A carnival of technology

One of the first things I remember doing after I started at Telchemy was paying my taxes, which, that week actually starting the Monday before, means it took me three months to the day to get completely fed up with driving. Today I decided to triple my commute time and took the bus to work.

I think I may be able to cut that time down a bit, but it’s going to take some experimentation. This morning I took the train to Doraville where I hopped on to the GCT route 10, which takes a slow, meandering path up through Norcross to the Gwinnett transit hub, a dingy circle of concrete and traffic cones behind the movie at theater at Gwinnett Place Mall. Having missed the next bus there by about ten minutes or so, I then waited another twenty for the number 40 which heads up to Discover Mills and from there on to Lawrenceville. The 40 was a bit problematic in that I’m not sure exactly where it goes or stops through Discover Mills. There’s a park and ride lot near where I’d like to start biking on Sugarloaf, but it appears to only be accessible to southbound buses, so once the bus started circling around the far side of the mall I just bailed out. Maybe it circles back; I don’t know. At any rate, they’re both local buses and both seriously slow. There’s an express bus that travels from Arts Center, a seemingly distant start but really only station south of where I transfer for the northeast line. It’s probably faster, though it’s on a less forgiving schedule and costs an extra $1.25. Maybe I’ll give it a shot some time.

The transfer process between MARTA and GCT is pretty goofy. Though I did see one bus with some sort of a disabled Breeze reader on it, but this bus was noticeably different in other respects—high ceilings, luggage racks, reclinable Greyhound-style seats—so I suspect it was meant for GRTA routes and perhaps pressed into local service after the distressingly early Xpress cutoff time had passed. GCT does not do Breeze. To transfer to GCT from the MARTA station, though no physical proof of fare is possible in this transferless tomorrow, they still want something, so the driver asks to see your Breeze card. Perhaps this made sense a couple of years ago, back when you could only buy the paper ticket and couldn’t reload it, but now that the driver can’t take away whatever else might have been loaded on there they simply ask for proof that you were at some point in your life a paying MARTA customer, or at least you went through the trouble to mug one. On the way back they use those old bus-to-rail transfer cards that used to litter the floors of the station back before we were supposed to be able to do away with them.

With the exception of that one I rode on the way home, the buses were basically MARTA buses—same hard plastic seats, same layout, same stuttering sigh when they brake. However, they seemed much more austere than MARTA buses: the comically huge fire extinguisher is replaced by one you might find in a home, equally ineffective against a CNG engine catching fire, and, more strikingly, there were no ads, no TVs incessantly blaring, no placard on the bike rack offering me low low financing on a used car. I think this is just because GCT hasn’t found any bail bondsmen or loan consolidation companies willing to spend money on a second tier bus system. A handful of the bus shelters had their ad space filled with big “YOUR AD HERE” banners, but never was there a taker.

In conclusion GCT isn’t so bad, but if the crowds making the same transfers I did were any indication, GCT really needs to expand. Maybe Gwinnett will wise up and let MARTA in one of these days.

The bus broke down today! It was so exciting. It was my very first time. I knew it had to happen eventually, but the closest I’d come was being on a bus that rescued the passengers of another bus stuck on 400.

I thought I was doing pretty good on the way home today. It wasn’t super cold like it was this morning, it wasn’t super windy like yesterday, and I got to Mansell and 400 just as the southbound bus was making its turn. Once the light changed I illegally turned on to the onramp, sprinted toward that little bypass where the bus stops, skidded to a halt and got on; I was out of breath, but I wouldn’t have to wait another twenty minutes. It wasn’t not cold enough for me to look forward to that. The bus made it almost to Northridge before the alarms went off.

I still have no idea what was being indicated, but there were all kinds of beeps and bloops and buzzes going off at the front of the bus. Some riders may have exchanged glances, but for the most part everyone continued to sit glassy-eyed, listening to music or reading magazines or just staring out the window. The only time I’ve seen a whole bus react to something was that time some cars collided next to us and everyone thought the bus hit someone. Anyhow, the driver pulled off between the Northridge exit and the onramp, turned off the bus and fiddled around trying to get it to start again. After he left the bus to take a look at the engine people started to get more curious. When he came back and told us all to get off the bus, the silence was broken. Nobody complained that I could hear. It was mostly an exchange of other broken-down bus stories and some wondering at just what the HERO truck that pulled over thought they could do. MARTA has beaten away our hopes and expectations.

