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"As a conductor, when I stick my head out of the car to perform the required platform observation" I can't really believe that the country that managed to send

"As a conductor, when I stick my head out of the car to perform the required platform observation" I can't really believe that the country that managed to send man to the Moon is not able to put a camera somewhere in the train or on the platform, so conductor does not need to do something like this... If camera is too much, maybe a properly installed large mirror would do the trick.

yowlingcat 6y ago
Sending a man to the moon was done in the context of this military industrial state's show of might and veneration of the individual. Utilitarian arguments aside (especially given that investments into rail very directly translate into value for the populace it serves), rail transportation infrastructure investment wouldn't have quite the impact as far as propaganda manufacturing is concerned. Or, to put it another way, why does the collective imagination seem to be more captured by Tesla (and SpaceX to a degree) than The Boring Company? In part, it's a delivery on the promise of self-driving cars we were imagined would be our eventual retrofuturist societal inheritance.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ben_w 6y ago
  > Or, to put it another way, why does the collective imagination seem to be more captured by Tesla (and SpaceX to a degree) than The Boring Company? Point taken, but I don’t think the name “The Boring Company” is going to inspire many people even if it was a making weed-burgers for baseball fans.
mortehu 6y ago
On stations with curved platforms there are in fact monitors installed at the conductor's stopping position. For the rest of the stations, optimizing for the case where it's unsafe for the conductor to stick their head out seems odd; why is there a crowd on the platform then?
fastball 6y ago
Honestly the fact that we have cars driving around neighborhoods and highways by themselves but we haven't totally automated train driving is pretty ridiculous.
- euroclear 6y ago
  It's political more than technical. Automating the trains means eliminating the driver's job, and the Transit Worker's Union is opposed to the elimination of those positions.
  - dnhz 6y ago
    No, it's both. The NYC subway system has the option of automated train operation only on a few lines. This person is a conductor though. They sit in a cab in the middle of the train and operate the doors.
  - JAlexoid 6y ago
    So... The solution to the issue today is - eliminate their job by automation(aka progress), but that is something they staunchly oppose. Sounds like a catch 22
    - fastball 6y ago
      It's not really a catch-22. Progress should be made. Having machines do jobs we don't need humans to do will always be better for everyone in the long run, and it is better if we do it sooner rather than later. Luddism never helped anyone.
      - Leherenn 6y ago
        It doesn't help, because it doesn't work, once it's at the scale where people will assemble to fight against it, it's too late, you cannot prevent progress. However I would point out that the original Luddites, who were middle class, mostly died in abject poverty. We should not prevent automation, but at the same we should not just brush aside the plight of the displaced workers. New jobs will be created, but probably not for them.
NikolaeVarius 6y ago
They actively and explicitly don't do this to promote paying attention
jrockway 6y ago
There are two checks that the conductor does. One is to ensure that all the doors are "platformed", i.e. won't open into the tunnel. This is done by pointing at a striped bar hanging from the ceiling. They lean out the window and point because it's one of those "hacks" that makes compliance with the procedure more likely. (Kind of like how checklists dramatically increased aviation safety.) The second thing they do is check that the train isn't dragging anything when it's leaving the station. People do get caught in the doors (usually their clothes or bags), and you don't read about them dying because the conductor is paying close attention and stops the train. Can you engineer sensors to do this? Absolutely. Machine vision is getting better every year, but these procedures date from a time when digital cameras and computers didn't even exist. They work well, don't require maintenance, and are simple. An engineered sensor-based solution would be expensive, would break often in the dirty environment of the tunnels, and would be pretty imperfect. So I think a pretty good engineering compromise has been made here. Going to the moon happened because there was an unlimited budget and we only had to do it a few times. Seeing if your train is platformed correctly and that it's not dragging any customers to their death has less funding and has to happen thousands of times a day. Hence, we have a person in the train to do that, instead of a machine learning sensor network.
- JAlexoid 6y ago
  There are a million approaches to this. Minority of the solutions are CV. Most are already solved engineering problems. Elevators manage to not drag you, but multimillion dollar train cars can't? Your thought process is one of over-engineering. Don't overengineer.
  - jrockway 6y ago
    Elevators don't run outdoors at 60 miles an hour in a blizzard. Trains are taken out of service all the time because the door opening/closing machinery has stopped working. A sensor that can detect the sleeve of your shirt caught in the door would have to be more precise than what elevators use, and operate in significantly harsher conditions. (In Japan, platform doors are common. Every installation I've seen has multiple e-stop buttons to press if you get caught in them. Clearly they don't trust the sensors, if there are even sensors. And those doors are static and don't move with the train.)

