How 2 M.T.A. Decisions Pushed the Subway into Crisis
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Overreaction to safety incidents and inability to do cost-benefit analysis cripple American transit systems. DC's Metro, for example, was designed for trains to be driven automatically ("ATO"). In fact, they operated in automatic mode for decades, since the system was built in the 1970s. But in 2009, after nine people were killed in a collision, the system was disabled, and will remain disabled indefinitely.[1]
The result of disabling ATO is that what was previously a very smoothly running system has become a disaster, with human operators lurching into stations, then lurching some more to place the train correctly relative to the platform. Almost a million riders inconvenienced every day for a decade, just to avert recurrence of an incident that resulted in a handful of deaths in 30 years of operation.
[1] https://ggwash.org/view/62992/metro-kicks-the-automatic-trai....
Nothing to do with a union, but keep trying to shoe horn that in.
As alluded to in the article, the TWU has been fighting very aggressively against the reforms for most of the issues documented in this article.
Safety is already worse in NYC than other areas.
It all hinges on if the safety concerns are valid.
You're actually going to accept the reasoning they give uncritically and at face value?
Of course they'll frame nearly everything in rhetoric of safety, because politically that's the equivalent "but think of the kids".
Of course, when you actually look at it, it's obvious that the TWU has spent the last several decades fighting actual safety improvements (including those that are SOP at the other Big Four systems), because their only interest is in protecting their members' jobs.
As linked elsewhere in this article, if the MTA tries to introduce newer and safer machinery, the TWU actually extracts a "technological advancement" fee to compensate them for the missed job opportunities, in an attempt to disincentive them from adopting new technology.
The TWU is literally putting passengers' lives at risk because their only goal is to extract as much money as possible from the MTA, and they don't actually care about the end state of the subway system.
That question should be directed at you. It should be obvious this is a nuanced and complex issue.
Why would anyone trust an internet-rando and a single article?
You accept what appears to be a one-sided view. Do you believe that should increase or decrease your trustworthiness?
I'd like to know what's actually wrong in NYC so I can prevent the same in my own city.
I don't know where you get "one-sided" out of any of this. I responded to a claim that the problems in this article have nothing to do with unions, pointing out that the union for MTA workers has been the main driving force against solving the problems described in the article. Between the information in the article, the other information linked elsewhere in the comments here, and some basic Googling, that's all pretty easy to verify.
If anything is "one-sided", it's the original claim that I refuted.
> I'd like to know what's actually wrong in NYC so I can prevent the same in my own city.
Rampant corruption. The TWU isn't the only source of that corruption, but it's foolish to pretend they're not a significant part of it.
Instead of blindly speculating on what could be true, when you've already said that you're not familiar with the topic, how about doing your research on the facts and learning why this is what's actually true.
You started off with a claim that was directly debunked by actually reading the article. Then you pivoted to speculating (but not substantiating) the existence of information that could hypothetically make your original statement a little less incorrect.
At this point, the only foolish thing is pretending that you're contributing to the discussion in any meaningful way.
You can't expect the development and deployment of efficient automation in an environment where it's impossible to fire the existing human operators. Or where firing them would be just as expensive as keeping them around doing nothing useful.
OP complained about a driver slowing down and speeding up. TFA explained it. There's no magic.
Your viewpoint is staunch, one-sided, and brought no new information. That point of view sounds questionable.
If MTA were a private company, it would have gone bankrupt long ago. But we accept that public services should sometimes be subsidized at the public expense. That subsidy should go toward making the service cheaper and more available to the public. But public sector unions capture some of that subsidy to get higher pay and benefits for public sector workers than those workers would get in a private company.
One of those times the doors smashed into a person walking out on crutches.
In case anyone thinks this is a joke, it's not. The MTA pays the Transit Workers Union massive sums of money when they use technology they use which does a job otherwise performed by a human, even when it's been standard practice worldwide to automate that job for decades.