I put my balaclava back on (and tried to make it look not too much like a creepy ninja mask) and wondered whether or not to pull my bike off the front, either to prepare for the bus potentially bursting into flames or to just ride home from Northridge if things got too grim. The bus was leaking fluid out of the back, the HERO guys waved some flashlights around and scratched their chins, and eventually we all got back on the bus. A few minutes later an 87 bus came off of Northridge and stopped on the ramp, blocking all the traffic behind it, and we got on the new bus and continued to the station. We still arrived at North Springs before the next bus on the route, so things didn’t end up too bad. I wonder what broke.

Today was my first day playing in traffic again. I found aspects of it terrifying to consider, but probably not the aspects I should really worry about. Riding uphill in heavy traffic doesn’t worry me hardly a bit; it’s going downhill that I find concerning. I get going pretty fast when gravity’s on my side. I could get hurt! I made it pretty alright, though, and zooming downhill through traffic is actually quite exhilarating. While actually on the bike, there were a few spots with a lot of cars turning that had me worried at spots, but that was about it.

I took on that stupid hill northward on Sandy Springs Circle on Sunday, and I made it up to the Kroger, about the ? point before just completely giving up and stopping for lunch at some new Italian place. Apparently it’s some local chain that started in Norcross. They have more pictures of celebrities riding Vespas than I have ever seen in one place. They also have two actual Vespas parked out front, though I don’t know what they plan to do with them. They make a pretty good calzone. The stretch of Roswell Road between my green valley and Glenridge isn’t that bad, but I still ended up using some gears I didn’t know that I had. Oddly enough endurance doesn’t seem like too big an issue?I wasn’t huffing and puffing nearly as bad as when I originally started this crazy habit, and I didn’t have to stop completely at the top of the hill like I used to—I just can’t push as hard. Not pissing off the traffic that I’m blocking behind me is a big concern when I’m riding, so falling short of my old speeds is a bit distressing. Also, I can’t keep as straight at lower speeds, so there’s the worry that I’ll veer off into someone’s fender. I hope that this gets better soon, but I seem to be pretty quickly becoming reacquainted with all of the old feelings. I’ve even started dragging my shoes to make up for my shitty brakes without even thinking about it. I really should have bought cheaper shoes.

The MARTA ride went off without any unusual bumps. The Breeze gates are still as crappy as ever. It took three taps in the morning to get into the station, and on the way home I helped tap someone through at North Springs whose gate didn’t open because he was standing in the way of the beam like you would think you’re supposed to. The buses have replaced the card readers, or at least the face plate on the card readers, with fancy looking blue things in the three or four months I’ve been gone. The new readers have a grey rectangle on either side of the card target, and I’m not sure if they’re buttons or if they’re just hiding bolts. It still took my card without me having to do anything extra, so I didn’t ask. I didn’t see anyone today without a Breeze card, so I guess the transition went pretty ok. I still think it’s dumb that you need a Breeze card to transfer to rail but can’t buy one on a bus. Someone pointed out on a mailing list that Amtrak, about the only way into the city that doesn’t have a MARTA rail station, is especially troublesome. I would say that no one uses Amtrak, but my own Amtrak experience seemed crowded enough. So everyone gets to pay an extra $2.25 as a reward for using an inconvenient means of transportation. I don’t really like the Breeze cards.

I still don’t like the MARTA Breeze system, so I’m going to complain about it for a little bit. I’m sure I’ll have a new post about something ridiculous I bought or some goofy food I cooked in a day or two. I finally decided to buy a shaving brush and accessories, so I’ll probably post about that in a few days when it all arrives and I pitch my can of Barbasol.

