20 ms·

‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’

376 points by jonathanjaeger 9y ago

wccrawford 9y ago
There's an attempt to make this all sound like a conspiracy, but it all makes sense to me. There were accidents. They slowed the train to improve safety. The train is about as safe as ever. Why? Many, many more people are using than the trains than before. It's harder to keep that many people safe, so more caution is warranted. The only problem I see, if it's true, is that they classified delays stemming from maintenance under the wrong heading. And so far as I can tell, there's no real proof of that.
- DamonHD 9y ago
  But beyond a certain point slowing the trains gains little safety but (eg) pushes people back to the road where (in the UK for example) we spend 10x less to save a life than on the trains. Thus, overcaution on the trains will kill more people.
  - tashoecraft 9y ago
    Wonder how much further you can take it. If you lose a little safety (trains) and take more people off the road, you increase the risk of a train accident. How many people go back to the roads after a train accident? Is the backlash greater (my 0 data thoughts would be that more people would return to the road then just if the train was slow). I heard somewhere that more people died through increased car accidents after 9/11 (forget time span) that would have flown but didn't.
    - mhb 9y ago
      You don't really need to propagate it all the way to actual lives lost. If there is an hour of life lost on a too safe train, that's a fraction of a life lost.
    - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
      You can only take it so far as you're willing to hold accountable the people making the decisions.
- arzt 9y ago
  More importantly, they used the overcrowding excuse as a means to raise $800mm+ from New York taxpayers. If this capital wasn't necessary given the problems they cited were non-existent, this amounts to fraud.
  - DamonHD 9y ago
    Well, fraud only if it were deliberately misleading. It seems highly likely that the MTA believes what it is saying, even if it happens to be misguided, and driven by the right motivations.
    - tomohawk 9y ago
      It's either fraud (deliberate) or incompetence bordering on fraud. They have declining ridership, yet are claiming increasing overcrowding. In either case, probably time to clean house and get rid of the "better safe than sorry" crowd.
      - stouset 9y ago
        If they’re running fewer trains slower, then declining ridership is not incompatible with increased overcrowding.
    - bluGill 9y ago
      It is fraud though: they have/had an "other" category, but they called it "overcrowding" and then used the confusion on what overcrowding means to get funds (I'll bet when you hear overcrowding you think too many people not any of the many random things that can go wrong). Maybe it really is overcrowding, but since the category is really other we don't know. Overcrowding is NOT a misc category, it is a specific situation with a specific definition (the exact definition is something they use should be published so we can decide if we agree with it), with specific training on how to tell if this is really overcrowding as opposed to a failure to get a normal crowd through in time since the solution to the two problems is different. Other/misc is an import category to have - every system of collecting data needs to have a none of the above because there is always something you didn't think of. What is normally missing is that when other is used there needs to be a text explanation of what happened, and then an investigation to see what should be done. You collect data for things like "medical emergency" because from the category alone everybody understands that the delay is beyond control. When something is misc that means you didn't expect it and need to redesign your procedures so it never happens again. Thus the misc category should be something all operators hate to use: they get sucked into meetings on how do we ensure that it doesn't happen again.
- Angostura 9y ago
  The story I got was rather different; first that the safety measures were implemented in a ham-fisted manner and secondly that they failed to model or recognise correctly the overall effect that the measures would have on carrying capacity, and they are still failing to recognise it. I don’t know how fair these accusations are, of course.
- kelnos 9y ago
  That's not what I got from reading it. My reading is that an accident that was most likely caused by a driver falling asleep resulted in cover-your-ass style changes that have little to no measurable effect on safety, but cause massive real problems with the system that negatively affect millions of riders. And beyond that, they're shuffling blame around and waving their hands to distract people from systemic problems. I mean, if the delays are caused by slowing the trains down, they should say "we've slowed the trains down due to safety reasons, and that's why there are delays". Then people can either accept that and move on, or do actual studies into the problem to determine if their course of action is correct, and if the trade-offs made are worth it. I don't think it's some big hush-hush conspiracy; it's just garden-variety corruption and a desire to avoid fixing root causes of problems because they're complex and expensive. Easier to just keep collecting that paycheck while using "overcrowding" as an excuse to get more public money diverted to your agency.
jakelarkin 9y ago