One example, from tunnel boring:
> The critics pointed to several unusual provisions in the labor agreements. One part of Local 147’s deal entitles the union to $450,000 for each tunnel-boring machine used. That is to make up for job losses from “technological advancement,” even though the equipment has been standard for decades.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
The person in the middle's job seems to be operating the doors and making sure the train is berthed correctly, but all you have to do is put a line where the front of the train has to line up and the driver can do it. As for the doors, it's not like the driver has much else to do when in the station.
Because the TWU penalizes the MTA financially for technological advancement. They are incredibly powerful, mostly because neither the MTA nor the state government which oversees the MTA bother to keep costs in check.
There's no reason the L couldn't be completely automated, with zero employees per train. As described elsewhere in the thread, the person operating the train doesn't actually have to do anything at the moment; the entire process is already automated.
There's also this weird thing where, while the train is sitting there waiting to return the opposite way back to Brooklyn, they close all the subway doors except one in each carriage. It doesn't prevent people from getting on.
I won't go into details, but if the conductor wants to exit
the train and leave the doors open at the terminal, he needs
to walk to the next car at the last stop in order to open
the doors, which is why there's a short delay before they
open. If the doors open immediately at the last stop, then
it means the train is either going to go to the yard, or the
crew is going to manually key open one door per car (which
is only done if the train is going to sit there for at least
10 minutes, and helps the air comfort system).
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kx5fa/iama_new_york_c...
I think it's funny that the train's computer knows it's the last stop and announces that fact to the passengers... but the conductor has to manually override some sort of system before he or she can exit the train.
My understanding is that it's to keep the subway cars relatively climate-controlled. Especially in the summer, it's better not to let all the cool air from the AC leak out the open doors.
I keep wondering how many wasted man-hours this adds up to over the course of a day — especially on a line that's running at capacity, so if one train is 4 seconds later then the next train will be 8 seconds later and so on.
(The same seems to be true of elevators.)
Say what?
The only places in the EU that have public transportation on a scale comparable to NYC are London and Paris. I haven't ridden in Paris in a while, but in London, you absolutely do see cars that are overcrowded with people leaning against the doors.
I personally don't understand why it's done... but it is, and it seems common enough that if they were going to get sued they would have gotten sued.
Maybe Canada is a lot different than the US, though.
Montreal is just different than anywhere on the planet.
No, this must only happen with older rolling stock. Newer rolling stock both from European and Asian manufacturers operates like your "American" example
The solution to this is called "Pater noster". Just kidding....
Disclaimer: I design and deliver such systems.
It plagues software literally everywhere. We need to stop!
Every gas pump, payment terminal, elevator door is a testament to poor implementations of event driven state machinery...
</rant>
Fun fact: some operators around the world refuse to use computer-based systems for some applications because of that, and they are getting a strong support now because of cyber security threats. A relay is hard to hack :D
Disclaimer: I realize such studies :O)
We've easily lost another 3000+ people on the roads since 9/11, simply because the professional pearl-clutchers have made it such a pain in the ass to fly anywhere.
Also, it's incorrect to say that we could have used decades of problem-free operation to extrapolate and predict a low risk of similar accidents in the coming decades. The 2009 crash was caused by an aging system, and unless your solution involved replacing all the switches/sensors, we would have seen new failures at a more frequent rate.
Finally, the 2009 accident highlighted an inherent problem with the old system: putting a human operator in a train who is only responsible for acting in an emergency will not work. Just like the recent self-driving car fatality. It wasn't a case where we knew and should have accepted the risk, it was a case where the crash caused us to understand that the prior risk assessment was wrong (because it assumed that a human operator could prevent these kinds of accidents, when that's just not going to happen). So it was appropriate to change operations.
DOT estimates the cost of a human life at about $6 million. Times 9 is $54 million. Let's say such an event happens once every 10 years, so $5.4 million per year. The D.C. metro has 180 million rides per year. That works out to 3 cents per ride. Do you think people would pay 3 cents for a smoother, ATO-controlled Metro ride? I bet they would. (That's not even counting all the delays caused be forgoing automated control.)