I probably posted about this before, but Breeze sure does make it easy to lose fares. Monday was a holiday here in Los Estados Unidos de América (fun fact: your Spanish teacher probably taught you that the US is Estados Unidos, but the long name of Mexico is actually los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, and, as you know, we’re not Americanos in Spanish, since the rest of the continent takes Amerigo Vespucci’s name outside of this nation’s humble borders. So really we kind of messed things up by rebelling first and trying to take all the good names), and, unlike other federal holidays like Columbus Day, most everyone gets Memorial Day off. On most weeks I buy a seven-day pass on Monday. It costs $13, so it pays for itself in terms of single fares at 8 rides, the number I usually take in a week. This being a short week, I’ve been buying individual fares instead. The Breeze vending machines do not make this easy. In a particular transaction, you can purchase one fare, two fares, or ten fares. Even those with the patience to stand in front of the machine for five minutes, tapping cards and feeding in money, will find that the rides are still stored in pairs in the Breeze system. Your six rides will display as alternating one and zero remaining until finally genuinely exhausted. This is annoying enough on its own, but when combined with the dodgy transfer system, it becomes even more difficult to figure out what any particular tap really did.

When the Breeze system broke last week, MARTA, while trying to figure out how much money they lost, pulled out the datum that about 65% of daily riders use passes instead of buying individual fares. When I get off the train at North Springs and head for the bus, I don’t normally stop to tap my card at the gate at the entrance to the bus bay. The gate doesn’t require it for this direction (and can’t, since the magnetic card readers are only on the other side), I don’t want to bother, and an unlimited-ride pass allows a certain freedom in that it doesn’t matter whether any particular tap is a new ride or a continuation of an existing one. As for the other 35% of MARTA riders, I’m willing to bet that most of them, let’s say 85% for the sake of making things up, started their ride on a bus. The fare gates at the train stations no longer offer anything physical, so the magnetic bus-to-rail transfer card serves as the senseless proof that one paid to be on the bus parked inside a station you need to pay to enter. As such, the exit from train to bus is a mad rush of colliding into half-opened gates with no one tapping anything, and, when I don’t have a pass, I’m apt to forget the protocol and miss the tap necessary to pick up a transfer. I did so today, and I ended up paying an extra fare when I boarded the bus. Oops.

The buses are a daily reminder of how rough and incomplete this Breeze transition has been. There have been changes—the poor suckers who take MARTA to the airport now have to pay an extra 50¢ for a temporary card, and I think my stashed tokens are now officially only collectors items (whoops)—but it’s still a hybrid system. Buses accept Breeze cards (if the reader is working), but they don’t issue them. Handing over your exact change when you board earns you a magnetic swipe card or a tear-off transfer, instead, like it always has. The bus-to-rail transfer I got this evening also reminded me of how badly the magnetic card readers have been handled. Unlike the weekly and monthly passes issued after the new fare gates were installed, which replaced the old action shots of MARTA stuff happening with colorful ads extolling the virtues of smart cards, the bus-to-rail transfer cards have the same design they’ve had for years: a simple color coding for AM or PM, the words “Bus 2 Rail” and instructions to “Insert This End.” Back in the old days, passes and transfers were inserted into the front of the turnstiles, and, if you were lucky, your pass would come out the other end. It broke sometimes, but there was no way to screw it up. Everything was clearly labeled, and if you inserted the card face up and forward into a functional turnstile, it would let you in. The new magnetic card readers are open, like a credit card reader, and, though there’s a little picture showing you which way the stripe should go, this instruction presents a spatial relation puzzle that is not intuitive and can’t be solved as quickly. This, as well as the slow reaction of the gates, creates a jam any time a bus arrives. Busier stations have employees stationed at every entrance and exit, but the need for this is to me a sign of a broken system. Daily riders will eventually pick up the nuances through repetition, but it’s always going to be new to someone.

Breeze sucks. I dread the day when MARTA’s dream of replacing the current bus system comes to fruition.

The Breeze Bus visited the North Springs MARTA station today. It was a MARTA bus with a Breeze ad on the side in place and the front seats replaced with desks and stuff on the inside. There were several people at the gates into the bus bays hawking the breeze cards and getting people to step inside the bus to sign up and be educated as to just what this Breeze thing is all about. I think this is a good idea, since there’s a lot of confusion as to just how the Breeze cards are going to work and what they will cost, and I think bus riders are going to be hit the hardest with the new problems this system creates.

