21–24 of 24 posts
I'll take the New York Subway system any day over what Boston has (MBTA).
The meat of the story is that the MTA purposefully allows their system to remain crippled to drum up public money. > That’s why the MTA has tried to associate CBTC [a enormous overhaul of the signal system for the subway] with countdown clocks. New York riders crave realtime information about trains. They don’t care how they get it. So when Transit wants to drum up support for an obscure, costly, many-decades-long ca…
Arguably the non-cynical way that the MTA is thinking about it is that if CBTC gives you countdown clocks, bolting on an additional system just to do countdown clocks is extraneous cost. Basically $(CBTC) + $(Separate Countdown Clocks) > $(CBTC). Of course, that's how requirement creep often sets in. Wouldn't it be cheaper to just throw another feature in there while we're at it? That has to be cheaper than building…
I'll take the New York Subway system any day over what Boston has (MBTA).
To better clarify, I feel this battle around the spending on NY subways is trivial compared to the fundamental infrastructure issues in other cities (for this example, Boston).
By way of contrast - not only does the London underground have countdown clocks on platforms (accuracy +/- 1 minute), they also have an API allowing 3rd party developers to integrate tube (and bus) times into transport apps. https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/open-data-users/
For what it's worth, the London Underground has significantly less complicated interlocking patterns (with more transfers between trains instead). Check out some of these crazy layouts, like the Dekalb area or the 47-63rd St map: http://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway_Track_Map...
They try and explain it to the public: https://tfl.gov.uk/campaign/tube-improvements/behind-the-sce...