13 ms·

How 2 M.T.A. Decisions Pushed the Subway into Crisis

205 points by blondie9x 8y ago

rayiner 8y ago
> After a 1995 collision of two trains on the Williamsburg Bridge killed a train operator and injured more than 50 Overreaction to safety incidents and inability to do cost-benefit analysis cripple American transit systems. DC's Metro, for example, was designed for trains to be driven automatically ("ATO"). In fact, they operated in automatic mode for decades, since the system was built in the 1970s. But in 2009, after nine people were killed in a collision, the system was disabled, and will remain disabled indefinitely.[1] The result of disabling ATO is that what was previously a very smoothly running system has become a disaster, with human operators lurching into stations, then lurching some more to place the train correctly relative to the platform. Almost a million riders inconvenienced every day for a decade, just to avert recurrence of an incident that resulted in a handful of deaths in 30 years of operation. [1] https://ggwash.org/view/62992/metro-kicks-the-automatic-train-operation-can-farther-down-the-road https://ggwash.org/view/62992/metro-kicks-the-automatic-trai....
- solutionyogi 8y ago
  I hate the driver who pens the L line going to Brooklyn from Manhattan. He speeds way too much and then breaks way too hard. I have seen passenger fall because of it time and again. If we can't get rid of the union workers, I would rather have MTA pay these guys wages to sit at home and replace them with computer-driven subway.
  - electricEmu 8y ago
    TFA mentions train operators will preemptively slow down to keep their job. Nothing to do with a union, but keep trying to shoe horn that in.
    - chimeracoder 8y ago
      > TFA mentions train operators will preemptively slow down to keep their job. Nothing to do with a union, but keep trying to shoe horn that in. As alluded to in the article, the TWU has been fighting very aggressively against the reforms for most of the issues documented in this article.
      - electricEmu 8y ago
        Who need allusion? TFA explicitly states TWU wants to keep safety improvements. That's literally the job I would expect for a union. Safety is already worse in NYC than other areas. It all hinges on if the safety concerns are valid.
        chimeracoder 8y ago
        > TFA explicitly states TWU wants to keep safety improvements. That's literally the job I would expect for a union. Safety is already worse in NYC than other areas. You're actually going to accept the reasoning they give uncritically and at face value? Of course they'll frame nearly everything in rhetoric of safety, because politically that's the equivalent "but think of the kids". Of course, when you actually look at it, it's obvious that the TWU has spent the last several decades fighting actual safety improvements (including those that are SOP at the other Big Four systems), because their only interest is in protecting their members' jobs. As linked elsewhere in this article, if the MTA tries to introduce newer and safer machinery, the TWU actually extracts a "technological advancement" fee to compensate them for the missed job opportunities, in an attempt to disincentive them from adopting new technology. The TWU is literally putting passengers' lives at risk because their only goal is to extract as much money as possible from the MTA, and they don't actually care about the end state of the subway system.
        electricEmu 8y ago
        > You're actually going to accept the reasoning they give uncritically and at face value? That question should be directed at you. It should be obvious this is a nuanced and complex issue. Why would anyone trust an internet-rando and a single article? You accept what appears to be a one-sided view. Do you believe that should increase or decrease your trustworthiness? I'd like to know what's actually wrong in NYC so I can prevent the same in my own city.
  - michaelper22 8y ago
    The L train already uses CBTC (i.e automatic train operation); fast speeds are issued by the computer.
  - L_Rahman 8y ago
    There's also at least one conductor who starts closing the doors during the morning rush our while passengers are still existing at the 1 AV stop. One of those times the doors smashed into a person walking out on crutches.
  - InitialLastName 8y ago
    The L is entirely computerized already. The two people working on each train are there to press a "keep the union happy" button every 30 seconds.
    - chimeracoder 8y ago
      > The L is entirely computerized already. The two people working on each train are there to press a "keep the union happy" button every 30 seconds. In case anyone thinks this is a joke, it's not. The MTA pays the Transit Workers Union massive sums of money when they use technology they use which does a job otherwise performed by a human, even when it's been standard practice worldwide to automate that job for decades. One example, from tunnel boring: > The critics pointed to several unusual provisions in the labor agreements. One part of Local 147’s deal entitles the union to $450,000 for each tunnel-boring machine used. That is to make up for job losses from “technological advancement,” even though the equipment has been standard for decades. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
      - Declanomous 8y ago
        I don't understand why New York has two employees per train. Nearly everywhere else in the world has 1. The person in the middle's job seems to be operating the doors and making sure the train is berthed correctly, but all you have to do is put a line where the front of the train has to line up and the driver can do it. As for the doors, it's not like the driver has much else to do when in the station.
        InitialLastName 8y ago
        Nominally, the trains are long, and sometimes the stations are curved. A person in the middle of the train can see more of the doors to make sure they're clear.
        rayiner 8y ago
  - jrochkind1 8y ago
    Kinda sounds like he's doing his part to keep the trains actually on time in a totally broken signalling environment!
    - rohansingh 8y ago
      The L train is actually the one train with fully upgraded signals, and no track sharing with other trains. Probably for that reason, it also has the highest on-time percentage of all trains.
  - lobster_johnson 8y ago
    I've never been bothered by that (and as others point out, the L is automated, anyway). What I'd like to know is why, when the L reaches the 8th Ave stop in Manhattan, the operator waits 10 seconds after coming to a full stop before opening the doors. The train has already stopped, so this seems unnecessary. There's also this weird thing where, while the train is sitting there waiting to return the opposite way back to Brooklyn, they close all the subway doors except one in each carriage. It doesn't prevent people from getting on.
    - jrockway 8y ago
      They do this at every terminal. I have no idea why.
      - lobster_johnson 8y ago
        I found an answer here [1], via a Reddit thread [2] (where the answers are apparently gone): I won't go into details, but if the conductor wants to exit the train and leave the doors open at the terminal, he needs to walk to the next car at the last stop in order to open the doors, which is why there's a short delay before they open. If the doors open immediately at the last stop, then it means the train is either going to go to the yard, or the crew is going to manually key open one door per car (which is only done if the train is going to sit there for at least 10 minutes, and helps the air comfort system). [1] http://www.ibtimes.com/mta-worker-goes-underground-share-subway-secrets-reddit-top-10-reveals-324984 http://www.ibtimes.com/mta-worker-goes-underground-share-sub... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kx5fa/iama_new_york_city_transit_subway_conductor_ama/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kx5fa/iama_new_york_c...
        jrockway 8y ago
        Very interesting. I definitely always hear the conductor moving between cars at the last stop but I never connected that to being why the doors can't be opened. I think it's funny that the train's computer knows it's the last stop and announces that fact to the passengers... but the conductor has to manually override some sort of system before he or she can exit the train.
  - 8bitsrule 8y ago
    Oh yeah, that's it. Because non-union-workers would never drive like that. :-P
- waqf 8y ago