I’ve listed some of my gripes before, and I’m going to begin by reiterating one of those. It’s my understanding that Breeze cards will eventually be required for bus to rail transfers since otherwise MARTA would not be able to eliminate the magnetic card readers at the stations. Maybe the deployment of this Breeze Bus at the train stations will be enough to get a free card to everyone who needs one, but it won’t be perfect. Cards will be lost or forgotten, new people will start riding MARTA unaware of any of this Breeze stuff, and they’re going to have to pay 50¢ for a paper card when they board the bus. The buses don’t give change, and the fare is $1.75 to start with, so this is going to end up as three dollars for a lot of people. If the cards were just 25¢ I wouldn’t mind the idea nearly as much.

Besides the cost, Breeze cards just don’t work nearly as well in the bus as at the train stations. The card reader is being shaken around all day, which has often been a problem for the magnetic card readers, but the magnetic cards at least said what they were on the front. You could just show the card to the driver and avoid swiping it in a broken reader, but the Breeze cards can hold anything. Besides the rough environment the card reader lives in, it has to maintain some kind of connection to whatever databases hold the card information (I’m pretty sure that these cards just have an RFID chip and don’t hold any actual information as I don’t believe the technology exists for a system like this to write to a card through the air), and since the buses are going to be spending their time speeding through the middle of nowhere, that connection isn’t going to stay up all the time. I’ve had several problems myself with the bus being unable to read my card, but so far I haven’t run into a driver cared. That can’t last forever.

In all, Breeze really doesn’t benefit bus riders. If it’s ever required to tap your Breeze card to exit a train station, there’s at least some hope that MARTA will use this data to make appropriate scheduling decisions and not run four-car trains during rush hour, but bus riders are basically untracked unless they end their trip at a station.

Speaking of tapping to exit, there was another change at the North Springs station tonight: the gates between the bus bay and the train station were closed. Unless they really are starting to track rider movements, I have no idea why. The bus bay at North Springs is inside the fare gates, so it usually makes sense to have the bus gates open to facilitate easy movement when a rush people coming off a train or a bus tries to squeeze through. I don’t know if tapping the cards was actually required or people were just trying out the new cards they got from the Breeze Bus, but there was a bit of a backup at the gates as people were running into another problem with Breeze—the first reaction is more often to try swiping the card through the familiar magnetic readers than tapping it against the Breeze logo—and the Breeze attendants were all busy handing out new cards and unable to guide people through the gates. I don’t know if this will be solved by the removal of the magnetic readers or if people will just be completely lost. However it eventually turns out, tonight was pretty annoying.

Lastly, there are some privacy concerns with tapping to exit. MARTA no longer wants anonymous riders, and, though I guess this isn’t a huge concern for someone who pays for lunch with a credit card, I’d at least like to know exactly what data MARTA stores from the Breeze card system and for how long.

Shut up.

The temperature dropped back below freezing here in the thirteenth American colony, and damn were my hands cold today. I actually stopped at one point to warm my fingers back up since they kind of hurt a lot. I don’t know a lot about physiology, but I figure that pain and numbness is probably bad. I managed to make it to the MARTA station (where I was unable to catch a train, but that’s a story for a couple paragraphs down) without losing any digits, but my hands were pretty uncomfortable. I know the solution to this problem, though: new gloves!

This time, rather than seeing what REI has on sale this week, I decided to support local business and went to Roswell Bicycles. They have a clothing shop above the main store in what I guess used to be the “Sprockets Cafe.” I never knew the restaurant, but a part of me is kind of sad to see the death of a bike-oriented restaurant. Clothing is nice, though, and there’s only so much space available, so I guess this is better for the store or something. This disconnected upstairs clothing section was pretty small, which I don’t mind. They’re a bike shop, not a costume shop. The selection of gloves was a little disappointing, but I think that this is because I’m starting to exhaust my options. They had several varieties of the linerless shells in an assortment of shapes and waterproofness, much like I have, but the only things they had as far as insulation were big puffy ski-gloves and a few glove liners. I ended up buying a pair of liners in the only variety they had with sizes that fit me, and they’re ok. My hands were still kind of cold going home, but not to the point where I was worried about frostbite. To anyone looking to buy me something for Christmas, I’d kind of like a pair of warm gloves that can protect me from asphalt and allow me to use my fingers.

