Comment by galdosdi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by galdosdi | Hacker News Reader

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.

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