Barriers would make the New York City subway safer
themarkup.org
themarkup.org
Is this really how we imagined 2024? I thought we were suppose to be vacationing on the moons of Jupiter in 2024. We probably made quite a few wrong turns to be posing questions like this in 2024. Perhaps instead of reaching for more whiskey as we start to feel the pain we could actually sober up.
It feels to me like someone was asked to come up with a reasonable solution, took a deliberate detour through Whataboutism-land, and came back with the most ludicrous price possible.
Also, according to the MTA's own financial report (https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2...), the MTA has $5.6B in COVID-19 subsidy funding remaining, and they are expected to receive $15B in increased revenue from Congestion Pricing. So it sounds to me like they could probably afford even the ludicrously-priced barriers.
Per Alon Levy, from comparisons with installation costs elsewhere, about $10 million per station: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2022/01/20/platform-edge-...
> The total cost for installing full-height gates in just those 128 stations would be over $7 billion, the agency found, and half-height gates would cost $6.53 billion. Once installed, the agency would have to spend more than $119 million each year to maintain the doors.
54 million per station. I assume on average 3 lines in each station, maybe 8 doors per line?
$2.2M per door. That's just insane.
$54 million?
Yeah, no.
I bet you could go to Lowes or Home Depot and get the necessary materials for a couple of thousand bucks at most, and probably get the installation done for maybe $5k (or say $10k given the insane prices in NYC).
Then hire a few guys at (being generous) $100k a year to open and close the gates manually when the train reached the station and had stopped completely. Say 10 guys, so a million bucks a year.
At the quoted $54 million you could fund this low-tech setup for 54 years.
Redirect costs from increased tolls to building these barriers.
You could maybe do this with some public competition where that was an incentive and could bypass the people and processes, but that's not going to happen.
Even more robust DIY guns like this use metal components for only the breech, and that's a very small component that could easily be confused for any number of other things.
Breach only makes a lot of sense. That would indeed be hard to detect, and would likely solve the above.
Apparently the 380 cartridge doesn’t explode upon firing
Either way, I’m sure there is a way to make barriers happen even at the most difficult stations. The MTA just has a culture of saying no. I am sure something would happen very quickly if bonuses were tied to finding a solution.
There's always a way for any project, but it may be prohibitively expensive.
One obstacle is that trains vary in door positions or widths. How would you solve that problem without buying entirely new rolling stock with a uniform door layout? And is that really the best way for the MTA to spend its money right now?
And that's just one of the obstacles. I'm not disagreeing that the MTA is an inefficient bureaucratic nightmare, but when you really dig into the specifics of this project, it becomes pretty clear why it's not feasible without massive expensive changes to both stations and trains.
I'd much rather the MTA spend its budget on actually improving train service, considering the system is still digging its way out of the deferred maintenance of the 20th century. Platform doors feel like security theater, especially considering the cost.
Keep in mind that although subway crime went up during the pandemic, it was only to 2000s-era levels, and it's now on its way back down — as much as certain media outlets might try to convince you otherwise.
What makes you think that? The MTA has been ordering new cars pretty consistently for the past several decades. The rolling stock of the subway ranges from 1970s-era to brand new stock. Most of it is 21st century and perfectly good.
> Just order new trains and remodel stations
There's 6500 cars to replace and 400+ stations to remodel. Even if the MTA were capable of doing that on time and in-budget, it would be incredibly expensive, so I ask again: is that really the best way for the MTA to spend its budget? You're basically asking for the entire system to be rebuilt from the ground up, purely to support platform doors.
Please give me all the models that are EOL.
> there isn't usually more than three car variants using any given line
I'm not sure about the first point, do you have a source? As for the second point, sure — because there are currently 3 different door layouts on the A system and 3 on the B system. But those layouts are all freely mixed across lines right now. Even if they were not, interlining means trains of different lengths will be stopping at the same platform, which means incompatibility.
I suggest skimming the MTA report linked in the article, it goes into quite a lot of detail on this, including diagrams.
Traditional doors like you see in many parts of Asia probably aren't the answer, but if this sort of complete solution were installed, the middle conductor position could be eliminated, resulting in labor savings. Of course this would never happen due to politics.
Service needs to improve and this may be a better use of funds. I would say that safety is a citywide problem, not an MTA-specific issue, though.
Or have multiple doors for each train type. Or entire section moves depending on train type (i.e. ranch slider doors that open from both sides).
It doesn't have to be fancy. Chain link fencing with rolling gates can be made just about any size. You could either have the gates on motion/object sensors so they only opened when a train was at the platform and stopped, or use the low-tech method of just hiring some guys to open and close them by hand.
In any case, you could get by for a hell of a lot less than $54 million bucks per station.
As a bicyclist, I liked sharing the street more than I like being in a narrow dedicated bike lane, because the street was open & I could see clearly & now I'm between parked cars (with some pedestrians loading/unloading) and a sidewalk with pedestrians who sometimes go onto the path. Intersections are much harder to feel safe on, because now there are separate flows of traffic that re-encounter each other & have to figure stuff out. I just feel trapped and corralled. I loved being out and about.
We're talking about adding huge fences to some of our bridges for suicide prevention. Beautiful spaces with gorgeous overlook. I feel a profound sense of loss that again we are corraling ourselves in, tightening one of the few open spaces around us.
It's a bit daunting to me reimagining the subway, imagining it being a much more closed in confined system. The subway is such an interesting mix of busy platform and space, a juxtaposition, and it feels like we'd be losing that. We'd be losing openness and space. Losing sign of the trains themselves again doesn't seem like it matters deeply, is crucial, but it still makes me profoundly sad to imagine. More like an elevator than a train, solely an interior space, man elevating beyond the built environment into an abstracter form of infrastructure they cannot even see.
I recognize good motives for all these things, recognize the cause. But I don't feel like there's recognition back, I don't feel like anyone else is out there advocating for open, for space. Civilization accrues, taking bits and pieces of the public space with it as the stuff builds up and the space gets retooled; that seems to be the direction of things. I feel so alone in caring for & loving openness, want so badly to see some weight given against walling ourselves in. Downvoted already, yeah thanks.
It might be more than a feeling.