yowlingcat 6y ago

Sending a man to the moon was done in the context of this military industrial state's show of might and veneration of the individual. Utilitarian arguments aside (especially given that investments into rail very directly translate into value for the populace it serves), rail transportation infrastructure investment wouldn't have quite the impact as far as propaganda manufacturing is concerned. Or, to put it another way, why does the collective imagination seem to be more captured by Tesla (and SpaceX to a degree) than The Boring Company? In part, it's a delivery on the promise of self-driving cars we were imagined would be our eventual retrofuturist societal inheritance.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ben_w 6y ago
> Or, to put it another way, why does the collective imagination seem to be more captured by Tesla (and SpaceX to a degree) than The Boring Company? Point taken, but I don’t think the name “The Boring Company” is going to inspire many people even if it was a making weed-burgers for baseball fans.

mortehu 6y ago

On stations with curved platforms there are in fact monitors installed at the conductor's stopping position. For the rest of the stations, optimizing for the case where it's unsafe for the conductor to stick their head out seems odd; why is there a crowd on the platform then?

fastball 6y ago

Honestly the fact that we have cars driving around neighborhoods and highways by themselves but we haven't totally automated train driving is pretty ridiculous.

euroclear 6y ago
It's political more than technical. Automating the trains means eliminating the driver's job, and the Transit Worker's Union is opposed to the elimination of those positions.
- dnhz 6y ago
  No, it's both. The NYC subway system has the option of automated train operation only on a few lines. This person is a conductor though. They sit in a cab in the middle of the train and operate the doors.
- JAlexoid 6y ago
  So... The solution to the issue today is - eliminate their job by automation(aka progress), but that is something they staunchly oppose. Sounds like a catch 22
  - fastball 6y ago
    It's not really a catch-22. Progress should be made. Having machines do jobs we don't need humans to do will always be better for everyone in the long run, and it is better if we do it sooner rather than later. Luddism never helped anyone.
    - Leherenn 6y ago
      It doesn't help, because it doesn't work, once it's at the scale where people will assemble to fight against it, it's too late, you cannot prevent progress. However I would point out that the original Luddites, who were middle class, mostly died in abject poverty. We should not prevent automation, but at the same we should not just brush aside the plight of the displaced workers. New jobs will be created, but probably not for them.

NikolaeVarius 6y ago

They actively and explicitly don't do this to promote paying attention

jrockway 6y ago

There are two checks that the conductor does. One is to ensure that all the doors are "platformed", i.e. won't open into the tunnel. This is done by pointing at a striped bar hanging from the ceiling. They lean out the window and point because it's one of those "hacks" that makes compliance with the procedure more likely. (Kind of like how checklists dramatically increased aviation safety.) The second thing they do is check that the train isn't dragging anything when it's leaving the station. People do get caught in the doors (usually their clothes or bags), and you don't read about them dying because the conductor is paying close attention and stops the train. Can you engineer sensors to do this? Absolutely. Machine vision is getting better every year, but these procedures date from a time when digital cameras and computers didn't even exist. They work well, don't require maintenance, and are simple. An engineered sensor-based solution would be expensive, would break often in the dirty environment of the tunnels, and would be pretty imperfect. So I think a pretty good engineering compromise has been made here. Going to the moon happened because there was an unlimited budget and we only had to do it a few times. Seeing if your train is platformed correctly and that it's not dragging any customers to their death has less funding and has to happen thousands of times a day. Hence, we have a person in the train to do that, instead of a machine learning sensor network.

JAlexoid 6y ago
There are a million approaches to this. Minority of the solutions are CV. Most are already solved engineering problems. Elevators manage to not drag you, but multimillion dollar train cars can't? Your thought process is one of over-engineering. Don't overengineer.
- jrockway 6y ago
  Elevators don't run outdoors at 60 miles an hour in a blizzard. Trains are taken out of service all the time because the door opening/closing machinery has stopped working. A sensor that can detect the sleeve of your shirt caught in the door would have to be more precise than what elevators use, and operate in significantly harsher conditions. (In Japan, platform doors are common. Every installation I've seen has multiple e-stop buttons to press if you get caught in them. Clearly they don't trust the sensors, if there are even sensors. And those doors are static and don't move with the train.)