And now for MARTA: HOLY CRAP A TRAIN DERAILED. I rolled into Medical Center around 9am, as is my wont, but today something was different. The fire trucks that preceded me were the first clue that something was wrong, and the big crowd of people shivering outside in the tiny bus bay was the second. From what I’ve been able to piece together from news reports and press releases, the mess all started with a train that started having mechanical difficulties (they didn’t say which variety, but I’d suspect one of those breaky Bredas is the culprit). It went out of service north of Medical Center and the rest of the system started single-tracking around it. I don’t know for sure if there were passengers aboard at this time, but, judging from the number of ambulances, I suspect that there were. So the train is being operated manually at this point, the switches are set to bypass the broken train, and apparently someone screwed up somewhere, since the broken train hit a switch that was going the wrong way and went off the track. No one was hurt, but it sure did mess up MARTA service for a good while.

While at Medical Center I was told by MARTA employees that northbound train service was not running from that station and that I should take a bus. There were at least a hundred people waiting for buses, and I already had some means of transportation, so I decided to just ride up to Dunwoody station. At Dunwoody, another MARTA employee explained that there were significant delays for both north and southbound trains, no one really knows when the next train is going to arrive, and I probably should take one of the buses up to Sandy Springs. Fortunately, one of the northbound trains (operating on the southbound platform) came by before I got into the elevator, so I managed to catch that to North Springs. Once there, I found where all those extra bus routes between stations were coming from.

I usually get to North Springs with plenty of time to catch the 140 bus that leaves at 9:30. I could catch the 9:00 if everything works out, but I dawdle while leaving the apartment, so I bring a book and wait. Today I arrived at 9:40 or so, in time to see an overcrowded bus pull out onto 400. One of the people I recognize from the usual trip, who I saw talking to the driver before I got up to the bus, told me that the northbound bus service isn’t running anymore while shrugging a lot. I think he just decided to take the day off. I probably should have done the same, but I instead called a coworker with a pickup truck to pick me up at the station. The MARTA website during the day had information on the train delays and bus options around it, but it never really explained how this affected the bus routes. I saw another 140 bus do some crazy manœvres between the two halves of the bus bay (North Springs is split between routes that exit onto 400 North and routes that exit onto Peachtree-Dunwoody), picking up passengers before finally exiting on the ground roads, while waiting for a ride, so it seems like the buses heading north of North Springs were instead pulled into these emergency bus bridges. The 85 was still running as far as I could tell, but that bus takes the scenic route through Roswell, and I didn’t want to wait for that.

The thing that upsets me most about the whole ordeal, besides the fact that derailments really shouldn’t happen, is that bus service was sacrificed to supplement a train service that was, though crippled, still running. Only one platform was inaccessible the whole time, and northbound trains were able to use the southbound line between Medical Center and Dunwoody. The buses were only used to mitigate the 30+ minute delays for trains. I can understand why they did this: the trains are what most people think of when they think about MARTA, and the train is the fastest and most fun way to use Atlanta’s public transportation. My problem is with the 140 route being taken out of service. The 140 goes from the North Springs station to the Mansell Park & Ride lot, tools around Alpharetta for a little bit and then goes to the Windward Park & Ride lot. Its intent is basically to provide bus service beyond the end of the rail line to bus stations beyond the reach of the MARTA rail system. Both the Mansell and Windward lots should be rail stations.

