The Subway Is So Late, It’s Making New Yorkers Early

Between my own bike and Citi Bike I can get everywhere I need to without relying on any form of mass transportation. Biking is frequently the fastest form of transportation, depending start/end point of the trip anyway. It certainly is for my daily commute.

I had to move back to Queens a few months ago near where I grew up and the trip to SoHo that used to take at most 45 minutes is now 60-90 min. A few times I was stuck on the E for around 2.5 hours.

Living in the outer boroughs has become a huge disadvantage.

Was also one of the few in the office who lived in Manhattan. Everyone else was either Long Island or Jersey. So when bad weather hit, I had no excuse.

It’s no Switzerland or Japan, but it’s what a reasonably well run system looks like.

> realize how (relatively) stressful it can be

> when the trains are late.

So much this. I always thought that the typical characterization of Germany, "the trains run on time" was a put down for how boring and uptight we are.

Then I lived in places where the trains do not run on time.

Oh my god.

Whenever I travelled back to Berlin, I wanted to hug the BVG employees.

I for one would much rather live in a NY dealing with some temporary growth success issues than live in NY during the 70s (or really, any time before).

At the core of it, New York City simply has too many people on an old, straining infrastructure. And yes, though there are a few people who grow ever richer and a bloated City and State bureaucracy which are problematic, but there is also an enormous number of people who cannot and will not ever afford to live there - not middle class people hanging on, but a large number deep in poverty who won't ever get a foothold. And that's because there are actually a lot of services available. The city's has more than 10% of the entire homeless U.S. population, many of whom come out of state, and an estimated 500,000 illegal immigrants. With a population density is more than 2X that of many other thriving metropolises in the country, there's a lot of unnecessary suffering. When you're on either end of the economic spectrum, you can get a pretty good deal here. When you're in the middle, you get squeezed.

P.S. I don't know if you actually take the LIRR, but it's an absolute pleasure to ride compared to the subway.

Or isn't NYC Metro card integrated between different modes of transportation?

eg. today, the 6th is not operating uptown, between 9:45 last night, and 6:am next morning

You say, fine, I will take another line, but then the 2 and 3 are not operating at all due to 'tunnel repair',

You need to go to work? Your choice is go downtown, take one of the express trains to uptown, and take another downtown train.

So, your 15 minutes train ride becomes 45+ minutes. You can always take a cab, but this becomes expensive to do regularly, plus during rush hour it is hard to catch one.

NYC's subway runs 24hrs in theory only. It is always a whack-amole game if the train is 1. late, or overcrowded, your 2. station is closed, 3. the whole line is not running that day, and My least favorite: 4. Tain strands you for a while, because "there is traffic ahead", or some accident happen.

Just as the article mentioned, I noticed I had to start leaving early to make sure I make my soccer games in time (they are in brooklyn). In case the usual route has issues (which happens about 25-30%% of the time during weekends).

http://web.mta.info/nyct/service/pdf/tacur.pdf

At least back in 2012 or so, when I cared, the A train did keep reasonably close to this schedule (effectively genuinely on it when it wasn't rush hour). It definitely does not keep to this schedule now.

Now, do New Yorkers actually know this schedule? Well, sometimes, actually: while trains do come every few minutes in Manhattan, any specific train comes much more rarely, up to about every 20 minutes for the A train I linked above. This matters if you can't afford to live in Manhattan, or even if you live far away: for about a year, I commuted regularly from 181st St. to Fulton St. on the A, and you better damn well believe I had a specific train I wanted for that trip.

But even for those who don't, if the train gets too far off schedule, you start getting delays, because the trains cannot handle the throughput. Maybe for those commuting within the Midtown area, you know that a train will come every 3-5 minutes, but if the train that would normally take you is still 15 minutes away, then you've got at least a 12 minute backup of extra people who are going to be on that platform. Not only does that mean you won't manage to get your normal train (because you won't be able to reach the platform); it also compounds, since it'll cause people to enter and exit the trains more slowly. There are also many times when trains join or split from sharing the same track, and scheduling delays can change a smooth swapping of a switch back and forth to a traffic jam as controllers try to figure out whether it matters more to give the E or F priority on such-and-such a segment given that the nearest D and C trains are in such-and-such a place. You get this same kind of thing on your compute with disk seeks: it may not seem like a big deal if a read request shows up a millisecond late due to bus contention, but if it means that the drive head has just moved past the data you want, you're gonna have a long delay while it sweeps back, and that in turn may mean that other requests get delayed and so on.

So: yes, the schedule matters even if you don't know the schedule; but it still causes problems even if you want to think of it purely as "bandwidth."

And in my experience there is no cell service when you’re in the tunnels, so you can’t even let your work know there’s a problem.

Step 1: a train gets delayed for a minute somewhere on the line. A dozen common reasons exist- someone becomes ill, mechanical issue, debris on the tracks, etc.

Step 2: Because it's rush hour, there's minimal buffer time between trains so the train behind it must also stop (and the one behind it, and the one behind it, etc). Even a 60 second delay of one train can back up the whole line.

Step 3: Because a train is late, there's more people trying to get on and off, which makes it take more time per station. As well, with more people per train, there's more human-related delays per train. The additional delays mean "go to 1".

With large enough buffers between trains, the system is stable- the problems get smoothed out. With small buffers, like during rush hour, the system can get into a feedback-loop total system failure. A 30 minute trip becomes hours long.

Of course daily riders do and will forever complain. As someone who riders infrequently and is warned about impending doom, I find myself too often pleasantly surprised.

It's a reassuring signal that American democracy is working as intended: its results truly reflect our values.

But often the problems are structural and underfunding just erodes efficiency further.

Public transit doesn't get funded because it only works in dense urban areas and the wealthier folks drive anyway. European and Asian countries with the better public transit systems seem to be smaller geographically and connect cities to cities with federal funding. To illustrate we've got the Bos-Wash corridor connected via Amtrak but there would be backlash if we tried to fund a super awesome high speed rail there with federal funds because nobody else outside that area would benefit.

For comparison the size of Japan is basically our Eastern Seaboard or California and the UK would be the Northeast Corridor.

At least, that's how it works here in Washington State.

This only works for environments with one type of rolling stock only. It's not uncommon that you take a ride in a decades-old train (e.g. the oldest trains in the Munich subway hail from 1971, they are expected to run for essentially over 50 years!), switch lines at a station and end up in a train that rolled off the factory line 2 years ago. Each new train generation has, for example, different door widths, door positions, even the number of doors per wagon can change.

I think about this a lot. I know what it means when the AC is rerouted along the F to West 4th and can plan accordingly. How the hell is a tourist supposed to figure out how to get to Fulton?