The answer is that they should improve the technology so that the system is safe and faster.
Many policy difficulties arise from unwillingness to trade-offs between "sacred" and non-"sacred" values. It's easy to say that just one life is worth an arbitrary amount of non-fatal inconvenience to an arbitrary number of people. It's the cheap, easy platitude anyone can summon in a meeting. It feels good to say. Simple. Strong. Righteous.
But the world doesn't work this way. Mere life does not, in fact, have infinite, overriding value. Infrastructure engineering is not a morality play. It's a complex set of trade-offs, some involving safety. In a big system like public transit, as crass as it might be to say explicitly, the optimal number of deaths is seldom zero. Safety and utility are not, as the moralists might insist, incommensurable. They in fact exist on the same plane, and to build things that are effective and efficient, we need to trade them off against each other. Failure to do so leads to cowardly paralysis.
In other words: yes, we absolutely should accept some statistical nonzero risk of injury to save time or money in the overwhelmingly common case, because these things matter.
I'm all for improving the technology, but in the meantime the math should absolutely be done, at least to ensure the temporary fix isn't worse than the problem.
Was a total piece of cake in 2020, of course %)
Also the “one extra death per century” measure seems to be derived via the method of rectal extrication, we don’t know how many deaths a schedule change might cause or prevent at all, and I bet the people working on the subway have, if anything, some idea with massive error bars.
I dunno the math seems basically impossible to do, I mean it would have to include things like “how to people, possibly irrationally, respond to deaths on the subway.”
Your point probably still holds though.
So you can still find that there is a speed risk tradeoff the minimizes death which is not the same as minimizing the train risk.
Worse for NY's problems is that in that decision people are probably using something like the 95-percentile trip time as the criteria: It doesn't help them if the train is fast on average since they need to schedule for the worst-likely case. The fact that the crews are playing roulette with an kafkaesque speed limiter system and risking disciplinary action should they anger it essentially guarantees that the times will be both slow and highly inconsistent.
Yes it can, and it's essential that we do it, because the alternative is a ruinous level of risk aversion.
People stop taking the subway when it takes too long. That not only increases traffic, it also saps the system of funding.
You make this trade off every day without admitting it in such stark terms.
Every time you drive, bike, or fly to a destination you’re choosing speed at an increased risk of injury or death.
Only moderately risk adverse.
Unless you'd approve of all roads having a 15-20mph speed limit? Because that's the natural conclusion of prioritizing accidents much higher than speed. And I'm not being hyperbolic or using a slippery slope argument. I'm saying that you have to admit a tradeoff to get any kind of sensible result.
I hope you’re campaigning for a nationwide speed limit for automobiles of 20mph. It is good for the bureaucracy to be risk averse with loves after all.
Notably the lives OP was talking about included his own. I think that matters quite a bit. Risking your own life for better speed is a different ballgame than deciding the risk other people run is fine.
Disasters are Black Swan Events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory in Talebsbook he explains (ok it's a theory) that rare events happen commonly.
See also Terry Pratchet "one in a million chances happen nine times out of ten"