4 ms·

After an operator-error derailment on the commuter rail line I frequently ride, the response of the NTSB was to require the railroad de-prioritize on-time perfo

by dzdt 4y ago

After an operator-error derailment on the commuter rail line I frequently ride, the response of the NTSB was to require the railroad de-prioritize on-time performance and increase schedule times. As a frequent rider on the route I would much rather have my 15 minutes per day back and risk a once-per-century fatal accident. But the risk-averse bureaucracy we've built doesn't make such calculations with a balance like that: they prioritize safety above all else never mind the detriments.

poslathian 4y ago
I often wonder how we might estimate how much of the surplus created by economic growth and technology has been hoovered up by “alarp” in its many forms. I’m scared of the answer, and of the people who wouldn’t see a problem with it.
- concordDance 4y ago
  For those wondering:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALARP https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALARP As Low As Reasonably Practical
thrashh 4y ago
It’s not a bureaucracy thing IMO People are severely spooked when they hear people are injured If you have customers and you want to continue having customers, you really have to manage your PR. Injuries look really bad
hristov 4y ago
"Sure you save some lives but how many will be late!" I do not like this math. For example the accident may not be once per century. And it is good for the bureaucracy to be risk adverse if it comes to my life. The answer is that they should improve the technology so that the system is safe and faster.
- maria2 4y ago
  Many lifetimes of time are being wasted every day to save < 10 lives every century.
  - googlryas 4y ago
    Lifetimes aren't composed of tiny time slices of many people.
    - nitwit005 4y ago
      Ethics discussions often involve this sort of idea, although it's usually in terms of life-years.
  - jraph 4y ago
    Life can't be reduced to (productive) time like this. At least I find this take very sad.
    - maria2 4y ago
      Why do you find it sad? Everything has a cost. There are plenty of things that harm people every single day that we tolerate readily. For example, 91 lumberjacks died last year. There are way fewer employed lumberjacks than there are subway riders.
    - nullc 4y ago
      You don't necessarily need to make that comparison: If you make the trains too slow many people will drive instead which is radically more likely to kill them than the train. So you can still find that there is a speed risk tradeoff the minimizes death which is not the same as minimizing the train risk. Worse for NY's problems is that in that decision people are probably using something like the 95-percentile trip time as the criteria: It doesn't help them if the train is fast on average since they need to schedule for the worst-likely case. The fact that the crews are playing roulette with an kafkaesque speed limiter system and risking disciplinary action should they anger it essentially guarantees that the times will be both slow and highly inconsistent.
- gruturo 4y ago
  If OP's subway carried 80k people per day (and I guess this could be conservative), and they are all delayed 15 minutes, the overall wasted time equals 1 lifetime per month. I'm all for improving the technology, but in the meantime the math should absolutely be done, at least to ensure the temporary fix isn't worse than the problem.
  - Retric 4y ago
    There are feedback mechanisms here which shift where people live and work in response to changes in transportation times. Which means you can’t simply extrapolate like that over time.
  - vosper 4y ago
    Is it necessarily wasted, though? If the subway is tedious and unpleasant, then sure. But if I get a seat and I get 15 more minutes reading or staring out the window, then I’m probably not calling that a complete waste.
    - ErikVandeWater 4y ago
      If you told New Yorkers they had the option to live 15 minutes longer, but that is added time on the NYC subway, I think most would turn it down.
    - rayiner 4y ago
      Getting a seat on the NYC subway? Lol.
      - nine_k 4y ago
        Quite doable these days; I'd say 90% of my recent rides (Q, B, A, C lines). Was a total piece of cake in 2020, of course %)
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    Jokes aside time spend on the subway isn’t actually equivalent to time spend dead, we shouldn’t trade them one-for-one. Also the “one extra death per century” measure seems to be derived via the method of rectal extrication, we don’t know how many deaths a schedule change might cause or prevent at all, and I bet the people working on the subway have, if anything, some idea with massive error bars. I dunno the math seems basically impossible to do, I mean it would have to include things like “how to people, possibly irrationally, respond to deaths on the subway.”
- gok 4y ago
  Practically what happens is many people switch to driving and waste more lives
- quotemstr 4y ago
