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Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

It's more serious than that even, it's a safety issue. The platforms are fairly narrow and have no railings, and they aren't designed to hold two full train loads of people at the same time.

If a full train pulls up and the platform is already full people are going to end up on the tracks. I haven't seen this at Penn but I have seen the issue happen in the subway when there are train delays. When this happens the MTA has to hold the arriving train in the station with the doors closed and clear the platform before opening the doors to let people off.

It's a nightmare. Their concerns here seem completely reasonable.

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> The platforms are fairly narrow and have no railings, and they aren't designed to hold two full train loads of people at the same time.

It seems pretty unlikely that 100% of the people on the outbound train would use the app and trust the historical data to go to the platform early.

It doesn't have to be 100% - a significant number of waiting people will still present a safety issue.

The platforms are very narrow for the LIRR tracks, so holding 200% of a train (outbound and inbound) would be sheer pandemonium, and would practically guarantee someone falls off the platform. Even holding 100% of a train (just inbound, disembarking passengers) is already straining the platforms and methods of egress to their limits.

Holding even just 110-120% of a train load is very much a safety issue. I'm with the MTA on this one - the "mad dash" is horrifyingly inefficient, but is the safest course of action.

Of course, the correct fix to this is to fix the platforms such that passengers can wait at track-level without safety issue. But, of course, that's a multi-billion dollar problem nobody seems willing to touch.

People in that station actually talk to each other, so a few % of app users in the crowd might result in a large number of people knowing.

I'd hate to imagine what would happen during peak if a train came in on an unexpected track AND a different train on the expected track - it is not unusual for multiple trains to be announced at once. Then you'd have a pile of people trying to go up those narrow stairs while a pile of people were trying to go down.

Once people see others walking towards a platform (particularly if they just checked something on their phones), they tend to do the same.

But there are lots of trains leaving at any given time going to different places. There's no way to know which train somebody is heading to without asking them.

There aren't that many leaving simultaneously - plus they tend to be slotted into the same group of platforms.

Yes there are. That's the whole problem. It's complete chaos. There are several hundred people huddled in one area looking at one giant screen and there are several trains being called in sequence. How would you know that a given person was waiting for the 4:30pm Acela to Union Station to be called and not the 4:33pm Northeast Regional to Boston?

As somebody who commuted for a long time at peak rush hour back and forth from Penn Station to D.C., I can tell you that following people who "seem to know where they're going" would not be a reliable strategy.

There are dozens of platforms going to different places. Picking a random stranger and following them isn't going to get you where you're going.

So what you mean to say, with safety issue, is that government-provided infrastructure is so badly designed and ill-equipped to be used at the necessary scale attempts to improve matters must be stopped !

The app isn't really an improvement if it has mass adoption, you'd just move the rush for seats from the station hall to the track platform.

All infrastructure is a matter of trade-offs. Sure, they could have built the platforms 3 times wider, with funnels leading to the doors, and gates that open/close to prevent people from falling onto the tracks. But that would be an extreme increase in cost to build, and wouldn't lead to a significantly larger number of people able to take the train. This app doesn't improve matters: it causes an additional "tragedy of the commons" situation. By being the first one on the platform, you may get to claim your seat, at the common cost of making it harder for everyone else to get out of/on to the train.

Yes, at peak times there is congestion (just like at peak times there's highway congestion), and the existing infrastructure (built mostly before 1930) was built to be significantly safer and more efficient than existing systems. And 90 years later, it still is usually the most efficient and safest mode of transport in NYC. But given the record number of subway riders and record age of the infrastructure, it takes everyone pitching in a little to not make the situation intolerable. Part of that "pitching in" is "Don't go onto the platform before the train's riders have left".

Except that (correct me if I'm wrong), the platform is displayed 10 minutes before the train arrives, so there is already people waiting when the train arrives

It is displayed 10 minutes before the to train leaves. If a train is being turned over it will have already arrived and unloaded at that point.

In my experience after commuting for a few months, this is never the case. Even when the track listing is displayed 10 minutes prior to departure time, the train usually won't arrive for another few minutes. You get crowds of people where the doors will be. It's really not safe, although I've never seen someone fall so it can't be that bad.

This app is a classic tragedy of the commoms. If everyone used the app, it would be worse for everyone.

It's midtown, in New York City. Infrastructure is space-constrained, a problem we've had since soon after the Dutch left. Shouldn't be a shock to anyone.

Yeah, it seems obvious that they purposely don't assign the track until the last minute for a good reason, so of course they'd want to shut down any software to try and circumvent that system.

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