5 ms·
THe keyword here is “supposed”. I don’t have regular experience with NYC subway, but used to ride Toronto subway everyday, which is the subject to the similar p
by mynegation 9y ago
THe keyword here is “supposed”. I don’t have regular experience with NYC subway, but used to ride Toronto subway everyday, which is the subject to the similar problems. The trains do arrive every 3-5 minutes on weekdays, but then something happens (security incident on a train, unauthorized person on a track level, fires, signal problems, or - the most horrible - “personal injury on a track level”, the language for someone falling in front of the arriving train - intentionally or not. Then everything stops for tens of minutes, or hours in worst cases, stations get overcrowded, buses get sent to operate on the route, taxis and Uber’s are impossible to get and so on. Things like this push average delay times up, not the uniform slowness of the trains throughout the day.
- baud147258 9y agoHere in Paris, the rail & subway company instead of "personal injury on a track level", use "people accident". I'd say that most of the lines in Paris are the same.
- Tijdreiziger 9y agoIt's interesting how the euphemism used differs by country. The Dutch railway companies use "collision with a person".
- paublyrne 9y agoIn London it's "person on the track".
- baud147258 9y agoPerson on the tracks doesn't exactly imply there was an accident with the person. It just prevent the trains from moving.
- lorenzhs 9y agoIn part, euphemisms like "personal injury" are used to avoid encouraging copycat suicides. In 2009, a popular German footballer's suicide-by-train received a lot of media coverage. The number of railway suicides more than tripled in the following ~10 days and never declined back to the previous level. See the table in https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schienensuizid https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schienensuizid and also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide. These euphemisms might sound, well, overly euphemistic or irreverent, but if they help curb the number of railway suicides, then I find that hard to argue with.
- baud147258 9y agoI've heard about the copy-cat suicide (but not under this name), but I did not realise it might be the cause of the use of such euphemisms. Of course one can question the usefulness of the euphemisms, since everyone know what they mean.
- colanderman 9y agoBoston is even more vague – "medical emergency".