Could slowing down the Green Line speed it up?
Nick Musachio thinks he’s found a novel solution to the Green Line’s tardiness problem, though getting the powers that be to give his patented "Always Green" invention a gander has been like pulling teeth.
“It’s based on the scientific principle of ‘common sense,’” said Musachio, an inventor who lives in the Como Park neighborhood.
A baby watches the Green Line from the outdoor patio of the Cupcake restaurant.
“Always Green” has garnered the interest of University of Minnesota transportation wonk David Levinson, an engineering professor who recently blogged about the idea at the Transportationist.org. Musachio also presented his technology to St. Paul City Engineer John Maczko and other higher-ups in city engineering, to more skeptical reaction.
He’s had little luck so far getting an audience before Metro Transit and the Metropolitan Council.
Musachio specializes in dreaming up new transportation technologies, and he’s read up on the Green Line light rail, which sometimes takes nearly an hour to complete the 11-mile trip from the Union Depot in downtown St. Paul to Target Field in downtown Minneapolis.
On Metro Transit’s printed schedules, official travel times run 48 minutes, up from previous estimates of 40 minutes. In reality, the train is averaging 52 to 53 minutes, which is too slow and unpredictable for critics.
For comparison’s sake, a 20-mile light rail trip in the Phoenix area takes 65 minutes, like clockwork.
Metro Transit has been pushing the city of St. Paul to give the Green Line greater power to prioritize green lights at University Avenue intersections. The system currently uses a complicated underground loop detection system that essentially calls information to the traffic signals ahead, letting them know a train is coming.
Those signals are then expected to respond by extending the green for a few more seconds or switching to green sooner than planned, effectively stealing time from the scheduled yellow light or a left-turn light. But for a variety of reasons, trains are not making it past the intersection within their window, the “green band,” on a reliable basis.
Tweaking the system to extend the green lights even longer is one possible solution, but Musachio says “Not so fast!”
And he literally means “Not so fast!” Rather than force traffic signals to turn green as the light rail approaches, Musachio suggests keeping the lights on a set timing sequence, so the green lights pop up at predictable, regular intervals for set periods of time.
Using “Always Green,” technology on board the light rail vehicles would then alert the driver how much faster he needs to drive to catch the next green light. If he’s not going to make a light a few blocks away, it tells him how much he needs to slow down to get the next green after that, all without stopping.
“If it’s not going to make the light, it tells it to go even slower ... so that it will make the next cycle,” Musachio said.
The idea is that a continuously moving train is better than a train that stops and starts, even if it means slowing (or speeding up) within particular route segments.
Why’s that? For starters, the ride is physically smoother and less herky-jerky for customers. Psychologically, it’s frustrating for customers to see so many stops at lights. The train would use less energy and generate less pollution than accelerating and decelerating from a stopped position.
“Over 50 percent of transportation pollution is caused by stopping and going,” Musachio said. “North Carolina State University did a study. Catalytic converters, they burn damn clean when you're driving steady.”
“But when you’re stopping, it's filthy. If you stop, you lose from a pollution standpoint, and a miles-per-gallon standpoint, too.”
“When you’re accelerating, you’re belching out the black stuff. There’s a higher incidence of mortality if you live within a quarter mile of a highway or a major thoroughfare. You definitely do not want to live near the acceleration lane after a stop light.”
And perhaps most important from a time standpoint, Musachio believes the overall trip would be faster. That’s because the amount of time wasted accelerating from a complete standstill to 30 or 40 miles per hour adds up over the course of dozens of traffic lights.
Remember when Batman knocked a Central Corridor construction worker in the jaw?
There’s even a technical term in transportation planning circles for the moment or two of lost travel time in between when a light changes color and a vehicle driver hits the gas. Now imagine that there’s an old lady in the road when the lights turn green. That moment of delay is extended even longer.
“When you come to a complete stop, people call it the ‘wasted green,’” Musachio said. “The light turns green, and there’s a 2 second delay, or grandma’s sitting in the road.”
Musachio estimates that by keeping the light rail vehicles in near-constant motion (other than at station stops), he can shave several minutes off the typical Green Line ride. His software modeling holds up, he said, but he’s never implemented it anywhere but YouTube.
But even if he’s completely wrong on the time savings, he thinks he can still save Metro Transit -- and the city of St. Paul -- money and energy while cutting down on pollution.
When it comes to accelerating up to full speed, “it’s a lot easier going from 20 (miles per hour) than from zero,” he said. “And a lot more comfortable. I mean, these poor passengers. Even if it doesn’t speed it up, it will be a hell of a lot more comfortable for the passengers.”
Musachio, who once appeared on a PBS children's television show about inventing, has made headlines before as the inventor of the E-Tran system, which powers trolleys and vehicles from a power strip in the road, as opposed to overhead wires.
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