Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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> One local figure spoke to Metro general manager Paul Wiedefeld and urged him to make sure Amazon got to ride on one of its newest, 7000-Series trains. Wiedefeld, who says he can’t recall whether the official was from Virginia, Maryland, or the District, responded by explaining that public transportation doesn’t work that way.

Wiedefeld, incidentally, is a total bad-ass. He was hired at the end of 2015. In 2017, the first year they started measuring end-to-end travel time, on-time performance was a dismal 66%. In Q2 of 2019, it was 87%. In 2016, he shut down the entire system for days, and entire lines for weeks at a time, for emergency repairs. He's steam-rolled over NIMBYs, dramatically shutting down entire stations all summer so crumbling platforms can be completely rebuilt: https://ggwash.org/view/72561/metro-reasons-loud-yellow-and-.... (Accomplishing in three months what took years of delays and disruptions during prior, partial shut-downs.) He's brought the hammer down on the WMATA union, controlling costs and resisting calls to overtax the system by extending service: https://wamu.org/story/17/04/27/transit-union-turns-back-met...; https://www.bizjournals.com/washington/news/2018/09/18/metro...; https://wamu.org/story/16/11/03/wmata_board_struggles_to_rea.... Not all heroes wear capes.

The linked article paints a slightly less heroic picture of someone who used a loophole in the ordinances to allow construction crews to jackhammer after 10PM in the residential areas and got away with it. So while families with small children were kept up in the long hours of the night, the loopholing hero was enjoying his quiet 9 hours of Zzzs.

All hypothetical of course, I am not from the area.

here's the paragraph describing the loophole:

""" “The parking areas, all the travel areas…the pedestrian walkways…that’s all considered inside the station,” Kirst added, explaining what the noise waiver granted to Metro covers. Crews working in those areas aren’t allowed to perform “excavation, demolition, saw cutting, and jack hammering” between 10 pm-6 am on Sunday through Thursdays, and 10 pm-8 am on Friday and Saturday. Those restrictions don’t apply to the tracks outside the stations, however. """

One of the reasons America can't build infrastructure is that we elevate the temporary inconvenience of a few "families with small children" over the long-term good for hundreds of thousands of people in the region. It's also the underlying basis for the myriad ways in which we let individuals and special interest groups sue to stop development that benefits everyone.

yes, this state of affairs where you can buy a property and then expect to not be inconvenienced by corporations or governments in a myriad ways and then to sue if your peace is threatened is called 'civilization'.

it seems that what you imagine is a 'temporary inconvenience of a few families'. what I imagine is a world where every day there is a new 'temporary inconvenience' which you are supposed to endure 'for the good of the many', over and over again -- because that is what will happen when 'heroes' like the one in the article are allowed to run amok.

It really depends what "few" means.

A benevolent dictator would do a nationwide cost-benefit analysis, and decide if 30 families having no sleep for a week outweighs 100,000 people getting to work 10 minutes faster for the next decade.

While sometimes our existing legal system makes the same choice as our fictional benevolent dictator, sometimes it doesn't because rather than looking at the big picture, it gets tied up with nuances of wording of ordinances and precident written decades earlier without knowledge of the current situation.

Whenever that happens, on average, people's lives get worse and the economy weaker, compared to an identical country which made the benevolent dictator choice.

Or the dictator could put them up in a hotel for that week.

Yes, because the suburbs are always a good option for families who aren't into the whole collective living thing.

And it makes sense. When you have a kid, that kid is your priority. There's less incentice to be willing to sacrifice for others who aren't your genetic progeny.

Full disclosure, I personally think having a kid is the single most selfish act a human can do. I don't mind it obviously, but do observe that it's amazing when other people expect me to prefer their offsprings' benefit over anything else.

No, you're already looking out for them. I think it makes sense to treat them like any other human, since that's all they are to me.

that's kind of not how kids were raised for the length of civilization before 1945

Being able to sleep properly is a health issue. I've had jackhammers outside my window at 6 am. It sucks.

If you can afford to live within jackhammer distance of a metro, you can afford earplugs

you ever tried convincing a scared crying 3 year old to put in an earplug?

I'm sure closing the windows, and putting on their favorite video, will work well enough to drown out the noise of the jackhammer. I lived a block from Caltrain for a few years and the loud whistles of the passing trains were a minor annoyance at best.

Screen time for children? This is hacker news -the collective groupthink will eat you alive for that suggestion /s

OK, have them listen to Mozart or whatever bourgeois parents these days think will turn their kids into geniuses :)

Won't some body think of the children?!

Wearing earplugs regularly isn't a solution, it's a sound bite and you know it. Just say you think peace doesn't actually matter.

> used a loophole in the ordinances

How can something that is standard in the ordinances of multiple districts (and is pretty common nationwide) be considered a loophole? It is pretty intentional that this work is exempt.

Not hypothetical. A dear friend of mine lives next to a Metro station and just recently complained that jackhammering was still going on at 11:30 PM for several nights in a row.

Outside the USA, I live near a subway line, and every single night for the last 10 years I hear hammering and yelling.

The subway needs disassembly to check it isn't worn out yet, which involves big sledgehammers to dislodge bits of track. Due to strict safety rules, they have to do that once per 10,000 wheels passing over the track, which is every day.

Does it reduce my quality of life? Yes. But not having the subway working efficiently and safely would have a much bigger impact, so is a cost I pay for a bigger benefit elsewhere.

I'm not trying to crap on Wiedefeld, but all he's doing is what every one knew/knows needs to be done, it's just that no one else before him would actually do it because it's a very tough pill to swallow. Turns out fixing things improves reliability, but he's had to inconvenience a lot of riders to get it. Some have switched from public transit completely.

The reality is that Metro still has a lot of work in front of it and still has to crawl back form decades of neglect and poor planning. Metro could operate at 100% reliability, but it still wouldn't offer sufficient travel options for a large majority of the area because it doesn't fit the commuting patterns of the area. Short of extending lines and adding new ones, there's only so much the metro in it's current incarnation can do.

> all he's doing is what every one knew/knows needs to be done,

That's not true at all. He's fighting through tremendous resistance from various factions. From unions seeking to insulate themselves from private-sector competition, http://www.fairfaxtimes.com/articles/metro-to-use-contractor..., to urbanists demanding that Metro offer massively money-losing late-night rides to support "active nightlife": https://ggwash.org/view/70172/metro-needs-late-night-service.... He's taking a bold course that elevates long-term sustainability over temporary inconvenience, and quality of the core offering over trying to cater to every want or need. Lots of people disagree whether that is what needs to be done.

He did not shut down the entire system for days. That was a single day.

tell that to anyone on the red line

Must suck for anyone who was trying to get to work while he was shutting down transportation for weeks.

> He's brought the hammer down on the WMATA union

Ahh, that hero crushing the working class.

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