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New York's Subway Is Slow Because They Slowed Down the Trains After A 1995 Accident
According to the Village Voice, New York City's subway trains are running slower because the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is deliberately running the trains slower. The Village Voice obtained MTA internal documents, discovering that the decision to run the trains slower was made following a fatal 1995 crash on the Williamsburg Bridge. From the report: The subway's performance has been steadily deteriorating for many years. The authority's own internal data shows that delays due to "incidents," such as broken signals and tracks or water damage, have only marginally increased since 2012. 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. From January 2012 to December 2017, these delays increased by a whopping 1,190 percent -- from 105 per weekday to 1,355. In December, one out of every six trains run across the entire system experienced such a delay. The increase has been steady and uninterrupted over the past six years.
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In 1995, a Manhattan-bound J train crossing the Williamsburg Bridge rear-ended an M train that was stopped on the bridge, killing the J train operator and injuring more than fifty passengers. The National Transportation and Safety Board investigation placed most of the blame on the J train operator, who the NTSB suspected had been asleep. But the NTSB also identified potential issues with the signal system that contributed to the accident, which it found didn't guarantee train operators enough time to apply the emergency brakes even when awake. "They slowed the trains down after the Williamsburg Bridge crash," a veteran train operator who asked not to be identified told the Village Voice. "The MTA said the train was going too fast for the signal system." As a result, the MTA, quite literally, slowed all the trains down, issuing a bulletin informing employees in April 1996 that their propulsion systems would be modified so they could achieve a maximum speed of 40 miles per hour, down from the previous high of 50 to 55 miles per hour on a flat grade. But the MTA didn't stop there, internal documents show. One of the NTSB's safety recommendations was to set speed limits. As a result, the MTA began a still-ongoing process of changing the way many signals work to meet modern safety standards.
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In 1995, a Manhattan-bound J train crossing the Williamsburg Bridge rear-ended an M train that was stopped on the bridge, killing the J train operator and injuring more than fifty passengers. The National Transportation and Safety Board investigation placed most of the blame on the J train operator, who the NTSB suspected had been asleep. But the NTSB also identified potential issues with the signal system that contributed to the accident, which it found didn't guarantee train operators enough time to apply the emergency brakes even when awake. "They slowed the trains down after the Williamsburg Bridge crash," a veteran train operator who asked not to be identified told the Village Voice. "The MTA said the train was going too fast for the signal system." As a result, the MTA, quite literally, slowed all the trains down, issuing a bulletin informing employees in April 1996 that their propulsion systems would be modified so they could achieve a maximum speed of 40 miles per hour, down from the previous high of 50 to 55 miles per hour on a flat grade. But the MTA didn't stop there, internal documents show. One of the NTSB's safety recommendations was to set speed limits. As a result, the MTA began a still-ongoing process of changing the way many signals work to meet modern safety standards.
The subway runs an operating profit, I think it came out to something like 20 cents a passenger. However that money is "shared" with the New York City Transit side of the bus system, which runs at a loss.
If they were to eliminate the bus-subway transfers and separate the revenue pools, the subway would probably be shown to operate at even more of a profit (since a lot of people take an unofficial round trip discount by taking the subway one way and the bus back).
Bullshit. Per capita inflation-adjusted government revenue may dip occasionally during a recession, but it's up tremendously over time. Can't blame this on a lack of revenue. The MTA has it's own sources of funds, anyway. It's not supposed to depend on the Federal government.
Even The New York Times acknowledges that this is a political issue, one which Democrat Cuomo is mostly to blame for.
The real scandal is that NY's Subway costs more to build an operate than just about anywhere else. Their labor cost is $140K/year/worker on _average_. They also run two people per train, compared to one pretty much anywhere else and they still manage to have their crews spend less time working vs. deadheading.
Face it, this is the natural result of government worker unions combined with complicit politicians. The politicians and their cronies and allies make money and the public gets screwed as they suck the subway system dry.
