5 ms·

This might seem cool to people that aren't in NYC, but it's really not what we need. We need more tracks, more tunnels, and more trains. Second Avenue Sagas, th

This might seem cool to people that aren't in NYC, but it's really not what we need. We need more tracks, more tunnels, and more trains. Second Avenue Sagas, the transit blog of record for NYC, is... more critical. > wifi =/= building for the next 100 years. Massive subway expansion at reasonable costs is what's needed. https://twitter.com/2AvSagas/status/685484086614437889 https://twitter.com/2AvSagas/status/685484086614437889 https://twitter.com/2AvSagas/status/685564984668123136 https://twitter.com/2AvSagas/status/685564984668123136 > I want to walk into a train station and never have to wait more than 3 minutes for a train. https://twitter.com/2AvSagas/status/685537323124133890 https://twitter.com/2AvSagas/status/685537323124133890 The other thing is that Cuomo tends to just drop these announcements without any warning or planning. Sort of like the "throw it over the wall" model in open-source.

infinotize 11y ago
Cuomo shows just how absurdly off base with reality he is in his tweet "I want to sit in a seat ... I've come to expect that." New Yorkers don't even want a seat, we want trains that show up at regular intervals and a signaling system that doesn't fail at rush hour multiple times a week. Since Cuomo wouldn't ride the subway, some people brought a cardboard cutout: http://gothamist.com/2015/07/10/cardboard_cuomo_subway.php http://gothamist.com/2015/07/10/cardboard_cuomo_subway.php
- cballard 11y ago
  I want seats removed from the trains (456, L), so that people can actually fit.
  - potatolicious 11y ago
    I get the sentiment and empathize but there are actually handicapped and other mobility-impaired people out there... Lots of them in fact.
    - hkmurakami 11y ago
      Maybe standing room only cars located far away from the station entrance areas?
    - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
      My local bus system has ramp entries, and the driver can require non-mobility-impaired riders to give up seats at the front. (And those seats can also be folded up to make room for wheelchairs.) Would something like that work for the New York subways? Or would it require too much oversight to make people follow the rules?
      - potatolicious 11y ago
        Simply wouldn't work - each train has a driver and a conductor, the driver does not interact with passengers at all (and for safety reasons, probably shouldn't), while the conductor can only oversee his/her immediate surroundings. The issue goes beyond simply wheelchair-bound passengers, but also the fact that the elderly also ride the trains. There are a large number of people who aren't fully disabled but for whom having a seat is important, so it's not enough to simply reserve a few places for a few individuals. The 4/5/6 trains are a clusterfuck because they're vastly oversubscribed. The serve the entirety of the Bronx and the hyper-dense Upper East Side, not to mention the entire east side of Manhattan. The solution to this isn't "leave a large demographic of riders in the cold to gain marginal capacity", the solution is "build the f'ing 2nd Ave subway". There are a large category of improvements to the subway that, while valuable, offer only marginal improvements to capacity. Open-gangway trains can increase per-train passenger capacity by ~5%. CBTC digital train signaling upgrades will get you ~10-20% more capacity by packing trains closer to each other safely. Even stacking a bunch of these improvements together will not resolve the massive capacity deficit the MTA suffers from system-wide. Only new track, new trains, and new stations will. IMO standing-room-only cars fit in this category. It would give us a bit more capacity, but nowhere near enough to make a real dent on the capacity problem - and this particular "improvement" has a high cost in excluded passengers. Even if we made all the cars standing room only, you'd still be packed like sardines into the 4/5/6 in the morning, and you'd still have to watch helplessly as multiple trains pass by packed to the brim.
melling 11y ago
Yeah, you are correct that we need more, a lot more. However, the argument that "we shouldn't do X because we need A, B, and C" is overused all the time to piss and moan whenever someone proposes solving an easy problem that will benefit many people.
bbanyc 11y ago
"Throw it over the wall" isn't the half of it. Last year, when a major snowstorm was forecast to hit NYC, Cuomo announced that the subways would be shutting down - without notifying or consulting the MTA or city government. This threw a wrench into existing plans for inclement weather, with the ultimate result being that trains ran empty along their normal routes until the storm had passed.
- cballard 11y ago
  Yes, they actually need to run the trains in that case so that the third rail doesn't ice up. They even stopped at all station stops, made announcements, and open and closed the doors. There was no reason not to just let people ride them.
hawkice 11y ago
Sounds like 2nd Ave Sagas thinks a world class city should have a world class public transit system. That is my main thought, having been a user of Chicago and New York public transport: Why is this so much worse than e.g. Hong Kong? WiFi isn't the right scale of $ investment to get there.
- martingordon 11y ago
  I think it comes down to fares. You can travel between any two stations on the subway for $2.75. In contrast, the HK metro charges a fare between ~$0.50 to $7.00 depending on destination. Many other metro systems across the world use a zone-based fare scheme as well. There's always a public outcry when MTA announces they're going to raise fares, and any attempt to introduce a distance/zone-based fare would be denounced as unduly burdensome on the poor, since they tend to live further out. In any case, I don't think the current MetroCard-based system could support such a scheme anyway. The number one thing to improve straphangers' "quality of travel" would be to implement CBTC[1] so that we can get countdown clocks to remove the uncertainty that comes with waiting for a train. If I know the next train is coming in 15 minutes, I can hang out above ground or by the stairs and use my cell service rather than standing on the platform not knowing whether the next train is 2 minutes or 20 minutes away. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications-based_train_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications-based_train_con...
  - kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
    Metrocard is going to be replaced in the not too distant future. I wouldn't be surprised if the next system has zones. They already have subsidized cards for low income travelers so a fare hike will have less impact. That's the only way they can begin to address their budget deficit issue.
    - potatolicious 11y ago
      Heavily disagreed - the budget deficit issue comes from a combination of state refusal to properly fund the MTA, and the MTA's own shittastic (and more than likely corrupt) processes for contracts that results in everything being vastly more expensive than it should be. Not to mention vastly more expensive than every other first-world infrastructure project. The problem with a zone system is that it effectively punishes the poor for being too poor live near work. The further out in NYC you go the less able people are to afford higher fares, but yet that is exactly what a zone system does. And like most other direct subsidies, the subsidized MetroCards are a terrifyingly bad solution to this - for one thing in a zone system, even with subsidies, the poor will still end up paying dramatically more than they do today to get to work. Not only that, only the poorest of the poor even qualify for these MetroCards, leaving out a vast income range for whom transit costs are still a burden and a substantial portion of income. A zone system with subsidies will likely end up looking like: - The extreme poor pay slightly more than they do today because of the combination of living very far and subsidization. - The "merely" poor pay dramatically (possibly 2x+ multiples) more than they do today because they are "too rich" to qualify for subsidization but yet live at the outer reaches of the transit system. - Middle income individuals pay more than they do today, they don't qualify for subsidy but they live > 1 zone from work. - Upper/upper middle class individuals pay similar or slightly more than they do today, because they don't qualify for subsidy but are likely to live within the same zone as work (i.e., Manhattan below 110th). A zone system, even with subsidies, will be insanely regressive to the point of comical absurdity. Ignoring the fact that it's incredibly regressive, the zone system also won't do much against the budget issues the MTA faces - if you're going to squeeze someone for money you don't squeeze the residents of Brighton Beach or Bay Ridge or Hunts Point or Elmhurst - they don't got any money left to be squeezed out. Mid-low income families living in the far reaches of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, for whom transit is already a high percentage of their monthly budgets, have little left to give.
volaski 11y ago
While more tunnels and trails will be convenient for a lot of people, it won't necessarily generate significantly more revenue for MTA. On the other hand if MTA invests in wifi, they will make tons more money through all the new business opportunities that arise (Imagine instead of those paper banner ads where it says "download on the appstore", or "sign up with the code 'subway'" which are basically useless since you can't really download it on the spot nor effectively trackable, you could actually download, purchase, sign up for things. Currently most people just waste their time playing candy crush and temple run but that will all change. Their ad revenue will shoot straight up). When they make more money, they can invest in other useful features you mentioned. They're not stupid. They're doing a good job.
- cballard 11y ago
  The MTA is not a business, it's a public service. We already generate enough revenue in taxes, but it's sent upstate instead of being used here. NYC subsidizes the rest of the state. http://observer.com/2014/10/northern-exposure-the-give-and-take-between-upstate-and-downstate/ http://observer.com/2014/10/northern-exposure-the-give-and-t...
  - afarrell 11y ago
    Rents and therefore incomes are higher in a high-demand urban area. Isn't the phenomenon of money being transferred from city->country an inevitability in any society with progressive income taxes?
    - potatolicious 11y ago
      Yeah, as wealth generation becomes more urban you have to pretty much expect cities to subsidize suburbs and rural areas. The main issue here though is that due to some sordid political history the MTA is a state agency, despite running the NYC subway. This has resulted in the city's transit budgets being routinely raided to supplement state budget needs, and also a focus on state-centric mass transit efforts to the detriment of in-city mass transit (see: redeveloping Penn Station which serves long-distance train commuters, designing the AirTrain to LaGuardia to primarily serve suburban Long Island travelers, etc). There's a pretty dramatic misalignment of incentives when a state agency under the command of the governor runs the city's subways, rather than the mayor or even a regional government.
jrcii 11y ago
Just to vent: The 59th st connection that connects the 4/5/6 Upper East Side, Harlem, and Bronx to the heart of Midtown (N/R/Q) was down the other day at 8:40 AM on a weekday, after they had everyone standing on the track for 20 minutes wondering what was going on. Totally unacceptable.
hkmurakami 11y ago
>This might seem cool to people that aren't in NYC Yeah this seems to be most beneficial for international travelers coming to NYC as tourists whose regular cell plans may not give them favorable roaming terms in the States.

