It's not right, and the explanations about the age of the systems are mostly excuses. There is a good article somewhere, maybe the Atlantic, where the reporter

It's not right, and the explanations about the age of the systems are mostly excuses. There is a good article somewhere, maybe the Atlantic, where the reporter was able to get some MTA managers to admit they were essentially holding fixes to the visible problem (no arrival time signaling) hostage as a means to gather public support and funding for less visible overhaul of the infrastructure, by bundling the two together. Hard to prove this is the case, but it smells right to me. Modern signaling system that did nothing but give arrival times to the public would not have to make use of any infrastructure at all -- it could run completely independently -- and could be done for a tiny fraction of the billions of dollars that the MTA is spending on the slow work they say is currently necessary to get it.