If you want to fix it, then remove all the union rules and privatize it. I know, will never happen, because certain folks have too much political power in NYC.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
The problem is the hack for enforcing speed limits - timer signals. Basically, train passes spot "a", a hidden timer starts counting, signal at spot "b" turns green if the timer runs out before the train gets there, otherwise it stays red. If you ride up front (on one of the few trains where you can see the same as the operator), you can see how the timer signals work and see the speed the train is going (either with a GPS app on your phone, or by peeking through the gap in the door to the cab). Here's a typical interaction:
A sign says "GT 35" meaning 35 MPH enforced speed limit. Great. Except, even in a perfect world, if they actually go 35, they will not see the signal clear - the timer would hit zero the second the train reaches it. So they have to go 34. But, the speedometers aren't perfectly calibrated and may be off by up to 3MPH, so now down to 31. But wait, the signals aren't calibrated right either; some of them say 35 but are actually counting down too fast (not like there's a quartz crystal in there), it could be off by as much as 5MPH. The end result is, in an enforced 35, the operator can only "safely" (as in his keeping his/her job safe) go 26. Experienced operators will instinctively know the fastest they can get away with, but anyone new will follow the rule of 9MPH under the limit. Since throughput during rush hours is only as fast as the slowest train, one overly cautious operator can tank the schedule for all the trains behind him.
Now one solution to this justified over-caution was "two shot" timers - there are two signals. The first one is yellow with an S under it, the second red. If the first one clears to green before the train passes it, the second one also turns green. If the first one does not clear to green, the operator has to slow down so that his average speed since the start of the first timer is slower than the enforced limit, or the second one remains red. So if he enters a 25 going 35, in order to make that second shot he has to drop down to somewhere around 15 (but likely that won't be enough, so they will instead come to a complete stop). In the case of two shot timers, to deal with a 25MPH enforced speed limit, trains operators who make a mistake on the first shot are reducing their speed to 0 for several seconds. All this has to do is happen once to cause a ripple effect on all trains behind.
At a lot of the locations these timer signals do not make any sense. Some of them are on uphill grades. Some are on banked curves designed for 60MPH running - if it were simply a signal system limitation that had them slow down the trains, there would be no reason to treat curves any differently from straightaways. The speed restrictions designed for human limitations on reaction time were also copied over to the modern signal system the L train uses without being re-evaluated (in other words, they fixed the original problem from 1995 but left in the hack). Thus why it is an expose - reducing speeds is now a kneejerk reaction to any perceived danger, bordering on superstition.
... in the 1800s.
Naturally I wouldn't employ that solution in exactly the same way because we have better technology to facilitate the concept, but I would still enact the same concept.
The British system simply made it physically impossible for trains to enter a stretch of track unless the train in front of it or going the other way or whatever had turned in a key. The key was slotted into a signalling box which permitted other trains to enter that track. If the key was NOT turned in then further trains could not physically access that track. The switching station would literally not actuate.
Now, if you did it today, you'd use computers and sensors and encryption... etc... but the concept would be the same. If a train currently holds the "key" for a bit of track then you can't have that key and you can't access that track. You could have the trains automatically brake if they entered track that hadn't been vacated yet... you could turn off the third rail to make it extra fool proof... and you could have the brakes default to an ON state in the event that the third rail was disabled.
Yes yes... engineering problems with what I said. Engineering solutions always have problems... even good engineering solutions.
There are problems with a hydro electric dam and an automobile and a jet aeroplane. The trick is solving those without losing the utility of what you're attempting to do. Point is that this isn't actually that complicated.
The system I conceptualized is damn near foolproof if executed competently. You could have drunk, high, sleeping train operators, going down the track at whatever speed the track/trains can handle, without any crashes into other trains.
Its possible. We can do it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
No... roads, sewer systems, health care programs, international highways, bridges, funds for education.
Red states have pretty terrible economies because they don't invest in their citizens and they drive their best and brightest out of their states to other states.
So red states depend heavily on the federal government. States like wyoming with 280,000 citizens per senator vote themselves federal money paid for by states with 19,000,000 citizens per senator. It's atrocious.
I wonder just how low the population of these states has to go before the system breaks down.
You know, if california just paid 40,000 of their "liberal" folks to live in wyoming that would flip wyoming blue.
40,000/38,000,000 seems like a pretty good deal to me.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.