As to the switches and sensors--Metro already replaced the track circuits (per the NTSB's recommendation): https://wamu.org/story/17/04/06/metro-shelves-plans-bring-ba....
The situation changes completely at the level of the decision makers of countries and large cities work at. /Everything/ is a variant of the trolley problem and all resources could in theory be used to save a life. Not accepting a risk of death can do more harm than good and realistically infrastructure; it just obscures the cause and effect.
Eg, we'll never know if someone died because their doctor was late because a train operator made a mistake operating a train. The cause-effect chain is too convoluted. But statistically speaking, something like that will happen every so often. Deaths from inefficiency are just as bad as deaths from direct accident; and if the scale is large enough that they can reasonably be detected then they need to be considered too.
Obviously most of the time a high standard of safety is going to be best, but trains are a high-risk environment moving 100s people at speeds they were never meant to move. True perfection over 30 years is probably not a required standard. Great goal though.
I think the problem with your cost-benefit analysis is that you are using different methodologies to value the cost and the benefit. If you value the benefit of non-lurching trains by asking what people would pay, then you need to use a value for human life that asks what people would agree to receive to be killed--which I believe is much more than $6 million.
Conversely, if you are going to value a human life based on lost earnings/support to family/etc., or some other figure which might produce results in the ballpark of $6 million, then on the other side you need to consider only the lost earnings/hard economic costs of an annoying train ride, which are $0 -- there is no economic loss caused by lurching into a station.
Politicians continue to underfund WMATA, which means they can't assure safety using an automated system, so that have to use humans.
Edit: I should add: in the United States.
Something in that system must be configured to be resistant to superior technology. Cuz it couldn't be the humans, right?
“Train operators face steep penalties after a number of instances of tripping a signal, like losing vacation days or being forced into early retirement.”
That’s a recipe for exactly the problem they are seeing. Fix the signals. Fix the policy. It will fix the problem.
But I also suspect this whole thing is much more intentional than we are being led to believe — it’s actually intentional policies which have led to expected slowdowns in a jaded attempt to boost funding. The whole narrative around overcrowding has collapsed. The narrative around underfunding is also collapsing. But I’m not sure the other shoe (proof that this was a charade to increase funding) has dropped quite yet.
The union wants the trains to go slow so they can say they're fighting for policies that protect workers. The MTA wants signal enforced speed limits so they can say they're preventing crashes.
If we could just have an adult discussion about the damage of marginally (if at all) increased risk compared to the benefits of a more functional subway system this wouldn't be as big of a problem.
This isn't even a resources issue, changing policy is close to free.
Have you ever performed maintenance literally inches from a train going 40mph? The union has valid safety concerns for wanting trains to slow down in the vicinity of workers, and this particular safety measure only applies to late-night routes when they are performing maintenance on closed lines that share tracks with operating lines.
The problem is that the MTA introduced a number of other "safety" measures that did nothing to affect the safety of workers or employees, such as increasing the distance between cars or introducing speed-limiting signals, and these other measures apply 24-7.
Cops and tow truck drivers have more exposure to worse traffic going faster for less pay and nobody is in a hurry to bring back the national speed limit.
I'd take working on tracks over changing someone's tire on the side of the highway.
In my areas, they usually close a lane next to the accident in addition to the lane where the accident occurred. This is basically the exact same thing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Move_over_law#In_the_United_...
If it results in increased funding, for problems mistakenly blamed on overcrowding, that can result in more money for the union leadership, too.
The crux of the issue is that while operations are funded with a variety of dedicated resources, capital expenditures are not, and those include things like replacing tracks, signals, and trains. Most of the recent fare hikes, IIRC, would have been avoided if the State and City provided funding for these plans, but they don't, so the MTA issues debt, and these hikes are almost entirely just to keep up with debt interest.
