A Peek Inside New York's Subway Redesign Plan | Hacker News Reader

A Peek Inside New York's Subway Redesign Plan

citylab.com

38 pointsjseliger68 comments

Do we really need wifi and USB ports on the train? There are already a lot of wifi access points on the platform, but it requires clicking on a prompt to agree to T&C which is an extra step many don't bother taking.

I'm reminded of TVs the Taxi and Limousine Commission mandated to be placed in all yellow/green cabs in NYC. It's always dubious improvements that people often don't ask for. What people really wanted was more availability as evidenced by the success of Uber. I imagine in regards to train service, New Yorkers would settle for cleaner, less smelly stations and more regular service, especially on the weekends. But I guess that wouldn't get as much press coverage.

Personally I find on-train connectivity to be very useful. And if you read the rest of the article, those features are really just in addition to the various other improvements, like wider doors and (of course) just having more trains in general.

I imagine the USB and WiFi were just a small, trivial add-on they planned since they're already blowing money on new train cars in the first place. It doesn't cost too much, makes your train ride a little nicer, and gets the MTA better press and reputation.

In the end I don't see any problem with it.

Do you live in NYC? I don't expect these ports to last longer than 3 weeks. Wifi sure, but USB, charging stations are the exact opposite of what I want on a commuter train.

You are an optimist it seems! I give it a week before someone either does something incredibly annoying or stupid with them, the system gets hacked through a USB port (because this is MTA afterall so of course the USB's are connected to a vital central mainframe system with no security), or it's used by peddlers selling crap on that platforms. That or the mob finds a way to install Jimmy The Idiot to charge you a quarter to use it. This is New York. If it can go wrong you bet your last nickel that rolled off the roof it will happen.

If the USB ports at the Staten Island Ferry can still work (well, barely work, but work nonetheless) then I have faith these USB ports will last at least a few months. Although I don't see what that should have to do with me wanting to have them.

Funnily enough, they just shut off most of the USB ports on the SI Ferry because passengers were literally fighting over them...

I still feel like USB ports are one of those things that's really marginally beneficial.

The option of USB ports on the trains is likely such a small percentage of the overall cost, but it likely gets enough people thinking "The MTA is thinking about things that matter to me."

They cost almost nothing and can help people out when they're in a jam, so why not?

I just wonder how long it'll take before they're all broken from people inserting their connectors backwards, or before they become an anachronism since they're the wrong type of USB.

It'll probably cost quite a bit more than you think. For example, in flight entertainment systems are way more expensive than the cost of the touchscreen monitors because they require a power subsystem that draws from the plane's generators but is completely isolated from the rest of the avionics for safety reasons. This requires literally miles of extra wiring for a jumbojet which is very labor intensive. For something like the Boeing Dreamliner, which has about 60 miles of wiring, that's a significant expense.

That's not including the extra cost of maintenance for yser facing electronics that the trains have never had before. That said, airports like SFO and LAX have had charging ports and plugs for a while so there's data to estimate from.

These problems are easily solved.

1) The right type of USB is the old, standard USB type A connector. Whatever kind of device you have, you should have a cable which plugs into this connector. The other USB connectors are on the device side; every charger these days has a USB-A connector on the charger side.

2) It should be pretty easy to design such a thing to be robust: all you have to do is make the USB connectors on the train easily replaceable. This can be done by putting the USB-A connectors on their own PCB, with all the charging electronics on a separate board below it. Then the supplier just needs to sell these replacement boards really cheap (because they're just a few type-A connectors plus a pin header strip) in bulk to the MTA. Even better, the MTA should get the design files, so they can farm out production of replacement boards if the supplier goes bust or they want to get a better price. Keep the charging circuitry on the lower board, and make the upper board easily replaceable with a screwdriver (with a security key) so maintenance workers can swap them out as necessary.

Hopefully they use a type of easily replaceable part. Any connector has a max insertion rating. Public places tend to reach that rating fairly quickly.

Or full of gum.

Gum if we're lucky.

