In the 1970s, NYC Dabbled in Carpeted Subway Trains | Hacker News Reader

In the 1970s, NYC Dabbled in Carpeted Subway Trains

gothamist.com

46 pointsHooke56 comments

All London Underground lines have cushioned, upholstered seats. You can even tell which line you’re on because each line has a unique fabric pattern known as a “moquette”:

https://londonist.com/london/transport/all-the-tube-moquette...

(The fabric does wear out eventually, but it seems relatively cheap and easy to replace. It’s rare to see a dirty or overly worn out seat)

Commuter trains into London often have carpeted floors, too, depending on the operator and type of train. It does make for a quieter, more civilised experience!

The Red Line in Boston has fabric seats too... they're great for soaking up homeless people's piss.

Yeah the red line in Chicago used to have fabric seats too.

There was one day someone had put ... some kind of liquid in every window seat. Every single stop people would get on the train, see the open seats and every one of us in an aisle seat would have to explain the story again. Sometimes you do gotta laugh

CTA still mostly has fabric seats on its train lines and nearly all busses. They started testing fully hard seats a few years back but people complained about sliding around, so they're moving to a hard seat and a fabric back these days to give people at least a little bit of a grip.

The question you need to ask is, why are Boston's homeless urinating on Subway trains? Why don't they piss on the street like Londoners do?

Gets cold in winter

They are still fairly dirty. The pattern just hides it well: https://youtu.be/giU81hhoBYg

> each line has a unique fabric

The article you linked explicitly disproves that. There are 15 lines but only 10 distinct fabrics.

Well, OK. But the rolling stock on those lines is (in some cases) shared between the lines. The same train could end up operating the Circle, District, or Hammersmith & City lines. Parts of the track are also shared between those same lines, so I guess TfL wanted some consistency.

In my personal ideal world, this would be a great idea! Passengers on best behavior, no food/drink, no being drunk/high on the train, obviously no urination/defecation except in restrooms, etc. And if you do make a mess, be responsible by paying for the cleaning. But of course many people are far from my ideal, so we can't have things like this.

An idealized world such as that pretty much comes to a crashing end in any medium to large sized company when you experience what pigs you coworkers can be in regards to employee break rooms and even rest rooms.

From messes in share refrigerators, microwaves, or counter space, to restrooms issues that make you wonder how often the maintenance people service it each day and when. I am not sure if this is just a US thing but I used to expect better from coworkers.

I guess it's just about the virtue of integrity.

Even casual house parties attract integrity-less people who will destroy your carpet by bringing food into carpeted rooms and then trampling it over without seemingly noticing. That's why it's good for every human on the planet to have experience with cleaning various things, so they know how much work it is when they make a mess.

Such a subway already exists, in the capital of North Korea!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hxVWjW4TuM

I would be happy if municipalities simply cleaned and maintained public spaces like subways. It's possible, but it's a boiling the ocean problem. Homelessness, mental illness, vicious youth, all in a context of ever-decreasing public infrastructure investment and bitter inequality of resources and opportunity-- it doesn't help make for a clean subway system.

Yes, it requires polite, clean, courteous people -- like in Japan. It is possible, but it depends on the culture.

I remember the u-bahn in Munich being like this when I visited in 2006-ish. Stations were large, clean, and efficient since ticketing is on an honor system. You just walk down to a platform and board the first train. Trains were clean, relatively comfortable, and quiet. It was an excellent experience the few dozen times I rode it.

Personal ideal world in which everyone has pristine shoes too. It's already a struggle to keep carpets clean in individual houses after a few years, I can't even imagine in a subway.

I still do not understand how anyone wears shoes while in their (or anyone's) home.

Ah yes, after years of trying to convince drunk people to stop getting in their cars and driving home let's now kick them off of public transit.

In truth, drunk people need to be at home and not in public. Public drunkenness is the violation, compounded by driving. Adding public transit is not at all unreasonable.

Nobody has the 'right' to be a slobbering mess-making drunk in public. At all.

Yes,

Ignoring that trying to convince the entirety of society to never drink again at social gatherings (even in your "drunk at home" ideal unless people exclusively drink alone and never at other people's homes they will still need a way to get home) is a complete non-starter based on the last 9,000-odd years of human society and interaction.

Ignoring that removing all public consumption of alcohol from bars, restaurants, sports events, and basically everywhere else would have a huge knock-on effects for all sorts of areas of the economy.

Ignoring that many people are able to drink the 2-3 beer that makes it illegal for them to drive without becoming a "slobbering mess-making drunk".

Ignoring all the thousand other anti-social things people do on transit and in public that makes life miserable most places.

Your idea makes sense and will solve your annoyance without thousands of people dying every year.

Strawman. Jumping straight from 'don't be a slobbering drunk in public' to 'never drink again at social gatherings' is the usual alcoholic response to any suggestion that they may be doing anything wrong.

It's disingenuous to attack me - after all the 'public drunkenness' violation was voted into law, and not just by me personally.

In Nevada there is basically a constitutional right to be drunk in public. The state constitution bans local municipalities from enacting laws against public drunkenness. Up for argument as to whether that is a good idea or not but interesting nonetheless.

If you think my comment implies that drunk people should be banned from public transit, you are very wrong. My comment is about an ideal world where everyone has virtues, not about regulation in an imperfect world.

