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Comment by IG_Semmelweiss | Hacker News Reader

I asked a while back to a NYC city planner the reason they didn't publish station MTA station layouts / exits on gmaps , like you see for example for toyko in gmaps

I was told this was not opened publicly because of terrorist concerns. But if you wanted to get MTA station layouts, it was certainly possible to get them from the city.

I guess we have flipped that page!

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> because of terrorist concerns.

The New York bureaucracies favorite excuse for not doing work they are responsible for.

Not sure why this is downvoted? Do people not remember how for ~20yr "terrorism" was habitually used as a justification for "because we don't want to" by every government organization from the MTA to small town parks departments.

I was going to say! "Because Terrorism" has been the catch-all vague excuse for limiting access to everything, for decades.

Hi I am the creator. My cousin kindly asked his friend who works for the MTA for me, if my project is a problem for them... and the answer was something like "as long as the drawings don't show columns and/or any structural elements they are fine." My drawings are all meant to be diagrams and only show publicly accessible areas anyway. It's not like the terrorists can't go walk around and figure the stations out themselves if they want...

Just like the excuses for banning photos in PATH

Truly ridiculous to think that a terrorism group is filled with incapable individuals so as to not be able to map out a well traveled and popular location.

Stop pretending terrorists are stupid, quite often they're smarter than you, and seeing this as an excuse tells me that bar is not difficult to pass.

The truly hilarious thing is that the Tokyo subway system actually suffered a terrorist attack in 95, and still they publish the locations of all 200+ exits from Shinjuku station.

That's because US society is absolutely paranoid these days, and has been for the last 23 years. Other countries aren't.

This was also an oft-cited reason why trains with pass-through gangways were not a thing in Toronto for a long time.

So that people couldn't run away from an attacker?

To limit a perpetrator to a single car.

Open gangways are still detrimental because they make it easier for showtime people to carry speakers and instruments between cars

They do that with the closed trains by opening the doors you aren’t supposed to open anyhow. And you can’t lock them due to their need in emergencies.

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