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Comment by chrisfinazzo | Hacker News Reader

If you're up for an additional dose of stupidity, consider the fact that London shuts down the Underground completely (with a few exceptions) every single night for maintenance and repairs. Every inch is inspected each 48 hours.

Why the MTA can't do this kills me and partially explains why people screamed bloody murder about a complete shutdown. The signaling system alone is held together by the equivalent of tape and chewing gum.

https://ny.curbed.com/2018/3/29/17176200/new-york-subway-sig...

If I was in his shoes I would have just said, "Either deal with the loss of the L line, or agree to tolerate a less than 24/7/365 operating schedule." Alas, the L is the only line I know of which uses PTC, which is designed to alleviate some of these issues.

There is no third option.

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If you're up for an additional dose of stupidity, consider the fact that London shuts down the Underground completely (with a few exceptions) every single night for maintenance and repairs. Every inch is inspected each 48 hours.

It's bloody murder, as you say, to turn NYC, whose delis/bodegas, restaurants and bars stay open until 12, 2, 4 am, all night, into London, where most bars end at 11pm, and restaurants much earlier. Part of that is cultural and part of that is that service staff can't necessarily afford Uber (which was banned too, wasn't it), or taxis, which cost a fortune. Yes, the night bus, that IS something London has that NY doesn't (the buses in NYC are atrocious).

NYC would be a different city if they shut down subways at midnight. The existing maintenance is already a nightmare (and an alphabet soup of outage notices).

I agree that we shouldn't make the tradeoff that London does. I'm a NY lifer and being out in London past 10pm makes me feel like I'm skulking around in a period drama.

But bus rapid transit is real and many of the people who make this city run (my dad for many years drove a cab he picked up from a garage in LIC) already depend on buses for their last mile commute. It is entirely possible to do five years or a decade of overnight subway shutdowns with BRT supported by real enforcement and protected lanes while preserving the city's culture.

To people who want to make the case for buses and cabs, I have one question, how is this actually better?

By definition, it's still considered public transit, but you are subject to the same traffic patterns and congestion as private cars (admittedly, an additional expense).

Subways and Light Rail avoid this mess entirely. Not that there aren't still problems (Signals, PTC v Permissive Blocks, etc.) but you're much less likely to be stuck somewhere for long periods of time not moving.

MTA runs 24 hours. Lots of people take it at night. I do all the time. Shutting it down at night would be an incredible inconvenience.

You can avoid traffic at night so driving / busses are more viable replacements.

24/7 operation means higher costs and more random failures.

Driving is not a viable replacement in NYC. You would need a car. Most people don't have 'em, and even though traffic might be light there's still nowhere to park 'em.

I was more thinking Taxi / Lyft than just a personal car. That covers occasionally being out late, working the night shift means you can take the subway one way and just take a bus back.

Taxi/Lyft are waaay more expensive than the subway. Unlimited subway/bus is $116.50 per month. Taxi/Lyft could easily be $50/day or more depending on how far out you live. This is not a viable alternative for most people.

Sure, if your doing this daily the bus is a much better option. Without a running subway you would expect relatively increased bus service.

But, for the occasional trip the cost benifit tradeoff of the city saving vast mounts of money and reduced delays is worth a few people being inconvenienced.

The point is that this is a daily commute for many people, not just the occasional trip. NYC is a 24/7 city and there are substantial night shifts at all sorts of different businesses, very few of which are making enough money to swing a daily hired car.

At which point a bus is a 100% viable option.

Too bad they can't cross water on their own (you know, Manhattan being an island and all that).

> can’t cross water on their own,

Ahh, did not realize you where trolling about a world without bridges. I mean wtf dude, the inefficiency from running a 24/7 subway reduces the city's ability to afford more bridges.

Manhattan has plenty of train tunnel river crossings with no nearby automobile crossing. Go look at a map.

"reduces the city's ability to afford more bridges"

Further, Manhattan is just not that big. Nowhere is very far from anywhere else when you step aside from the horrid congestion.

Have you ever lived in NYC? This is just plainly wrong.

