All NYC Subway Stations to Receive Wi-Fi by End of 2016 | Hacker News Reader

All NYC Subway Stations to Receive Wi-Fi by End of 2016

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76 pointsjonbaer85 comments

This might seem cool to people that aren't in NYC, but it's really not what we need. We need more tracks, more tunnels, and more trains. Second Avenue Sagas, the transit blog of record for NYC, is... more critical.

> wifi =/= building for the next 100 years. Massive subway expansion at reasonable costs is what's needed.

https://twitter.com/2AvSagas/status/685484086614437889

https://twitter.com/2AvSagas/status/685564984668123136

> I want to walk into a train station and never have to wait more than 3 minutes for a train.

https://twitter.com/2AvSagas/status/685537323124133890

The other thing is that Cuomo tends to just drop these announcements without any warning or planning. Sort of like the "throw it over the wall" model in open-source.

Cuomo shows just how absurdly off base with reality he is in his tweet "I want to sit in a seat ... I've come to expect that."

New Yorkers don't even want a seat, we want trains that show up at regular intervals and a signaling system that doesn't fail at rush hour multiple times a week.

Since Cuomo wouldn't ride the subway, some people brought a cardboard cutout: http://gothamist.com/2015/07/10/cardboard_cuomo_subway.php

I want seats removed from the trains (456, L), so that people can actually fit.

I get the sentiment and empathize but there are actually handicapped and other mobility-impaired people out there... Lots of them in fact.

Maybe standing room only cars located far away from the station entrance areas?

My local bus system has ramp entries, and the driver can require non-mobility-impaired riders to give up seats at the front. (And those seats can also be folded up to make room for wheelchairs.)

Would something like that work for the New York subways? Or would it require too much oversight to make people follow the rules?

Simply wouldn't work - each train has a driver and a conductor, the driver does not interact with passengers at all (and for safety reasons, probably shouldn't), while the conductor can only oversee his/her immediate surroundings.

The issue goes beyond simply wheelchair-bound passengers, but also the fact that the elderly also ride the trains. There are a large number of people who aren't fully disabled but for whom having a seat is important, so it's not enough to simply reserve a few places for a few individuals.

The 4/5/6 trains are a clusterfuck because they're vastly oversubscribed. The serve the entirety of the Bronx and the hyper-dense Upper East Side, not to mention the entire east side of Manhattan. The solution to this isn't "leave a large demographic of riders in the cold to gain marginal capacity", the solution is "build the f'ing 2nd Ave subway".

There are a large category of improvements to the subway that, while valuable, offer only marginal improvements to capacity. Open-gangway trains can increase per-train passenger capacity by ~5%. CBTC digital train signaling upgrades will get you ~10-20% more capacity by packing trains closer to each other safely. Even stacking a bunch of these improvements together will not resolve the massive capacity deficit the MTA suffers from system-wide. Only new track, new trains, and new stations will.

IMO standing-room-only cars fit in this category. It would give us a bit more capacity, but nowhere near enough to make a real dent on the capacity problem - and this particular "improvement" has a high cost in excluded passengers.

Even if we made all the cars standing room only, you'd still be packed like sardines into the 4/5/6 in the morning, and you'd still have to watch helplessly as multiple trains pass by packed to the brim.

Yeah, you are correct that we need more, a lot more. However, the argument that "we shouldn't do X because we need A, B, and C" is overused all the time to piss and moan whenever someone proposes solving an easy problem that will benefit many people.

"Throw it over the wall" isn't the half of it. Last year, when a major snowstorm was forecast to hit NYC, Cuomo announced that the subways would be shutting down - without notifying or consulting the MTA or city government. This threw a wrench into existing plans for inclement weather, with the ultimate result being that trains ran empty along their normal routes until the storm had passed.

Yes, they actually need to run the trains in that case so that the third rail doesn't ice up. They even stopped at all station stops, made announcements, and open and closed the doors. There was no reason not to just let people ride them.

