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Using Countdown Clock Data to Understand the New York City Subway

toddwschneider.com

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Re: Using Countdown Clock Data to Understand the New York City Subway

#41

Post by Alex3917 »

rayiner wrote: post #31
Alex3917 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our public services suck, which means that they turn into safety nets instead of something that are broadly used by the population. If roads, trains, schools, water, electricity, libraries, etc. don't count as widely used, what exactly does?

Rich people buy bottled water (and our water system is a disaster that’s poisoning poor kids with lead). Rich people either send their kids to private schools, or carve out enclaves with public schools that have just other rich people (while the “safety net” inner city schools deteriorate). Electricity isn’t a “public service.” For the most part, private companies provide electric service in the US using private infr…

> Rich people buy bottled water (and our water system is a disaster that’s poisoning poor kids with lead).

Rich people consume way more public water than poor people. How many poor people have huge single family homes with lawns and swimming pools? How many buy tons of consumer products, own several cars, and are buying large amounts of organic food?

And given that basic filtration removes 99.9% of lead, you'd die of hypernatremia long before it would be possible to get lead poisoning from drinking filtered tap water.

Re: Using Countdown Clock Data to Understand the New York City Subway

#42

Post by chimeracoder »

crdoconnor wrote: post #33
rayiner wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the acale of that in comparison to paying more worksrs than you need more money than you need to? Most of MTA’s expenses are labor costs. Contracting corruption is bad and illegal, but is not what’s driving the costs.

That's certainly MTA management's narrative when asked by, say, the New York Times.

> That's certainly MTA management's narrative when asked by, say, the New York Times.

If you're saying that the MTA is trying to misrepresent their role in their own dysfunction when speaking to the news in order to generate coverage that makes them look more favorable, then the MTA should fire their whole PR team, because they're clearly incompetent.

It's pretty clear to anybody who's following the issue that the MTA and TWU have an unethically incestuous relationship, in which the TWU and MTA essentially collude to extract as much money from the state as they can while literally not even doing the bare minimum to keep things running.

Re: Using Countdown Clock Data to Understand the New York City Subway

#44

Post by rayiner »

tptacek wrote: post #40
rayiner wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rich people buy bottled water (and our water system is a disaster that’s poisoning poor kids with lead). Rich people either send their kids to private schools, or carve out enclaves with public schools that have just other rich people (while the “safety net” inner city schools deteriorate). Electricity isn’t a “public service.” For the most part, private companies provide electric service in the US using private infr…

Our roads are not much crappier than Germany's roads --- or, at least, not much crappier than the roads in Bavaria.

I know it’s anecdotal, but coming from DC/Baltimore I was pretty amazed by the roads in Munich.

Re: Using Countdown Clock Data to Understand the New York City Subway

#45

Post by tptacek »

rayiner wrote: post #44
tptacek wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our roads are not much crappier than Germany's roads --- or, at least, not much crappier than the roads in Bavaria.

I know it’s anecdotal, but coming from DC/Baltimore I was pretty amazed by the roads in Munich.

I drove around Munich for a week, then from there through Austria for a couple weeks and back into Bavaria.

The roads are good. The autobahns are probably better than our interstates --- though not by that much. Traffic congestion was as much a problem there as in the American midwest. Their surface streets are on average not as good as Chicago metro area surface streets (but are probably better than Baltimore's). And I feel a good deal safer on US rural highways than I did on German and Austrian rural highways, which are beautiful, well-maintained, nightmarish death traps.

I think you'd be setting yourself up for a pretty tough argument if you wanted to claim that the US doesn't do public roads well. Do we do them better than Germany? No. But we do public roads anomalously well, especially for the degree of difficulty involved in providing them across a whole continent.

Re: Using Countdown Clock Data to Understand the New York City Subway

#46

Post by crdoconnor »

chimeracoder wrote: post #42
crdoconnor wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's certainly MTA management's narrative when asked by, say, the New York Times.