  Similarly, I have noticed that a difference between American subways and European subways is that when you stop at a station in Europe, the interlocks allow the automatic doors to open as soon as the train is slower than maybe 1–2 km/h. Whereas in America they don't open until a couple seconds after the train has come to a dead stop. I keep wondering how many wasted man-hours this adds up to over the course of a day — especially on a line that's running at capacity, so if one train is 4 seconds later then the next train will be 8 seconds later and so on. (The same seems to be true of elevators.)
  - bluedino 8y ago
    Imagine the lawsuits if the train wasn't 100% stopped when the doors were opened.
    - joering2 8y ago
      That and also driven so many European subways (most called METRO) you never seen cars as overcrowded as in USA and barely people leaning over the door! In USA its normal to lean against the door because people are exactly gotten used to the fact the train will stop first before the door gets open.
      - lotu 8y ago
        Ehh, if you changed it I bet people would learn really quickly not to lean on doors. Most people leaning on doors are going to be young people with decent reaction times and balance so I wouldn’t even expect injury more like surprise. It would probally be reasonable to run a publicity campaign to reduce surprise as people don’t like being supprised.
        rhizome 8y ago
        Most people leaning on doors are going to be young people with decent reaction times and balance Say what?
      - lainga 8y ago
- api 8y ago
  CYA is rule #1 in bureaucracies. If something happens and you "do nothing," you're responsible, so you have to "do something."
- psychometry 8y ago
  Delays have pushed more people onto the roads (bikes, taxis, etc.), where there is a much higher chance of injury or fatality. So their decision has probably killed more people than if they had changed nothing.
  - CamperBob2 8y ago
    Yes, and see the TSA for another example. We've easily lost another 3000+ people on the roads since 9/11, simply because the professional pearl-clutchers have made it such a pain in the ass to fly anywhere.
    - gowld 8y ago
      "pearl-clutcher" is a sexist term, and the perpetrators of the TSA are for the major part by far not pearl-wearers.
      - zachsnow 8y ago
        That’s so interesting! I see now what you mean (hi google), but my initial mental image was a rich old man with a death-grip on his riches.
- fusiongyro 8y ago
  The purpose of this change probably isn't so much to make the trains more safe as to facilitate transferring blame for a fatal accident from the transit system to a human operator.
- asr 8y ago
  I agree with your point, but strongly disagree with your example. You think DC should be running the risk of accidents which kill riders because of trains that lurch into stations? Loss of life is a massive cost, even if only economic factors are accounted for. Please show me a cost-benefit analysis where that is outweighed by lurching trains (even many millions of lurching trains). Also, it's incorrect to say that we could have used decades of problem-free operation to extrapolate and predict a low risk of similar accidents in the coming decades. The 2009 crash was caused by an aging system, and unless your solution involved replacing all the switches/sensors, we would have seen new failures at a more frequent rate. Finally, the 2009 accident highlighted an inherent problem with the old system: putting a human operator in a train who is only responsible for acting in an emergency will not work. Just like the recent self-driving car fatality. It wasn't a case where we knew and should have accepted the risk, it was a case where the crash caused us to understand that the prior risk assessment was wrong (because it assumed that a human operator could prevent these kinds of accidents, when that's just not going to happen). So it was appropriate to change operations.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    > You think DC should be running the risk of accidents which kill riders because of trains that lurch into stations? DOT estimates the cost of a human life at about $6 million. Times 9 is $54 million. Let's say such an event happens once every 10 years, so $5.4 million per year. The D.C. metro has 180 million rides per year. That works out to 3 cents per ride. Do you think people would pay 3 cents for a smoother, ATO-controlled Metro ride? I bet they would. (That's not even counting all the delays caused be forgoing automated control.) As to the switches and sensors--Metro already replaced the track circuits (per the NTSB's recommendation): https://wamu.org/story/17/04/06/metro-shelves-plans-bring-back-automated-trains https://wamu.org/story/17/04/06/metro-shelves-plans-bring-ba....
    - roenxi 8y ago
      It's worth elaborating on a central point; the idea that 'preventable deaths are unacceptable' only makes sense at ordinary human scales. In someone's day-to-day life, they aren't reasonably going to be in a situation where letting someone die will be the best alternative. The situation changes completely at the level of the decision makers of countries and large cities work at. /Everything/ is a variant of the trolley problem and all resources could in theory be used to save a life. Not accepting a risk of death can do more harm than good and realistically infrastructure; it just obscures the cause and effect. Eg, we'll never know if someone died because their doctor was late because a train operator made a mistake operating a train. The cause-effect chain is too convoluted. But statistically speaking, something like that will happen every so often. Deaths from inefficiency are just as bad as deaths from direct accident; and if the scale is large enough that they can reasonably be detected then they need to be considered too. Obviously most of the time a high standard of safety is going to be best, but trains are a high-risk environment moving 100s people at speeds they were never meant to move. True perfection over 30 years is probably not a required standard. Great goal though.
- dopamean 8y ago
  This example is exactly why I'm dubious of the idea of mass adoption self driving car technology. Edit: I should add: in the United States.
- christophclarke 8y ago
  The problem is that ATO relies on the underlying technology to be working and maintained. Maintenance requires money, which WMATA doesn't have. That's the issue. Humans don't require maintenance the same way something like ATO does. Politicians continue to underfund WMATA, which means they can't assure safety using an automated system, so that have to use humans.
- 8bitsrule 8y ago
  Got to wonder why - while they were paying people to begin 'installing and modifying hundreds of signals to prevent trains from going too fast' - they didn't modify the signals so they could be remotely re-configured. Something in that system must be configured to be resistant to superior technology. Cuz it couldn't be the humans, right?
mwexler 8y ago
While I love interactive docs as much as the next person, I wondered if all these demos were really necessary to get the point across in this particular case. The text did a pretty admirable job, along with a few charts. Did the more graphical pieces help, or were they more of an "ooh, pretty" feature?
- volkk 8y ago
  personally, it allowed me to read much faster and understand the points without concentrating on every word
- natch 8y ago
  They are trying to get their points across to entrenched public officials and bureaucrats so maybe it’s needed.
- ams6110 8y ago
  Close reading of text for information is a dying skill. If it can't be stated in 120 characters or presented as an animation, you've lost a big part of your audience.
- romwell 8y ago
  The value that the graphical pieces provide is that they are interactive. The graphical pieces build up to the one where you control both parameters simultaneously, and see how you can halve the throughput of the system by seemingly innocuous changes. The whole point is that the cause of the slowdowns is not obvious because the effect of the changes is non-linear. Sure, you can take the author's word for it - but with the neat simulation, you don't have to. You can see the model in front of your eyes.
gniv 8y ago
Didn’t MTA say they are increasing the speed limits after the Village Voice article was published?
jdlyga 8y ago
This is the best article I've ever read on the subways. So many people blame so many factors: people holding doors, overcrowding, badly made signals, etc. But this explains it very well with clear visuals.