Public transportation is expensive. Having a public transportation system not run at loss is impossible, since if fares were high enough to cover all costs, no one would use it. MARTA receives its funding from fares and a 1% sales tax in Fulton County, DeKalb County and they city of Atlanta. There is no state or federal funding, despite the economical benefits that a robust transportation system in the state’s capital would provide to the state as a whole. Opposition to MARTA, to overgeneralize a bit, comes from both local and distant sources: people in metro counties like Cobb and Gwinnett have voted against MARTA expansion mostly out of fear that black people would ride it to their suburban utopias and steal their big-screen TVs, whereas people in Georgia outside of Atlanta often view Atlanta as a kind of tumor on their rural state, sucking away some uncertain amount of resources while providing no obvious benefit. The Cobb County commissioners recently voted to allow MARTA to extend its Route 12 service beyond the county line up to the Cumberland transfer center, so it’s possible that the metro counties could eventually join the transportation club, but there’s still the problem of state funding. The MARTA tax districts voted not to extend the sales tax beyond 2032 in an effort to force the state to provide funding, but in the meantime this means that MARTA can’t issue the 30-year bonds it would need to make rail extensions, so, though they are currently eying a site either in Roswell or Alpharetta for a new station, they will not likely be able to extend rail service farther north for some time. The only concessions that the state has made so far are to allow variations in their absurd control of the MARTA budget to permit more of the sales tax revenue to be used for operational expenses. The current 55-45 split between operations and capital improvements, I believe, expires in 2009.

What I’m trying to say here is that my morning was ruined by some asshole from Tifton. Thanks a lot, Georgia Assembly.

I should probably mention that I have received my plastic Breeze Card from MARTA. It’s useless to me until my October month pass expires, but November’s pass will go on the card. The November pass will actually be one of the new 30-day passes, not strictly tied to a calendar month like before, which is a nice change, but they could have done that with the magstripe cards.

I noticed this weekend while trolling my logs that one person arrived at my page while searching for “‘Breeze Card’ sucks.” I never stated such a thing, but I think that this is one of my nonsensical referral strings that I should address. As it stands right now, other than the improved fare gates, I do think that the Breeze Card kind of sucks for these reasons:

The machines are difficult to use. Under the old system, when you arrived at a train station, you put money in a machine and you received tokens. It was simple and easy to use. With the new kiosks, it takes several button pushes before you can purchase a fare, making the system more complex and difficult, especially for the visually impaired. Tokens had their weaknesses, of course. I don’t know if token sucking was ever specifically a problem, but I was forced to jump more than one turnstile after it refused to accept a token, and people selling tokens and transcard use was always a problem at North Ave. and likely elsewhere. Simulating the behavior of old token machines is not feasible with MARTA’s intention of charging 50¢ for the short-term Breeze tickets, but I see this as a weakness in the system. It should be as easy as possible to pay for a fare, whether that fare is recorded in a token or a temporary smart card.

The new fare gates are just as broken as the old ones. The old turnstiles were broken pretty frequently, and, though I don’t have any data on relative brokenness of the two systems, I would expect new gates to be completely operational at least for a little while. I find it especially annoying when both wide gates are broken at Medical Center at the same time. Lugging a bike onto MARTA requires the extra wide gates unless I want the system to think I’m tailgating myself, and, while I’m ranting, I really wish that people of an average width not carrying luggage or bicycles would quit using the wider gates. The old luggage/handicap/bicycle gates discouraged use by being of an entirely different form from the turnstiles and by often setting off an alarm even when used properly, but the wider version of the breeze gates is simply a more comfortable looking version of the ones adjacent.

It’s probably kind of expensive. One of the problems that has plagued MARTA since its inception is that, as mandated by a state legislature that would like to see it fail, only 50% of its revenue may be used for operational expenses, the other 50% going towards capital improvements. The law has been temporarily amended a few times, and I believe that MARTA currently uses a 45/55 split, but it stands that the state mandates their budget constraints without providing any funding. This is relevant to the Breeze system since Breeze is a capital improvement and, as noted above, the new kiosks can be difficult to use. This is currently mitigated by dedicated employees providing help and training to confused riders. I don’t know if this is currently covered under the capital or operational portion of the MARTA budget, but it’s going to have to become operational at some point, and the wages of Breeze employees takes money away from MARTA’s basic services.

