This article has a lot of text before getting to describing the problem.
Summary: Train wreck 1995 and a installation of a safety-first, CYA response that slows down the trains and does not increase safety.
Longer Summary: Train wreck in 1995. Maybe driver was asleep. Start installing new signals that not only automatically stop the trains when there is a train ahead (good idea and already in place), but also when going over 45mph. Trains used to go up to 55mph with no systemic problems. Drivers go even slower than 45mph because the train is automatically stopped when going faster (as you would want to do if there was a train ahead) instead of just giving a warning and letting the train keep going.
As more of the system gets these new signals, more of the system has slower trains. Thus the increase of delays that are labeled generically as "insufficient capacity, excess dwell, unknown" from about 20% of delays in 2012 to about 60% in 2017.
This would not be the first time that the MTA has willfully deceived the public by maintaining two sets of facts - the private set which reflects the truth and another set of facts that are used in discussion with the public.
15 years ago the MTA was caught maintaining two different sets of books - one internal that showed the agency had a surplus of cash and another set of books for the public which showed the agency as being "cash strapped" and needing to raise fares as a result. See:
The culture of this agency is rotten and its corruption endemic. It's hard to believe it's capable of producing anything other than it's current broken state.
About 8 years ago there were a few house ads in the cars that were effectively gaslighting riders. It was one of the craziest things I'd ever seen as a consumer -- borderline antagonistic. The agency, and the workers to some extent, can be pugilistic when criticized.
We, collectively, seem to accept car accidents because we think we can avoid them with good driving skills. Train accidents leave us helpless, and we can’t cope with that.
The whole concept of ”bad things happen to good people for no reason” is extremely hard to bear. Somehow this reminds me of people who believe the right diet will protect them from cancer, the right prenatal care from birth defects, etc.
This will be the hardest thing to accept about self-driving cars. If the US goes from 37k auto deaths per year to 1k deaths, but some of those are "my Tesla sped into a brick wall at 200mph with little Susie in it," how many people grab the steering wheel?
I don't think that is the crucial difference. In a train or plane crash, hundreds die in a single event. But when a hundred people die in a hundred car crashes every day, the individual event is barely worth a mention on page 6 of the news.
It's the same mentality that means we have root cause analysis for plane and train crashes but for a car crash, SOP is pretty much to blame 1) whoever died or 2) noone at all, and 3) never the infrastructure.
You're absolutely correct about fear combined with lack of control.
It's the same thing that powers fears over mass shootings even though, statistically, they are a tiny fraction of overall gun violence. Most of the rest, however, can be avoided by keeping yourself out of bad situations with gangs or drugs...so even though the stats are higher people feel more in control...vs just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It's worth looking at "for no reason" in greater detail for cars, which is different from those other medical cases in significant ways. We collectively as a society decided that motorization of roads was worth pursuing at the expense of human health and safety, if you look at rhetoric at the time of cars' introduction, in no small part due to input from car manufacturers. This wasn't about driving skills; it was about restructuring all of society to make cars close to the bottom rung, not infrequently at the expense of minority groups. More recently, car-related deaths occur from bad design and usually refusal to fix it until sufficiently many lives have been taken. Any kind of "Vision Zero" which is focused on enforcement rather than infrastructure fixes is bound to fail.
So if "bad things happen to good people for no reason" is unpalatable and it's the narrative for mass transit, and "bad things happen to drivers for reasons in their control" is the easy narrative for cars, I'd say "bad things happen to good people for reasons that are in our control but we still do nothing" is closer to the true narrative for cars, but it is also unpalatable. There is an element of this in many risk-related scenarios, but it is especially clear here.
I'm not lack of control is the deciding factor here. People still accept car accidents even if they're not the ones driving the car, such as when you're riding a bus.
But there is one type of delay that’s gotten exponentially worse during that time: a catchall category blandly titled “insufficient capacity, excess dwell, unknown,” which captures every delay without an obvious cause.
This smacks of corruption or of elements of society deciding that systems aren't going to simply work anymore. The population of New York City when I lived in Queens was 7.3 million when I lived there in 1989. The subways pretty much worked back then. The figure for population of New York City in 2017 I found was 8.5 million. Population increase can't account for the difference. There must have been considerable systemic decay.