I'm picturing a piece of cardboard in the shape of a USB plug that you stick in a jack to see if it's clean and not too broken before you insert your real cable.

Maybe wallet-sized cards with a diagram of how to fold them into that shape?

A perfect implement for inserting gum.

As well as functional clean elevators in more stations.

More seats (trains like the R maximize seat/space ratio while trains like the 4/5/6 don't)

Also ban bums from sleeping on trains.

> Also ban bums from sleeping on trains.

I think there's likely already a law against it, it's a matter of enforcement. And I for one have a hard time being mad at someone sleeping on a train at night during the winter time; shelters aren't fun places, they fill up and have stringent requirements, and for many of them, the alternative is freezing to death outside.

New York's answer to the homeless problem is to throw them in jail, and considering many suffer from severe mental illness, this is really cruel and inhumane.

So they're swept under the rug. It's absurd.

Compared to San Francisco where they're let to just wry in the wind?

Most American cities I've visited take an indifferent and/or actively hostile attitude towards people with mental illness.

It's actually kind of scary.

Yeah. If you have a family history of mental illness and live in America, make sure you've got a big support network of friends and family, in case you develop a mental illness. That would probably be more useful than healthcare coverage.

In America anyway where having health-care is tied to employment and employment can be difficult to maintain when you're increasingly mentally ill.

Somewhere more civilized it's not as much a problem to see a psychiatrist, the cost is fully covered. If there's medication and you can't afford it there's ways of getting that covered too.

It's much better to have people "in the system" where they're receiving disability support, subsidized housing, and medical care than to just turf them on the street or treat them as profit centers in private prisons.

They gotta sleep somewhere. All the shelters are full.

I wonder if the wifi is coordinated with LinkNYC/SidewalkLabs (that consortium providing those kiosks).

USB-C, sure. It becomes the standard with 24 months

Will it?

I am biased here, I have one of those fancy new macbooks, so I am worried to shit I made the wrong calculation here. But all evidence I see seems to suggest they won't.

In the fall, a lot more Macs are going to ship with USB-C.

At any rate, Android phone usage will drive adoption.

^ This one trillion times.

Make the general experience better rather than lipstick on a pig.

The big innovation seems to be trains with fewer seats and more standing space. That increases capacity, but few people get to sit down.

No platform edge doors, surprisingly. Many newer systems have those. But they require that the trains all have their doors in the same places, so you can't mix types of train sets.

Display signs may just duplicate info people can get on some phone app. (The MTA has an API with their train and bus position info, at least for the lines that have reporting gear.[1]) But those are cheap.

[1] http://datamine.mta.info/

> Display signs may just duplicate info people can get on some phone app.

Public transit should never require ownership of a smartphone. All features should be accessible equally to everyone. Having an app is great, but you can't reasonably advocate for the removal of physical signs in public transport.

I believe the GP was referring to the train arrival and other dynamic signage, rather than the static signage that exists now.

Bang for the buck, it feels like getting wifi (and cellular data) into all stations is way more useful and future-proof than a bunch of displays that are going to look quaint and outdated a year after we spend billions getting them installed.

If you want to know which track is downtown, or what the stops are on the express, the existing maps and signage will get you there. If you want to know about service interruptions and arrival information (or potentially connecting train information or more detailed trip estimates based on subway traffic in the future), then unless you can understand the static coming out of the loudspeakers, you're out of luck.

It's taken them more than 10 years to get arrival signs into the stations, and (as above) they already seem very outdated, with insufficient information many times (because three display lines is not enough lines for busy stations when you're waiting for a 6). Plus most stations still don't have them, which seems absurd given that every other subway system in the world has them.

Once I'm in a large underground station I'm more likely to follow the overhead signs than rely on my phone

Echoing others' points about not requiring people to own smartphones to get around the city.

But more than that, the physical signs are superior to smartphone feeds in many ways - we already have situations where people are milling around outside stations fetching the status feed. Crowding is a severe problem with the NYC subway, and a sign that you can just glance at while walking is much more efficient than having everyone stop and check their phones.

