Trolley safety system put off
Green Line lacks anticrash gear; T questions cost, suitability
The MBTA, long under pressure to install anticrash technology on its Green Line, is already six months behind schedule in planning the bare outlines of a modern system.
That means it will probably take many years before the T has the kind of automated operating system in place that could have prevented two serious rear-end crashes on the line within the past year. For decades, other light rail systems - as well as the T's other lines - have had systems of varying sophistication levels that automatically stop trolleys from running red lights or getting too close to another trolley.
A May 8 crash near Government Center highlighted the Green Line's vulnerability to operator error. The crash, which sent nearly 50 people to the hospital, was blamed on an operator sending a text message. In a crash last May near Waban station, an operator who ran a red light died after her vehicle struck another trolley from behind.
The T has had five Green Line collisions since January 2007, out of about 1.1 million trips. And costs are adding up. This month's crash will probably cost the agency more than $10 million in lost property and medical claims.
Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority managers have ques tioned whether modern operating systems used elsewhere will work on the idiosyncratic Green Line. And they say they have lacked the money it will take to revamp the century-old line. Estimates for a first-class system top $300 million.
But other hybrid light rail systems like the Green Line - which operate both on streets and underground - have found ways to make the technology work. And though the T has scarce resources for long-term investments, the agency's budget documents say safety should be the top priority as it weighs spending hundreds of millions a year from borrowing and federal grants to pay for projects like expansion, station reconstruction, and train car purchases.
"The technology has been around 30 years," said Stephan G. MacDougall, the president of the Carmen's Union, representing operators and drivers, who believes the T can build a cost-efficient operating system on the platform of its modern radio system. "They're playing catch-up."
Richard J. Leary, the MBTA's chief operating officer, said last week that the T decided a few months ago to invest $1 million in technology upgrades, half to test a low-cost alert system on the Mattapan trolley and the other half to hire engineers to explore a more extensive automated system that would use computers to control the speed and braking systems on all Green Line cars. The investments come as investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board have been asking questions about the Green Line's old manual operating system, Leary said.
Despite the interest from federal investigators, draft documents provided by the T show the agency has fallen about six months behind schedule on its target dates for hiring a consultant. The T cannot solicit bids for consulting services until next month because the agency could not find money to allocate to the project until then, according to spokesman Joe Pesaturo. It may take an additional two years to determine the type of system the T would buy, Leary said.
Earlier this month, at a press conference initiating the strict ban on cellphones for T operators, MBTA General Manager Daniel A. Grabauskas, said questions about the old operating system were "a distraction from the real issue, which is [driver] distraction." He said at the same conference that the T was looking at updating its manual system, but sounded skeptical, warning there would be significant hurdles to installing the kind of modern automated systems used in other parts of the country, given the high volume of trolleys that run on the Green Line. During rush hour, the T runs trolleys every 30 seconds at its busiest station.
"I go back to my earlier comments that 800 bus operators drive safely each day without the aid of an automatic stop system," Grabauskas, who declined an interview request, wrote in a follow-up e-mail.
Questions about the T's Green Line have festered for years. The day after a MBTA operator Ter'rese Edmonds died in a crash last year, retired MBTA engineer John Weiser wrote a letter to Grabauskas, urging him to consider an updated signal system.
Weiser said he had helped investigate more than a dozen Green Line crashes in his time at the T from 1978 through 2004, and more than 1,200 derailments. Often, his recommendations for an updated signal system were scrubbed from the final report "due to internal politics," he wrote in his letter to Grabauskas.
Grabauskas did not respond to the letter; Pesaturo said he did not have a record that he received it.
"You can't take away that it's ultimately the operators' fault," Weiser said. "But from a safety point of view, had the T installed positive train stops, when the train went through the red light, the brakes would automatically be applied."
San Francisco's Muni Metro system faced many of the same challenges the Green Line is dealing with when it installed such a system in 1998. Like the Green Line, several Muni lines converge underground, where trolley cars need to move in and out quickly. A decade ago, Muni officials paid $80 million to install the system only in the underground portions of the track, about 6.3 miles. Operators switch back to manual control on surface streets.
When the system was first installed, it caused a kind of bedlam that locals dubbed "Muni Meltdown." Doors jammed. Trolleys got stuck in their stations, creating huge back-ups.
"It totally failed. It literally was faster to walk," said Andrew Sullivan, head of a riders group called Rescue Muni. "The public was appropriately outraged."
But after a week, the meltdown ended and efficiency on the line actually improved, and even critics of the implementation are glad to have the automated system. Instead of running trains every two minutes or more, the automated system can run them every minute. In practice, they run about every 75 seconds. The system has not had any rear-end crashes in the automated underground areas, said Jim Kelly, senior operations manager for Muni.
Noah Bierman can be reached at nbierman@globe.com. 