinal-only seating array. Toronto’s Rocket cab cars feature a similar rail car size (75 feet long) and feature four wide doors per side; they still manage to provide 53 seats, representing a 17% decrease over the 7000 series seated capacity.

WMATA’s own actions show that seated capacity isn’t a primary consideration. WMATA has been slowly reducing the number of seats per rail car series and increasing standing room with each new version; the original 1000 series had seating for 82; the 2000 series sat 76 per car; the 5000 series seats 68, and the 6000 series seats 64.

Given the stated goal of this white paper to determine potential for long-term solutions to WMATA’s core capacity challenges, I hope they don’t discard the idea of adding more doors to the future railcar fleet. Combined with some other suggestions, there’s a great opportunity to improve both the system’s capacity and reliability.

Improving passenger information in WMATA’s 7000 series railcars

As more of WMATA’s new 7000 series railcars enter service, more riders get a chance to experience the new cars in regular service, under the demands of everyday use. The same is true for me – after several chances to ride the new cars in regular service, I have a few observations – particularly relating to passenger information.

I’ve written previously about the big-picture issues for WMATA’s next railcar design: maximizing the usefulness of the existing system means changing railcars to more efficiently move people through the system – and that means more doors, wider doors, open gangways, different seating arrangements, etc.

There’s also room for improving the passenger information systems. The 7000 series include lots of new features, including real-time displays and automated station announcements. Each car has two types of LED displays – a screen that can scroll any kind of text near the end of each car, easily visible from anywhere onboard, and a variable display showing the next stops the train will serve.

7000 series information displays - photo by the author.

7000 series information displays circled in red – photo by the author.

The ‘next stop’ displays above the windows (modeled after the FIND system on several NYC subway car types) contain useful information, but the actual LEDs do not read well at the angles available for most passengers in the car. Even moving closer to the sign doesn’t help much, particularly when compared to the sign at the end of the car:

Comparison of visibility of LED signage in WMATA 7000 series railcars. Photo by the author.

Comparison of visibility of LED signage in WMATA 7000 series railcars. Photo by the author.

None of the next few stops are nearly as visible from this vantage point as “Franc-Springd” at the end of the car. Reading the display more or less requires standing directly in front of it; a challenge compounded by the seating layout, placing 2×2 seating directly under the ‘next stop’ displays.

WMATA 7000 series next stop displays. Photo by the author.

WMATA 7000 series next stop displays. Riders must be in front of the displays to read the LEDs. Photo by the author.

By contrast, New York’s FIND displays are located above center-facing seating. This both puts the displays in a line of sight for people sitting on the opposite side of the railcar, but also takes advantage of the additional standing room in New York’s subway car design.

Completely re-arranging seating layouts or changing the location of these signs is a big change. But there are other opportunities to improve passenger information for users. In addition to the LED signs, each 7000 series car includes four video-capable monitors per car, located adjacent to the doors:

WMATA 7000 series video screen. Photo by the author.

WMATA 7000 series video screen. Photo by the author.

Currently, the screens display a strip map (updated in real time) in the top half of the screen, rudimentary information about the station services (for example, a note that you can transfer to Metrobus – but not any particular route information) in the lower left, and a rotating ad space in the lower right corner (in this photo, listing WMATA’s website).

The above photo illustrates one of the biggest problem with these displays – they do not read well at a distance. Discerning any of the information requires moving closer to the display.

Photo by the author.

Consider another example of a similar technology from a bus in New Zealand, using larger text that can be easily read at a distance; displaying the travel time (in minutes, not number of stops) to the next few stops, as well as the end of the line; and putting less important information in a smaller typeface.

fidlerbusscreentweet

Displays within railcars in Paris use a similar approach (image from Transitized) with large text (easily visible), focusing just on the next two or three stations, along with the estimated travel time to key transfer points as well as the end of the line.

Information about the current stop and next stop should be available for riders to consume instantaneously. Editing the amount of information and using large type reduces the time required for riders to process that information – to say nothing about the need to move through the car to take a closer look.

The nice thing about software is you can change it. WMATA and the District DOT recently installed real-time arrival displays at numerous bus shelters in the city. At first, the displays took too long to cycle and scroll through extraneous information. After some initial testing, the displays now show more useful information to riders at a glance – no need for scrolling or displaying the arrival times for buses scheduled to arrive in the distant future.

New software and a different approach to displaying information on these screens could make them more useful – and potentially help cover for the visibility issues with the above-the-window next stop displays.