NYC's transit mode share for commute trips is above 50% [1]. Of the additional 1.2 million people, this means that this population growth probably produced at least 1.2 million additional daily rides, since 50% of the 1.2 million rides the subway twice a day, to and from work.
1.2 million additional daily riders is about double the entire Washington Metro daily ridership and triple that of BART's daily ridership! Indeed, 1.2 million daily riders is about equal to ridership on the Lex! So I disagree with your conclusion that "Population increase can't account for the difference". This sort of ridership growth would have destroyed any other comparable system in the US. If anything, it's amazing that the NYC subway hasn't fallen apart more than it already has.
Do take congestion into account; something that can run perfectly smoothly at 90% of capacity may severely struggle at 96% and basically grind to a halt by 99%. It’s not linear.
(I am not stating that congestion plays any part in it, but you can’t simply write it off.)
There's an attempt to make this all sound like a conspiracy, but it all makes sense to me.
There were accidents. They slowed the train to improve safety.
The train is about as safe as ever. Why? Many, many more people are using than the trains than before. It's harder to keep that many people safe, so more caution is warranted.
The only problem I see, if it's true, is that they classified delays stemming from maintenance under the wrong heading. And so far as I can tell, there's no real proof of that.
I've said it before [1] and I'll say it again, even if I get downvoted to hell again: Unions
NYC has some of the strongest unions in the country. Everything from hotels to the MTA are plagued by really, really strong unions that only care about their interests -- leaving the city with a shameful transit system, in this case.
Unions make up nearly 25% of workers in NYC[2], that's more than the double the national average. The corruption is rampant[3] and the city is literally powerless against them[4].
There was an automatic light rail to Docklands in London when I last visited. In 1991.
Helsinki metro was planning to have automated trains when the western extension opens in 2014. It opened in late 2017, without automation because of technical difficulties. I have a hard time believing there will be much automated traffic on the roads here (with uneven surfaces, unclear markings, snow, and other traffic) before the metro can be automated (in a dedicated tunnel where there is no other traffic, movement is technically only possible on the rails and there is no snow).
Nothing. Hong Kong, Singapore, London, Paris, Copenhagen as well all have lines that run in driverless mode. Heck, even SF Muni runs in autonomous mode in the subway, it's only run in manual mode on the streets.
Everyone is blaming unions, but it is really culture. NYC is very corrupt, has been for a very long time (part of its charm), and this corruption is at all level of society. It just happens that the effects of corruption at the MTA is very visible.
Money. The technology is not hard to create, but it does take a bunch of engineers time and effort to design it all (probably a mix of mechanical and computer work), and then more time to buy the equipment and install it. There is nothing off the shelf, even if some other subway gave them all the design (unlikely), it would still be hundreds of thousands of dollars per train to make it fit the New York trains.
In principal Bart[0] is supposed to be operated almost automatically and the train operator is there for announcements, closing doors and watching the track for hazards. In practice, the operator does a lot of speeding up/down manually. I can't find it now, but I remember reading an article that claimed that Bart trains were operated in manual mode 90% of the time, not sure the reason.
Vancouver SkyTrain opened in 1985 and was fully automated from day one. The rolling stock used on the majority of the system (Bombardier ART) was specifically designed for driverless operation.
Interestingly, at the time the Vancouver SkyTrain was undergoing construction, the same tech was being installed in Toronto for the Scarborough rapid transit line. The transit union in Toronto opposed automation, so the trains had to be specially modified to add operator cabins so the trains could be driven manually. Vancouver was able to get away with it because the system was a greenfield project, there was no union of subway workers around already to oppose automating the trains.
We have that in Hungary. Line 4 in Budapest is fully automated. Initially it was manually operated, then the drivers were just a fallback (or to soothe the nerves..), then they pretty much removed the driver's cabin, and nowadays anyone can stand next to and look through the front window. It's cool.
L (Manhattan/Brooklyn) is automated. The drive is there to simply signal "I'm here" to automated system. The second person on is there to mumble something that is difficult to anyone understand.