nisa 8y ago
Strange how the article blames the workers and unions while also admitting it's not their fault. - cheap and worse brakes appear to be the initial error beeing made - lack of control over their signals and blaming the workers for it is not excusable. Also there must be some kind of cheap and reliable assistant that can calculate the maximum velocity and help the driver. - badly organized maintenance is also not the workers fault.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  There's alot of context missing, mostly because you'd need a book to provide context! It isn't the union workers per se, but the transit union is a massively politically powerful organization that gets what it wants, and the calculus there doesn't necessarily make sense. NY politics in general and NYC politics (plus the confluence of labor) in particular is an arcane and dark art. There's always a vicious cycle where the various interests are very difficult to manage. Administering something as impactful, complex and expensive as MTA with the number stakeholders is a Sisyphean task.
- aeorgnoieang 8y ago
  > Tony Utano, the president of the Transport Workers Union Local 100, said he would fight any rule change that could put workers at risk. Given that any change "could put workers at risk", it seems pretty clear that the union's are likely to be somewhat to blame. Surely the train operators are not to blame for bad signals but why then is no one else at the MTA to blame? Are the workers that installed the signals not union members too? Are none of the MTA managers union members?
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
    Yes, the Transit Workers Union has specifically been fighting against reforming the flagging rules for decades. They're more than "somewhat" responsible for this situation.
  - thirtyseven 8y ago
    Managers are generally not allowed to be union members since they have an adversarial relationship with the workers.
dajohnson89 8y ago
Awesome visualizations.
- gorbachev 8y ago
  Absolutely! One of the best use of visualizations to support a story I've seen ever. New York Times in general does a great job with visualizations.
kaycebasques 8y ago
When I first learned about computer networking, I remember being blown away when I learned that network congestion dynamics also explained how freeway traffic worked. It’s cool to see the same idea in this article! Specifically, I thought it was amazing how it explained why if someone stops abruptly on a crowded highway, every subsequent driver will have to experience that pause, even hours later, so long as the highway maintains the same level of congestion. You network folk will undoubtedly explain it better than me, but I think that's the correct gist of the idea?
- kps 8y ago
  I wonder whether any of the large networked navigation software does random early drop.
- paulmd 8y ago
  I've always had this odd feeling that traffic is actually a Bernoulli flow, where instead of "pressure" you have congestion. eg if you have two lanes merging and the system is at capacity, then the "pressure" across the streamline increases and traffic slows down as a result. And when you have very little pressure (or diverging arterial roads) traffic tends to speed up. Of course there is a secondary problem of "phantom" traffic jams where the system is not really slowing down due to traffic merging or anything, you just have spots where traffic is not flowing at all for no real reason (the optimal solution being that everyone puts their foot on the gas and accelerates together). I suppose the physical analogue might be cavitation or non-laminar/turbulent flow? I can't find any academic references on this but it's always made intuitive sense to me.
  - lainga 8y ago
    This is exactly why traffic regimes are sometimes described as "laminar" or "turbulent". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_diagram_of_traffic_flow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_diagram_of_traffic...
  - yc-kraln 8y ago
    Here's one for you: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/operations/tft/chap5.pdf https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/operations/tf... I seem to remember a statistic that said, essentially, traffic waves propagate backwards at approximately 12mph. There are a set of circumstances where you can set up a "standing" wave of traffic where cars will have to tap their brakes at the same place for hours, for no reason.
kevin_b_er 8y ago
The negative feedback loop on faulty signals should be a read for anyone doing engineering, including software engineering. If the workers go the proper speed, the faulty signal will trip an emergency break. This actually threatens their jobs because they'll be blamed for tripping the e-brake as if the signals worked perfectly. 1. The management trusts the automation too much without proper checks or tests proving the automation is accurate. 2. These workers are still blamed, even after signals are known to be bad. 3. People, even in here, blame the workers (and the union) for the fault of the system's quality being garbage. 4. Workers try to preserve their jobs by just working around the problem and reducing productivity all-around.
- jrockway 8y ago
  I'm not sure. The incentives could go either way. If the incentive is "on time performance is a must and the signal system is not going to check your speed", then people would drive the trains over the recommended speed to make the schedule, and thus derail the train around curves or not keep the speed low enough for the block system to provide adequate train protection. As it stands now, the incentive is to not get "tripped", so people drive the trains well below the speed at which the signalling system will trip the train... doing anything else runs the risk of getting yelled at or worse, and nobody wants that, so they play it safe. A computer can be programmed to take into account both concerns and drive the train at the exact speed to satisfy all the constraints of the signalling system. If a computer gets tripped for travelling through a block too quickly, a meeting is had and a fix is checked in. The software doesn't care if you're mad at it. You just fix it and move on. Humans are more fragile, and if you don't align the incentives correctly you will not get the right result.
jessaustin 8y ago
It seems stupid to use these unreliable "signals" at all, but even if they have to use them for "safety" they don't have to use them for operator evaluation. It would be real easy for every operator to carry a device that could prove e.g. she drove an appropriate speed even though her train tripped a poorly-maintained signal. I'm not foolish enough to imagine this would lead to the signals getting fixed, and from a political perspective it might be important to stipulate that it wouldn't, but that seems secondary to the horrible schedule problems that tentative driving has caused.
- gamblor956 8y ago
  What sort of magical device would accomplish this feat? It couldn't be GPS-based, as GPS signals wouldn't penetrate to the subway level. It couldn't be momentum-based, because that's not sufficiently accurate. It couldn't be connected to the train's computers because that would require major upgrades to every train in the system, which would take decades.
  - nisa 8y ago
    Every truck at least in the EU has such a mandated device. Basically it's a signed timestamp with current speed. They have a shedule, they know the driver. If they fear manipulation just include the device in the train and read the data every other week. Trains in the EU also have this.
    - gamblor956 8y ago
      We're talking about subways, which do not have access to GPS, and which is what EU trains use. Most of the trains in the MTA system predate the EU and a fair number of the countries that are members of the EU! The London system uses a different positional system based on location beacons built into the lines to locate trains (essentially, land-based GPS).