  > I do not like this math Many policy difficulties arise from unwillingness to trade-offs between "sacred" and non-"sacred" values. It's easy to say that just one life is worth an arbitrary amount of non-fatal inconvenience to an arbitrary number of people. It's the cheap, easy platitude anyone can summon in a meeting. It feels good to say. Simple. Strong. Righteous. But the world doesn't work this way. Mere life does not, in fact, have infinite, overriding value. Infrastructure engineering is not a morality play. It's a complex set of trade-offs, some involving safety. In a big system like public transit, as crass as it might be to say explicitly, the optimal number of deaths is seldom zero. Safety and utility are not, as the moralists might insist, incommensurable. They in fact exist on the same plane, and to build things that are effective and efficient, we need to trade them off against each other. Failure to do so leads to cowardly paralysis. In other words: yes, we absolutely should accept some statistical nonzero risk of injury to save time or money in the overwhelmingly common case, because these things matter.
- kccqzy 4y ago
  When the train is often late, it simply pushes people to drive more, and depending on the specifics driving on the highway could very well be less safe. Ergo, it results in a net loss of lives. This is pointed out near the end of the article.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > the accident may not be once per century. And it is good for the bureaucracy to be risk adverse if it comes to my life People stop taking the subway when it takes too long. That not only increases traffic, it also saps the system of funding.
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  > "Sure you save some lives but how many will be late!" I do not like this math. For example the accident may not be once per century. And it is good for the bureaucracy to be risk adverse if it comes to my life. I hope you’re campaigning for a nationwide speed limit for automobiles of 20mph. It is good for the bureaucracy to be risk averse with loves after all.
- nostromo 4y ago
  > "Sure you save some lives but how many will be late!" You make this trade off every day without admitting it in such stark terms. Every time you drive, bike, or fly to a destination you’re choosing speed at an increased risk of injury or death.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    Note that flying is safer than walking.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  > And it is good for the bureaucracy to be risk adverse if it comes to my life. Only moderately risk adverse. Unless you'd approve of all roads having a 15-20mph speed limit? Because that's the natural conclusion of prioritizing accidents much higher than speed. And I'm not being hyperbolic or using a slippery slope argument. I'm saying that you have to admit a tradeoff to get any kind of sensible result.
- rocqua 4y ago
  How much delay is acceptable for a 0.001% point yearly mortality reduction on a busy rail line? Certainly not an hour. So there is some tradeof. Notably the lives OP was talking about included his own. I think that matters quite a bit. Risking your own life for better speed is a different ballgame than deciding the risk other people run is fine.
- fukutyphoo 4y ago
  Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan had a system designed for a 1 in 100 year accident. It happened after 8 years. https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/3016087/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/3016087/ PS, this is a great video about the typhoon that caused the disaster. Disasters are Black Swan Events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory in Talebsbook he explains (ok it's a theory) that rare events happen commonly. See also Terry Pratchet "one in a million chances happen nine times out of ten"
- Nomentatus 4y ago
  But hold on - do you really want to be significantly slower on your way to the hospital or doctor, for symptoms that you didn't think merited an ambulance; but actually do? This isn't an uncommon kind of trip, it's a pretty common one. Adding minutes to millions of trips adds deaths that are much harder to count up, but are no less real. Now add in kids left alone for an extra few minutes times millions, etc, etc. There are tradeoffs here; risk doesn't lie on just one side of the equation.
joe_the_user 4y ago
A bureaucracy can't ignore the possibility of a deadly crash. But they chose the slow-down instead of spending the money needed for safety. Which is despicable imo. But there is the quandary that they know a modernization project could be a disaster just all American public transit projects tend to be disasters.
- danuker 4y ago
  Reminds me of Atlas Shrugged, when they had to resort to manual track signal switching. "Physical men, serving as lamposts. You’ve advocated it long enough—you’ve got what you wanted’" (pp. 875-76).
nkrisc 4y ago
Kinda sucks for the people who get killed so you can arrive sooner though, right?
themitigating 4y ago
But if you were in that accident or a parent/friend in it you'd have the opposite opinion and demand "the politicans make things safer " You're just a selfish npc
rtpg 4y ago
What if we actually just operated trains safely, made improvements to the system, and then sped things up _because we improved the safety to make it possible?_ "We risk crashes or make everything slow" is a false choice when we're talking about years-long perspectives. Especially given that there are lots of contributors to throughput and slowness.