the abysmal state of their technology is completely to blame. problems described point to an inability to monitor trains or operators in ways that don't create massive slowdowns as knock-on effects.
nikanj 9y ago
We, collectively, seem to accept car accidents because we think we can avoid them with good driving skills. Train accidents leave us helpless, and we can’t cope with that. The whole concept of ”bad things happen to good people for no reason” is extremely hard to bear. Somehow this reminds me of people who believe the right diet will protect them from cancer, the right prenatal care from birth defects, etc.
- lotsofpulp 9y ago
  Are you suggesting that different lifestyles don't result in different risks? Such as not smoking, not drinking alcohol while pregnant, not eating excessively?
- stefan_ 9y ago
  I don't think that is the crucial difference. In a train or plane crash, hundreds die in a single event. But when a hundred people die in a hundred car crashes every day, the individual event is barely worth a mention on page 6 of the news. It's the same mentality that means we have root cause analysis for plane and train crashes but for a car crash, SOP is pretty much to blame 1) whoever died or 2) noone at all, and 3) never the infrastructure.
  - waqf 9y ago
    Not only are car crashes less salient than train crashes, but also the converse effect: the inconvenience of car speed limits is more salient than the inconvenience of train speed limits, because you're the one driving.
  - kelnos 9y ago
    I think the cycle feeds into itself though: part of the reason planes and trains are so safe is because of the extensive root-cause analysis of crashes, which routinely result in suggestions for improvement that make the rest of travel safer. Remove the investigations and you'd end up with more plane and train crashes. When a car crashes, we just scrape up the debris and move on, after usually assigning blame to one of the drivers who ends up with higher insurance premiums or a lawsuit, assuming they survived. There's little effort to learn from the crashes.
mabbo 9y ago
I spent 5 years taking the Toronto subway (Yonge line, North York Center to Union) every day. I noticed this interesting pattern. During rush hour, any small delay on one train will almost certain impact every train down the line- there's little time buffer between trains. The bigger the delay, the more trains effected by it. The more passengers per train, the more likely that train will have a delay- loading and unloading taking too long, sure, that can cause a small delay. But consider events like heart attacks, seizures, a fight breaking out- all kinds of major-delay-causing-events that are roughly speaking a linear function from 'time passenger is on the train' to 'likelihood of major delay event'. If you have twice as many passengers, you have twice the odds of a major delay. If a passenger spends twice a long on a train, you have twice the odds of them causing a major a delay. Delays cause more passengers per train and cause longer time-on-train for each passenger. It's all non-linear. Any one tiny delay can spark a total breakdown and the longer that delay is the more likely it will cause more in turn. How on earth does the system ever work at all?
- kd0amg 9y ago
  How on earth does the system ever work at all? By promising a schedule that doesn't assume nothing goes wrong. Time padding means the inevitable minor delays can be absorbed quickly, and infrequent longer delays are recoverable. Also, I don't know about Toronto, but most of the big delays in Boston are issues with equipment rather than passengers. Derailment, signal failure, etc. should scale with vehicle traffic rather than vehicle occupancy/passenger count, and big delays decrease how much traffic is going around at the moment.
smilekzs 9y ago
Risking asking the obvious: What is stopping us from having autonomous subways, considering we are almost gonna have autonomous cars?
- joncrane 9y ago
  Poor initial implementation combined with fear. The DC Metro used to have a semi-autonomous mode that's been turned off for years since there was a glitch that caused a crash.
  - jandrese 9y ago
    The "glitch" was decades of deferred maintenance that left sensors inoperable along the line. Theoretically now that the SafeTrack initiative is complete they should be able to return to semi-autonomous operation, but I doubt it. I'm not expecting the DC Metro to go autonomous anytime soon either. It's a huge jobs program for inner city residents. Basically a commuter tax for a social program.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
  Because of jobs?
- Totoradio 9y ago
  It's already a thing, first example that comes to mind is line 14 in the Paris metro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_M%C3%A9tro_Line_14 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_M%C3%A9tro_Line_14
  - sbarre 9y ago
    The Skytrain in Vancouver does not have human conductors either. Although I would assume there are conductors in a control centre somewhere?
    - masklinn 9y ago
      There are no conductors, there's a control room with system overview and links to metros, stations and service personnel. See http://www.ansaldo-sts.com/sites/ansaldosts/files/brochures/copenhagen_metro.pdf http://www.ansaldo-sts.com/sites/ansaldosts/files/brochures/... page 21.
bogomipz 9y ago