> Display signs may just duplicate info people can get on some phone app.

If you happen to be at a station with cellular signal or wifi.

If you're not a tourist without a data plan. If your phone is charged. If you're the kind of person to own a phone that can run apps. If you've taken the time to install the app.

Signs are useful, people.

The sub-surface lines in London are about to finish changing over to new trains. These look a lot like the images in the article, differences include that the flexible area between carridges is full width and height. We have air cooling (that's not air con), cctv and wifi but no usb. Stations and crossrail will have wifi and 3/4G.

The new BART cars also have less seating than the current cars. Good for Oakland to Civic Center trips, not so for longer trips from Fremont ( and soon to be) points south.

How about A/C in the stations for once? Or turning on the A/C when temperatures are moderate but humidity is high? With low enough temperatures and humidity, a surprising amount of grime and overcrowding becomes bearable.

Instead of AC, I always thought it would be fun to use the heat to do something productive (like make electricity), even if not effect, it could consume the heat?

I'm not sure if using recovered heat from the subway system to generate electricity is economically feasible (probably not). In the end you'd have to eject the heat anyway, probably to the Hudson and East rivers.

Or into the buildings above. Could the heat be used to pre-heat cold boiler water in buildings? Of the low efficiency (but no carbon?) electric could run LED lights or other small electronics. There would be a loss in converting to electric and a loss converting back to heat.

On underground trains, you have to choose between air conditioning the platforms or the trains. It wouldn't be feasible (especially in old systems like New York or London) to do both because of the lack of ventilation (the hot air needs to go somewhere).

I don't care about clean stations, I'd rather have stations with elevators and escalators, so the handicapped and the elderly can actually use them.

I for one mourn the fact the forces that be in my city are intent on pulling us back to 1960 transport wise.

We are poised to break 1M within the next decade, and some have been floating some form of light rail to serve the quickly growing city. Unfortunately, looking at the ten year plan published recently shows that what made it in from those discussions were...widening roads.

Good on NYC for attempting to put somewhere in the US on parity with other first world metropolises.

Something as simple as the new grab bars in the middle of the car will be a great improvement. Although I'd rather it be a 3-bar split as opposed to the 2 in the mockup. That way we can still have the annoyingly frequent bar leaner and still have a place to hold on to.

On paper the improvements look nice. I don't get the preservation portion. That adds cost with little utility.

Clean the stations, make them less grimy, eliminate the dark dungeon feel, dress up the load bearing beams a bit with a material where grime and soot can be easily cleaned.

Put in some women only cars on the crowded lines to prevent groping... Maybe one day get a north-south line to join the outer borough lines (a peripheral line). Most lines are in and out of Manhattan, as if people didn't move interborough.

Is there data on whether women-only cars work? What happens when you jump on the subway at the last second and end up in one of the other cars?

Not to mention that it stinks very much of segregation, which was said below by some posters although sarcastically.

I think the right thing to do is to attack the pervs and the criminals. That is where the actual blame lies, right?

We should put in some minority only cars too! Wouldn't want that privilege to rub off.

>> "Put in some women only cars on the crowded lines to prevent groping"

Rather than delay the problem so that those people can just go and grope people somewhere else how about better CCTV so they can be caught and punished.

Women only cars - yeah, segregation on public transport is such a great idea and completely legal! /s

> Put in some women only cars on the crowded lines to prevent groping

That's straight up segregation. Not only is this illegal, it's unfair to basically the other half of the population for an additional "safe space".

What a complete waste of time and money. These are all very marginal nice to haves. What people want is for their subway commute to take less time, end of story. Or for those on crowded lines like the 4/5, less crowding. Maybe ease the crowding enough that you could even reach your hands into your pocket to grab your USB device to use those new USB outlets they're hyping (there's no way you could currently on many lines during peak)

The only new feature worth a damn in that whole story is adding more countdown clocks, but even that just quantifies but does not in any way reduce the waiting time.

