MBTA readies a garble-free PA system
Announcements tied to message boards
The era of the garbled or nonexistent platform announcement is coming to an end at the T.
Officials at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority said yesterday that they have been testing a crystal-clear public address system that announces when a train is approaching the station, is delayed, or is canceled.
''I turned to my girlfriend and said, 'Whoa, that's new to me,' " said Fred Bermont, 26, a database programmer from Cambridge, who was riding the Red Line last weekend when he first heard an announcement under the improved system tested in the past week. ''It was just unexpected. Just hearing that gave me hope for the future of the system."
The new announcements can be heard at all stations and are synchronized with electronic message boards repeating the information at T stops at Downtown Crossing, Back Bay, Porter Square, Airport, Aquarium, and North Station.
The message boards will be added to Harvard Square, Alewife, and Park Street stations by the fall, with all 71 MBTA subway stations getting them by summer 2007.
Daniel A. Grabauskas, general manager of the MBTA, said a similar system at commuter rail stations could be in place in from eight months to a year.
The transformation started last week when the T replaced the 25-year-old central computer terminal that generated the announcements with new digital recordings. When the trains pass sensors outside stations, the recordings are triggered. A T employee makes live announcements about delays and other service bulletins.
Once acoustic engineers install and adjust new speakers over the next year, T officials say, there will be a major improvement in getting information to passengers, who have complained for decades about garbled announcements.
''We are going to far exceed what people are used to hearing out of those speakers," said Grabauskas.
As he outlined the new, $35 million system in comments at Back Bay station, the announcements for inbound and outbound trains were coming in loud and clear on the platforms and in the upstairs lobby, giving about 1 minute advance notice on inbound trains and 2 minutes on outbound train.
That should help riders rushing to catch a train from a lobby and passengers who have been waiting for more than several minutes, T officials said.
The system can count down the minutes until a train arrives, but Grabauskas said that isn't necessary.
''You don't need 15 minutes lead time for a rapid transit train," he said. ''If you know you have enough time to get down the stairs, that may be all the information our customers need."
The system is also able to announce to southbound Red Line passengers that an approaching train is either Braintree-bound or Ashmont-bound, something that has been largely guesswork.
Other newer major transit systems are well ahead of the T on announcing train arrivals. On the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, for instance, multicolored displays show the number of minutes remaining until trains pull into the station. In Europe, train announcements are a tradition, and at some stations, a digital clock counts down the seconds until a train arrives.
While the change on the T is only a week old, there have been some complaints.
Riders have noticed that in some of the announcements, the T's traditional references to inbound and outbound trains have been replaced by references to northbound and southbound or eastbound or westbound. T officials promised to tweak the terminology as the new system expands.
With the system, the T will finally comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, a federal law that calls for both audio and visual announcements for passengers who are visually- or hearing-impaired.
The next stage involves acoustical tests at all the stations, where renovations and time have not been kind to the ceiling speakers. In some cases, officials said new ceilings were built over speakers. In other cases, the speakers are wrapped in so much insulation they couldn't be heard. Workers found one speaker embedded within an overhead light.
Add the often thick accents of some T employees, and the public address announcements had become what Grabauskas compared to the mumbling of Charlie Brown's teacher in ''Peanuts" cartoons.
''When the announcements start to snap, crackle, and pop, you just tune it out," said Teri Jackson, 47, a registered nurse from Dorchester riding the Red Line yesterday at the JFK/UMass Station.
''Most of the time I can barely hear them clearly," said Tanisha Young, 25, of Cambridge. ''Hopefully, it's not an announcement about trains being delayed, but it usually is."
Mac Daniel can be reached at mdaniel@globe.com. 