This would not be the first time that the MTA has willfully deceived the public by maintaining two sets of facts - the private set which reflects the truth and another set of facts that are used in discussion with the public. 15 years ago the MTA was caught maintaining two different sets of books - one internal that showed the agency had a surplus of cash and another set of books for the public which showed the agency as being "cash strapped" and needing to raise fares as a result. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/23/nyregion/hevesi-says-mta-moved-millions-to-simulate-a-deficit.html http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/23/nyregion/hevesi-says-mta-m... The culture of this agency is rotten and its corruption endemic. It's hard to believe it's capable of producing anything other than it's current broken state.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > The culture of this agency is rotten and its corruption endemic How does one realistically reform something like this?
  - DiabloD3 9y ago
    You fire everyone. However, if I remember correctly, they're unionized, which is why this hasn't happened yet.
    - geofft 9y ago
      Is management unionized? The article makes it sound like the engineers themselves are frustrated with this system.
      - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
        You can't just stop the gravy train by removing management. Bad culture is at all levels.
        wpietri 9y ago
        Bad culture is at all levels, but management control the factors that turn culture bad. If you'd like to see a fine example of how changing the management and the management philosophy can turn a place around, look at NUMMI. There's a This American Life episode with extensive worker interviews: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015
stcredzero 9y ago
But there is one type of delay that’s gotten exponentially worse during that time: a catchall category blandly titled “insufficient capacity, excess dwell, unknown,” which captures every delay without an obvious cause. This smacks of corruption or of elements of society deciding that systems aren't going to simply work anymore. The population of New York City when I lived in Queens was 7.3 million when I lived there in 1989. The subways pretty much worked back then. The figure for population of New York City in 2017 I found was 8.5 million. Population increase can't account for the difference. There must have been considerable systemic decay.
- mrbabbage 9y ago
  NYC's transit mode share for commute trips is above 50% [1]. Of the additional 1.2 million people, this means that this population growth probably produced at least 1.2 million additional daily rides, since 50% of the 1.2 million rides the subway twice a day, to and from work. 1.2 million additional daily riders is about double the entire Washington Metro daily ridership and triple that of BART's daily ridership! Indeed, 1.2 million daily riders is about equal to ridership on the Lex! So I disagree with your conclusion that "Population increase can't account for the difference". This sort of ridership growth would have destroyed any other comparable system in the US. If anything, it's amazing that the NYC subway hasn't fallen apart more than it already has. [1] https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/databook/travel-mode-shares-in-the-u-s/ https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/databook/travel-mode-sha...
  - somecontext 9y ago
    For some context in case anyone was curious: according to old news articles, the average weekday ridership in 1989 was ~3.7 million rides per day. It is ~5.7 million rides per day now. Ridership in the past few decades has increased faster than the population. One factor cited in some analyses of this phenomenon is the significant decrease in the crime rate relative to the 1980s and 1990s, but that is likely not the only contributor.
  - kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
    The ridership was higher in 1948 and there was no crisis of sardine packed trains and crowded platforms then. MTA is intentionally running the system below capacity to cut costs.
macawfish 9y ago
In Minneapolis, the mob bought and dismantled a fully functioning streetcar system. Same forces seem alive and well today. They just chose to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into building a new stadium.
- tomasien 9y ago
  I am sure those forces still exist, but the will to fix the subways in NYC and expand it in other cities (LA especially) is stronger than ever. White flight is either reversing or wants to reverse, and a group with increasing power wants public transportation. I wish we built functioning public transportation because its the right thing to do, I'll accept it happening because young professionals demand it.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
Does anyone know of a source that competently compares costs across different metro systems? Total operating cost per mile, per passenger-mile, et cetera.
njarboe 9y ago
This article has a lot of text before getting to describing the problem. Summary: Train wreck 1995 and a installation of a safety-first, CYA response that slows down the trains and does not increase safety. Longer Summary: Train wreck in 1995. Maybe driver was asleep. Start installing new signals that not only automatically stop the trains when there is a train ahead (good idea and already in place), but also when going over 45mph. Trains used to go up to 55mph with no systemic problems. Drivers go even slower than 45mph because the train is automatically stopped when going faster (as you would want to do if there was a train ahead) instead of just giving a warning and letting the train keep going. As more of the system gets these new signals, more of the system has slower trains. Thus the increase of delays that are labeled generically as "insufficient capacity, excess dwell, unknown" from about 20% of delays in 2012 to about 60% in 2017.