Sounds like 2nd Ave Sagas thinks a world class city should have a world class public transit system. That is my main thought, having been a user of Chicago and New York public transport: Why is this so much worse than e.g. Hong Kong? WiFi isn't the right scale of $ investment to get there.

I think it comes down to fares. You can travel between any two stations on the subway for $2.75. In contrast, the HK metro charges a fare between ~$0.50 to $7.00 depending on destination. Many other metro systems across the world use a zone-based fare scheme as well.

There's always a public outcry when MTA announces they're going to raise fares, and any attempt to introduce a distance/zone-based fare would be denounced as unduly burdensome on the poor, since they tend to live further out. In any case, I don't think the current MetroCard-based system could support such a scheme anyway.

The number one thing to improve straphangers' "quality of travel" would be to implement CBTC[1] so that we can get countdown clocks to remove the uncertainty that comes with waiting for a train. If I know the next train is coming in 15 minutes, I can hang out above ground or by the stairs and use my cell service rather than standing on the platform not knowing whether the next train is 2 minutes or 20 minutes away.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications-based_train_con...

Metrocard is going to be replaced in the not too distant future. I wouldn't be surprised if the next system has zones. They already have subsidized cards for low income travelers so a fare hike will have less impact. That's the only way they can begin to address their budget deficit issue.

Heavily disagreed - the budget deficit issue comes from a combination of state refusal to properly fund the MTA, and the MTA's own shittastic (and more than likely corrupt) processes for contracts that results in everything being vastly more expensive than it should be.

Not to mention vastly more expensive than every other first-world infrastructure project.

The problem with a zone system is that it effectively punishes the poor for being too poor live near work. The further out in NYC you go the less able people are to afford higher fares, but yet that is exactly what a zone system does.

And like most other direct subsidies, the subsidized MetroCards are a terrifyingly bad solution to this - for one thing in a zone system, even with subsidies, the poor will still end up paying dramatically more than they do today to get to work. Not only that, only the poorest of the poor even qualify for these MetroCards, leaving out a vast income range for whom transit costs are still a burden and a substantial portion of income.

A zone system with subsidies will likely end up looking like:

- The extreme poor pay slightly more than they do today because of the combination of living very far and subsidization.

- The "merely" poor pay dramatically (possibly 2x+ multiples) more than they do today because they are "too rich" to qualify for subsidization but yet live at the outer reaches of the transit system.

- Middle income individuals pay more than they do today, they don't qualify for subsidy but they live > 1 zone from work.

- Upper/upper middle class individuals pay similar or slightly more than they do today, because they don't qualify for subsidy but are likely to live within the same zone as work (i.e., Manhattan below 110th).

A zone system, even with subsidies, will be insanely regressive to the point of comical absurdity.

Ignoring the fact that it's incredibly regressive, the zone system also won't do much against the budget issues the MTA faces - if you're going to squeeze someone for money you don't squeeze the residents of Brighton Beach or Bay Ridge or Hunts Point or Elmhurst - they don't got any money left to be squeezed out. Mid-low income families living in the far reaches of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, for whom transit is already a high percentage of their monthly budgets, have little left to give.

Very well reasoned! Thank you.

There are many reasons not to have zones but people often miss the very serious transition/logistical problem that would be required for any change-over -- a zone system literally doubles the number of times a passenger has to swipe or scan their payment method.

That means literally millions of swipes a day that didn't exist before, each time someone has to exit the system. Many of those will necessarily fail as people don't have sufficient funds to leave the station they are in. This is a failure mode the NYC subway simply doesn't have now, all people in the system are free to leave any any time through any available low-tech door.

The idea of several hundred thousand people trying to get out through (presumably newly installed) turnstiles at grand central during rush hour while random people in front of me stall out and get trapped because their cards have insufficient funds doesn't sound fun at all. How about a tour group getting off in a very constricted station in lower Manhattan and having 90 people trapped unable to leave the platform and no room for passengers to enter? What about stations where you can't reverse direction without leaving the station, how do you head to a station you can afford to exit?

