Why New York Subway Lines Are Missing Countdown Clocks | Hacker News Reader

Why New York Subway Lines Are Missing Countdown Clocks

theatlantic.com

102 pointsjsomers21 comments

The meat of the story is that the MTA purposefully allows their system to remain crippled to drum up public money.

> That’s why the MTA has tried to associate CBTC [a enormous overhaul of the signal system for the subway] with countdown clocks. New York riders crave realtime information about trains. They don’t care how they get it. So when Transit wants to drum up support for an obscure, costly, many-decades-long capital project to upgrade to CBTC, they always point to the clocks. (“Sustained Investment Makes Real-Time Information Possible,” declares one 2012 press release.) Reporters, struggling to make sense of a half-dozen interrelated projects, follow the MTA’s lead and assume that realtime train-location information depends on signal upgrades.

> But that would make for some pretty expensive clocks, and it would make them awfully long in arriving. The F train, for instance, if it had to wait for CBTC to get realtime arrival information, wouldn’t see it until 2035.

>It’s a misleading narrative. You can get countdown clocks without touching the signals. The MTA knows this.

The analolgy with the ACA website comes at the end:

> I keep thinking of Healthcare.gov. Everyone knows that the initial project was a costly disaster, but less well known is that a small team came along and saved it. The story includes this remarkable fact: The old system cost $250 million to build and $70 million a year to maintain. The new system—which actually worked—cost about $4 million to build; its yearly maintenance was about $1 million.

That's one way to spin it. But as a regular subway rider, that's not how I read it. I wouldn't say that crippled is a good way to describe not having countdown clocks. Instead I'd call crippled the status quo subway system -- subject to frequent breakdowns and delays due to an ancient signaling and control system in poor repair.

CBTC, without the unnecessary legacy system kept around who-knows-why and without the overstaffing kept around because of union contracts, should be the desired end state. And there's no great reason it has to take another 175 years or cost another $20B. To bring that end state modestly closer I'm happy to wait a little longer for arrival clocks -- YMMV.

To me this story is one of poor political oversight, terrible middle and upper management both in terms of day-to-day operations and in terms of bidding/ working with contractors, and overly powerful public sector unions. To anyone familiar with the MTA none of these come as any real surprise.

Personally, I think this sort of ends-justify-the-means political wrangling is bad, not the least because it requires dishonesty on the part of individuals. (And I rode the NYC subway daily for 2 years.)

Arguably the non-cynical way that the MTA is thinking about it is that if CBTC gives you countdown clocks, bolting on an additional system just to do countdown clocks is extraneous cost. Basically $(CBTC) + $(Separate Countdown Clocks) > $(CBTC).

Of course, that's how requirement creep often sets in. Wouldn't it be cheaper to just throw another feature in there while we're at it? That has to be cheaper than building a whole other system right? What is missing in that original function is how adding in the requirement for countdown clocks powered by CBTC increases the cost of CBTC itself. This plays out over dozens of features big and small, and next thing you know you have the F-35.

I'm relatively familiar with this story already so I wasn't shocked by the countdown clock portion of the system. I think everyone at the MTA knows that you could build a system that just provided countdown clocks for passengers for not that much money. Keep in mind the ATS system they mention that powers the A division countdown clocks is actually as safety critical as CBTC and therefore is engineered (and priced) like an airliner. It's not priced like an Arduino broadcasting the trains location to receivers that guesstimate when the trains will arrive but only works 95% of the time.

The real meat of the story for me is that the MTA doesn't have a realistic plan for rolling out CBTC at all. They basically have the constraint of never shutting down a subway for a significant period of time, and also that to realize the savings from CBTC you have to eliminate the block control system from that stretch of line. It seems like they can't make a hybrid system work unless it covers the entire line (that's why they started with the L).

I think if they work on that core problem the whole thing becomes tractable. How do you safely manage the transition of a train from a CBTC "block" to the old style block? If they do that then you can start at the end of the line and incrementally rip out the old system and put in CBTC through weekend work. They were able to replace the entirety of the 7 line's trackage in about 2 summers, and if they didn't have replace the old style signals it sounds like it's not much more work than that to bring in CBTC.

With regard to your first paragraph: CBTC is sufficiently far into the future than any reasonable discount rate will still make it sensible to build a standalone countdown clock system that disintegrates when CBTC is accomplished. Put another way: it is easily worth the cost of countdown clock system just to cover the finite span (~20 years) it will take to get CBTC. I know you're playing devil's advocate, but I don't think the MTA can honestly endorse the argument.

The article mentions the MTA has a constraint of never shutting down a line, but this conveniently ignores the fact that the B line was split into two pieces for ~ 18 years (1986-2004) while the track on the Manhattan Bridge was being reworked. The fact that it took 18 years to rework this 1 mile length of track points to the real issue, not the fact that NYC cannot accept "downtime".

It's worth pointing out that the Bernard S. Greenberg mentioned in the article in connection with NXSYS is the celebrated Multician who ported Emacs.

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

Well, if all they're after is a system to inform the ops where a train is... put active microwave beacons on the train ends, and recievers in regular distances in the tunnels. Problem solved.

By way of contrast - not only does the London underground have countdown clocks on platforms (accuracy +/- 1 minute), they also have an API allowing 3rd party developers to integrate tube (and bus) times into transport apps.

https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/open-data-users/

> By way of contrast - not only does the London underground have countdown clocks on platforms (accuracy +/- 1 minute), they also have an API allowing 3rd party developers to integrate tube (and bus) times into transport apps.

The MTA has countdown close, just only on the IRT lines. And the MTA has an API for both subway and bus times.

For what it's worth, the London Underground has significantly less complicated interlocking patterns (with more transfers between trains instead).

Check out some of these crazy layouts, like the Dekalb area or the 47-63rd St map: http://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway_Track_Map...

London Underground doesn't yet have CBTC on the complicated lines, though it's in progress and due to be completed in 2022. The cost is over £5 billion, which based on the numbers in the article doesn't seem a likely level of investment for NYC.

They try and explain it to the public: https://tfl.gov.uk/campaign/tube-improvements/behind-the-sce...

In Russian metro there are count-up timers. Not that this is a big deal, though, when intervals between trains are shorter (2-4 minutes in St.-Petersburg; less in Moscow).

count-up timers like "you missed the last train by 30 seconds! haha?" Seems like a very tauntingly russian thing to do.

I guess you could see it that way, but everyone knows that the trains run regularly every 2-3 minutes so it's more you know how long of a wait you're going to have. For the most part all it does is let you know how long you're going to be waiting on the platform and how on time the trains are that day.

I thought they switched those out for countdown timers?

At least in St.-Petersburg: nope. After visiting Helsinki and seeing countdown timers there (they have ~6 min intervals and countdown timers show minutes only) I thought countdown timers would be more useful, even if more complicated to implement; but alas.

CBTC and moving-block signalling systems like ETCS are nothing new though? They have been in use on main line railroads and subways all over the world for years now.

I'll take the New York Subway system any day over what Boston has (MBTA).

To better clarify, I feel this battle around the spending on NY subways is trivial compared to the fundamental infrastructure issues in other cities (for this example, Boston).

How so? Do you ride the NYC subway? The MTA is more an employment agency than an agency of change. For example, they have been working on the 2nd avenue subway, phase 1 only (a total of 3 stops) since 2007 and it's still not done. Projected completion is now December 2016. This two mile section of track is billions over budget and years behind schedule.

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