Never underestimate the power of unions. They can make or break a technology. Automated driver less subway cars create a precedent which can make unions feel threatened.
Of course the reality of it is more complicated, but they are a powerful force (for better or worse).
Nothing. Viennas subway has semi autonomous trains since 1960 or so. The driver just presses a “leave station” button after verifying nobody is stuck in the doors.
DC Metro use to but then there was a major accident that resulted in them reversing the system. They plan to eventually make them driverless in the future.
I spent 5 years taking the Toronto subway (Yonge line, North York Center to Union) every day. I noticed this interesting pattern.
During rush hour, any small delay on one train will almost certain impact every train down the line- there's little time buffer between trains. The bigger the delay, the more trains effected by it. The more passengers per train, the more likely that train will have a delay- loading and unloading taking too long, sure, that can cause a small delay. But consider events like heart attacks, seizures, a fight breaking out- all kinds of major-delay-causing-events that are roughly speaking a linear function from 'time passenger is on the train' to 'likelihood of major delay event'.
If you have twice as many passengers, you have twice the odds of a major delay. If a passenger spends twice a long on a train, you have twice the odds of them causing a major a delay. Delays cause more passengers per train and cause longer time-on-train for each passenger.
It's all non-linear. Any one tiny delay can spark a total breakdown and the longer that delay is the more likely it will cause more in turn.
By promising a schedule that doesn't assume nothing goes wrong. Time padding means the inevitable minor delays can be absorbed quickly, and infrequent longer delays are recoverable.
Also, I don't know about Toronto, but most of the big delays in Boston are issues with equipment rather than passengers. Derailment, signal failure, etc. should scale with vehicle traffic rather than vehicle occupancy/passenger count, and big delays decrease how much traffic is going around at the moment.
Single shot timers? Exclusion locks on fixed sections of the track?
Modern control systems such as ETCS3 can allocate virtual track segments (moving blocks) to individual trains and adjust the reserved length based on the current speed.
But the 2014 study — the first time the authority had attempted to analyze the impact of any of the revamped signals, using its improved data system — found 2,851 lost total passenger hours per weekday could be attributed to thirteen modified signals alone.
That's 84 person-years per year, just considering the weekday impact of those thirteen signals. Over a lifetime a year, to save (speculatively) one life per decade? Call me callous, but I don't think it's worth it.
I think the topic of a declining/slowly collapsing society needs serious research. How do you definitively measure if a society is progressing or regressing? If you measure by infrastructure the US probably hit its peak in the 60s and has been declining since then.
they must have installed one of these single-shot timers on the uptown A between 50th and 59th. it always crawls through 50th, stops in the tunnel, then crawls into 59th. didn't used to until a couple years ago.
Does anyone know of a source that competently compares costs across different metro systems? Total operating cost per mile, per passenger-mile, et cetera.
the abysmal state of their technology is completely to blame. problems described point to an inability to monitor trains or operators in ways that don't create massive slowdowns as knock-on effects.
wouldn't trains be the easiest transport system to add self driving to? all it would need is throttle, and if they have access to the position of other trains too that's a major advantage.
I live in NYC. For a couple of years I'd be reading NYTimes articles about the system is having problems from overcrowding, yet you'd see articles that more people took subways in the 1950's - 1960's.
Within the past few months there was a NYTimes article that stated that after an accident in the mid 1990s (?) that they slowed the system down. Thus, the problem wasn't overcrowding, but slowing the system down.
The system has been underfunded for maintenance. When the city went broke in the 1970s (?), the financing was transferred to the state from the city. NY State taxes the city but does not returned the taxed funds to the city for the MTA. Transferring management of the MTA back to the city would help with holding the Mayor accountable, something to think about if they want to be re-elected.
[+] [-] njarboe|8 years ago|reply
Summary: Train wreck 1995 and a installation of a safety-first, CYA response that slows down the trains and does not increase safety.
Longer Summary: Train wreck in 1995. Maybe driver was asleep. Start installing new signals that not only automatically stop the trains when there is a train ahead (good idea and already in place), but also when going over 45mph. Trains used to go up to 55mph with no systemic problems. Drivers go even slower than 45mph because the train is automatically stopped when going faster (as you would want to do if there was a train ahead) instead of just giving a warning and letting the train keep going.