It’s one thing to pay workers really well (especially when you include benefits on an accrual basis) but it’s another to pay really well and have terrible labor efficiency.
If the workers go the proper speed, the faulty signal will trip an emergency break. This actually threatens their jobs because they'll be blamed for tripping the e-brake as if the signals worked perfectly.
1. The management trusts the automation too much without proper checks or tests proving the automation is accurate. 2. These workers are still blamed, even after signals are known to be bad. 3. People, even in here, blame the workers (and the union) for the fault of the system's quality being garbage. 4. Workers try to preserve their jobs by just working around the problem and reducing productivity all-around.
As it stands now, the incentive is to not get "tripped", so people drive the trains well below the speed at which the signalling system will trip the train... doing anything else runs the risk of getting yelled at or worse, and nobody wants that, so they play it safe.
A computer can be programmed to take into account both concerns and drive the train at the exact speed to satisfy all the constraints of the signalling system. If a computer gets tripped for travelling through a block too quickly, a meeting is had and a fix is checked in. The software doesn't care if you're mad at it. You just fix it and move on. Humans are more fragile, and if you don't align the incentives correctly you will not get the right result.
Specifically, I thought it was amazing how it explained why if someone stops abruptly on a crowded highway, every subsequent driver will have to experience that pause, even hours later, so long as the highway maintains the same level of congestion.
You network folk will undoubtedly explain it better than me, but I think that's the correct gist of the idea?
eg if you have two lanes merging and the system is at capacity, then the "pressure" across the streamline increases and traffic slows down as a result. And when you have very little pressure (or diverging arterial roads) traffic tends to speed up.
Of course there is a secondary problem of "phantom" traffic jams where the system is not really slowing down due to traffic merging or anything, you just have spots where traffic is not flowing at all for no real reason (the optimal solution being that everyone puts their foot on the gas and accelerates together). I suppose the physical analogue might be cavitation or non-laminar/turbulent flow?
I can't find any academic references on this but it's always made intuitive sense to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_diagram_of_traffic...
I seem to remember a statistic that said, essentially, traffic waves propagate backwards at approximately 12mph. There are a set of circumstances where you can set up a "standing" wave of traffic where cars will have to tap their brakes at the same place for hours, for no reason.
- cheap and worse brakes appear to be the initial error beeing made
- lack of control over their signals and blaming the workers for it is not excusable. Also there must be some kind of cheap and reliable assistant that can calculate the maximum velocity and help the driver.
- badly organized maintenance is also not the workers fault.
NY politics in general and NYC politics (plus the confluence of labor) in particular is an arcane and dark art. There's always a vicious cycle where the various interests are very difficult to manage. Administering something as impactful, complex and expensive as MTA with the number stakeholders is a Sisyphean task.
Given that any change "could put workers at risk", it seems pretty clear that the union's are likely to be somewhat to blame.
Surely the train operators are not to blame for bad signals but why then is no one else at the MTA to blame? Are the workers that installed the signals not union members too? Are none of the MTA managers union members?
Managers are generally not allowed to unionized because they aren't covered by the federal law which protects that right; where they are unionized (which happens in some public sector areas) it's usually not in the same unions as their employees, for the reason you discuss.
Nevertheless "red zone" working (on an otherwise open line with no mechanical barrier or technological controls keeping you safe) is in widespread use in the UK's mainline railway and sure enough it's dangerous.
Although I'll agree that "safety" is the go to explanation for industrial disputes in these sectors, it is striking how often a dispute over "safety" is resolved through better pay or conditions of employment (which in principle you'd naïvely expect to never happen). From actual workers we see the usual human trend for convenience over safety. Red zone is easy to plan, easy to execute, paste in a generic execuse where the plan says to explain why you couldn't use a safer method and you're done. Until a team member dies or is badly injured and investigators read your paperwork.
I seem to recall a nasty London accident where a track worker was struck by a train after walking up a convenient slope to the track where they were working, thus bypassing all the signs on the official route telling them it was closed. They knew they weren't supposed to go that way, they just didn't expect the penalty for non-compliance to be death. People never do.