by dzdt 4y ago

poslathian 4y ago

I often wonder how we might estimate how much of the surplus created by economic growth and technology has been hoovered up by “alarp” in its many forms. I’m scared of the answer, and of the people who wouldn’t see a problem with it.

concordDance 4y ago
For those wondering:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALARP https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALARP As Low As Reasonably Practical

thrashh 4y ago

It’s not a bureaucracy thing IMO People are severely spooked when they hear people are injured If you have customers and you want to continue having customers, you really have to manage your PR. Injuries look really bad

hristov 4y ago

"Sure you save some lives but how many will be late!" I do not like this math. For example the accident may not be once per century. And it is good for the bureaucracy to be risk adverse if it comes to my life. The answer is that they should improve the technology so that the system is safe and faster.

maria2 4y ago
Many lifetimes of time are being wasted every day to save < 10 lives every century.
- googlryas 4y ago
  Lifetimes aren't composed of tiny time slices of many people.
  - nitwit005 4y ago
    Ethics discussions often involve this sort of idea, although it's usually in terms of life-years.
- jraph 4y ago
  Life can't be reduced to (productive) time like this. At least I find this take very sad.
  - maria2 4y ago
    Why do you find it sad? Everything has a cost. There are plenty of things that harm people every single day that we tolerate readily. For example, 91 lumberjacks died last year. There are way fewer employed lumberjacks than there are subway riders.
  - nullc 4y ago
    You don't necessarily need to make that comparison: If you make the trains too slow many people will drive instead which is radically more likely to kill them than the train. So you can still find that there is a speed risk tradeoff the minimizes death which is not the same as minimizing the train risk. Worse for NY's problems is that in that decision people are probably using something like the 95-percentile trip time as the criteria: It doesn't help them if the train is fast on average since they need to schedule for the worst-likely case. The fact that the crews are playing roulette with an kafkaesque speed limiter system and risking disciplinary action should they anger it essentially guarantees that the times will be both slow and highly inconsistent.
gruturo 4y ago
If OP's subway carried 80k people per day (and I guess this could be conservative), and they are all delayed 15 minutes, the overall wasted time equals 1 lifetime per month. I'm all for improving the technology, but in the meantime the math should absolutely be done, at least to ensure the temporary fix isn't worse than the problem.
- Retric 4y ago
  There are feedback mechanisms here which shift where people live and work in response to changes in transportation times. Which means you can’t simply extrapolate like that over time.
- vosper 4y ago
  Is it necessarily wasted, though? If the subway is tedious and unpleasant, then sure. But if I get a seat and I get 15 more minutes reading or staring out the window, then I’m probably not calling that a complete waste.
  - ErikVandeWater 4y ago
    If you told New Yorkers they had the option to live 15 minutes longer, but that is added time on the NYC subway, I think most would turn it down.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    Getting a seat on the NYC subway? Lol.
    - nine_k 4y ago
      Quite doable these days; I'd say 90% of my recent rides (Q, B, A, C lines). Was a total piece of cake in 2020, of course %)
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Jokes aside time spend on the subway isn’t actually equivalent to time spend dead, we shouldn’t trade them one-for-one. Also the “one extra death per century” measure seems to be derived via the method of rectal extrication, we don’t know how many deaths a schedule change might cause or prevent at all, and I bet the people working on the subway have, if anything, some idea with massive error bars. I dunno the math seems basically impossible to do, I mean it would have to include things like “how to people, possibly irrationally, respond to deaths on the subway.”
gok 4y ago
Practically what happens is many people switch to driving and waste more lives
quotemstr 4y ago
