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‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’

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Re: ‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’

#171

Post by tjohns »

ovi256 wrote: post #85
gsnedders wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general principle in railway movement authority is that there's an easy fail safe: stop moving. If nothing moves, there can be no collision. If something goes wrong? Stop the train. You can then figure out what went wrong and address it with no risk. Things shouldn't be going wrong, speeds shouldn't be being exceeded, etc.

>If nothing moves, there can be no collision. If no train on the line moves, sure. But stoping just the one train won't improve safety, and was historically the cause of many accidents. I remember just the one in Shanghai in 201x. One train stopped, the following train hit it.

That shouldn't happen under normal circumstances. That's whole idea behind railway signals.

Rail segments (blocks) are supposed to be automatically locked off while a train is on that segment of track. No two trains can be on the same block at the same time. If a train stops, the signal guarding that block will remain red, ordering the next train to stop before it gets anywhere close.

Re: ‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’

#172

Post by [deleted] »

soperj wrote: post #58
iooi wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aver…

So really the answer isn't unions. It's corruption. Unions work in many places in the world.

[deleted]

Re: ‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’

#173

Post by squiggleblaz »

mistermann wrote: post #128
bsder wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you agree with the optimization that the man in charge is implementing. If you don't, well, in China, sucks to be you.

It depends. You may not enjoy certain micro-optimizations, but to me it seems perfectly possible that even though living in a communist dictatorship has many negatives, the net benefits under a benevolent dictator could easily surpass the drawbacks, especially when compared to a free but largely corrupt Western society where the benefits may not make it outside the top 10%. And this isn't even getting into the longer…

No benevolent dictatorship has ever existed. It is hard to imagine how it could exist; it seems that corruption is such a natural and apparently reasonable behavior that we will always see it.

Your a theoretical should be discarded.

Re: ‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’

#174

Post by freelunch »

vnj23iwe wrote: post #147
DiabloD3 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You fire everyone. However, if I remember correctly, they're unionized, which is why this hasn't happened yet.

Fire everyone at Agency A for shitty behavior. Then turn around and realize everyone at Agency B is cooking the books, so fire them. And so on. Then turn around and realize basically every large institution humans have ever built relies on shady, selfish, behavior and stop caring about reforming individuals since thousands of years of policing have done jack and squat to remove the behavior from the species. Seriousl…

So why does Tokyo’s system work so much better? They’re humans too, but apparently their transit system works much better.

Re: ‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’

#175

Post by jrockway »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #154
mrbabbage wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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! Ind…

The ridership was higher in 1948 and there was no crisis of sardine packed trains and crowded platforms then. MTA is intentionally running the system below capacity to cut costs.

That is very true. I rarely commute during peak hours, and the trains are just as packed at these off-hours because the headway drops off like crazy after the peak time. That's just cost-cutting. The system can run with rush hour frequencies at 2 in the morning if someone is willing to pay for it. (Yes, at some point you have to do maintenance; for that a reduction of frequency is perfectly reasonable.)

There are also plenty of places on the system where longer trains could be run. A trains are 600ft long. C trains are run on the exact same tracks with 480ft trains. Nothing feels worse than boarding a C train that's packed because you know there's nothing stopping the MTA from running longer trains there. They claim they don't have the equipment for this, which may be true during rush hours, but it's a complete lie during the rest of the day. There are plenty of 600ft trains ready to go just sitting in the yard.

Re: ‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’

#176

Post by kelnos »

stefan_ wrote: post #11
nikanj wrote: post #6

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 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…

I think the cycle feeds into itself though: part of the reason planes and trains are so safe is because of the extensive root-cause analysis of crashes, which routinely result in suggestions for improvement that make the rest of travel safer. Remove the investigations and you'd end up with more plane and train crashes.

When a car crashes, we just scrape up the debris and move on, after usually assigning blame to one of the drivers who ends up with higher insurance premiums or a lawsuit, assuming they survived. There's little effort to learn from the crashes.

Re: ‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’

#177

Post by kelnos »

L_Rahman wrote: post #90
iooi wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aver…

Saying this is because of unions is like saying America has political problems because it is a democratic nation state. Democracies and unions are modes of people collectively exerting power with inherent. The actual criticism to be made here is the pathology of all New York institutions and the people entrenched among them - the unions that serve the MTA, the people who own, build and rent the real estate, the polit…

There's a difference, though: democracies (in theory) are designed to allow the majority to exert power, while unions are there to allow minorities to exert power. In this case, assuming the parent's assertion is true, you have a union that is exerting power for its own benefit, at a huge detriment to the majority. We can collectively decide that this is ok, if we want: if we value the continued employment of union members over a more efficient subway system, then that's fine. If not, then we're in trouble.

Hell, I'd be fine paying the unionized subway employees for the rest of their lives to sit at home doing literally nothing if that was the only way to get them to agree to automating their jobs away. At least then we'd have the outcome we want, and not have to pay the next several generations of subway operators to do a job that holds the system back.

Re: ‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’

#178

Post by kelnos »

gyrgtyn wrote: post #95
iooi wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aver…

that's weird, the best subway in america is the most unionized one?

Perhaps in spite of? NYC's subway is the way it is because of many factors unrelated to unionization. And the worse transit systems in the US aren't really worse because of their level of unionization.

Re: ‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’

#179

Post by kelnos »

masklinn wrote: post #76
gsnedders wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Union culture can be significant though. From my understanding, in the US I'd expect a union to refuse any form of automation indefinitely; in other countries, they might accept it if the redundant staff are provided training for another job with good employment prospects.

> Union culture can be significant though. Union culture is as antagonistic in France as in the US (for the same reasons that corporations are antagonistic) and it not only has multiple GOA4 metro systems running right now across the country[0], Paris is actually converting existing lines to full automation . All of Germany (which has a much more cooperative union culture) has two GOA4 lines both in Nuremberg, meanwh…

I'd be surprised if the unions representing the train drivers in France were just all "ok, cool, automate away and fire the drivers when you're done". Did they require that drivers be employed in other positions, or receive some sort of training for different jobs?

Unions in the US are annoyingly different: most (at least those that I'm even passingly familiar with) seem to have one major goal: keeping the status quo (with regular pay and benefits increases for its members, of course). They generally do not go for "hey, we're going to eliminate your jobs, but we'll compensate you in such a way that you'll continue to be gainfully employed elsewhere".

Re: ‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’

#180

Post by kelnos »

wccrawford wrote: post #2

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 mainten…

That's not what I got from reading it.

My reading is that an accident that was most likely caused by a driver falling asleep resulted in cover-your-ass style changes that have little to no measurable effect on safety, but cause massive real problems with the system that negatively affect millions of riders. And beyond that, they're shuffling blame around and waving their hands to distract people from systemic problems.

I mean, if the delays are caused by slowing the trains down, they should say "we've slowed the trains down due to safety reasons, and that's why there are delays". Then people can either accept that and move on, or do actual studies into the problem to determine if their course of action is correct, and if the trade-offs made are worth it.

I don't think it's some big hush-hush conspiracy; it's just garden-variety corruption and a desire to avoid fixing root causes of problems because they're complex and expensive. Easier to just keep collecting that paycheck while using "overcrowding" as an excuse to get more public money diverted to your agency.

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