Contrary to the article saying "And there’s no easy fix", it seems like this would be a fairly easy fix?
However, if drivers all started going at the normal speed and regularly tripping broken signals, it would absolutely destroy the system. When a train's emergency brake is tripped, it takes tens of minutes to reset it and get the train going again. If that was happening at every faulty signal on a daily basis, the system would grind to a halt.
Really the only fix is dealing with the signals. But that's extremely difficult because they haven't been regularly maintained and are very old. Most of them use mechanical timing systems and other insane things that nobody has built parts for. There's no particular reason to believe that "changing them back" would go any better than the botched rollout of the initial change.
That is workers should be rewarded if they trip a system and after investigation it is proven the system was wrong. That worked just found a real bug and it needs to be fixed.
It's a very easy fix. The problem is that it's a very time-consuming and expensive fix to repair and/or replace all the signals. (Doing A doesn't accomplish much since the faulty signals will automatically slow down the trains anyway, and then impose an additional delay while the train's brakes are reset.)
There must be some period of time with low traffic - put a few managers and signal-guys in the train and rock the line at maybe +5% of regular advertised speed. Count where and how often the train stops. Fix that. Do that for all lines.
Honestly if that is the real problem that would probably take them a few weeks at most.
Perhaps they were working fine in the same configuration they were in for decades, but once they were touched to change the settings, they are just entirely unreliable. I dunno, but ancient mechanical parts can be like that.
I want a followup article explaining why it's so hard to fix the signals, the OP didn't really go into it, heh.
As far as I can tell, the London Underground only allows work on sub-surface and deep tracks when the line is completely shut down. Like, not just slowing down trains on the tracks either side of the work, but not running trains on any of the tracks full stop.
Airbags are equipped with acceleration sensors that have a very simple test: is the acceleration force greater than X? If so, deploy!
The point of the system is to have a system that is accurate enough to replace the current system, which neither of your solutions achieves.
But you've convinced me. A much better solution would just be a camera pointed at the speedometer.
From the above I can be close enough to how fast you were going. If you should be going 15mph and are doing 16 and slowing down - well that is in the margin of error and you are fine. If you should be going 15mph and are going 25 I'll know that.
The key to the above is margin of error. I don't need centimeter level accuracy, just enough that I can reconstruct if you were close to right or not.
On top of that, you're asking the MTA to buy hundreds of new devices and maintain those on top of the existing devices they don't have the capacity to maintain...
You misunderstand what I'm proposing. I'm not suggesting this system replace anything. I'm suggested a much cheaper system that just collects data to monitor the performance of the existing systems. The comments are full of suggestions that the existing e-brake system is causing drivers to go too slow because if the e-brake triggers the driver is in trouble even if the driver was going a safe speed and the e-brake was wrong. (It is a good thing that the existing e-brake fails in this way!) My proposal was a data source so we could know if the driver was really in the wrong, or the automated system. The proper response for the driver being in the wrong is very different from the e-brake being in the wrong, and that data seems to be missing.
I'm asking MTA to buy and maintain these devices on top of everything else because this is data they need anyway: a second source of data for reconstruction after the fact. Airplanes have a "black box" data recorder for much the same reason: nobody can predict everything that might go wrong. However if we have the right data after the fact we can at least make sure that particular failure never happens again. Airplanes a extremely safe because that data is analysed and acted on. MTA doesn't seem to have the data (though I will admit it is entirely possible they have it and are unwilling to look at it for whatever reason)
If it can't be stated in 120 characters or presented as an animation, you've lost a big part of your audience.
The graphical pieces build up to the one where you control both parameters simultaneously, and see how you can halve the throughput of the system by seemingly innocuous changes.
The whole point is that the cause of the slowdowns is not obvious because the effect of the changes is non-linear. Sure, you can take the author's word for it - but with the neat simulation, you don't have to. You can see the model in front of your eyes.