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    I don't have an amazon link for you, but it doesn't seem that magical to me? Submarines have had inertial nav for decades. This is a simpler problem, because travel is restricted to rails and drift can be corrected as often as necessary. Every airbag in every automobile is equipped with a very accurate fairly inexpensive MEMS acceleration sensor, which would the only specialized component required for such a system. Hobbyist components like the ADXL345 are also cheap. It wouldn't surprise me if such a system already exists for e.g. tracking underground mining equipment, but if not it wouldn't be an impossible task for an organization with the budget of MTA. It's not as though the system would need to be incredibly precise; it's replacing one that at its best can only measure average speed over some huge distance.
Dowwie 8y ago
This is a great use of visualizations. Bostock made his mark while at the NYTimes.
makomk 8y ago
"The London Underground, a system of similar size and age, has had no track worker fatalities since 1998." As far as I can tell, the London Underground only allows work on sub-surface and deep tracks when the line is completely shut down. Like, not just slowing down trains on the tracks either side of the work, but not running trains on any of the tracks full stop.
- jkaptur 8y ago
  Also, as I understand it, the line shuts down each night.
jrochkind1 8y ago
Sounds like there could be large benefit from A) removing the punishment for tripping the signal, that causes drivers to go extra extra slow (well under safe and officially regulated speed) cause they know there are faulty unpredictable signals which they'll still get punished for tripping; and B) fixing faulty signals (which they probably don't even know about when all the drivers are slowing down so much in case of faulty signal that they don't even know which ones are faulty). Contrary to the article saying "And there’s no easy fix", it seems like this would be a fairly easy fix?
- WhompingWindows 8y ago
  Won't you have to convince the union to do this change? They seem particularly intractable from my outsider's POV. If they accept culpability here and make one change, maybe they would consider that as bending and inviting future concessions. It's a shame that overall efficiency and rider satisfaction count for much less to the union than their own politics.
- rohansingh 8y ago
  From a moral standpoint, it's definitely wrong to punish drivers for signal issues, and we should stop doing that. However, if drivers all started going at the normal speed and regularly tripping broken signals, it would absolutely destroy the system. When a train's emergency brake is tripped, it takes tens of minutes to reset it and get the train going again. If that was happening at every faulty signal on a daily basis, the system would grind to a halt. Really the only fix is dealing with the signals. But that's extremely difficult because they haven't been regularly maintained and are very old. Most of them use mechanical timing systems and other insane things that nobody has built parts for. There's no particular reason to believe that "changing them back" would go any better than the botched rollout of the initial change.
  - jrochkind1 8y ago
    Ah, I see your point, yes, thanks.
  - bluGill 8y ago
jakelarkin 8y ago
how hard is it to put a location based speed governor on the train instead of using antiquated mechanical signals to enforce max speeds? or is that just too much common sense for the MTA?
- gamblor956 8y ago
  It would be extremely difficult. How would the train know where it is? GPS is unusable at that depth. You'd need location beacons...but at that point you're better off just using signals, like they already are, rather than upgrading every train and dealing with the ongoing maintenance of making sure that each train's location-based speed governor is properly up-to-date with all proper slow-down locations.
  - mortehu 8y ago
    Could you please explain why positioning would be hard? Since trains only move on the edges of a fixed graph, you'd think positioning would be super easy compared to almost all other indoor positioning applications.
    - crocal 8y ago
      It is hard because it must be vitally accurate. Screw it up and you end up with collision hazards. The number of dimensions is not the problem. The safety is.
    - gamblor956 8y ago
      Your indoor positioning applications would require the installation of numerous positioning beacons--or in other words, significantly more hardware than the many thousands of speed signals they have already installed and are unable to maintain.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
- crocal 8y ago
zaroth 8y ago
I had to read a little bit to find the real reason - combine faulty signals which trigger over-speed warnings when they shouldn’t — with the following... “Train operators face steep penalties after a number of instances of tripping a signal, like losing vacation days or being forced into early retirement.” That’s a recipe for exactly the problem they are seeing. Fix the signals. Fix the policy. It will fix the problem. But I also suspect this whole thing is much more intentional than we are being led to believe — it’s actually intentional policies which have led to expected slowdowns in a jaded attempt to boost funding. The whole narrative around overcrowding has collapsed. The narrative around underfunding is also collapsing. But I’m not sure the other shoe (proof that this was a charade to increase funding) has dropped quite yet.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  We live in a society where all the actors in the system need to virtue signal about how much they care about safety, usefulness of the system be damned. That's why the draconian speed limit policy in the first place. The union wants the trains to go slow so they can say they're fighting for policies that protect workers. The MTA wants signal enforced speed limits so they can say they're preventing crashes. If we could just have an adult discussion about the damage of marginally (if at all) increased risk compared to the benefits of a more functional subway system this wouldn't be as big of a problem. This isn't even a resources issue, changing policy is close to free.
  - gamblor956 8y ago
    The union wants the trains to go slow so they can say they're fighting for policies that protect workers. Have you ever performed maintenance literally inches from a train going 40mph? The union has valid safety concerns for wanting trains to slow down in the vicinity of workers, and this particular safety measure only applies to late-night routes when they are performing maintenance on closed lines that share tracks with operating lines. The problem is that the MTA introduced a number of other "safety" measures that did nothing to affect the safety of workers or employees, such as increasing the distance between cars or introducing speed-limiting signals, and these other measures apply 24-7.
ggm 8y ago
root cause? undercapitalized.
davidf18 8y ago
> "Before the 1995 Williamsburg Bridge crash, the M.T.A. had installed less expensive brakes with longer stopping distances ..." I live in NYC and use the subways. This was a huge error in judgment to change brakes to lower quality brakes with longer stopping distances. I can't imagine how this change from the original specifications of the subway system was even allowed to be approved. This is the root cause of much of the issues, the demonstrated lack of judgment of leadership who allowed this change in lower quality brakes to occur. There is a third reason not listed in the article about why there are problems in the subway system (and a lack of the 2nd Ave subway line completion) and that is bad priorities. The MTA has spent $13 billion building 3.5 miles of track and a new underground station at Grand Central for the Long Island Railroad which already uses Penn Station. The priority of course should have been a much more used 2nd Ave subway line and maintenance. For those not from NYC, there are two subway lines of the West Side of Manhattan (#1,2,3 and A, B, C, D) but only one on the East Side (#4, 5, 6) which ends up with truly horrendous overcrowding on the East Side subway lines. The 2nd Ave line has been planned for almost a century but supposedly because of lack of funds it was not built. The issue was not lack of funds but bad priorities, building a Long Island Rail station in Grand Central over completing the 2nd Ave Subway. 'The estimated cost of the Long Island Rail Road project, known as “East Side Access,” has ballooned to $12 billion [now $13 billion].' [1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
parliament32 8y ago
Meta but the interactive visuals are great! They're an excellent supplement to the text.
dopamean 8y ago
Losing your job over a faulty signal sounds like some serious bullshit. I hope they sued.