Transfers are difficult. The habit of most bus riders is to put money into the bus fare machine rather than using any sort of card. During the Breeze transition, transfers are handled as under the old system: paper transfers are provided for bus-to-bus transfers, and magstripe cards are provided for bus-to-train transfers. I imagine that MARTA would like to eliminate the magstripe transfers in favor of Breeze cards, but this can only happen if every bus rider is required to purchase a Breeze ticket when paying in cash. Bus drivers are supposed to be able to sell Breeze services from their console in a manner similar to the kiosk, but this means that MARTA has a choice between continuing to waste money on bus-to-train transfer cards or delaying buses while customers purchase a 50¢ Breeze card for every transfer. The second choice, of course, would further inconvenience riders accustomed to simply paying $1.75 for a ride without the need for extra hardware, and the first choice, which I doubt they will take, will limit the Breeze system’s ability to track rider usage.

The transition from old fare media is a bit sketchy. For the transition from tokens to Breeze, the Breeze machines will accept tokens in exchange for a Breeze ticket loaded with one fare. However, tokens cannot, until the start of 2007, be used to reload existing Breeze cards. Up until the advent of my bicycling, I’d call myself an average infrequent MARTA user, and I’ve found eight tokens laying around from old rides. I’ll probably keep the Superbowl XXVIII one and the shiniest of the regular tokens for the sake of history, but that leaves nine dollars worth of fares that I’d like to spend. Will I be able to convert them into Breeze card fun bucks, spending them as part of a monthly pass, or even be able to turn them into fares on my Breeze card? Should MARTA even allow my former, ideal supposition? I’ve been riding MARTA off and on since 2000, so I wouldn’t be surprised if a couple of those tokens only cost me $1.50. I don’t know the best answer to these questions.

That said, I think that the overall changes of Breeze are good for MARTA. Fare evasion is much more difficult now, and, once the tap-to-exit system is fully deployed, MARTA will have data on rider habits that was impossible with the turnstiles. To add some anecdotal evidence to the positive aspect of this change, the East-West line was notorious for fare evasion as well as inadequate service with four-car trains becoming full before reaching Avondale from Indian Creek. By having more complete entry data (and fees) and knowledge of where these people exit, MARTA will be more able to provide appropriate service where needed. A tap-to-exit system also opens the possibility of distance-based fares. I don’t know if MARTA plans to implement this, but, given the amount of area covered, I don’t think it would be inappropriate to charge someone traveling from Midtown to Arts Center differently from someone taking the bus and train from Alpharetta to the airport. Lastly, having a Breeze card linked to a person rather than using anonymous tokens and magstripe cards allows MARTA to provide a form of theft and loss protection similar to what you would expect from a credit card. I don’t know if anyone was ever mugged for their tokens or month pass, but the fear of such can end with Breeze.

I think that the Breeze smart card system is ultimately a step forward. MARTA still has some crap to work out, and there are some disadvantages to the new system when compared to the old tokens and turnstiles, but Breeze solves some serious problems concerning fare collection and statistics. Tapping a smart card instead of swiping a magstripe card or inserting a token is only a different way to enter MARTA, not better nor worse, and the new system opens up several possibilities for MARTA to improve. I only hope that they take them.

The parents came over to visit a couple of weekends ago using the pretext of returning those Breeze Kings and Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir CDs I left back in May. We went to the aquarium, which I guess is the thing to do now when visiting Atlanta, and I took some photos in case you were wondering what a blurry fish looks like. We also ate a lot of meat and drank some beer at the Five Seasons Brewery. I had fun, and I hope they did. Laziness took over my drive to clean before they arrived, so I’m not sure if mom’s lack of comment means that it wasn’t really that bad or she was just being polite.

I bought a new bike thing. I tried to buy a pair of SKS mudguards a while back from REI, but I somehow ended up with the messed up bent pair, and when I took them back, REI no longer had another pair of the right size. I now have a different style—the “Commuter,” still full fenders and still from SKS—that I bought at Roswell Bikes for not very much. They’re black. It hasn’t rained on me yet, so I can’t say how well they work.

