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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’

#201

Post by inferiorhuman »

masklinn wrote: post #68
gsnedders wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. What? Alstom, Ansaldo STS, Bombardier, Siemens, and Thales all have off-the-shelf designs that they will happily sell. And I've probably forgotten some here. I realise none of these are American companies, and "Buy American" i…

That's the com system, but there are fully automated off-the-shelf systems (com, rolling stock, …). Two examples are Siemens's VAL (Lille, Taipei's Brown, Seoul's U-line, VAL tech has also been used in Lyon's D and Paris's 14 and 1) and Hitachi's AnsaldoBreda Driverless (Copenhagen, Taipei's Yellow, Milan 5, …). The latter is very popular and getting deployed in several places right now: Honolulu, Thessaloniki, Lima…

> The latter is very popular and getting deployed in several places right now: Honolulu, Thessaloniki, Lima 2, Rome C, …

Is Breda really popular? SFMTA forbade Breda from bidding on this latest round of vehicles because the current ones have been so problematic. I don't think Chicago or Seattle had a much better experience with Breda either.

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

#202

Post by jnty »

7dare wrote: post #198
ovi256 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

In fact, the crash at the origin of this whol debacle was caused by a train being stopped on the tracks and being rear-ended by another.

That's an interesting way of looking at the cause and effect. Trains unexpectedly stopping in an expected and inevitable property of all networks, whereas trains exceeding their movement authority is not.

Stopping a train anywhere should therefore always be safe, so the safety failing is with the train behind, not the one in front.

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

#203

Post by smcl »

bsder wrote: post #187
mistermann wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> And this isn't even getting into the longer term prospects of the very real danger of the efficiency and scale of China starting to eat into the core economies of other nations as they move away from simple manufacturing and beginning moving up the value chain, as we are now seeing. I wasn't really that worried about China as they are automating extremely quickly and have shown no better ability to utilize the disp…

I think I'm missing something - TSMC should move their fabs off the island because of some goings-on in the mainland? The countries are obviously connected in various ways, but they're definitely not yet united so I'm struggling to see what the reasoning here is

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

#204

Post by inferiorhuman »

alexbeloi wrote: post #25
smilekzs wrote: post #14

Risking asking the obvious: What is stopping us from having autonomous subways, considering we are almost gonna have autonomous cars?

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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…

I doubt BART runs manually 90% of the time. When run manually the speed limit is so much lower you'd know. However BART operators often have to reposition the trains manually within a station and crank the switches manually.

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

#205

Post by gsnedders »

Symbiote wrote: post #186
taneq wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If stopping doesn't fix things, you're not using enough of it. Time for networked emergency brakes on all trains!

Europe may has that, with the GSM-R system. I remember reading of at least one minor accident that stayed minor because the driver to discover the landslide over the track at low speed passed the button, stopping the incoming faster train on the other track. http://www.szdc.cz/en/pro-media/tiskove-zpravy/funkce-gsm-r-...

AFAIK, this is just a Czech extension to GSM-R. That said, I recall various instances of GSM-R being used in the UK to broadcast a general message to stop, albeit one that the driver has to act upon.

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

#206

Post by himlion »

klodolph wrote: post #190
davedx wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. In the Netherlands, intercity trains can go up to 135 km/h (83 mph), and they’ve successfully increased the frequency of these trains on some lines this year. Suffice to say with Dutch population density, the train network is also quite dense. Quite an achievement I think.

The MTA subway isn't really intercity, unless you think of the boroughs as different cities. Although the express trains should be able to go much faster than they do, like the A from 59 St to 125 St, which takes ~8 minutes for 5.3 km even though there are no stops and no other trains on the track. This kind of thing makes a huge impact on the quality of life for people living in the city.

For intercity trains in the Netherlands some stops are only kilometers apart as well. 50 kilometers between stops would be the absolute maximum.

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

#207

Post by gsnedders »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #201
masklinn wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the com system, but there are fully automated off-the-shelf systems (com, rolling stock, …). Two examples are Siemens's VAL (Lille, Taipei's Brown, Seoul's U-line, VAL tech has also been used in Lyon's D and Paris's 14 and 1) and Hitachi's AnsaldoBreda Driverless (Copenhagen, Taipei's Yellow, Milan 5, …). The latter is very popular and getting deployed in several places right now: Honolulu, Thessaloniki, Lima…

> The latter is very popular and getting deployed in several places right now: Honolulu, Thessaloniki, Lima 2, Rome C, … Is Breda really popular? SFMTA forbade Breda from bidding on this latest round of vehicles because the current ones have been so problematic. I don't think Chicago or Seattle had a much better experience with Breda either.

The former AnsaldoBreda… had issues (and that's really an understatement). Now owned by Hitachi, it seems like we aren't seeing the same build quality issues getting into service (though esp. in the earlier days of Hitachi running it, some issues were only found after they left the factory).

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

#208

Post by Symmetry »

freelunch wrote: post #174
vnj23iwe wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're privatized.

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

#210

Post by emodendroket »

bobthepanda wrote: post #114
rb808 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes me sad about missed potential. I've taken the ski train from Central London to the French Alps - was great. With high speed rail it should be possible to get a 8hr overnight train from Chicago (or Dallas & Houston) to Winter Park CO. I'm guessing it'll never happen https://www.eurostar.com/uk-en/train/france/ski-train

Running the ski train in Europe makes sense because it's leveraging high speed rail that was built and is mostly used for other things; very little new stuff was needed. Chicago-Denver, as a city pair, is so sparsely populated and so far apart that new HSR doesn't pencil out, nor does building it out incrementally (it's hard to justify KC to Denver or Omaha to Denver)

We built a rail system that spanned the country once and the highway system doesn't just maintain itself.
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