As more of the system gets these new signals, more of the system has slower trains. Thus the increase of delays that are labeled generically as "insufficient capacity, excess dwell, unknown" from about 20% of delays in 2012 to about 60% in 2017.
[+] [-] bogomipz|8 years ago|reply
15 years ago the MTA was caught maintaining two different sets of books - one internal that showed the agency had a surplus of cash and another set of books for the public which showed the agency as being "cash strapped" and needing to raise fares as a result. See:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/23/nyregion/hevesi-says-mta-m...
The culture of this agency is rotten and its corruption endemic. It's hard to believe it's capable of producing anything other than it's current broken state.
[+] [-] throwaway_80bf3|8 years ago|reply
http://cdn.journalism.cuny.edu/blogs.dir/176/files/2010/03/f...
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|8 years ago|reply
How does one realistically reform something like this?
[+] [-] nikanj|8 years ago|reply
The whole concept of ”bad things happen to good people for no reason” is extremely hard to bear. Somehow this reminds me of people who believe the right diet will protect them from cancer, the right prenatal care from birth defects, etc.
[+] [-] bernardom|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stefan_|8 years ago|reply
It's the same mentality that means we have root cause analysis for plane and train crashes but for a car crash, SOP is pretty much to blame 1) whoever died or 2) noone at all, and 3) never the infrastructure.
[+] [-] brightball|8 years ago|reply
It's the same thing that powers fears over mass shootings even though, statistically, they are a tiny fraction of overall gun violence. Most of the rest, however, can be avoided by keeping yourself out of bad situations with gangs or drugs...so even though the stats are higher people feel more in control...vs just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
[+] [-] gracenotes|8 years ago|reply
So if "bad things happen to good people for no reason" is unpalatable and it's the narrative for mass transit, and "bad things happen to drivers for reasons in their control" is the easy narrative for cars, I'd say "bad things happen to good people for reasons that are in our control but we still do nothing" is closer to the true narrative for cars, but it is also unpalatable. There is an element of this in many risk-related scenarios, but it is especially clear here.
[+] [-] aqme28|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiliap2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stcredzero|8 years ago|reply
This smacks of corruption or of elements of society deciding that systems aren't going to simply work anymore. The population of New York City when I lived in Queens was 7.3 million when I lived there in 1989. The subways pretty much worked back then. The figure for population of New York City in 2017 I found was 8.5 million. Population increase can't account for the difference. There must have been considerable systemic decay.
[+] [-] mrbabbage|8 years ago|reply
1.2 million additional daily riders is about double the entire Washington Metro daily ridership and triple that of BART's daily ridership! Indeed, 1.2 million daily riders is about equal to ridership on the Lex! So I disagree with your conclusion that "Population increase can't account for the difference". This sort of ridership growth would have destroyed any other comparable system in the US. If anything, it's amazing that the NYC subway hasn't fallen apart more than it already has.
[1] https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/databook/travel-mode-sha...
[+] [-] JackFr|8 years ago|reply
C'mon Village Voice, that's not a log chart!
Growing exponentially has a real meaning and it doesn't mean growing fast.
[+] [-] chrismorgan|8 years ago|reply
(I am not stating that congestion plays any part in it, but you can’t simply write it off.)
[+] [-] wccrawford|8 years ago|reply
There were accidents. They slowed the train to improve safety.
The train is about as safe as ever. Why? Many, many more people are using than the trains than before. It's harder to keep that many people safe, so more caution is warranted.
The only problem I see, if it's true, is that they classified delays stemming from maintenance under the wrong heading. And so far as I can tell, there's no real proof of that.
[+] [-] smilekzs|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iooi|8 years ago|reply
NYC has some of the strongest unions in the country. Everything from hotels to the MTA are plagued by really, really strong unions that only care about their interests -- leaving the city with a shameful transit system, in this case.
Unions make up nearly 25% of workers in NYC[2], that's more than the double the national average. The corruption is rampant[3] and the city is literally powerless against them[4].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14948921
[2] http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20170910/BLOGS01/170909...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/nyregion/carpenters-nyc-u...