205 points by blondie9x 8y ago

> After a 1995 collision of two trains on the Williamsburg Bridge killed a train operator and injured more than 50 Overreaction to safety incidents and inability to do cost-benefit analysis cripple American transit systems. DC's Metro, for example, was designed for trains to be driven automatically ("ATO"). In fact, they operated in automatic mode for decades, since the system was built in the 1970s. But in 2009, after nine people were killed in a collision, the system was disabled, and will remain disabled indefinitely.[1] The result of disabling ATO is that what was previously a very smoothly running system has become a disaster, with human operators lurching into stations, then lurching some more to place the train correctly relative to the platform. Almost a million riders inconvenienced every day for a decade, just to avert recurrence of an incident that resulted in a handful of deaths in 30 years of operation. [1] https://ggwash.org/view/62992/metro-kicks-the-automatic-train-operation-can-farther-down-the-road https://ggwash.org/view/62992/metro-kicks-the-automatic-trai....

solutionyogi 8y ago
I hate the driver who pens the L line going to Brooklyn from Manhattan. He speeds way too much and then breaks way too hard. I have seen passenger fall because of it time and again. If we can't get rid of the union workers, I would rather have MTA pay these guys wages to sit at home and replace them with computer-driven subway.
- electricEmu 8y ago
  TFA mentions train operators will preemptively slow down to keep their job. Nothing to do with a union, but keep trying to shoe horn that in.
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
    > TFA mentions train operators will preemptively slow down to keep their job. Nothing to do with a union, but keep trying to shoe horn that in. As alluded to in the article, the TWU has been fighting very aggressively against the reforms for most of the issues documented in this article.
    - electricEmu 8y ago
      Who need allusion? TFA explicitly states TWU wants to keep safety improvements. That's literally the job I would expect for a union. Safety is already worse in NYC than other areas. It all hinges on if the safety concerns are valid.
      - chimeracoder 8y ago
        > TFA explicitly states TWU wants to keep safety improvements. That's literally the job I would expect for a union. Safety is already worse in NYC than other areas. You're actually going to accept the reasoning they give uncritically and at face value? Of course they'll frame nearly everything in rhetoric of safety, because politically that's the equivalent "but think of the kids". Of course, when you actually look at it, it's obvious that the TWU has spent the last several decades fighting actual safety improvements (including those that are SOP at the other Big Four systems), because their only interest is in protecting their members' jobs. As linked elsewhere in this article, if the MTA tries to introduce newer and safer machinery, the TWU actually extracts a "technological advancement" fee to compensate them for the missed job opportunities, in an attempt to disincentive them from adopting new technology. The TWU is literally putting passengers' lives at risk because their only goal is to extract as much money as possible from the MTA, and they don't actually care about the end state of the subway system.
        electricEmu 8y ago
        > You're actually going to accept the reasoning they give uncritically and at face value? That question should be directed at you. It should be obvious this is a nuanced and complex issue. Why would anyone trust an internet-rando and a single article? You accept what appears to be a one-sided view. Do you believe that should increase or decrease your trustworthiness? I'd like to know what's actually wrong in NYC so I can prevent the same in my own city.
- michaelper22 8y ago
  The L train already uses CBTC (i.e automatic train operation); fast speeds are issued by the computer.
- L_Rahman 8y ago
  There's also at least one conductor who starts closing the doors during the morning rush our while passengers are still existing at the 1 AV stop. One of those times the doors smashed into a person walking out on crutches.
- InitialLastName 8y ago
  The L is entirely computerized already. The two people working on each train are there to press a "keep the union happy" button every 30 seconds.
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
    > The L is entirely computerized already. The two people working on each train are there to press a "keep the union happy" button every 30 seconds. In case anyone thinks this is a joke, it's not. The MTA pays the Transit Workers Union massive sums of money when they use technology they use which does a job otherwise performed by a human, even when it's been standard practice worldwide to automate that job for decades. One example, from tunnel boring: > The critics pointed to several unusual provisions in the labor agreements. One part of Local 147’s deal entitles the union to $450,000 for each tunnel-boring machine used. That is to make up for job losses from “technological advancement,” even though the equipment has been standard for decades. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
    - Declanomous 8y ago
      I don't understand why New York has two employees per train. Nearly everywhere else in the world has 1. The person in the middle's job seems to be operating the doors and making sure the train is berthed correctly, but all you have to do is put a line where the front of the train has to line up and the driver can do it. As for the doors, it's not like the driver has much else to do when in the station.
      - InitialLastName 8y ago
        Nominally, the trains are long, and sometimes the stations are curved. A person in the middle of the train can see more of the doors to make sure they're clear.
        rayiner 8y ago
- jrochkind1 8y ago
  Kinda sounds like he's doing his part to keep the trains actually on time in a totally broken signalling environment!
  - rohansingh 8y ago
    The L train is actually the one train with fully upgraded signals, and no track sharing with other trains. Probably for that reason, it also has the highest on-time percentage of all trains.
- lobster_johnson 8y ago
  I've never been bothered by that (and as others point out, the L is automated, anyway). What I'd like to know is why, when the L reaches the 8th Ave stop in Manhattan, the operator waits 10 seconds after coming to a full stop before opening the doors. The train has already stopped, so this seems unnecessary. There's also this weird thing where, while the train is sitting there waiting to return the opposite way back to Brooklyn, they close all the subway doors except one in each carriage. It doesn't prevent people from getting on.
  - jrockway 8y ago
    They do this at every terminal. I have no idea why.
    - lobster_johnson 8y ago
      I found an answer here [1], via a Reddit thread [2] (where the answers are apparently gone): I won't go into details, but if the conductor wants to exit the train and leave the doors open at the terminal, he needs to walk to the next car at the last stop in order to open the doors, which is why there's a short delay before they open. If the doors open immediately at the last stop, then it means the train is either going to go to the yard, or the crew is going to manually key open one door per car (which is only done if the train is going to sit there for at least 10 minutes, and helps the air comfort system). [1] http://www.ibtimes.com/mta-worker-goes-underground-share-subway-secrets-reddit-top-10-reveals-324984 http://www.ibtimes.com/mta-worker-goes-underground-share-sub... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kx5fa/iama_new_york_city_transit_subway_conductor_ama/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kx5fa/iama_new_york_c...
      - jrockway 8y ago
        Very interesting. I definitely always hear the conductor moving between cars at the last stop but I never connected that to being why the doors can't be opened. I think it's funny that the train's computer knows it's the last stop and announces that fact to the passengers... but the conductor has to manually override some sort of system before he or she can exit the train.
- 8bitsrule 8y ago
  Oh yeah, that's it. Because non-union-workers would never drive like that. :-P
waqf 8y ago