Sure in the long run anything is possible, but I don't think people who advocate for a zone system in NYC have usually thought about the actual human scale logistics required for that to work. The NYC subway is a very big complicated and crowded system and that's a major change to how passengers flow through it.

The Washington DC Metro has zone based fares that easily exceed $5 during rush periods and it's certainly done nothing for our quality of travel.

Waiting 20 minutes for a train on weekends is not uncommon. Neither is stopping underground for long amounts of time. Our metro system here is pretty terrible. It's usually cheaper and more convenient to just drive where you need to go. And it will always remain that way, because the people in power don't have to use it (and they don't care about the people who do).

CBTC and countdown clocks are orthogonal (although if you're doing CBTC, countdown clocks are a minor addition) - the A division has clocks, even though only the L is CBTC.

Thanks for the clarification. I knew that the L had CBTC and just assumed the A Division did as well. Turns out the A Division uses something called ATS (Automatic Train Supervision) which enables countdown clocks, but I couldn't find a whole of information on how it actually works.

Perhaps because New York's Subway is much older? It's more than a 100 years old, and has been remarkably resilient through the decades. Of course it has many problems as already pointed out in this discussion thread, but it's an engineering marvel in an of itself when it was built, given the constraints.

It shouldn't all be older, though - in the time that most of the Asian metros have been built, we've built, uh, the F train tunnel and a 7 train stop in the middle of nowhere? Really?

London has an even older system, with more constraints (it was built with two tracks, not for). Yet they are doing the right scale of investment: new lines costing billions.

The London Underground opened over 150 years ago, and yet manages to keep up with capacity requirements, open new lines, and generally is incredibly reliable. I'd be surprised to get to a platform and wait longer than five minutes for the next train.

Part of that is because they don't run 24 hours allowing maintenance to take place at night, but I think the biggest factor is Transport for London being a mostly independent entity - they're not required to put money they make back into a central pool, and instead can reinvest it in their own services.

I couldn't agree more regarding MTA vs. London Tube! The tube has slightly less passengers/year and fewer stations overall, but it provides a much better user experience despite being older and with greater engineering constraints (the deepest tracks are 60m below ground) [1].

WiFi is already in virtually all stations since years.

> Part of that is because they don't run 24 hours allowing maintenance to take place at night

This has changed with five lines now operating 24/7 [2].

[1] http://assets.londonist.com/uploads/2015/08/infographic-1log...

[2] https://tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/images/nighttubemap-.gif

Night service is currently only running on Friday and Saturday nights, although if I remember correctly that's due to a dispute with the driver's union, rather than TfL wanting to have some nights for maintenance.

My understanding is that the "weekend only" is just a first phase, and they will extend the service 7 days a week during the course of 2016. Assuming they find an agreement with the Unions, I guess...

While more tunnels and trails will be convenient for a lot of people, it won't necessarily generate significantly more revenue for MTA. On the other hand if MTA invests in wifi, they will make tons more money through all the new business opportunities that arise (Imagine instead of those paper banner ads where it says "download on the appstore", or "sign up with the code 'subway'" which are basically useless since you can't really download it on the spot nor effectively trackable, you could actually download, purchase, sign up for things. Currently most people just waste their time playing candy crush and temple run but that will all change. Their ad revenue will shoot straight up). When they make more money, they can invest in other useful features you mentioned. They're not stupid. They're doing a good job.

The MTA is not a business, it's a public service. We already generate enough revenue in taxes, but it's sent upstate instead of being used here. NYC subsidizes the rest of the state.

http://observer.com/2014/10/northern-exposure-the-give-and-t...

Rents and therefore incomes are higher in a high-demand urban area.

Isn't the phenomenon of money being transferred from city->country an inevitability in any society with progressive income taxes?

Yeah, as wealth generation becomes more urban you have to pretty much expect cities to subsidize suburbs and rural areas.

The main issue here though is that due to some sordid political history the MTA is a state agency, despite running the NYC subway. This has resulted in the city's transit budgets being routinely raided to supplement state budget needs, and also a focus on state-centric mass transit efforts to the detriment of in-city mass transit (see: redeveloping Penn Station which serves long-distance train commuters, designing the AirTrain to LaGuardia to primarily serve suburban Long Island travelers, etc).

