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No, as a bit of a railfan I can assure you that this would be not nearly as efficient or easy to operate as you assume. The NYC subway believe it or not is a w

No, as a bit of a railfan I can assure you that this would be not nearly as efficient or easy to operate as you assume. The NYC subway believe it or not is a wonder of efficiency compared to most US transit agencies. (Many of which don’t even have double tracking) You basically want to gut it in favor of avoiding the company of the unwashed masses. In the long run this would lead to much longer wait and travel times.

jonahbenton 4y ago
Agree, what the city does with transit, as in most areas, is in fact extraordinary. (In education, I had an elected position for a while on NYC equivalent to school boards and came to understand the DOE is an absolutely incredible institution that should be studied as a model...) I am not saying at all to replace what we have now. The opposite. On top of the existing bulk people movers, layer on a point to point capability to utilize spare track capacity. Lots of experimentation regarding logistics would be needed to be sure, but in principle a) we should have the technical capability to deploy small autonomous cabs without needing technical integration with the existing signalling system b) we should be able to make better use of the extraordinary amount of interconnected track surface we have been blessed with, especially outside of Manhattan and especially at off hours. The reason someone in deep Brooklyn has to wait 20 minutes for a 2 or a D or an F on a weekend is that it is inefficient to run a 10 car train that can move 2000 people when only 200 are travelling. Happy to learn of existing experiments in this vein but to my eyes we should look at supplementing the bulk system with autonomous small capacity pods.