- gsnedders 9y ago
  > Drivers go even slower than 45mph because the train is automatically stopped when going faster (as you would want to do if there was a train ahead) instead of just giving a warning and letting the train keep going. Is there any protection system that allows the maximum speed to be exceeded with just a warning? Certainly all those I can think of (TPWS, TVM, PZB, or something more modern like ETCS) have a given maximum speed you're allowed to exceed by a small tolerance but nothing more (though, of course, the system may be isolated, but that's not allowed in passenger service). The failing here sounds like it is setting the line speed to 45mph rather than anything higher.
  - thunfischbrot 9y ago
    That, and considering a speed limiter instead of stopping the train when traveling too fast. What good does it do to stop the train when going too fast instead of limiting it in the first place?
    - gsnedders 9y ago
      The general principle in railway movement authority is that there's an easy fail safe: stop moving. If nothing moves, there can be no collision. If something goes wrong? Stop the train. You can then figure out what went wrong and address it with no risk. Things shouldn't be going wrong, speeds shouldn't be being exceeded, etc.
the8472 9y ago
Single shot timers? Exclusion locks on fixed sections of the track? Modern control systems such as ETCS3 can allocate virtual track segments (moving blocks) to individual trains and adjust the reserved length based on the current speed.
- afterburner 9y ago
  Far easier to install in greenfield (fresh) projects.
  - the8472 9y ago
    ETCS is designed for incremental rollout and upgrade of the levels. And they require less equipment on the track too since things are mostly done wirelessly, level 2 doesn't require signals, level 3 doesn't even require balises.
slippers 9y ago
could it be that more time spent inside a train increases profit? maybe they just want passengers looking at advertising. they are a captive audience.
davidf18 9y ago
I live in NYC. For a couple of years I'd be reading NYTimes articles about the system is having problems from overcrowding, yet you'd see articles that more people took subways in the 1950's - 1960's. Within the past few months there was a NYTimes article that stated that after an accident in the mid 1990s (?) that they slowed the system down. Thus, the problem wasn't overcrowding, but slowing the system down. The system has been underfunded for maintenance. When the city went broke in the 1970s (?), the financing was transferred to the state from the city. NY State taxes the city but does not returned the taxed funds to the city for the MTA. Transferring management of the MTA back to the city would help with holding the Mayor accountable, something to think about if they want to be re-elected.
solotronics 9y ago
I think the topic of a declining/slowly collapsing society needs serious research. How do you definitively measure if a society is progressing or regressing? If you measure by infrastructure the US probably hit its peak in the 60s and has been declining since then. https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/ https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/
- drb91 9y ago
  "Progress" seems subjective and political. I posit no definitive measure of progress exists.
  - solotronics 9y ago
    its pretty objective if you measure it in terms of infrastructure. - rate of new miles of roads - rate of increase/decrease in potholes per 10 miles - number of bridges that need fixing - number of people on government assistance - percentage of population in jail - peoples test scores on standardized international tests its not like things are unmeasureable... just that politics awards those who ignore these things
    - drb91 9y ago
      Not objective at all. There are a lot of values and politics embedded in the things you chose and the implicit direction that is healthy for infrastructure. And it should be, because “objective” metrics are inevitable gamed and their value is gone.
- wpietri 9y ago
  Step one is defining a target condition. The problem is that people have different target conditions. The enormous rise in inequality since the 1960s [1] makes clear that some people have a target condition of "I personally own everything". [1] http://economistsview.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451b33869e201a5115729b5970c-popup http://economistsview.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451b33869e201a51...
lg 9y ago
they must have installed one of these single-shot timers on the uptown A between 50th and 59th. it always crawls through 50th, stops in the tunnel, then crawls into 59th. didn't used to until a couple years ago.
matt_smith123 9y ago
Guys like this will be running the self driving automobile infrastructure in 50 years.
dkarl 9y ago
But the 2014 study — the first time the authority had attempted to analyze the impact of any of the revamped signals, using its improved data system — found 2,851 lost total passenger hours per weekday could be attributed to thirteen modified signals alone. That's 84 person-years per year, just considering the weekday impact of those thirteen signals. Over a lifetime a year, to save (speculatively) one life per decade? Call me callous, but I don't think it's worth it.
jlebrech 9y ago
wouldn't trains be the easiest transport system to add self driving to? all it would need is throttle, and if they have access to the position of other trains too that's a major advantage.