There's a pretty dramatic misalignment of incentives when a state agency under the command of the governor runs the city's subways, rather than the mayor or even a regional government.

You can get the BART problem although, where you have to get 3-5 counties and 25+ municipal governments working together to make a unified metro transit system. In the BART's case, only 2-3 counties did and now there are big transit gaps everyone regrets today.

Yes it is a public service, and that's why they need to generate more revenue if they want to provide higher quality service with their fixed budget. Money doesn't fall from the sky.

Just to vent: The 59th st connection that connects the 4/5/6 Upper East Side, Harlem, and Bronx to the heart of Midtown (N/R/Q) was down the other day at 8:40 AM on a weekday, after they had everyone standing on the track for 20 minutes wondering what was going on. Totally unacceptable.

>This might seem cool to people that aren't in NYC

Yeah this seems to be most beneficial for international travelers coming to NYC as tourists whose regular cell plans may not give them favorable roaming terms in the States.

Meanwhile, San Francisco can't muster the courage to build a station on top of an existing tunnel boring site.

http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2015/12/no-progress-for-a...

They just put 4G in the Chicago subways a couple weeks ago. That seems like a better solution than public WiFi, which you have to sign in to and is almost always overloaded or poor signal.

The wifi appeared in NYC before the LTE, but now that LTE is available everywhere wifi is, I've just stopped using the wifi, because LTE Just Works and is just as fast.

> which you have to sign in to

Why do you need to sign in into a public WiFi? Why can't it be open to everyone?

Because we live in a fallen world.

This is a free Hotspot wireless internet Service (the “Service”) provided by Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) for use by customers of MTA. All users are required to log-in individually as an independent user.

1. Our agreement

1.1 This agreement applies from when we accept your request for Service. Please read the terms carefully before activating Service with us.

1.2 By using and/or activating Service with us and/or clicking the accept button on the login/registration page you agree to be bound by this agreement. If you do not agree to the terms of the agreement, do not use the Service.

1.3 We may modify the agreement at any time. In accordance with clause 1.2, use of the Service constitutes acceptance of the agreement current at that point in time.

1.4 These Terms and Conditions do not alter in any way the terms or conditions of any other agreement you may have with MTA for products, services or otherwise. This agreement contains disclaimers and other provisions that limit our liability to you.

... blah blah blah blah blah and on and on.

In such case I'm not interested, thanks. It's enough that my mobile provider tracks me, why would I need MTA to track me in addition?

Because you're a foreign tourist who didn't get mobile internet access for their trip to NYC.

I wonder how many of the people in the system the MTA/NYPD can identify in real time and with what precision it can locate them. I presume they know the identities of a large proportion through entrance swipes from credit/debit-purchased metrocards, but that still leaves the problem of determining when someone has exited and where they in the meantime.

Between the travel data they're storing on the metrocards (exhibit number one, the Ebola doctor) and the ubiquitous cameras, I think the WiFi has more to do with tracking the public than improving service.

Don't forget the mics they setup all over the city http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3006019/Microphones-...

Yeah, those, lamppost cameras, and mobile watchtowers.

I seem to recall using wifi on the Moscow metro two years ago, and not just the stations, but the trains. Granted, some of the lines are still running cars that were made in "Leningrad" in the 70's, but...I mean you'd expect NYC trains to be made of castable diamond and levitating two inches above the rails by this point, so it's surprising they're still catching up electronically.

The oldest cars in the current NYC subway fleet are R32s built in 1964.

Even worse, huh?

Those old cars are tanks, for what its worth - they've been scheduled to be replaced several times over the years, and each time their replacement has been postponed to replace newer fleets of cars which have developed major problems. They don't have the fancy signage of some of the newer fleet, but they function very well.

Many of the MTA trains are from the 70's too with classic simulated wood grain and all. Of course they do at least have AC.

