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Our vendor executed a system reboot that caused a shut down of the turnstiles
- josephorjoe 5y agoi saw that and hoped it was a lie as the alternative is that the mta has granted a vendor who apparently has quite poor judgment the ability to shut down the subway system (or at least force people to jump turnstiles).
- jiveturkey 5y agoforce? why not have the attendant open the gate?
- VWWHFSfQ 5y agoNot every station has an attendant, especially at 2AM. But even then, every gate is unlocked. At worst they just sound an alarm. But most of the time the alarms are turned off anyway.
- pavel_lishin 5y agofwiw, the gates are unlocked from inside the platform; you can't just yank it open if you're going into the subway.
- jmkb 5y agoMost entrances do not have a human attendant nearby, and the general trend in NYC (and probably most places) has been to replace the humans with vending machines.
- pavel_lishin 5y agoЖенщину вынули, автомат всунули.
- jrockway 5y agoI don't think there are any stations that don't have at least one person working there at all times. The worst case here is "software bug at 2AM means that you have to use the staffed entrance".
- ericbarrett 5y agoThere are many, many unattended stations in the NYC Subway at night, if you leave lower Manhattan.
- jrockway 5y agoWhich stations? I've been reading how the MTA tried to eliminate extra floating staff to cover agent's "lunch" breaks, and they got shut down by the state. Even in the middle of the night, someone has to be there for 30 minutes while the normal agent takes their lunch break. Obviously, it's relatively recent that we got 24/7 service back, but I'm not counting the COVID service reductions.
- ericbarrett 5y agoAll my subway experience is pre-COVID. I dunno what the regs say, or what the MTA publicizes, but the reality is almost any station in Brooklyn, Queens, Harlem, etc. is going to be unsupervised in the late hours. Maybe there’s somebody lurking in an annex somewhere, but the ticket/info booth will be locked up and no MTA personnel, not even a janitor, will be visible. This was even the case for heavily trafficked stops like Bedford or Lorimer on the L.
- jrockway 5y agoOK, very interesting. I searched around for policies, and didn't find anything except people complaining about that 30 minute lack of coverage for "lunch". I assumed that if they flat-out had nobody in stations, there would be similar outrage. I live in Brooklyn Heights and used to routinely work until 2 in the morning; there was always someone in the booth a High St. and Clark St. at that hour.
- aneutron 5y agoIn Paris there are similar turnstiles, but when there's a problem, the default is opened, not closed. It makes absolutely no sense, because the main thing is to keep the traffic moving, not to engorge it.
- VWWHFSfQ 5y agoThe turnstiles in NYC are set to fail open as well unless manually overriden. It seems someone did that, for some reason. Possibly incompetence.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago"client called and complained about lost revenue when we did it the way that's specified in our documentation so we're gonna put a note in the checklist to override it going forward"
- optimalsolver 5y agoSeems like not having them open would be disastrous in an emergency scenario.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wil421 5y agoUsually here are gates with a fire alarm next to them so you bypass them when needed.
- jrockway 5y agoYou don't pay a fare to exit the New York City Transit system, so nothing will prevent you from leaving during a fire; control system failure or otherwise. There are also emergency exit doors (that many people open to exit more quickly in normal operation of the subway). One may argue that having to go through a turnstile at all is an evacuation disaster, but presumably the designers thought about this and the exit doors are adequate in an emergency. This is different than systems like London and Tokyo, where you pay for the distance you traveled, and a station evacuation mandates opening the fare controls to let people exit more quickly. For better or for worse, that option has never existed in New York.
- terom 5y agoThe context here seems to be that this is the first night of the return to 24h service, but the system was out of use at 2am in the morning. Have the vendors previously been using the night-time service break for maintenance operations?
- ciisforsuckas 5y agoIt seems like this is what occured.
- jfrunyon 5y agoIt returned to 24h service at 2am, and was out of service at 2am. Occam's razor: switch back to "open for business 24/7" didn't happen as planned. Besides, who actually gets around to overnight, manual maintenance at the very start of the maintenance break? ;)
- offtop5 5y agoThis feels very dangerous. While able body adults could just jump it, anyone with a disability could be trapped. What if their was a fire ? This is a good argument to just remove physical turnstiles and rely upon an honor system.
- neom 5y agoNext to those turnstyles is a large grated wall, it has a push bar emergency exit from the inside.
- aaronharnly 5y agoThe turnstiles limit entry, not exit. Also there are exit doors that can be pushed open.
- gruez 5y ago>This is a good argument to just remove physical turnstiles and rely upon an honor system. I think the compliance rate would be very poor in NYC
- bombcar 5y agoAccording to my rough calculations, if the NYC farebox revenue was replaced by a state-wide tax it'd be $330 per person (roughly).
- gruez 5y agoThat $330 would be a hard sell to the 60% of the people who live in new york state but not in new york city. >if the NYC firebox revenue I'm assuming you mean farebox revenue right?
- bombcar 5y agoYes, stupid autocorrect. The basic idea would be to see how much they save vs all the costs spend on maintaining fair box revenue. However, there's also a political aspect (people have less of a problem paying for something they're using) and a policing aspect (you can kick out vagrants who don't have a ticket), and a "tax the non-voters" (out-of-towners pay for tickets, just like hotel tax, and this is popular with locals).
- analognoise 5y agoWho was the vendor? Cubic Transportation Services?
- TheGigaChad 5y agoThis is why you have a person operating them manually.
- EricE 5y agoWhat I find fascinating about this comment section: No one seems alarmed that ONE server reboot can take down all the turnstiles at the same time?!? Does that not scream there is a disaster waiting to happen at a moments notice if there is that little of resiliency and availability in their application architecture?
- Animats 5y agoThe real questions are, why does the vendor have any connection to the operational system at all, and how much can they do via that interface?
- rhodozelia 5y agoFor “updates and bug fixes” just like on your computer, your phone and your car. They have root, you don’t.