There's an attempt to make this all sound like a conspiracy, but it all makes sense to me. There were accidents. They slowed the train to improve safety. The train is about as safe as ever. Why? Many, many more people are using than the trains than before. It's harder to keep that many people safe, so more caution is warranted. The only problem I see, if it's true, is that they classified delays stemming from maintenance under the wrong heading. And so far as I can tell, there's no real proof of that.

DamonHD 9y ago
But beyond a certain point slowing the trains gains little safety but (eg) pushes people back to the road where (in the UK for example) we spend 10x less to save a life than on the trains. Thus, overcaution on the trains will kill more people.
- tashoecraft 9y ago
  Wonder how much further you can take it. If you lose a little safety (trains) and take more people off the road, you increase the risk of a train accident. How many people go back to the roads after a train accident? Is the backlash greater (my 0 data thoughts would be that more people would return to the road then just if the train was slow). I heard somewhere that more people died through increased car accidents after 9/11 (forget time span) that would have flown but didn't.
  - mhb 9y ago
    You don't really need to propagate it all the way to actual lives lost. If there is an hour of life lost on a too safe train, that's a fraction of a life lost.
  - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
    You can only take it so far as you're willing to hold accountable the people making the decisions.
arzt 9y ago
More importantly, they used the overcrowding excuse as a means to raise $800mm+ from New York taxpayers. If this capital wasn't necessary given the problems they cited were non-existent, this amounts to fraud.
- DamonHD 9y ago
  Well, fraud only if it were deliberately misleading. It seems highly likely that the MTA believes what it is saying, even if it happens to be misguided, and driven by the right motivations.
  - tomohawk 9y ago
    It's either fraud (deliberate) or incompetence bordering on fraud. They have declining ridership, yet are claiming increasing overcrowding. In either case, probably time to clean house and get rid of the "better safe than sorry" crowd.
    - stouset 9y ago
      If they’re running fewer trains slower, then declining ridership is not incompatible with increased overcrowding.
  - bluGill 9y ago
    It is fraud though: they have/had an "other" category, but they called it "overcrowding" and then used the confusion on what overcrowding means to get funds (I'll bet when you hear overcrowding you think too many people not any of the many random things that can go wrong). Maybe it really is overcrowding, but since the category is really other we don't know. Overcrowding is NOT a misc category, it is a specific situation with a specific definition (the exact definition is something they use should be published so we can decide if we agree with it), with specific training on how to tell if this is really overcrowding as opposed to a failure to get a normal crowd through in time since the solution to the two problems is different. Other/misc is an import category to have - every system of collecting data needs to have a none of the above because there is always something you didn't think of. What is normally missing is that when other is used there needs to be a text explanation of what happened, and then an investigation to see what should be done. You collect data for things like "medical emergency" because from the category alone everybody understands that the delay is beyond control. When something is misc that means you didn't expect it and need to redesign your procedures so it never happens again. Thus the misc category should be something all operators hate to use: they get sucked into meetings on how do we ensure that it doesn't happen again.
Angostura 9y ago
The story I got was rather different; first that the safety measures were implemented in a ham-fisted manner and secondly that they failed to model or recognise correctly the overall effect that the measures would have on carrying capacity, and they are still failing to recognise it. I don’t know how fair these accusations are, of course.
kelnos 9y ago
That's not what I got from reading it. My reading is that an accident that was most likely caused by a driver falling asleep resulted in cover-your-ass style changes that have little to no measurable effect on safety, but cause massive real problems with the system that negatively affect millions of riders. And beyond that, they're shuffling blame around and waving their hands to distract people from systemic problems. I mean, if the delays are caused by slowing the trains down, they should say "we've slowed the trains down due to safety reasons, and that's why there are delays". Then people can either accept that and move on, or do actual studies into the problem to determine if their course of action is correct, and if the trade-offs made are worth it. I don't think it's some big hush-hush conspiracy; it's just garden-variety corruption and a desire to avoid fixing root causes of problems because they're complex and expensive. Easier to just keep collecting that paycheck while using "overcrowding" as an excuse to get more public money diverted to your agency.

jakelarkin 9y ago

the abysmal state of their technology is completely to blame. problems described point to an inability to monitor trains or operators in ways that don't create massive slowdowns as knock-on effects.