I’m not really sure where MARTA is going with this Breeze card thing. I requested one of the plastic cards from their website but have seen no sign of it yet, and, though I haven’t used one of the kiosks recently, I don’t think they’re yet being sold elsewhere. When I last used the paper cards, there seemed to be about a 50% chance of it working on the bus, so I’m guessing that the bus conversion is the holdback. I think they also changed how transfers work. I don’t use transfers as part of my commute, but I had thought that a transfer was recorded for your breeze card when you enter the train station. I overheard on Thursday a MARTA employee explaining to a kiosk user that you tap the card when you exit to get a rail-to-bus transfer, and today I noticed stickers on the fare gate offering the same advice. I guess they’re trying to make sure you only get transfers to buses that make sense. I think right now the bus drivers still take your paper card when you use it, so I guess that’s going to have to stop before they allow more than more fare on the card at a time.

PS: flat tire. No obvious cause, but the crappy Performance tube looked like it already had some kind of patch where the hole is.

You may be familiar with the Google maps overlay that David Cantrell created a while back using the MARTA rail lines. Since David doesn’t live in Georgia anymore, I took over the role of MARTA fanatic and copied his data for my own purposes. The only improvements I’ve made so far are using the different types of circle-P icons for the different varieties of parking at the stations, adding icons for the park and ride lots and adding a handful of points of interest for CCT. I also bent the track lines a little for a few sections north of Lindbergh, but I stopped that while I come to terms with the fact that the line data files are going to be really freaking huge. I also switched the data files to XML, since I hear that makes everything more fun.

Of perhaps more interest than the map itself, though, are a couple little tools I made to simplify data input. The first is a tool for finding points. Anywhere you click on the map will add a marker, and clicking on the marker will give you the coordinates. The second is a tool for making lines. Every point you click will be added to a GPolyline object, and the coordinates will be displayed in the textbox at the bottom of the page. Comes with an undo button, because I have poor mouse control. I’ve found these two pages to be quite useful, so I thought that I would share.

My MARTA riding has been going pretty well. I’ve given up altogether on driving, instead riding the two or three miles from my apartment to Medical Center. People have been surprisingly unjerkwadish on Glenridge, and I was even able to give someone directions to St. Joseph’s hospital today while stopped at a light, giving me a warm fuzzy feeling between gasps for air. Not having a car on the other end of the train has meant two rides in the rain, though, and I think I’ve already destroyed my brake pads trying not to careen into fifteen directions of traffic while riding downhill on a wet Roswell Road. I figure the bike is about due for its break-in service, so maybe they can replace them if needed and hopefully not make fun of me.

Riding the train has been a fun way to relax for a few minutes away from the hassle of traffic, and I’ve been noticing a few interesting things. For example, there’s apparently a Lexus advertisement in the tunnel between Dunwoody and Sandy Springs done as a sort of 50mph flip book. I wonder how much they paid to have that installed, and I wonder if Lexus is targeting the right audience with people riding public transportation. On one train ride I also happened to notice a rail map leftover from 1993 similar to that one at Peachtree Center station. Besides showing Sandy Springs and North Springs as under construction, as well as still calling the Western terminus “Hightower” and having Omni as part of the overnamed station to the west of Five Points, it showed provisional lines for some of their lofty ideas, such as the Northwest line, the Hapeville line and the line towards Emory whose name I forget. It also had a busway going south from Candler Park, which I found interesting in light of the newer East Corridor bus rapid transit idea. I really don’t understand the east corridor motivation besides being able to extend beyond Indian Creek without having to build new rail lines. Regardless, it’d be nice if they built more rail lines.

Another thing I’ve been noticing about MARTA lately is the voice that announces the next station. Among the various automated voices around Atlanta, such as the sorely missed robot people-mover voice (stop do not enter) and the welcome to the baggage terminal guy, MARTA lady definitely sounds the hottest. I wonder who she is. She’s probably about 60, though, so I don’t spend too much time fantasizing about a MARTA supermodel, hidden away in catacombs of the city, recording what’s near Lenox. I did, however, note today that she pronounced “GRTA.” GRTA is a money-pit started by Roy Barnes that, I think fairly recently, began running busses from the ass end of nowhere into the city. I usually make it rhyme with MARTA when I’m making fun of it (most of the time) and grr-tuh when I’m not. Apparently it’s actually pronounced something like gr?ta.