Much of the technology in the NY subway hasn't been updated in over 100 years

It's like, people complain about how shitty reporting is these days, but when a publication puts some time and effort into its stories, people complain about how they ripped off a rag that covered the story earlier even though they did a shitty job at it.

It's hard to compare construction and maintenance costs between two different cities where one has 30% more track and 10x the square mileage AND is 24hours in operation.

The second avenue subway is way over-budget, will take far longer than it should have to build, and is poorly designed. But when it is finally done it will bring a lot of value to a lot of people's lives. The same cannot be said of the F35.

The subways are generally not that different in cleanliness from the corresponding streets and sidewalks above them. You could ask a different question, which is why NYC as a whole is not very clean, but that's a much more involved and complicated question than this facile complaint.

Other options include bringing back the commuter tax which was foolishly eliminated for short-term political gain, and getting more of our money back from Albany and/or Washington.

The times I've watched it, they do an incredibly lazy job, so the net result is not much cleaning. If the goal was "clean the platform" instead of "look like you're cleaning the platform", the system would probably be a lot cleaner.

The MTA has a large number of labor relations problems they need to fix. That's what's really holding them back.

(I also watched an interesting exchange recently. Someone jumps the turnstile. Someone reports that to the station agent, who just watched it happen. She replies "are you sure, I didn't see that", and went back to playing with her phone. This attitude of neglect completely kills the "if you see something, say something" culture the MTA tries to instill. If I see something, I'll keep it to myself to avoid the ridicule I'd receive from the employees or police.)

Think about it that way: It's a system where over time all the "bugs" have been identified, resolved and failure modes mitigated. If you were to replace the system with something new, you'd likely introduce the same old bugs, and new ones, without zero operational gain. Train tracks are rather fixed in their operation; in fact their design is dictated by the train movements. Changes in possible train movements come with changes to the tracks, and those changes are easily reflected by hardwired circuitry.

In other words, subway is efficient because it is always competitive with the congestion over ground, and even if it is creepy, it continues to be used.

[0] http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

You can compare apples to staplers by comparing it to other systems that don't do that, but that misses the point. When one actually moves here you start to realize just how the whole thing works, and realize that systems that close at night, or don't have express trains, are just hopelessly inferior and not a valid basis for comparison.

There's actually billions of dollars being spent on projects like the 2nd Avenue line and the recently completed extension of the #7 train. For some reason, the powers that be consider this more essential than updating the ancient signalling infrastructure and maintaining the crumbling stations.

For what exactly? Something almost no one interacts with is new for the sake of new?

Here on HN where its assume high tech is necessary to scale because of high growth, the subway provides a view, however temporary, of another world where once technology scales "enough", new is no longer a relevant goal, aside from maintenance costs.

One big problem with a forklift upgrade of a fifty year old system is the short term maintenance cost of the new system is lower (or, more accurately is unknown, but optimistically assumed to be lower) however the total net systemic cost over the next half century is likely to be much higher for the new system... after all, its very easy to rebuild 1950s and older technology, but near impossible to repair 2010s technology. I'm claiming (cost of maintaining old system 1950 to 2050) < (old system from 1950-2000) + (new system 2000-ish to 2050). We know we can afford the budget cost of maintaining pre-1950s gear in 2015... those costs will only drop with technology, but we know its impossible to internally maintain 2015 gear now and it may never be possible.

I know there is a huge obsession with new and shiny amongst programmers, but when it comes to massive real world infrastructure projects the last thing you want is unknown factors and "churn", especially when the benefits are unclear and dubious at best.

Just because something is old, dosent mean it should be upgraded, infact if its worked well for as long as it has you should consider that very carefully first.

There is absolutely no need to upgrade this particular piece of infrastructure; it won't increase the throughput of trains through the interlocking, and it won't be easier to maintain. This stuff is _simple_ and works fine.

The upgrade to CBTC seems like a scam from the contractors to me. The Canarise Line was upgraded to CBTC, which can handle 26 trains per hour as opposed to the 12 trains per hour of the ABS signalling. 12 trains per hour is one train every 5 minutes. But they run trains every 6 minutes anyway -- there is no period in the timetable where they run 26 trains per hour, or even 2 individual trains at that spacing. (There is a period where they claim "every 4-6 minutes", for a maximum of 15tph if indeed there are two trains 4 minutes apart. I've just missed a lot of L trains, and waiting 6 minutes seems like "a good day" to me. As I understand it, the L gets most of its load from one station, and so it takes longer than the best headway just to load passengers there. Then, they can't turn trains quickly enough at the terminal. They blame the track layout but it's actually their relaying procedure that's the problem.)