This is around the time the Washington DC Metro launched and they launched with carpeted cars. They stuck with carpets for decades and only in the past few years with the newest cars did they go to hard floors. The old carpets would get nasty and they would replace them with new carpets of a different color, leading to a sickly blend of 1970s brown seats and 2000s grey or red carpet.

A lot of trains still have carpeted floors in dc.

Yes, but it's less than half the active rolling stock. 538 vs 648 of the 7000 series, and and there are still 100 more 7000 series cars yet to arrive, which will lead to more retirement of the older cars. Once the 8000 series starts arriving in 2024, the end of carpeted trains (which will by then be...I dunno, less than a third of the cars?) will be very near.

Numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Metro_rolling_stock

Update: They have actually received all of the 7000 series cars, and it's 60% of the fleet.

https://wamu.org/story/20/02/27/metro-just-received-the-last...

Unimaginable as this may be, there are trains in Japan sporting green velour seating and wood(?) paneling. They are pristine and glorious-- a far cry from the hard plastics and vinyl we've come accustomed elsewhere to see as appropriate for public transit.

The London underground has fabric seats. I wouldn't call the Tube pristine, but I appreciate not having plastic seats.

I think most trains around the world have carpet - just city subways are the exception.

Curious thing:

Living vicariously through images - the regional rail around New York City, known as Metro North Railroad, uses what appears to be pretty thick vinyl on its trains, whereas CalTrans in Southern California uses cloth.

Wonder why a given material was chosen.

It never rains in Southern California?

London uses cloth and it rains a lot there. These trains have roofs.

Obviously this was a general trend at the time; honestly, once you've taken up a seemingly spotless carpet once you'll never want to own carpeting again.

The transit museum in Brooklyn is really eye opening for this; on the bottom floor you can walk through trains going back to the start of the private Subway system(s).

There have been a lot of mystifying design decisions through the years. The earliest ones had wicker, leather and wood and seem more spacious than today's trains.

This is why dogfooding is important. Any designer who thought upholstered surfaces in a public transit railcar was a good idea was someone who probably didn't regularly use public transit. On the other hand, you have to appreciate the designers for trying to improve the public transportation experience for the users. There seems to be very little innovation in passenger compartment design, and it might be fruitful to explore new designs.

> "The interior sound level of a SOAC train is as quiet as the interior of a modern office building"

Well - we managed to make the interior of office buildings louder by an order of magnitude since then...

DC metro has always had carpet. I think they're getting rid of it these days. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/the...

The newest cars aren't carpeted, but the WMATA is still maintaining the food/beverage ban.

London tube has carpeted seats, and while they do wear the experience is perfectly nice.

The iconic patterns are even available as merch:

https://www.ltmuseumshop.co.uk/

MARTA in Atlanta had carpeted subway cars for decades. We all celebrated when the last one of those cars were taken out of service in favor of hard surface flooring. The carpet absorbed urine so it always smelled that way in all of the cars. Summers, which are hot, humid, and lasts for nine months, were especially bad. MARTA also had padded seats in the early years but they were replaced after a couple of years due to the high vandalism rates. You can see what MARTA trains looked like when new if you watch the deleted scenes from 'Escape from New York' on YouTube.

It’s also probably much easier to hose things down when the surface is not hydrophilic nor do you have to wait as long for it to dry off.

The Chicago El cars have a hard floor with channels that run lengthwise down the car that conveniently channel urine through the entire length of the car down the center aisle. Probably makes it easier to hose it out the back of the car later on.

The trains serving London are carpeted, and it's not an issue.

Possibly the underground is used by a wider range of classes.

I bumped into John Bercow (Speaker) last year getting off the tube at Westminster not sure senior Politicians ride the subway to work.

BART, the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit had cushioned, cloth covered seats and carpet for decades until only a few years ago.

And we all know how that turned out...

Yeah, that was really gross. On the brighter side - random liquids got absorbed in place, rather than flowing all around the floor like they do now ;-). I suspect someone at BART is a vintage guitar buff, the grillecloth over ceiling speaker panels looks like it's from a '50s or '60s Fender tube guitar amp.

To be quite honest, carpeted anything (other than a living room) makes me think of the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The Washington, DC metro still has many cars with carpets. They're pretty disgusting, but probably not quite as disgusting as you might think.

I was hoping to read about that classic 70s shag carpet.

This is such a laughably, obviously bad idea that it's hard to credit it to anyone who's taken so much as a single subway ride. Even for modern NYC but especially for 1970's NYC.... I mean, damn...

It's striking how something that's mundane in many parts of the world -- I'm talking Europe here, not just in stereotypically civilized Japan -- is considered by many to be a laughably bad idea in NYC. Maybe you should consider getting to the root causes that prevent you from having such extravagant luxuries...

The root cause is a city filled with disparate cultures. Where as other have a strict adherence to their native norms, our native norm is that we don't have native norms beyond surviving. The city is transient by nature, by the hour even with a commuting population of something like 8 million people.

So...what's easier to change? Culture, or carpet?

Sure. Multiculturalism and the melting pot is the root cause. Not homelessness, drug addiction, income disparity, access to (mental) health care.

Explain London then.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com