nikanj 9y ago

We, collectively, seem to accept car accidents because we think we can avoid them with good driving skills. Train accidents leave us helpless, and we can’t cope with that. The whole concept of ”bad things happen to good people for no reason” is extremely hard to bear. Somehow this reminds me of people who believe the right diet will protect them from cancer, the right prenatal care from birth defects, etc.

lotsofpulp 9y ago
Are you suggesting that different lifestyles don't result in different risks? Such as not smoking, not drinking alcohol while pregnant, not eating excessively?
stefan_ 9y ago
I don't think that is the crucial difference. In a train or plane crash, hundreds die in a single event. But when a hundred people die in a hundred car crashes every day, the individual event is barely worth a mention on page 6 of the news. It's the same mentality that means we have root cause analysis for plane and train crashes but for a car crash, SOP is pretty much to blame 1) whoever died or 2) noone at all, and 3) never the infrastructure.
- waqf 9y ago
  Not only are car crashes less salient than train crashes, but also the converse effect: the inconvenience of car speed limits is more salient than the inconvenience of train speed limits, because you're the one driving.
- kelnos 9y ago
  I think the cycle feeds into itself though: part of the reason planes and trains are so safe is because of the extensive root-cause analysis of crashes, which routinely result in suggestions for improvement that make the rest of travel safer. Remove the investigations and you'd end up with more plane and train crashes. When a car crashes, we just scrape up the debris and move on, after usually assigning blame to one of the drivers who ends up with higher insurance premiums or a lawsuit, assuming they survived. There's little effort to learn from the crashes.

mabbo 9y ago

I spent 5 years taking the Toronto subway (Yonge line, North York Center to Union) every day. I noticed this interesting pattern. During rush hour, any small delay on one train will almost certain impact every train down the line- there's little time buffer between trains. The bigger the delay, the more trains effected by it. The more passengers per train, the more likely that train will have a delay- loading and unloading taking too long, sure, that can cause a small delay. But consider events like heart attacks, seizures, a fight breaking out- all kinds of major-delay-causing-events that are roughly speaking a linear function from 'time passenger is on the train' to 'likelihood of major delay event'. If you have twice as many passengers, you have twice the odds of a major delay. If a passenger spends twice a long on a train, you have twice the odds of them causing a major a delay. Delays cause more passengers per train and cause longer time-on-train for each passenger. It's all non-linear. Any one tiny delay can spark a total breakdown and the longer that delay is the more likely it will cause more in turn. How on earth does the system ever work at all?

kd0amg 9y ago
How on earth does the system ever work at all? By promising a schedule that doesn't assume nothing goes wrong. Time padding means the inevitable minor delays can be absorbed quickly, and infrequent longer delays are recoverable. Also, I don't know about Toronto, but most of the big delays in Boston are issues with equipment rather than passengers. Derailment, signal failure, etc. should scale with vehicle traffic rather than vehicle occupancy/passenger count, and big delays decrease how much traffic is going around at the moment.

smilekzs 9y ago

Risking asking the obvious: What is stopping us from having autonomous subways, considering we are almost gonna have autonomous cars?

joncrane 9y ago
Poor initial implementation combined with fear. The DC Metro used to have a semi-autonomous mode that's been turned off for years since there was a glitch that caused a crash.
- jandrese 9y ago
  The "glitch" was decades of deferred maintenance that left sensors inoperable along the line. Theoretically now that the SafeTrack initiative is complete they should be able to return to semi-autonomous operation, but I doubt it. I'm not expecting the DC Metro to go autonomous anytime soon either. It's a huge jobs program for inner city residents. Basically a commuter tax for a social program.
em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
Because of jobs?
Totoradio 9y ago
It's already a thing, first example that comes to mind is line 14 in the Paris metro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_M%C3%A9tro_Line_14 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_M%C3%A9tro_Line_14
- sbarre 9y ago
  The Skytrain in Vancouver does not have human conductors either. Although I would assume there are conductors in a control centre somewhere?
  - masklinn 9y ago
    There are no conductors, there's a control room with system overview and links to metros, stations and service personnel. See http://www.ansaldo-sts.com/sites/ansaldosts/files/brochures/copenhagen_metro.pdf http://www.ansaldo-sts.com/sites/ansaldosts/files/brochures/... page 21.