Actually, Moscow metro has wifi only in trains. Which is quite annoying since half of the stations' cellular signal is at EDGE at best.

London started to get wifi, but it is unencrypted and you have to watch an ad before using it, by which time the train has arrived, so it has zero value.

Well it has value to the advertisers who got the opportunity to brainwash you into buying their products a bit.

Not my experience. I signed in once (can't recall watching an ad) and now any time a train enters a station with wifi it automatically connects. No ad and it usually connects quickly enough that I can load a page or refresh a feed while passengers get on/off.

I don't get why they don't roll out LTE in the tube. Would be so much more useful.

My first guess would be that wifi is accessible by a larger number of devices. A lot of people use tablets and e-readers on the tube and I'm sure quite a lot, maybe a majority of those, only support wifi.

Why would it be more useful? If they offered LTE you would need an account with a wireless provider to be able to use it, which is probably not an option for tourists who would pay insane roaming fees. On the other hand with WiFi most wireless carriers offer WiFi calling anyway nowadays, so you're able to do anything that you could also do on LTE.

Why not both. I bet carriers would love LTE in a subway metro. I use it for BART it works pretty well most of the time.

No tourist uses the wifi in the tube. It's abysmal and too expensive for that. Unless you live in London there is no point to subscribe to the wifi there. Also pretty irrelevant as an argument given the fact that roaming charges are dropping and that you can get prepaid sims everywhere.

Originally they did say they were going to do that, there were concept videos I saw of people making calls. But WiFi presumably paid them more.

If you pay or if you have a plan with a partner mobile carrier it saves your credentials and autoconnects. Other SSIDs like "EE-Auto" use EAP-SIM authentication.

Ah well they dont publicise that, and I don't think it is worth paying and I have no idea if I am with a partner but guess not.

> The MTA will also accelerate delivering real-time arrival data for all 469 subway stations, which will be available on the MTA’s SubwayTime app and will be streamed as an open data feed for any developer to use.

Neat.

I'm not sure _how_ they are going to do this, when most of the lines don't have this technology (it's literally turn the the century switching technology):

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/why-do...

Perhaps they same way they do it on buses?

No, you can't reliably receive GPS signals in a subway tunnel.

If you have wifi hotspots in every station you can track the trains that way, no GPS required.

I thought buses mostly used thr odometer? At least the ones where I lived used to use the odometer for the "next station" LED signs in the buses, and the bus stop arrival signs showed up not long after.

If they can equip the mice down there with repeaters they could get a pretty good 99% coverage rate. (BTW it is possible ... http://blog.tanaza.com/blog/bid/296349/Dogs-and-cats-turned-...)

Catching up to Moscow.

I started traveling to Moscow regularly before I moved to New York and when I did, I was shocked that not only was wifi not as ubiquitous as in Moscow but the subway in NYC didn't even have cell phone service. Felt very strange for Moscow to be so far ahead of New York.

it's normal - Moscow is 8 hours ahead of NYC

Boggles my mind that union square station still has no service

Not wifi, but in the much bigger metro network in Tokyo, You can use mobile connection (LTE) even in-between stations. They probably have underground relays.

In the SF Bay Area, BART has LTE too. Even when it's going under the Bay.

Likewise almost everywhere on Boston's subway -- though it's worth noting that the Boston subway as a whole is smaller and carries less people than New York's Lexington Avenue line.

Are they going to be open WiFi, or will require some authentication?

I've used the one on 34th and it requires acceptance of their TOS but if I remember correctly, I didn't need to input any personal info.

34th actually has usable T-Mobile connection.

So, January 2018. Got it.

This only applies to the stations, not the actual trains. The great majority of my commute time is spent on the train, not in the station (where you can often get LTE anyway).

> not in the station (where you can often get LTE anyway).

Often? Except for a few stations in Midtown, I rarely see any cell service once inside the turnstiles.

I have celluar data plan. I don't use the public wifi unless there is no coverage in the station. We need:

* more cellular coverage, for every station

* LED train schedule display in every train station

Would be great if you could buy tickets with your cellphone

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