Mexico’s subway drivers depend on WhatsApp to keep the trains running
restofworld.org
restofworld.org
Despite good connectivity, some drivers can’t afford
to stay online all the time, said Jaime. According to
Jimena, about 98% of the train operators on her line
use WhatsApp on the job, but some will often run out
of data, which they must pay for out-of-pocket.
Whatsapp is a readily available and an accessible solution... one that is better than current comms infrastructure. A local maximum
I used to know a marketing specialist in Mexico who lived there her whole life. Apparently 90% of advertising for cheap consumer goods is done on TV and radio. <10% on websites or streaming services, since many choose not to use them or can't afford subscriptions
Not to say that there aren't beautiful, well developed global cities with wonderful people and opportunities there. Guadalajara and Mexico City are great and growing. I see the country in a state very similar to late 1800s indusdrial America; high inequality, poor low-skill workers rights and pay with backlash occuring, large government backed infrastructure projects, fairly patriarchal buisness elite (and corruption within the "boys club"), fairly absent middle class relative to other countries. Moreso two classes. "Well off, global citizen" or "making ends meet, live in my town for my whole life or move where the work goes"
Relying on a phone app seems like an unstable solution, as when the next budget cut comes, it could include scrapping the company phones in the case they were provided. Or downgrading data plans that are so slow that latency is too high. Wouldn't be a problem until the next accident
Or, if workers are underpaid (low-skill, non corporate in Mexico), selling provided company phones on the 2nd hand market for cash could be fairly common... lying and saying they still have them
Unless if Mexico further lowers it's gini coefficient... something I'm very optimistic with (but over decades) OR provides rudimentary smart phones (or even dated tech like pagers) for work, to me this whatsapp method seems as an easy means for middle managers just to save on their spending budgets. Unless there is middle management buy-in to further develop its usage in a stable way, it seems like a piecemeal (yet effective and creative) solution by the workers due to infrastructure neglect
The 'proper' solution of new radios on the train and all the associated ground infrastructure installation cost could be really expensive (think millions of dollars). Yet just giving each driver a data plan would only cost thousands of dollars.
The whatsapp solution is so much cheaper because the infrastructure (4G towers) is already installed for passengers of the train, the network is already run for citizens of the country, and the software work is already done by Whatsapp for their other 1.1 Billion users.
Whatsapp isn't a 'cheap' solution. It's the very expensive solution where the cost has already been paid for by a billion other people, so, as long as it meets the needs of the subway, it is the cheap solution.
Those people might be right. But I'd like to point to the old solution, the radios in the trains, which are in the middle of a decade long outage right now. It's more reliable than that.
And this stuff isn't safety critical - in-cab radios are mostly used for logistics. Everything from scheduling shifts to getting trains to wait a few extra minutes to even out gaps in the service. Without it, the service wouldn't run so smoothly. But it could still run.
> Previously, each train could automatically identify its proximity to another one. “It is designed to stop so trains don’t collide,” said Pérez Varela. Now, human operators, who had initially been hired as a fail-safe to manually halt a train if the automatic pilot failed, need to intervene more often. Trains usually run at 70 kilometers per hour, but when the autopilot signals that it is not working, operators must take immediate action to manually reduce the speed to 35 kilometers per hour to avoid derailment. > > Since the trains are increasingly manually driven, real-time communication among operators is essential. “We are all provided with a radio but it doesn’t work properly,” Jaime, an operator who has worked at the Metro for 17 years, told Rest of World on condition of anonymity. “That’s why we started using our cellphones.”
That reads to me like they need communication to ensure they don't run into the rear of the train ahead.
FWIW, telco companies in Mexico don't charge for WhatsApp data transfer. As for prices, a 30 day Telcel 4.5GB plan is 200 pesos ($10) per month. So long as you don't use up the data doing things outside of WhatsApp, like surfing the web, which will expire the plan, then you get free WhatsApp (and Instagram and most social media) transfer for the month.
So it's not the worst organic solution and it's not even obvious how to centralize a better solution. For example, how many subway drivers are there and how much govt bureaucracy would be needed to do something like give everyone a $10 stipend for WhatsApp? Even giving each driver an extra $10 pesos per month wouldn't change anything.
The radios of those are outside. The radios of subway are underground. It's not great for radios, requires infrastructure, and phones solve it in same way, by having infrastructure close to cover for reduced range.
Then you upgrade? There's nothing that precludes that the bespoke system won't die and by the looks of it the current system has already died leading to the use of Whatsapp.
it wouldn't be that expensive to make your own app that sends and receives messages over 4g.
WhatsApp is consumer-grade software. Using it to manage a transport system is like using a $50 home-oriented manual espresso machine in a busy cafe instead of a proper commercial unit with automatic grinding, multiple nozzles, and a support agreement in place.
The reason its so good is how it handles edge cases. it brilliantly handles edge cases like when connection is extremely spotty. In 2015 when I was backpacking around Europe I learned this the hard way when iMessage repeatedly hit issues where it would get stuck transmitting mid message and would require drastic things like rebooting the iPhone (because that damn status bar gets stuck and then you have no recourse) whereas no matter how slow/spotty the connection (like 64kb/s or slower), Whatsapp would patiently work and reliably get the transmission through eventually.