bogomipz 9y ago

This would not be the first time that the MTA has willfully deceived the public by maintaining two sets of facts - the private set which reflects the truth and another set of facts that are used in discussion with the public. 15 years ago the MTA was caught maintaining two different sets of books - one internal that showed the agency had a surplus of cash and another set of books for the public which showed the agency as being "cash strapped" and needing to raise fares as a result. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/23/nyregion/hevesi-says-mta-moved-millions-to-simulate-a-deficit.html http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/23/nyregion/hevesi-says-mta-m... The culture of this agency is rotten and its corruption endemic. It's hard to believe it's capable of producing anything other than it's current broken state.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> The culture of this agency is rotten and its corruption endemic How does one realistically reform something like this?
- DiabloD3 9y ago
  You fire everyone. However, if I remember correctly, they're unionized, which is why this hasn't happened yet.
  - geofft 9y ago
    Is management unionized? The article makes it sound like the engineers themselves are frustrated with this system.
    - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
      You can't just stop the gravy train by removing management. Bad culture is at all levels.
      - wpietri 9y ago
        Bad culture is at all levels, but management control the factors that turn culture bad. If you'd like to see a fine example of how changing the management and the management philosophy can turn a place around, look at NUMMI. There's a This American Life episode with extensive worker interviews: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015

stcredzero 9y ago

But there is one type of delay that’s gotten exponentially worse during that time: a catchall category blandly titled “insufficient capacity, excess dwell, unknown,” which captures every delay without an obvious cause. This smacks of corruption or of elements of society deciding that systems aren't going to simply work anymore. The population of New York City when I lived in Queens was 7.3 million when I lived there in 1989. The subways pretty much worked back then. The figure for population of New York City in 2017 I found was 8.5 million. Population increase can't account for the difference. There must have been considerable systemic decay.

mrbabbage 9y ago
NYC's transit mode share for commute trips is above 50% [1]. Of the additional 1.2 million people, this means that this population growth probably produced at least 1.2 million additional daily rides, since 50% of the 1.2 million rides the subway twice a day, to and from work. 1.2 million additional daily riders is about double the entire Washington Metro daily ridership and triple that of BART's daily ridership! Indeed, 1.2 million daily riders is about equal to ridership on the Lex! So I disagree with your conclusion that "Population increase can't account for the difference". This sort of ridership growth would have destroyed any other comparable system in the US. If anything, it's amazing that the NYC subway hasn't fallen apart more than it already has. [1] https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/databook/travel-mode-shares-in-the-u-s/ https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/databook/travel-mode-sha...
- somecontext 9y ago
  For some context in case anyone was curious: according to old news articles, the average weekday ridership in 1989 was ~3.7 million rides per day. It is ~5.7 million rides per day now. Ridership in the past few decades has increased faster than the population. One factor cited in some analyses of this phenomenon is the significant decrease in the crime rate relative to the 1980s and 1990s, but that is likely not the only contributor.
- kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
  The ridership was higher in 1948 and there was no crisis of sardine packed trains and crowded platforms then. MTA is intentionally running the system below capacity to cut costs.

macawfish 9y ago

In Minneapolis, the mob bought and dismantled a fully functioning streetcar system. Same forces seem alive and well today. They just chose to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into building a new stadium.

tomasien 9y ago
I am sure those forces still exist, but the will to fix the subways in NYC and expand it in other cities (LA especially) is stronger than ever. White flight is either reversing or wants to reverse, and a group with increasing power wants public transportation. I wish we built functioning public transportation because its the right thing to do, I'll accept it happening because young professionals demand it.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

Does anyone know of a source that competently compares costs across different metro systems? Total operating cost per mile, per passenger-mile, et cetera.

njarboe 9y ago

This article has a lot of text before getting to describing the problem. Summary: Train wreck 1995 and a installation of a safety-first, CYA response that slows down the trains and does not increase safety. Longer Summary: Train wreck in 1995. Maybe driver was asleep. Start installing new signals that not only automatically stop the trains when there is a train ahead (good idea and already in place), but also when going over 45mph. Trains used to go up to 55mph with no systemic problems. Drivers go even slower than 45mph because the train is automatically stopped when going faster (as you would want to do if there was a train ahead) instead of just giving a warning and letting the train keep going. As more of the system gets these new signals, more of the system has slower trains. Thus the increase of delays that are labeled generically as "insufficient capacity, excess dwell, unknown" from about 20% of delays in 2012 to about 60% in 2017.

