MTA Taps Digital Technology Amid Crisis

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After Hurricane Sandy hit, New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority provided some badly needed sunlight.

How it did so, some transit observers say, could also provide a blueprint for communicating with riders amid any crisis in the digital age.

Even with its New York City region subways, buses and commuter rail shuttered, its tunnels flooded and bridges closed after the killer storm struck on Oct. 29, 2012, the MTA scrambled to update riders through social media about its efforts to get back up and running.

The agency, which had closed the 100-year-old system's operations before Sandy struck that Monday, resumed service piecemeal during the week. It got the word out -- even within limitations of the moment -- through images, live maps and data-driven updates on Twitter and other channels.

Given that the MTA is one of the largest municipal issuers, with roughly $36 billion of debt, it was also a form of investor disclosure.

"Big time," said storm financing expert Alan Rubin, a managing director with Tigress Financial Partners. "The MTA is a bonded institution. It's just as important for the investment community to know what the MTA is doing."

Climate change post-Sandy is no longer an abstract topic, according to Juliette Michaelson, vice president for strategy at the transportation think tank Regional Plan Association.

"In many ways, I'd say Sandy was a turning point in the way we think about climate change in the city," she said at a workshop on crisis management at the New York Transit Museum in downtown Brooklyn. "Not only that, but actually Sandy was also the turning point in the way the government, especially the MTA, changed in the way that it communicates with its customers, both in a time of [major] crisis, and hopefully on a day-to-day basis all minor crises that the MTA experiences."

The museum's fall series has included insights on the effects of other harrowing events on mass transit, including the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; the 1965 and 2003 blackouts; and the blizzard and hurricane of 1888 and 1938, respectively.

MTA assistant director of multimedia J.P. Chan told the gathering how staff scurried to gather as much information as it could when Sandy struck.

"Our priority was to get images out and let the public know what we were doing," said Chan, also an independent filmmaker.

"I had power but the MTA's own email system, actually, was knocked out so we were all relying on our Gmail and Yahoo accounts trying to get in touch with each other. In addition, a lot of cellphones were down. I had an MTA car and I had a camera and my job was to go out take as many images as I could. Then I went home and uploaded them and it was on YouTube the same day."

Chan's rounds included South Ferry station at Manhattan's lower tip, where the damage was the most vivid. "The entire station had been flooded, which was not anything I was prepared to see," he said of a station -- built below the water table – for which the MTA spent $600 million three years earlier to remodel.

The information thrust put an agency – frequently a venting target for agitated commuters and sometimes vilified for its sheer size – in a different light.

"As soon as we had pictures and video showing just how bad the damage was and we were putting it out, suddenly the dynamic in the public was not 'Why wasn't the MTA restoring service?' it's 'Oh my goodness, how's the MTA ever gonna get through this?' director of external communications Adam Lisberg said in an agency-produced video.

"In a strange way, it united us and our customers against the water," he said. "And when we were able to get some service restored, we had the public on our side cheering us on."

Transit staff, meeting around the clock, produced special maps that showed functioning subway lines in color, and others greyed out. Volunteers helped, said Jeff Ferzoco, New York City business development manager at CartoDB and proprietor of his own design firm, Linepointpath.

"There's a huge community of map nerds," he said.

The MTA's On the Go information kiosks in more than 30 subway stations can adapt to any crisis, said Damon Gutierrez, their key architect and an associate partner at technology media company Intersection. Kiosks, he said, can integrate with MTA technology and generate real-time information by subway line or individual station, and even categorize crisis by urgency levels.

"One is the 'unworst.' There was an outage, service is back and expect residual delays," he said. "Five is like, 'Get out, get out of the station.'"

Rubin, who helped design and underwrite the catastrophe fund for storm relief for Lehman Brothers in 1992 after Hurricane Andrew struck Miami-Dade County, Fla., praised the MTA for its moves well after Sandy left town.

"Remember, they were the first ones who did the catastrophe funds," Rubin said. "Their risk managers are probably some of the brightest in the country, to be honest."

The MTA in 2013 issued a $200 million catastrophe bond, the first such bond to cover storm-surge risk arising from named storms.

Its $29 billion capital program for 2015-2019, which a state review panel in Albany must approve, will further its efforts to harden the system beyond what the agency did with federal Sandy reimbursement funds, according to Chairman Thomas Prendergast.

"The one example I always use: Now, on under-river tunnels, we specify a submarine cable. What does that mean? Not a cable in a submarine, [but] a cable that you expect will be under water at some time in its useful life. So we do things like that," Prendergast said after the MTA board's Nov. 16 meeting.

"We will raise the locations of critical facilities where we know the floods may in a 50- or 100-year period come close to that," he said. "Those are parts of the integral design process of the capital program."

The MTA intends to provide a variety of structural and safety enhancements at the Hugh Carey-Brooklyn Battery tunnel and Queens-Midtown Tunnel with capital funds, according to the capital plan document. Also in store is a hardening of the Robert F. Kennedy-Triborough Bridge against future seismic and wind events, while proposed structural and deck work at the Throgs Neck, Henry Hudson and Verrazano bridges will incorporate seismic improvements whenever possible.

Its bridges and tunnels unit will also design and install 166 bridge structural health monitoring systems, which track how bridges react to daily and extreme loads.

Michaelson, recalling how station countdown clocks were controversial a few years ago – some critics wanted the funding steered more directly to actual service – said MTA tech advances were late in the game but welcome.

"The MTA is becoming more transparent," she said. "Because the MTA presented to the public an honest face about what it was confronting [during Sandy], people sort of gave them the benefit of the doubt."

Of course, not all MTA-related videos are house-produced. One recent example that went viral on various social media outlets was "Pizza Rat," a video of a large rodent carrying a slice of pizza down a set of stairs at the L line's First Avenue subway station in the East Village.

"In my estimation, we are one of the most transparent authorities out there, a highly scrutinized public authority," said Chan. "Something happens like Pizza Rat and it's going to be on Flickr."

The openness resonated with out-of-town visitors.

"I wish we could do that in Boston," said Marc Ebuña, who grew up in Queens riding the No. 7 train and Long Island Rail Road, and co-founded the Boston advocacy group TransitMatters.

In Boston, a record 110 inches of snow last winter paralyzed parts of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, or the "T," as locals call the state agency that operates Greater Boston's subway trains, buses and commuter rail. The fiasco prompted Gov. Charlie Baker and lawmakers to impose a control board to oversee the T.

"The T was definitely trying to get the message out in a similar way that the MTA was doing with Sandy, but the content wasn't well-produced and it wasn't high-quality," said Ebuña. "A lot of the content was not packaged in a way that displayed social-media adroitness."

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Transportation industry New York
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