infinotize 11y ago

Cuomo shows just how absurdly off base with reality he is in his tweet "I want to sit in a seat ... I've come to expect that." New Yorkers don't even want a seat, we want trains that show up at regular intervals and a signaling system that doesn't fail at rush hour multiple times a week. Since Cuomo wouldn't ride the subway, some people brought a cardboard cutout: http://gothamist.com/2015/07/10/cardboard_cuomo_subway.php http://gothamist.com/2015/07/10/cardboard_cuomo_subway.php

cballard 11y ago
I want seats removed from the trains (456, L), so that people can actually fit.
- potatolicious 11y ago
  I get the sentiment and empathize but there are actually handicapped and other mobility-impaired people out there... Lots of them in fact.
  - hkmurakami 11y ago
    Maybe standing room only cars located far away from the station entrance areas?
  - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
    My local bus system has ramp entries, and the driver can require non-mobility-impaired riders to give up seats at the front. (And those seats can also be folded up to make room for wheelchairs.) Would something like that work for the New York subways? Or would it require too much oversight to make people follow the rules?
    - potatolicious 11y ago
      Simply wouldn't work - each train has a driver and a conductor, the driver does not interact with passengers at all (and for safety reasons, probably shouldn't), while the conductor can only oversee his/her immediate surroundings. The issue goes beyond simply wheelchair-bound passengers, but also the fact that the elderly also ride the trains. There are a large number of people who aren't fully disabled but for whom having a seat is important, so it's not enough to simply reserve a few places for a few individuals. The 4/5/6 trains are a clusterfuck because they're vastly oversubscribed. The serve the entirety of the Bronx and the hyper-dense Upper East Side, not to mention the entire east side of Manhattan. The solution to this isn't "leave a large demographic of riders in the cold to gain marginal capacity", the solution is "build the f'ing 2nd Ave subway". There are a large category of improvements to the subway that, while valuable, offer only marginal improvements to capacity. Open-gangway trains can increase per-train passenger capacity by ~5%. CBTC digital train signaling upgrades will get you ~10-20% more capacity by packing trains closer to each other safely. Even stacking a bunch of these improvements together will not resolve the massive capacity deficit the MTA suffers from system-wide. Only new track, new trains, and new stations will. IMO standing-room-only cars fit in this category. It would give us a bit more capacity, but nowhere near enough to make a real dent on the capacity problem - and this particular "improvement" has a high cost in excluded passengers. Even if we made all the cars standing room only, you'd still be packed like sardines into the 4/5/6 in the morning, and you'd still have to watch helplessly as multiple trains pass by packed to the brim.

melling 11y ago

Yeah, you are correct that we need more, a lot more. However, the argument that "we shouldn't do X because we need A, B, and C" is overused all the time to piss and moan whenever someone proposes solving an easy problem that will benefit many people.

bbanyc 11y ago

"Throw it over the wall" isn't the half of it. Last year, when a major snowstorm was forecast to hit NYC, Cuomo announced that the subways would be shutting down - without notifying or consulting the MTA or city government. This threw a wrench into existing plans for inclement weather, with the ultimate result being that trains ran empty along their normal routes until the storm had passed.

cballard 11y ago
Yes, they actually need to run the trains in that case so that the third rail doesn't ice up. They even stopped at all station stops, made announcements, and open and closed the doors. There was no reason not to just let people ride them.

hawkice 11y ago

Sounds like 2nd Ave Sagas thinks a world class city should have a world class public transit system. That is my main thought, having been a user of Chicago and New York public transport: Why is this so much worse than e.g. Hong Kong? WiFi isn't the right scale of $ investment to get there.