gsnedders 9y ago
> Drivers go even slower than 45mph because the train is automatically stopped when going faster (as you would want to do if there was a train ahead) instead of just giving a warning and letting the train keep going. Is there any protection system that allows the maximum speed to be exceeded with just a warning? Certainly all those I can think of (TPWS, TVM, PZB, or something more modern like ETCS) have a given maximum speed you're allowed to exceed by a small tolerance but nothing more (though, of course, the system may be isolated, but that's not allowed in passenger service). The failing here sounds like it is setting the line speed to 45mph rather than anything higher.
- thunfischbrot 9y ago
  That, and considering a speed limiter instead of stopping the train when traveling too fast. What good does it do to stop the train when going too fast instead of limiting it in the first place?
  - gsnedders 9y ago
    The general principle in railway movement authority is that there's an easy fail safe: stop moving. If nothing moves, there can be no collision. If something goes wrong? Stop the train. You can then figure out what went wrong and address it with no risk. Things shouldn't be going wrong, speeds shouldn't be being exceeded, etc.

the8472 9y ago

Single shot timers? Exclusion locks on fixed sections of the track? Modern control systems such as ETCS3 can allocate virtual track segments (moving blocks) to individual trains and adjust the reserved length based on the current speed.

afterburner 9y ago
Far easier to install in greenfield (fresh) projects.
- the8472 9y ago
  ETCS is designed for incremental rollout and upgrade of the levels. And they require less equipment on the track too since things are mostly done wirelessly, level 2 doesn't require signals, level 3 doesn't even require balises.

slippers 9y ago

could it be that more time spent inside a train increases profit? maybe they just want passengers looking at advertising. they are a captive audience.

davidf18 9y ago

I live in NYC. For a couple of years I'd be reading NYTimes articles about the system is having problems from overcrowding, yet you'd see articles that more people took subways in the 1950's - 1960's. Within the past few months there was a NYTimes article that stated that after an accident in the mid 1990s (?) that they slowed the system down. Thus, the problem wasn't overcrowding, but slowing the system down. The system has been underfunded for maintenance. When the city went broke in the 1970s (?), the financing was transferred to the state from the city. NY State taxes the city but does not returned the taxed funds to the city for the MTA. Transferring management of the MTA back to the city would help with holding the Mayor accountable, something to think about if they want to be re-elected.

solotronics 9y ago

I think the topic of a declining/slowly collapsing society needs serious research. How do you definitively measure if a society is progressing or regressing? If you measure by infrastructure the US probably hit its peak in the 60s and has been declining since then. https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/ https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/

drb91 9y ago
"Progress" seems subjective and political. I posit no definitive measure of progress exists.
- solotronics 9y ago
  its pretty objective if you measure it in terms of infrastructure. - rate of new miles of roads - rate of increase/decrease in potholes per 10 miles - number of bridges that need fixing - number of people on government assistance - percentage of population in jail - peoples test scores on standardized international tests its not like things are unmeasureable... just that politics awards those who ignore these things
  - drb91 9y ago
    Not objective at all. There are a lot of values and politics embedded in the things you chose and the implicit direction that is healthy for infrastructure. And it should be, because “objective” metrics are inevitable gamed and their value is gone.
wpietri 9y ago
Step one is defining a target condition. The problem is that people have different target conditions. The enormous rise in inequality since the 1960s [1] makes clear that some people have a target condition of "I personally own everything". [1] http://economistsview.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451b33869e201a5115729b5970c-popup http://economistsview.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451b33869e201a51...

lg 9y ago

they must have installed one of these single-shot timers on the uptown A between 50th and 59th. it always crawls through 50th, stops in the tunnel, then crawls into 59th. didn't used to until a couple years ago.

matt_smith123 9y ago

Guys like this will be running the self driving automobile infrastructure in 50 years.

dkarl 9y ago

But the 2014 study — the first time the authority had attempted to analyze the impact of any of the revamped signals, using its improved data system — found 2,851 lost total passenger hours per weekday could be attributed to thirteen modified signals alone. That's 84 person-years per year, just considering the weekday impact of those thirteen signals. Over a lifetime a year, to save (speculatively) one life per decade? Call me callous, but I don't think it's worth it.

jlebrech 9y ago

wouldn't trains be the easiest transport system to add self driving to? all it would need is throttle, and if they have access to the position of other trains too that's a major advantage.