Similarly, I have noticed that a difference between American subways and European subways is that when you stop at a station in Europe, the interlocks allow the automatic doors to open as soon as the train is slower than maybe 1–2 km/h. Whereas in America they don't open until a couple seconds after the train has come to a dead stop. I keep wondering how many wasted man-hours this adds up to over the course of a day — especially on a line that's running at capacity, so if one train is 4 seconds later then the next train will be 8 seconds later and so on. (The same seems to be true of elevators.)
- bluedino 8y ago
  Imagine the lawsuits if the train wasn't 100% stopped when the doors were opened.
  - joering2 8y ago
    That and also driven so many European subways (most called METRO) you never seen cars as overcrowded as in USA and barely people leaning over the door! In USA its normal to lean against the door because people are exactly gotten used to the fact the train will stop first before the door gets open.
    - lotu 8y ago
      Ehh, if you changed it I bet people would learn really quickly not to lean on doors. Most people leaning on doors are going to be young people with decent reaction times and balance so I wouldn’t even expect injury more like surprise. It would probally be reasonable to run a publicity campaign to reduce surprise as people don’t like being supprised.
      - rhizome 8y ago
        Most people leaning on doors are going to be young people with decent reaction times and balance Say what?
    - lainga 8y ago
api 8y ago
CYA is rule #1 in bureaucracies. If something happens and you "do nothing," you're responsible, so you have to "do something."
psychometry 8y ago
Delays have pushed more people onto the roads (bikes, taxis, etc.), where there is a much higher chance of injury or fatality. So their decision has probably killed more people than if they had changed nothing.
- CamperBob2 8y ago
  Yes, and see the TSA for another example. We've easily lost another 3000+ people on the roads since 9/11, simply because the professional pearl-clutchers have made it such a pain in the ass to fly anywhere.
  - gowld 8y ago
    "pearl-clutcher" is a sexist term, and the perpetrators of the TSA are for the major part by far not pearl-wearers.
    - zachsnow 8y ago
      That’s so interesting! I see now what you mean (hi google), but my initial mental image was a rich old man with a death-grip on his riches.
fusiongyro 8y ago
The purpose of this change probably isn't so much to make the trains more safe as to facilitate transferring blame for a fatal accident from the transit system to a human operator.
asr 8y ago
I agree with your point, but strongly disagree with your example. You think DC should be running the risk of accidents which kill riders because of trains that lurch into stations? Loss of life is a massive cost, even if only economic factors are accounted for. Please show me a cost-benefit analysis where that is outweighed by lurching trains (even many millions of lurching trains). Also, it's incorrect to say that we could have used decades of problem-free operation to extrapolate and predict a low risk of similar accidents in the coming decades. The 2009 crash was caused by an aging system, and unless your solution involved replacing all the switches/sensors, we would have seen new failures at a more frequent rate. Finally, the 2009 accident highlighted an inherent problem with the old system: putting a human operator in a train who is only responsible for acting in an emergency will not work. Just like the recent self-driving car fatality. It wasn't a case where we knew and should have accepted the risk, it was a case where the crash caused us to understand that the prior risk assessment was wrong (because it assumed that a human operator could prevent these kinds of accidents, when that's just not going to happen). So it was appropriate to change operations.
- rayiner 8y ago
  > You think DC should be running the risk of accidents which kill riders because of trains that lurch into stations? DOT estimates the cost of a human life at about $6 million. Times 9 is $54 million. Let's say such an event happens once every 10 years, so $5.4 million per year. The D.C. metro has 180 million rides per year. That works out to 3 cents per ride. Do you think people would pay 3 cents for a smoother, ATO-controlled Metro ride? I bet they would. (That's not even counting all the delays caused be forgoing automated control.) As to the switches and sensors--Metro already replaced the track circuits (per the NTSB's recommendation): https://wamu.org/story/17/04/06/metro-shelves-plans-bring-back-automated-trains https://wamu.org/story/17/04/06/metro-shelves-plans-bring-ba....
  - roenxi 8y ago
    It's worth elaborating on a central point; the idea that 'preventable deaths are unacceptable' only makes sense at ordinary human scales. In someone's day-to-day life, they aren't reasonably going to be in a situation where letting someone die will be the best alternative. The situation changes completely at the level of the decision makers of countries and large cities work at. /Everything/ is a variant of the trolley problem and all resources could in theory be used to save a life. Not accepting a risk of death can do more harm than good and realistically infrastructure; it just obscures the cause and effect. Eg, we'll never know if someone died because their doctor was late because a train operator made a mistake operating a train. The cause-effect chain is too convoluted. But statistically speaking, something like that will happen every so often. Deaths from inefficiency are just as bad as deaths from direct accident; and if the scale is large enough that they can reasonably be detected then they need to be considered too. Obviously most of the time a high standard of safety is going to be best, but trains are a high-risk environment moving 100s people at speeds they were never meant to move. True perfection over 30 years is probably not a required standard. Great goal though.
dopamean 8y ago
This example is exactly why I'm dubious of the idea of mass adoption self driving car technology. Edit: I should add: in the United States.
christophclarke 8y ago
The problem is that ATO relies on the underlying technology to be working and maintained. Maintenance requires money, which WMATA doesn't have. That's the issue. Humans don't require maintenance the same way something like ATO does. Politicians continue to underfund WMATA, which means they can't assure safety using an automated system, so that have to use humans.
8bitsrule 8y ago
Got to wonder why - while they were paying people to begin 'installing and modifying hundreds of signals to prevent trains from going too fast' - they didn't modify the signals so they could be remotely re-configured. Something in that system must be configured to be resistant to superior technology. Cuz it couldn't be the humans, right?

mwexler 8y ago

While I love interactive docs as much as the next person, I wondered if all these demos were really necessary to get the point across in this particular case. The text did a pretty admirable job, along with a few charts. Did the more graphical pieces help, or were they more of an "ooh, pretty" feature?

volkk 8y ago
personally, it allowed me to read much faster and understand the points without concentrating on every word
natch 8y ago
They are trying to get their points across to entrenched public officials and bureaucrats so maybe it’s needed.
ams6110 8y ago
Close reading of text for information is a dying skill. If it can't be stated in 120 characters or presented as an animation, you've lost a big part of your audience.
romwell 8y ago
The value that the graphical pieces provide is that they are interactive. The graphical pieces build up to the one where you control both parameters simultaneously, and see how you can halve the throughput of the system by seemingly innocuous changes. The whole point is that the cause of the slowdowns is not obvious because the effect of the changes is non-linear. Sure, you can take the author's word for it - but with the neat simulation, you don't have to. You can see the model in front of your eyes.

gniv 8y ago

Didn’t MTA say they are increasing the speed limits after the Village Voice article was published?

jdlyga 8y ago

This is the best article I've ever read on the subways. So many people blame so many factors: people holding doors, overcrowding, badly made signals, etc. But this explains it very well with clear visuals.

nisa 8y ago

Strange how the article blames the workers and unions while also admitting it's not their fault. - cheap and worse brakes appear to be the initial error beeing made - lack of control over their signals and blaming the workers for it is not excusable. Also there must be some kind of cheap and reliable assistant that can calculate the maximum velocity and help the driver. - badly organized maintenance is also not the workers fault.