Where can I get that rate? My 30-day pass is $121.

i think its because they are correcting for the commuter tax deduction. ask your HR folks about https://www1.nyc.gov/site/dca/about/commuter-benefits-law.pa...

Nope, just out of date. $116.50 was the price prior to the increase to $121.

The commuter tax deduction lets you buy the cards with pre-tax money deducted from your paycheck, which is a substantial reduction up to 45% or so depending on your marginal tax rate. Of course, because it's using pre-tax money, it's giving a bigger discount to higher earners, which makes it the opposite of progressive, which seems opposite of what's intended.

Separately, seniors/disabled people pay half fare: http://web.mta.info/nyct/fare/rfindex.htm

Turns out the monthly price was raised from $116.50 to $121 in 2017, so I'm guessing you moved here since then. I'll confess that I don't buy the monthly passes because I bike to work every day, and thus don't take subway nearly often enough to recoup the monthly costs.

There is a surprising amount of street traffic at night in much of the city.

Driving and busses are absolutely not a viable replacement for the subway in NYC, at anytime of day.

It shouldn't be a big deal to bring in a few buses to run those routes at night. Just shut down one line at a time - or whatever you want to work on. Ideally you time the traffic lights so those buses always have green and so the times are not slower.

BART gets shut down every night for maintenance inspection, everyone complains about how you can't ride BART at night.

You can't win.

The winning condition isn't to get zero complaints.

NYC has been shutting down particular lines for maintenance on nights and weekends (as needed) as a regular thing over the past few years. (And while I can't speak for London, the US systems that take night-time breaks hardly use them to inspect every inch every night -- they include DC, where negligence has been chronic enough that partial shutdowns to deal with it are stretching into weekdays.)

Because it was done on an 'as needed' basis, the distinction I would make is that these shutdowns (IIRC) were to deal with acute issues. A more regularized schedule, where shutdowns are part of normal operation and are documented well in advance might lead to a situation where problems (like those on the L) are less frequent to begin with.

The MTA doesn’t do this because people actually depend on the subway at night.

Getting around London after the underground is shut is incredibly inconvenient, and even they have been moving the most important trains to all-night service.

Yes, but maybe convenience has to suffer? What (for example) if a monthly shutdown happened? Is there any model of regular maintenance outage you could "countenance" instead of just saying "but that is inconvenient so it shouldn't happen"?

What if it was done one line at a time weekly?

Seriously: do you think there is no model worth exploring here?

Yes, but maybe convenience has to suffer?

So, no buttered roll for you on the way to work in the morning because the bakery staff couldn't get to work at night.

The bodega on the corner is closed anyway because the morning people have to do the stock because it the overnight staff couldn't get in.

Garbage trucks block your way because the garbagemen couldn't get to work overnight.

There's no morning news because the thousands of people behind the scenes couldn't get to work over night.

The cleaning crew in your office vacuums while you're on the phone because they couldn't get to work at night.

There are hundreds of thousands of people who work overnight in New York City. Nine-to-five stopped happening in New York in the late 1700's.

And yet people live in London and Paris and lots of other cities without 24h tubes 365. Seriously: you cannot conceive of a night service using buses? That's how Melbourne works around tram and train failures.

Your examples are not convincing.

You do realize that the L was closed every weeknight (22:45 to 05:00) as well every weekend, from circa Oct 15 through Nov 30 last year [1]? And yet people got their bread and newspapers, and the world did not go under. Comments like yours are hysterical hyperbole.

For the record, the JMZ are running close enough to the L that, while an inconvenience, for many people in the Williamsburg/Bushwick/Ridgewood area, it is a viable alternative. The L isn't everything.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.gothamist.com/amp/articles/...

Politicians are rarely if ever rewarded for thinking long-term. (note that this often applies to corporate executives too)

The L train is frequently shut down at night and weekends for maintenance.

That's not what people are screaming about. Shutting down the L train for 5 hours, like the London underground, happens often and is OK. Shutting down the L train for 15 months is a completely different situation.

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