martingordon 11y ago
I think it comes down to fares. You can travel between any two stations on the subway for $2.75. In contrast, the HK metro charges a fare between ~$0.50 to $7.00 depending on destination. Many other metro systems across the world use a zone-based fare scheme as well. There's always a public outcry when MTA announces they're going to raise fares, and any attempt to introduce a distance/zone-based fare would be denounced as unduly burdensome on the poor, since they tend to live further out. In any case, I don't think the current MetroCard-based system could support such a scheme anyway. The number one thing to improve straphangers' "quality of travel" would be to implement CBTC[1] so that we can get countdown clocks to remove the uncertainty that comes with waiting for a train. If I know the next train is coming in 15 minutes, I can hang out above ground or by the stairs and use my cell service rather than standing on the platform not knowing whether the next train is 2 minutes or 20 minutes away. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications-based_train_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications-based_train_con...
- kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
  Metrocard is going to be replaced in the not too distant future. I wouldn't be surprised if the next system has zones. They already have subsidized cards for low income travelers so a fare hike will have less impact. That's the only way they can begin to address their budget deficit issue.
  - potatolicious 11y ago
    Heavily disagreed - the budget deficit issue comes from a combination of state refusal to properly fund the MTA, and the MTA's own shittastic (and more than likely corrupt) processes for contracts that results in everything being vastly more expensive than it should be. Not to mention vastly more expensive than every other first-world infrastructure project. The problem with a zone system is that it effectively punishes the poor for being too poor live near work. The further out in NYC you go the less able people are to afford higher fares, but yet that is exactly what a zone system does. And like most other direct subsidies, the subsidized MetroCards are a terrifyingly bad solution to this - for one thing in a zone system, even with subsidies, the poor will still end up paying dramatically more than they do today to get to work. Not only that, only the poorest of the poor even qualify for these MetroCards, leaving out a vast income range for whom transit costs are still a burden and a substantial portion of income. A zone system with subsidies will likely end up looking like: - The extreme poor pay slightly more than they do today because of the combination of living very far and subsidization. - The "merely" poor pay dramatically (possibly 2x+ multiples) more than they do today because they are "too rich" to qualify for subsidization but yet live at the outer reaches of the transit system. - Middle income individuals pay more than they do today, they don't qualify for subsidy but they live > 1 zone from work. - Upper/upper middle class individuals pay similar or slightly more than they do today, because they don't qualify for subsidy but are likely to live within the same zone as work (i.e., Manhattan below 110th). A zone system, even with subsidies, will be insanely regressive to the point of comical absurdity. Ignoring the fact that it's incredibly regressive, the zone system also won't do much against the budget issues the MTA faces - if you're going to squeeze someone for money you don't squeeze the residents of Brighton Beach or Bay Ridge or Hunts Point or Elmhurst - they don't got any money left to be squeezed out. Mid-low income families living in the far reaches of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, for whom transit is already a high percentage of their monthly budgets, have little left to give.

volaski 11y ago

While more tunnels and trails will be convenient for a lot of people, it won't necessarily generate significantly more revenue for MTA. On the other hand if MTA invests in wifi, they will make tons more money through all the new business opportunities that arise (Imagine instead of those paper banner ads where it says "download on the appstore", or "sign up with the code 'subway'" which are basically useless since you can't really download it on the spot nor effectively trackable, you could actually download, purchase, sign up for things. Currently most people just waste their time playing candy crush and temple run but that will all change. Their ad revenue will shoot straight up). When they make more money, they can invest in other useful features you mentioned. They're not stupid. They're doing a good job.

cballard 11y ago
The MTA is not a business, it's a public service. We already generate enough revenue in taxes, but it's sent upstate instead of being used here. NYC subsidizes the rest of the state. http://observer.com/2014/10/northern-exposure-the-give-and-take-between-upstate-and-downstate/ http://observer.com/2014/10/northern-exposure-the-give-and-t...
- afarrell 11y ago
  Rents and therefore incomes are higher in a high-demand urban area. Isn't the phenomenon of money being transferred from city->country an inevitability in any society with progressive income taxes?
  - potatolicious 11y ago
    Yeah, as wealth generation becomes more urban you have to pretty much expect cities to subsidize suburbs and rural areas. The main issue here though is that due to some sordid political history the MTA is a state agency, despite running the NYC subway. This has resulted in the city's transit budgets being routinely raided to supplement state budget needs, and also a focus on state-centric mass transit efforts to the detriment of in-city mass transit (see: redeveloping Penn Station which serves long-distance train commuters, designing the AirTrain to LaGuardia to primarily serve suburban Long Island travelers, etc). There's a pretty dramatic misalignment of incentives when a state agency under the command of the governor runs the city's subways, rather than the mayor or even a regional government.

jrcii 11y ago

Just to vent: The 59th st connection that connects the 4/5/6 Upper East Side, Harlem, and Bronx to the heart of Midtown (N/R/Q) was down the other day at 8:40 AM on a weekday, after they had everyone standing on the track for 20 minutes wondering what was going on. Totally unacceptable.

hkmurakami 11y ago

>This might seem cool to people that aren't in NYC Yeah this seems to be most beneficial for international travelers coming to NYC as tourists whose regular cell plans may not give them favorable roaming terms in the States.