Typical case of totally different priorities between NYS and NYC. Cuomo obviously does not ride the subway. NYC needs to secede already

Edit: I didn't notice the price is $27 billion. This makes me angry. That's enough to make some pretty substantial "real" boring improvements that would actually improve service. According to wikipedia Phase I of the Second Ave Subway cost "just" $4.5billion. And we're going to blow $27 billion on prettier signs? Are you !@#$% kidding me? I wish I could vote against you more than once, Cuomo

Edit 2: To be fair, there is one useful feature of the new trains: More space to pack more passengers with the "open gangway" design. But the rest is a waste

To be fair, the $27 billion includes 1,025 new subway cars (which tend to cost more than $1 million each) plus extensive renovations to 31 stations. Also, the "open gangway" design in combination with the other improvements (wider doors, collapsible seats) will reduce crowding on trains, which in turn reduces crowding on platforms and dwell time. During rush hour that will have a noticeable impact on travel times. Outside of CBTC, which would allow running more trains per hour, there aren't really other ways to make the existing system run faster.

I do think the $27 billion tag is too high, though.

I'm willing to exclude the new trains entirely from the criticism, except for funds which go towards new features other than more space. 1 or 2 million per car @ about 1000 cars is "only" 1 or 2 billion out of the 27 billion though.

Most of this money is going towards making the system shinier and prettier, instead of actually improving commute times for anyone

Whenever the city spends money on projects like this, you have to remember it's more about employing people than actually improving things. Look at the 2nd avenue subway - almost 9 years to build a tunnel about a mile long. And now they are saying they may not complete it in December.

Did you even read the article? The trains have wider doors, flip up seats, and other features intended to fit more people and get people moving faster. It's literally the best they can do until they replace the outdated signaling on the tracks, which is an even more expensive project.

> What people want ... end of story

I do want what's described in the article. So clearly your claim is not entirely accurate.

Obviously that's shorthand for something like "What [most] people [mostly] want" ....

Are you sure though? Let's assume it was up to you, and you had a choice between $27 billion worth of the improvements mentioned in the article -- mostly aesthetics -- versus choosing $27 billion worth of making your commute time shorter and/or making service more reliable (eg off hours).

You'd really choose the fancy signs and USB chargers over the shorter commute? Really?

"End of story" seems pretty final to me. Either way you're only expressing what you want.

Since you're focusing on trivialities, you obviously skipped a things in the article. They're spending $27B on 1,025 new subway cars with a significantly upgraded layout: Bigger doors and roomier, open-ended layout will fit more people and make it easier to find a seat, make it faster to load/unload people, plus be friendlier to wheelchairs. Those are big changes, not aesthetics. Since they're upgrading things they might as well add some superficial nice-to-haves like wifi and USB chargers, because they're cheap and it's 2016.

It's time to modernize, even the surface details. The NYC subway experience is an embarrassment, especially when you compare it to the subways in other, nominally poorer cities/countries that care more about public transit.

If you want to complain about something meaningful, complain about the lack of wheelchair access to stations.

You didn't read well.

The most important thing that they can do besides buying more subway cars is to computerize the driving of the subways which would double the throughput. They started experimenting with this (on the L or 7 lines?) but they should implement it more quickly.

New cars and polished stations. but I don't see anything about improving the actual infrastructure with more tracks, better signaling, etc. I guess we hope that those sorts of improvements are happening but are not interesting enough to write about?

I don't have sources available on my phone, but I believe it is something they are actively working on. The problem is it's just so much more expensive, takes a long time, and doesn't affect public opinion as much.

The Wikipedia article "Signaling of the NYC Subway" has a lot of information.

i know they are working on this. but as a member of the subway-riding public, far and away the number 1 thing I have a strong opinion about is delays, which almost always are blamed on "signal problems"

I agree. Problem is the general public is even less informed than the people commenting on this article. They'll probably just think it's a waste of money.

Why do the new subway cars always smell like bad breath is coming through the ventilation system, even when empty and recently cleaned?

Is it some kind of anti-vagrant odor, like the repellent counterpart to Subway restaurant's fresh bread fragrance?

So just like Seattle's light rail cars? Just much more traffic?

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