Spooky23 8y ago
There's alot of context missing, mostly because you'd need a book to provide context! It isn't the union workers per se, but the transit union is a massively politically powerful organization that gets what it wants, and the calculus there doesn't necessarily make sense. NY politics in general and NYC politics (plus the confluence of labor) in particular is an arcane and dark art. There's always a vicious cycle where the various interests are very difficult to manage. Administering something as impactful, complex and expensive as MTA with the number stakeholders is a Sisyphean task.
aeorgnoieang 8y ago
> Tony Utano, the president of the Transport Workers Union Local 100, said he would fight any rule change that could put workers at risk. Given that any change "could put workers at risk", it seems pretty clear that the union's are likely to be somewhat to blame. Surely the train operators are not to blame for bad signals but why then is no one else at the MTA to blame? Are the workers that installed the signals not union members too? Are none of the MTA managers union members?
- chimeracoder 8y ago
  Yes, the Transit Workers Union has specifically been fighting against reforming the flagging rules for decades. They're more than "somewhat" responsible for this situation.
- thirtyseven 8y ago
  Managers are generally not allowed to be union members since they have an adversarial relationship with the workers.

dajohnson89 8y ago

Awesome visualizations.

gorbachev 8y ago
Absolutely! One of the best use of visualizations to support a story I've seen ever. New York Times in general does a great job with visualizations.

kaycebasques 8y ago

When I first learned about computer networking, I remember being blown away when I learned that network congestion dynamics also explained how freeway traffic worked. It’s cool to see the same idea in this article! Specifically, I thought it was amazing how it explained why if someone stops abruptly on a crowded highway, every subsequent driver will have to experience that pause, even hours later, so long as the highway maintains the same level of congestion. You network folk will undoubtedly explain it better than me, but I think that's the correct gist of the idea?

kps 8y ago
I wonder whether any of the large networked navigation software does random early drop.
paulmd 8y ago
I've always had this odd feeling that traffic is actually a Bernoulli flow, where instead of "pressure" you have congestion. eg if you have two lanes merging and the system is at capacity, then the "pressure" across the streamline increases and traffic slows down as a result. And when you have very little pressure (or diverging arterial roads) traffic tends to speed up. Of course there is a secondary problem of "phantom" traffic jams where the system is not really slowing down due to traffic merging or anything, you just have spots where traffic is not flowing at all for no real reason (the optimal solution being that everyone puts their foot on the gas and accelerates together). I suppose the physical analogue might be cavitation or non-laminar/turbulent flow? I can't find any academic references on this but it's always made intuitive sense to me.
- lainga 8y ago
  This is exactly why traffic regimes are sometimes described as "laminar" or "turbulent". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_diagram_of_traffic_flow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_diagram_of_traffic...
- yc-kraln 8y ago
  Here's one for you: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/operations/tft/chap5.pdf https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/operations/tf... I seem to remember a statistic that said, essentially, traffic waves propagate backwards at approximately 12mph. There are a set of circumstances where you can set up a "standing" wave of traffic where cars will have to tap their brakes at the same place for hours, for no reason.

kevin_b_er 8y ago

The negative feedback loop on faulty signals should be a read for anyone doing engineering, including software engineering. If the workers go the proper speed, the faulty signal will trip an emergency break. This actually threatens their jobs because they'll be blamed for tripping the e-brake as if the signals worked perfectly. 1. The management trusts the automation too much without proper checks or tests proving the automation is accurate. 2. These workers are still blamed, even after signals are known to be bad. 3. People, even in here, blame the workers (and the union) for the fault of the system's quality being garbage. 4. Workers try to preserve their jobs by just working around the problem and reducing productivity all-around.

jrockway 8y ago
I'm not sure. The incentives could go either way. If the incentive is "on time performance is a must and the signal system is not going to check your speed", then people would drive the trains over the recommended speed to make the schedule, and thus derail the train around curves or not keep the speed low enough for the block system to provide adequate train protection. As it stands now, the incentive is to not get "tripped", so people drive the trains well below the speed at which the signalling system will trip the train... doing anything else runs the risk of getting yelled at or worse, and nobody wants that, so they play it safe. A computer can be programmed to take into account both concerns and drive the train at the exact speed to satisfy all the constraints of the signalling system. If a computer gets tripped for travelling through a block too quickly, a meeting is had and a fix is checked in. The software doesn't care if you're mad at it. You just fix it and move on. Humans are more fragile, and if you don't align the incentives correctly you will not get the right result.

jessaustin 8y ago

It seems stupid to use these unreliable "signals" at all, but even if they have to use them for "safety" they don't have to use them for operator evaluation. It would be real easy for every operator to carry a device that could prove e.g. she drove an appropriate speed even though her train tripped a poorly-maintained signal. I'm not foolish enough to imagine this would lead to the signals getting fixed, and from a political perspective it might be important to stipulate that it wouldn't, but that seems secondary to the horrible schedule problems that tentative driving has caused.

gamblor956 8y ago
What sort of magical device would accomplish this feat? It couldn't be GPS-based, as GPS signals wouldn't penetrate to the subway level. It couldn't be momentum-based, because that's not sufficiently accurate. It couldn't be connected to the train's computers because that would require major upgrades to every train in the system, which would take decades.
- nisa 8y ago
  Every truck at least in the EU has such a mandated device. Basically it's a signed timestamp with current speed. They have a shedule, they know the driver. If they fear manipulation just include the device in the train and read the data every other week. Trains in the EU also have this.
  - gamblor956 8y ago
    We're talking about subways, which do not have access to GPS, and which is what EU trains use. Most of the trains in the MTA system predate the EU and a fair number of the countries that are members of the EU! The London system uses a different positional system based on location beacons built into the lines to locate trains (essentially, land-based GPS).
- jessaustin 8y ago
  I don't have an amazon link for you, but it doesn't seem that magical to me? Submarines have had inertial nav for decades. This is a simpler problem, because travel is restricted to rails and drift can be corrected as often as necessary. Every airbag in every automobile is equipped with a very accurate fairly inexpensive MEMS acceleration sensor, which would the only specialized component required for such a system. Hobbyist components like the ADXL345 are also cheap. It wouldn't surprise me if such a system already exists for e.g. tracking underground mining equipment, but if not it wouldn't be an impossible task for an organization with the budget of MTA. It's not as though the system would need to be incredibly precise; it's replacing one that at its best can only measure average speed over some huge distance.