> I do not like this math Many policy difficulties arise from unwillingness to trade-offs between "sacred" and non-"sacred" values. It's easy to say that just one life is worth an arbitrary amount of non-fatal inconvenience to an arbitrary number of people. It's the cheap, easy platitude anyone can summon in a meeting. It feels good to say. Simple. Strong. Righteous. But the world doesn't work this way. Mere life does not, in fact, have infinite, overriding value. Infrastructure engineering is not a morality play. It's a complex set of trade-offs, some involving safety. In a big system like public transit, as crass as it might be to say explicitly, the optimal number of deaths is seldom zero. Safety and utility are not, as the moralists might insist, incommensurable. They in fact exist on the same plane, and to build things that are effective and efficient, we need to trade them off against each other. Failure to do so leads to cowardly paralysis. In other words: yes, we absolutely should accept some statistical nonzero risk of injury to save time or money in the overwhelmingly common case, because these things matter.
kccqzy 4y ago
When the train is often late, it simply pushes people to drive more, and depending on the specifics driving on the highway could very well be less safe. Ergo, it results in a net loss of lives. This is pointed out near the end of the article.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> the accident may not be once per century. And it is good for the bureaucracy to be risk adverse if it comes to my life People stop taking the subway when it takes too long. That not only increases traffic, it also saps the system of funding.
barry-cotter 4y ago
> "Sure you save some lives but how many will be late!" I do not like this math. For example the accident may not be once per century. And it is good for the bureaucracy to be risk adverse if it comes to my life. I hope you’re campaigning for a nationwide speed limit for automobiles of 20mph. It is good for the bureaucracy to be risk averse with loves after all.
nostromo 4y ago
> "Sure you save some lives but how many will be late!" You make this trade off every day without admitting it in such stark terms. Every time you drive, bike, or fly to a destination you’re choosing speed at an increased risk of injury or death.
- concordDance 4y ago
  Note that flying is safer than walking.
Dylan16807 4y ago
> And it is good for the bureaucracy to be risk adverse if it comes to my life. Only moderately risk adverse. Unless you'd approve of all roads having a 15-20mph speed limit? Because that's the natural conclusion of prioritizing accidents much higher than speed. And I'm not being hyperbolic or using a slippery slope argument. I'm saying that you have to admit a tradeoff to get any kind of sensible result.
rocqua 4y ago
How much delay is acceptable for a 0.001% point yearly mortality reduction on a busy rail line? Certainly not an hour. So there is some tradeof. Notably the lives OP was talking about included his own. I think that matters quite a bit. Risking your own life for better speed is a different ballgame than deciding the risk other people run is fine.
fukutyphoo 4y ago
Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan had a system designed for a 1 in 100 year accident. It happened after 8 years. https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/3016087/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/3016087/ PS, this is a great video about the typhoon that caused the disaster. Disasters are Black Swan Events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory in Talebsbook he explains (ok it's a theory) that rare events happen commonly. See also Terry Pratchet "one in a million chances happen nine times out of ten"
Nomentatus 4y ago
But hold on - do you really want to be significantly slower on your way to the hospital or doctor, for symptoms that you didn't think merited an ambulance; but actually do? This isn't an uncommon kind of trip, it's a pretty common one. Adding minutes to millions of trips adds deaths that are much harder to count up, but are no less real. Now add in kids left alone for an extra few minutes times millions, etc, etc. There are tradeoffs here; risk doesn't lie on just one side of the equation.

joe_the_user 4y ago

A bureaucracy can't ignore the possibility of a deadly crash. But they chose the slow-down instead of spending the money needed for safety. Which is despicable imo. But there is the quandary that they know a modernization project could be a disaster just all American public transit projects tend to be disasters.

danuker 4y ago
Reminds me of Atlas Shrugged, when they had to resort to manual track signal switching. "Physical men, serving as lamposts. You’ve advocated it long enough—you’ve got what you wanted’" (pp. 875-76).

nkrisc 4y ago

Kinda sucks for the people who get killed so you can arrive sooner though, right?

themitigating 4y ago

But if you were in that accident or a parent/friend in it you'd have the opposite opinion and demand "the politicans make things safer " You're just a selfish npc

rtpg 4y ago

What if we actually just operated trains safely, made improvements to the system, and then sped things up _because we improved the safety to make it possible?_ "We risk crashes or make everything slow" is a false choice when we're talking about years-long perspectives. Especially given that there are lots of contributors to throughput and slowness.