> That's certainly MTA management's narrative when asked by, say, the New York Times. If you're saying that the MTA is trying to misrepresent their role in their own dysfunction when speaking to the news in order to generate coverage that makes them look more favorable, then the MTA should fire their whole PR team, because they're clearly incompetent. It's pretty clear to anybody who's following the issue that the MT…

The relationship between the MTA management and TWU is fractious at best.

The relationship between MTA management and the scores of construction companies that curiously increased their costs 50% in recent years is curiously pretty good, but I'm sure that had nothing to do with the increased costs.

Of course tried to spin a corruption problem as a union problem. Are they really going to blame themselves?

Re: Using Countdown Clock Data to Understand the New York City Subway

#47

Post by comboy »

RossM wrote: post #6
anthonybsd wrote: post #2

>The L train is also the only line that uses modern >communications-based train control (CBTC), which allows >trains to operate in a more automated fashion. It's not "more automated fashion", it's fully automated, LIDAR and all - they are fully autonomous. L trains have operators because of unions throwing a fit and most of the times they sit there twiddling their thumbs.

I feel it's worth reminding that there's a difference between autonomous trains, driverless trains and unattended trains. The L train is considered Grade of Automation 2 - it starts and stops itself, though it has someone in the driver's seat who controls the doors and gives control to the ATO system. Driverless (GoA3) trains move that role to a train attendant who controls the doors from within the train. Unattended…

It would seem that GoA 4 is already out there in Denmark:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...

Re: Using Countdown Clock Data to Understand the New York City Subway

#48

Post by rayiner »

tptacek wrote: post #45
rayiner wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it’s anecdotal, but coming from DC/Baltimore I was pretty amazed by the roads in Munich.

I drove around Munich for a week, then from there through Austria for a couple weeks and back into Bavaria. The roads are good. The autobahns are probably better than our interstates --- though not by that much. Traffic congestion was as much a problem there as in the American midwest. Their surface streets are on average not as good as Chicago metro area surface streets (but are probably better than Baltimore's). An…

I'll concede that I don't have data to back up my claim, and that anecdotally roads might be the area of infrastructure where we're least bad compared to Western Europe and Japan.

Re: Using Countdown Clock Data to Understand the New York City Subway

#49

Post by mseebach »

crdoconnor wrote: post #46
chimeracoder wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's certainly MTA management's narrative when asked by, say, the New York Times. If you're saying that the MTA is trying to misrepresent their role in their own dysfunction when speaking to the news in order to generate coverage that makes them look more favorable, then the MTA should fire their whole PR team, because they're clearly incompetent. It's pretty clear to anybody who's following the issue that the MT…

The relationship between the MTA management and TWU is fractious at best. The relationship between MTA management and the scores of construction companies that curiously increased their costs 50% in recent years is curiously pretty good, but I'm sure that had nothing to do with the increased costs. Of course tried to spin a corruption problem as a union problem. Are they really going to blame themselves?

Both of those things can be true simultaneously. Anyone insisting on a single, isolated cause of badness in such a complex system is pushing an agenda.

Re: Using Countdown Clock Data to Understand the New York City Subway

#50

Post by mseebach »

gowld wrote: post #37
anthonybsd wrote: post #2

>The L train is also the only line that uses modern >communications-based train control (CBTC), which allows >trains to operate in a more automated fashion. It's not "more automated fashion", it's fully automated, LIDAR and all - they are fully autonomous. L trains have operators because of unions throwing a fit and most of the times they sit there twiddling their thumbs.

> most of the times they sit there twiddling their thumbs. Most of the times? What would happen if operators were twiddling their thumbs (or absent) the rest of the times? Uber's self-driving car also has an operator "twiddling their thumbs most of the times", but I wouldn't want to eliminate the operator.

> Uber's self-driving car also has an operator "twiddling their thumbs most of the times", but I wouldn't want to eliminate the operator.

Eliminating the driver is literally the whole point of self driving car research, at least as pursued by Uber and Waymo.

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