Lee Biernbaum
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Lee Biernbaum
@leebier.bsky.social
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Transportation Policy, Brookline Housing and Town Meeting, work for MassDOT/MBTA but views all my own.
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We've made a heap of changes to our accessibility metrics, including under-the-hood changes to our Platform Access metric which takes into account where we do (or don't!) have redundancy for elevators or where a single elevator serves >1 platform. Blog post for that one is coming up, so stay tuned.
A diagram comparing platform accessibility standards for a hypothetical elevator under two policies: the new (2024) SDP policy, where all elevator outages are considered inaccessible, versus the old (2021) SDP policy, where unplanned elevator outages with alternative shuttle service are considered accessible, resulting in a lower accessibility score of 29% under the old policy compared to 71% under the new policy.
June 4, 2025 at 6:56 PM
It's the first to include the changes from the 2024 Service Delivery Policy update. We made tweaks to our measures, using new and better data sources, and better reflecting rider experiences (for example, we now penalize dropped trips). Blog post for more info: www.massdottracker.com/latest-posts...
A diagram comparing Bus Reliability Standards for an example bus stop, illustrating bus arrivals at Columbia Rd. at Quincy St. on August 26, 2024, in the inbound direction for Route 16. A canceled bus scheduled to arrive at 9:44 AM is excluded under the old standards but counted as a failure under the new standards, resulting in a lower reliability score of 50% under the new standards compared to 60% under the old standards.
June 4, 2025 at 6:56 PM
This year's SDP Report implements our new reliability metric, Excess Trip Time. We're really excited about this one because you can see how it shows the degradation of service and the result of the work to address problems. Blog post for more info www.massdottracker.com/latest-posts...
A line chart comparing the On-Time Performance and Excess Trip Time performances for the Red Line from January 2022 to May 2024. In January 2022, Excess Trip Time was considered passing for approximately 80% of passengers, and On-Time Performance was considered passing for approximately 85% of passengers. On-Time Performance was mostly steady from January 2022 to May 2024, remaining between 80% and 90%. For the same time period, Excess Trip Time steadily declined from approximately 80% in January 2022 to approximately 15% in November 2023, before increasing to approximately 40% on May 2024. This is to demonstrate how Excess Trip Time is more sensitive to rider experience than On-Time Performance. For reference, when FTA service reductions were implemented in summer 2022, Excess Trip Time was approximately 60% and On-Time Performance was approximately 85%, and when Global Speed Restrictions were implemented in March 2023, Excess Trip Time was approximately 20% and On-Time Performance was approximately 80%.
June 4, 2025 at 6:56 PM
Start your #TRBAM Monday with Innovative Public Transit Fare Policies: Lessons from the Real World. Room 145A.

Great presenters (details at annualmeeting.mytrb.org/OnlineProgra...) including from TUM, WMATA / The Lab @ DC, Korbato / MIT, and SEPTA / jawnt / UPENN.

#transit #PublicTransit #TRB
QR code with link to website mentioned in the main text of the post.
January 7, 2024 at 8:39 PM