131–140 of 243 posts
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Unions.
There are countries with way stronger unions and automated trains. I doubt unions are the deciding factor.
Also, as far as I can tell US public sector unions are as strong as those in any other rich country.
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 agenc…
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. http://cdn.journalism.cuny.edu/blogs.dir/176/files/2010/03/f...
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> The culture of this agency is rotten and its corruption endemic How does one realistically reform something like this?
You fire everyone. However, if I remember correctly, they're unionized, which is why this hasn't happened yet.
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.
Far easier to install in greenfield (fresh) projects.
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For Susie parents it's basically: "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."
It's not just that. Look, let's say a Tesla, oh, just as a random example, careens directly into a clearly visible truck because its cameras can't distinguish white trucks from bright sunny skies, killing "my daughter Susie." In this hypothetical, this is a truly autonomous Tesla, and overall, these truly autonomous Teslas are less crash-prone than the human average. As Susie's dad, my argument is that this accident…
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>Trains used to go up to 55mph with no systemic problems. During the age of steam, express passenger trains regularly exceeded 55 mph. For example, during the 1930s the Burlington Zephyr regularly exceeded 85 mph. For example it made the Chicago to Denver run in 1934 in 13 hours rather than the 18 hrs it takes today. Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/transport/2009/05/stop_th...
The parent is talking about subway "trains" (sets of coaches, with each car having its own small electric engines, all powered by a common third rail); not, er, train trains (vehicles that pull themselves along two rails using a locomotive.)
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.
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.
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So really the answer isn't unions. It's corruption. Unions work in many places in the world.
Per the linked articles, unions are intertwined with the corruption. This wouldn’t be the case if unions were politically touchable. As long as there enough voters who will always say, “unions aren’t the problem”, they will be part of the problem. They get money for nothing and nobody blames them.
This creates a communication hurdle between Europe and America. The expectations of what a union does differ so much, you could say Europeans and Americans mean a totally different thing when using the same word.
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> Wow, that's a bit ridiculous. Less than what's happened with the London Underground Sub-Surface Railway, which is now on the third resignalling contract to get them to GoA Level 3.
And here we are approaching the crux of the issue. Building a new line so it's fully automatic is relatively straightforward. Re-engineering an existing line to make it automatic (without shutting it down for months, which understandably is rarely an option) is like performing open heart surgery on a patient while he is running a marathon.
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The parent is talking about subway "trains" (sets of coaches, with each car having its own small electric engines, all powered by a common third rail); not, er, train trains (vehicles that pull themselves along two rails using a locomotive.)
Nitpick: self-propelling cars are not a distinguishing property for light rail. Some modern high speed trains use self-propelling cars[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_Velaro
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_multiple_unit#Example...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_395
High speed aside, in the UK, i think pretty much all inner and outer suburban main-line trains are electric or diesel multiple units (eg if you get a train from London to Cambridge that takes 45 minutes, that's an EMU). According to some random report i found on wikipedia [1], in 2011 there were 1248 locomotive-hauled carriages, 2892 DMU carriages, and 8046 EMU carriages. I could tell you a great many more particulars but suppose that you are tired of it by this time.
[1] http://archive.nr.co.uk/browse%20documents/rus%20documents/r...