From our soon-to-be transit correspondent Craig Cal
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This is the type of progressive thinking the TTC and the City of Toronto badly needs.
The East Japan Railway company (JR EAST) has a fantastic Research & Development centre dedicated to achieving five goals: safety and stability improvement, convenience and comfort improvement, promotion of reduction in costs, contributions to the global environment, and new developments for stations.
One of their many interesting research initiatives is a ticket gate which contains piezo elements under the floor, producing electricity as people walk through it.
“When combined with high-efficiency storage systems, the ticket gate generators can serve as a clean source of supplementary power for the train stations. Busy train stations will be able to accumulate a relatively large amount of energy.â€
While the actual amount of energy that can be produced is still under going research, the sheer inventiveness of the idea has to be admired. In a city addicted to energy and rife with pollution, I feel that the TTC has a responsibility to set and strive for high environmental standards. This is just one of the many overlooked aspects of our public transit system that deserves attention.
Since we are talking about ticket gates, let me use this opportunity to share one of my pet peeves. Bad design of any sort is the reoccurring theme of my pet peeves, and this is one of the TTC’s many indiscretions.
Have you ever seen a ticket booth with a line-up of 15 people, waiting for 1 person to buy their bus tickets, ask for directions or get change? It burns me every time I see it. I guess it’s the designer in me dying for some type of solution. Some people take matters into their own hands and push themselves through regardless of what’s going on at the booth. Something must be done. Perhaps the TTC could dispense bus tickets through the red token machine? Perhaps they could install computers near the booth solely for trip planning usage? Any suggestions?
Craig Cal
via Treehugger
10 comments
Not just the TTC. Malls, Canada’s Wonderland, sports arenas… Capturing the energy of any high-traffic areas in the city could be an incredible source of power generation. I like it. 🙂
What bugs me about turnstiles are those at unmanned entrances/exits. You know the kind I mean, were you put in your token then push your way through all these bars. Now if you happen to be pushing a baby carriage, a bicycle, a scooter, have lots of parcels in your arms, etc. tough luck!
Now in some of the stations with elevators I’ve noticed that their unmanned entrances/exits have a way for those in wheelchairs and those listed above to enter and exit. A door slides open, you walk in, the door closed behind you, then the door in front of you opens and out you go. We need those at EVERY unmanned entrance/exit!
We need mandatory fare cards & card dispensers, it’s as simple as that. Phase out tokens and cash fare ASAP.
Instead of monthly passes, we need 30-day cards. Instead of weekly passes, we need 7 day cards. Instead of buying X tokens, we need to put $X on our refillable cards.
This would not only add speed, customer flexibility and efficiency to the entire system, but prevent the loss of millions of dollars in fraud, which the TTC claims is equal to 1% of annual revenue (but probably much more.)
You can’t get something for nothing. If the floor deforms enough to put electrical energy into storage, then the transit user must use more muscle energy getting out of that depression than would ordinarily be used in walking. This extra energy must come from food. Compared to other ways of getting the same electrical energy, getting it from animal power (and humans are animals, after all) uses more resources and generates more carbon dioxide than does getting it directly from fossil fuels. This may be a way of downloading some costs from the transit system to the transit user, but it is not in any way a source of free energy or of energy with no environmental cost.
They need a smartcard system like the one in Hong Kong, where you just tap a censor with your smartcard which then opens the gates and lets you through. The subway stations in HK manage to handle 10 times more ppl with this system compared to what they have in Toronto right now, and a large part is due to the smart card system.
in japan, there is no such thing as cash fare.
everyone must purchase either a single ride ticket or a multipass and use that to get through the gates (not annoying turnstiles). there are ticket machines everywhere, and fare is collected based on distance you plan to travel. therefore someone travelling one stop pays less than someone travelling from one end of the city to the other. a brilliant system really, because if someone is tired and wants to take the subway/train just 2 stops they do because it’s cheap (and transit commission still gets some $) instead of wondering if it’s a waste of a token and opting to walk instead ($0 for the transit commission).
if only we had a system like that here. sigh.
As others have noted here, we need to move away from fare media where you even have to deal with a collector or a turnstile on a fare-by-fare basis to one where a pass of some kind gives you free access to the system.
Whether this is something simple like a Metropass or more advanced like some form of smart card with stored value is really a secondary issue. The important thing is to get away from performing some type of transaction every time someone enters a station.
It’s ironic that the TTC raises precisely this issue anytime someone talks about changing the free transfer arrangement — the volume of movement through stations with free transfers could not be handled if people needed to validate their fares again. The same enlightened attitude should extend to station entrances (and surface vehicle operations) as well.
Totally agree with Kevin on the efare thing… What’s stopping something like Dexit going on every bus and streetcar and in every station? Have machines everywhere to load up a Dexit card, and have Dexit sensors at every entrance to the system.
It does cost money to install Dexit (wikipedia link), but I bet they’d give the TTC a discount to get their system that much exposure!
Why spend millions of dollars on a “made for TTC” (or GTA) system when the technology is already in existance?
Forget the piezo-electric thing. I am sure that huge energy savings could be achieved by simply having escalators run at 1/4 speed when no one is on them. A sensor at the bottom (for up escalators) or top (for down escalators) speeds up the escalator when someone wants to travel up or down. This is not science fiction and is the norm for most escalators in Europe, especially Germany. A different version of this scheme actually turns the escalator off when no one is riding with a sign indicating, however, that the escalator is functional, but this would undoubtedly confuse the heck out of the escalator-riding public on the TTC.
Escalators at 1/4 power when no one is using it? Sounds like a good idea Nick.