Dowwie 8y ago

This is a great use of visualizations. Bostock made his mark while at the NYTimes.

makomk 8y ago

"The London Underground, a system of similar size and age, has had no track worker fatalities since 1998." As far as I can tell, the London Underground only allows work on sub-surface and deep tracks when the line is completely shut down. Like, not just slowing down trains on the tracks either side of the work, but not running trains on any of the tracks full stop.

jkaptur 8y ago
Also, as I understand it, the line shuts down each night.

jrochkind1 8y ago

Sounds like there could be large benefit from A) removing the punishment for tripping the signal, that causes drivers to go extra extra slow (well under safe and officially regulated speed) cause they know there are faulty unpredictable signals which they'll still get punished for tripping; and B) fixing faulty signals (which they probably don't even know about when all the drivers are slowing down so much in case of faulty signal that they don't even know which ones are faulty). Contrary to the article saying "And there’s no easy fix", it seems like this would be a fairly easy fix?

WhompingWindows 8y ago
Won't you have to convince the union to do this change? They seem particularly intractable from my outsider's POV. If they accept culpability here and make one change, maybe they would consider that as bending and inviting future concessions. It's a shame that overall efficiency and rider satisfaction count for much less to the union than their own politics.
rohansingh 8y ago
From a moral standpoint, it's definitely wrong to punish drivers for signal issues, and we should stop doing that. However, if drivers all started going at the normal speed and regularly tripping broken signals, it would absolutely destroy the system. When a train's emergency brake is tripped, it takes tens of minutes to reset it and get the train going again. If that was happening at every faulty signal on a daily basis, the system would grind to a halt. Really the only fix is dealing with the signals. But that's extremely difficult because they haven't been regularly maintained and are very old. Most of them use mechanical timing systems and other insane things that nobody has built parts for. There's no particular reason to believe that "changing them back" would go any better than the botched rollout of the initial change.
- jrochkind1 8y ago
  Ah, I see your point, yes, thanks.
- bluGill 8y ago

jakelarkin 8y ago

how hard is it to put a location based speed governor on the train instead of using antiquated mechanical signals to enforce max speeds? or is that just too much common sense for the MTA?

gamblor956 8y ago
It would be extremely difficult. How would the train know where it is? GPS is unusable at that depth. You'd need location beacons...but at that point you're better off just using signals, like they already are, rather than upgrading every train and dealing with the ongoing maintenance of making sure that each train's location-based speed governor is properly up-to-date with all proper slow-down locations.
- mortehu 8y ago
  Could you please explain why positioning would be hard? Since trains only move on the edges of a fixed graph, you'd think positioning would be super easy compared to almost all other indoor positioning applications.
  - crocal 8y ago
    It is hard because it must be vitally accurate. Screw it up and you end up with collision hazards. The number of dimensions is not the problem. The safety is.
  - gamblor956 8y ago
    Your indoor positioning applications would require the installation of numerous positioning beacons--or in other words, significantly more hardware than the many thousands of speed signals they have already installed and are unable to maintain.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
crocal 8y ago

zaroth 8y ago

I had to read a little bit to find the real reason - combine faulty signals which trigger over-speed warnings when they shouldn’t — with the following... “Train operators face steep penalties after a number of instances of tripping a signal, like losing vacation days or being forced into early retirement.” That’s a recipe for exactly the problem they are seeing. Fix the signals. Fix the policy. It will fix the problem. But I also suspect this whole thing is much more intentional than we are being led to believe — it’s actually intentional policies which have led to expected slowdowns in a jaded attempt to boost funding. The whole narrative around overcrowding has collapsed. The narrative around underfunding is also collapsing. But I’m not sure the other shoe (proof that this was a charade to increase funding) has dropped quite yet.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
We live in a society where all the actors in the system need to virtue signal about how much they care about safety, usefulness of the system be damned. That's why the draconian speed limit policy in the first place. The union wants the trains to go slow so they can say they're fighting for policies that protect workers. The MTA wants signal enforced speed limits so they can say they're preventing crashes. If we could just have an adult discussion about the damage of marginally (if at all) increased risk compared to the benefits of a more functional subway system this wouldn't be as big of a problem. This isn't even a resources issue, changing policy is close to free.
- gamblor956 8y ago
  The union wants the trains to go slow so they can say they're fighting for policies that protect workers. Have you ever performed maintenance literally inches from a train going 40mph? The union has valid safety concerns for wanting trains to slow down in the vicinity of workers, and this particular safety measure only applies to late-night routes when they are performing maintenance on closed lines that share tracks with operating lines. The problem is that the MTA introduced a number of other "safety" measures that did nothing to affect the safety of workers or employees, such as increasing the distance between cars or introducing speed-limiting signals, and these other measures apply 24-7.

ggm 8y ago

root cause? undercapitalized.

davidf18 8y ago

> "Before the 1995 Williamsburg Bridge crash, the M.T.A. had installed less expensive brakes with longer stopping distances ..." I live in NYC and use the subways. This was a huge error in judgment to change brakes to lower quality brakes with longer stopping distances. I can't imagine how this change from the original specifications of the subway system was even allowed to be approved. This is the root cause of much of the issues, the demonstrated lack of judgment of leadership who allowed this change in lower quality brakes to occur. There is a third reason not listed in the article about why there are problems in the subway system (and a lack of the 2nd Ave subway line completion) and that is bad priorities. The MTA has spent $13 billion building 3.5 miles of track and a new underground station at Grand Central for the Long Island Railroad which already uses Penn Station. The priority of course should have been a much more used 2nd Ave subway line and maintenance. For those not from NYC, there are two subway lines of the West Side of Manhattan (#1,2,3 and A, B, C, D) but only one on the East Side (#4, 5, 6) which ends up with truly horrendous overcrowding on the East Side subway lines. The 2nd Ave line has been planned for almost a century but supposedly because of lack of funds it was not built. The issue was not lack of funds but bad priorities, building a Long Island Rail station in Grand Central over completing the 2nd Ave Subway. 'The estimated cost of the Long Island Rail Road project, known as “East Side Access,” has ballooned to $12 billion [now $13 billion].' [1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

parliament32 8y ago

Meta but the interactive visuals are great! They're an excellent supplement to the text.

dopamean 8y ago

Losing your job over a faulty signal sounds like some serious bullshit. I hope they sued.