In hindsight, I am thankful Zuckerberg had the sense to acquire them. He has so far done a lot less to destroy it than I expected. Can you imagine if they got acquired by some garbage dump of a company like Oracle, or Salesforce, or (shudders) Google? Just think of all the ways they would have ruined it.
It's a quick patch that potentially creates many more problems however, since the product isn't rated for that work and cannot guarantee any uptime. Also the touchscreen can be quite distracting and therefore dangerous. If the problem is that the communication infrastructure doesn't work reliably, but cellphone coverage does, the answer, aside restructuring the existing infrastructure, should be small 4G capable SBC boards with audio and text features, one per train, not a cellphone with WhatsApp.
Also data packages in Mexico are pretty cheap. For the equivalent of 10 dollars, you can buy enough to use whatsapp, web browsing and other social media as well as make phone calls to all of North America almost without limits for 30 days. If you're really short on cash, a package costing just 1 dollar buys you two days of the same services.
Most companies have customer facing WhatsApp numbers too.
That's intended use of Whatsapp. Article is about usage for critical infra.
My assumption was that Meta was lobbying companies to bundle free WhatsApp data to increase their user base, but I'm not finding any proof. Does anyone else have an explanation?
The reason some exchange / sponsorship seems likely is that there's no option without WhatsApp. If you're a carrier, a GB WhatsApp data is the same load on your system as a GB of Telegram data. What's the incentive to make the most popular part of your product free?
Source: https://healthservice.hse.ie/staff/procedures-guidelines/dig...
This is not a system the size of the US so there's no need for "dark territory" [1] - this is a metro system! Best practice would be to have some kind of block-based system where only one train can occupy a block at a time, and signals control this (if you've ever played factorio, you know what I mean).
It seems that what happened is they tried to implement an automatic "moving block" system where trains would keep each other safe, but when that fails, they're back to no block at all, and relying on WhatsApp for SAFETY-CRITICAL communication. There is only one way this can possibly end.
Europe has been trying to design moving block as part of ETCS "level 3" and it turns out that's really hard to do to the usual safety standards. The only place I know of that does this in production is the Wuppertal overhead monorail (which is worth a visit, by the way).
The alternative is follow Toronto and New York, and slow the trains down and require full exclusion. But that has its own problems reducing system capacity, which Mexico City can scarce afford.
Oooh Mexico Májico. The Mexico City Metro system is falling into pieces. There have been several terrible accidents in very recent times:
- Line 12 Overpass Collapse (3 May 2021 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_Metro_overpass_col... )
- Line 3 Collision (couple of days ago) https://www.npr.org/2023/01/07/1147728625/mexico-city-subway... )
- Line 5 Fire (couple of days ago https://www.infobae.com/america/mexico/2023/01/11/metro-cdmx...).
This is the result of years and years of corruption and lack of maintenance. Officers of EVERY level stealing money that is supposed to go for maintenance. Or "contracting" their cousins, friends and other co-conspirators to perform the maintenance, but in reality they keep the money and let the infrastructure to rot.
This would go something like an open letter to management and the public.
"Dear metro users and management,
On X date we will compile with the rules. We'll all stop using our phones. If our radios aren't working we're required to run the trains even slower to maintain safety. (Hopefully that's actually a rule.)
We understand this will effectively shutdown the metro, but it needs funding to operate safely. We cannot in good conscious continue endangering the lives of our passengers and ourselves."
The public will demand funding.
(sick burn ;) )
I hope the different chat services run by Meta don't share any critical infrastructure.
https://localtoday.news/wa/twitter-bans-the-metrobusinfo-acc...
What makes you think that dedicated infrastructure run by the train people would be less centralized or more reliable than that run by Facebook?
> What makes you think that dedicated infrastructure run by the train people would be less centralized or more reliable than that run by Facebook?
For one, it avoids all of the issues above. For two, it is much, much easier and cheaper to achieve enough nines for a couple thousand users than for a couple billion users. For three, they don't need to have the expertise to run it themselves in-house - they can subcontract it to someone who knows how to run internal systems like that. The third item does put a supplier risk into the chain, but you already had that with Facebook; and at least you can swap out the supplier if you don't like them.
:)
That's smart to have a parallel system, but not great that both systems are the same company! A major Facebook outage would take down both systems at the same time.
Mexico City subway riders are expressing concerns that distracted train operators might be putting commuters’ lives at risk, following a collision of two trains that left one dead and dozens injured. However, due to the system being poorly maintained, drivers depend on their phones to communicate with each other and keep the trains running. The use of cellphones during working hours is not condoned by Mexico City’s mass transit workers’ union as per the organization’s general guidelines but it is essential for the trains to run smoothly. The Mexico City subway is one of the cheapest in the world: 5 pesos (about 25 cents) per ride, but the budget only covers operative costs. It would require double its current budget to cover maintenance costs.