[+] [-] ptaipale|8 years ago|reply
Helsinki metro was planning to have automated trains when the western extension opens in 2014. It opened in late 2017, without automation because of technical difficulties. I have a hard time believing there will be much automated traffic on the roads here (with uneven surfaces, unclear markings, snow, and other traffic) before the metro can be automated (in a dedicated tunnel where there is no other traffic, movement is technically only possible on the rails and there is no snow).
[+] [-] lflux|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danieltillett|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluGill|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexbeloi|8 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit#Automat...
[+] [-] Kelbit|8 years ago|reply
Interestingly, at the time the Vancouver SkyTrain was undergoing construction, the same tech was being installed in Toronto for the Scarborough rapid transit line. The transit union in Toronto opposed automation, so the trains had to be specially modified to add operator cabins so the trains could be driven manually. Vancouver was able to get away with it because the system was a greenfield project, there was no union of subway workers around already to oppose automating the trains.
[+] [-] kalmi10|8 years ago|reply
"The line operates using fully automated [..]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_4_(Budapest_Metro)
[+] [-] joncrane|8 years ago|reply
The DC Metro used to have a semi-autonomous mode that's been turned off for years since there was a glitch that caused a crash.
[+] [-] notyourday|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Totoradio|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelvin0|8 years ago|reply
Of course the reality of it is more complicated, but they are a powerful force (for better or worse).
[+] [-] the_mitsuhiko|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jstalin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] t3po7re5|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulie_a|8 years ago|reply
10-20 years from now isn't exactly "almost"
[+] [-] rayiner|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] em3rgent0rdr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vanjoe|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mabbo|8 years ago|reply
During rush hour, any small delay on one train will almost certain impact every train down the line- there's little time buffer between trains. The bigger the delay, the more trains effected by it. The more passengers per train, the more likely that train will have a delay- loading and unloading taking too long, sure, that can cause a small delay. But consider events like heart attacks, seizures, a fight breaking out- all kinds of major-delay-causing-events that are roughly speaking a linear function from 'time passenger is on the train' to 'likelihood of major delay event'.
If you have twice as many passengers, you have twice the odds of a major delay. If a passenger spends twice a long on a train, you have twice the odds of them causing a major a delay. Delays cause more passengers per train and cause longer time-on-train for each passenger.
It's all non-linear. Any one tiny delay can spark a total breakdown and the longer that delay is the more likely it will cause more in turn.
How on earth does the system ever work at all?
[+] [-] kd0amg|8 years ago|reply
By promising a schedule that doesn't assume nothing goes wrong. Time padding means the inevitable minor delays can be absorbed quickly, and infrequent longer delays are recoverable.
Also, I don't know about Toronto, but most of the big delays in Boston are issues with equipment rather than passengers. Derailment, signal failure, etc. should scale with vehicle traffic rather than vehicle occupancy/passenger count, and big delays decrease how much traffic is going around at the moment.
[+] [-] the8472|8 years ago|reply
Modern control systems such as ETCS3 can allocate virtual track segments (moving blocks) to individual trains and adjust the reserved length based on the current speed.
[+] [-] dkarl|8 years ago|reply
That's 84 person-years per year, just considering the weekday impact of those thirteen signals. Over a lifetime a year, to save (speculatively) one life per decade? Call me callous, but I don't think it's worth it.
[+] [-] blurbleblurble|8 years ago|reply
Same forces seem alive and well today. They just chose to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into building a new stadium.
[+] [-] solotronics|8 years ago|reply
https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/
[+] [-] lg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matt_smith123|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakelarkin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlebrech|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slippers|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidf18|8 years ago|reply
Within the past few months there was a NYTimes article that stated that after an accident in the mid 1990s (?) that they slowed the system down. Thus, the problem wasn't overcrowding, but slowing the system down.
The system has been underfunded for maintenance. When the city went broke in the 1970s (?), the financing was transferred to the state from the city. NY State taxes the city but does not returned the taxed funds to the city for the MTA. Transferring management of the MTA back to the city would help with holding the Mayor accountable, something to think about if they want to be re-elected.