
A Peek Inside New York's Subway Redesign Plan - jseliger
http://www.citylab.com/design/2016/07/a-peek-inside-new-yorks-subway-redesign-plan-cuomo/491798/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheAtlanticCities+%28CityLab%29
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bko
Do we really need wifi and USB ports on the train? There are already a lot of
wifi access points on the platform, but it requires clicking on a prompt to
agree to T&C which is an extra step many don't bother taking.

I'm reminded of TVs the Taxi and Limousine Commission mandated to be placed in
all yellow/green cabs in NYC. It's always dubious improvements that people
often don't ask for. What people really wanted was more availability as
evidenced by the success of Uber. I imagine in regards to train service, New
Yorkers would settle for cleaner, less smelly stations and more regular
service, especially on the weekends. But I guess that wouldn't get as much
press coverage.

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AznHisoka
As well as functional clean elevators in more stations.

More seats (trains like the R maximize seat/space ratio while trains like the
4/5/6 don't)

Also ban bums from sleeping on trains.

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pavel_lishin
> _Also ban bums from sleeping on trains._

I think there's likely already a law against it, it's a matter of enforcement.
And I for one have a hard time being mad at someone sleeping on a train at
night during the winter time; shelters aren't fun places, they fill up and
have stringent requirements, and for many of them, the alternative is freezing
to death outside.

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astrodust
New York's answer to the homeless problem is to throw them in jail, and
considering many suffer from severe mental illness, this is really cruel and
inhumane.

So they're swept under the rug. It's absurd.

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cududa
Compared to San Francisco where they're let to just wry in the wind?

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astrodust
Most American cities I've visited take an indifferent and/or actively hostile
attitude towards people with mental illness.

It's actually kind of scary.

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pavel_lishin
Yeah. If you have a family history of mental illness and live in America, make
sure you've got a big support network of friends and family, in case you
develop a mental illness. That would probably be more useful than healthcare
coverage.

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astrodust
In America anyway where having health-care is tied to employment and
employment can be difficult to maintain when you're increasingly mentally ill.

Somewhere more civilized it's not as much a problem to see a psychiatrist, the
cost is fully covered. If there's medication and you can't afford it there's
ways of getting that covered too.

It's much better to have people "in the system" where they're receiving
disability support, subsidized housing, and medical care than to just turf
them on the street or treat them as profit centers in private prisons.

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Animats
The big innovation seems to be trains with fewer seats and more standing
space. That increases capacity, but few people get to sit down.

No platform edge doors, surprisingly. Many newer systems have those. But they
require that the trains all have their doors in the same places, so you can't
mix types of train sets.

Display signs may just duplicate info people can get on some phone app. (The
MTA has an API with their train and bus position info, at least for the lines
that have reporting gear.[1]) But those are cheap.

[1] [http://datamine.mta.info/](http://datamine.mta.info/)

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cryptoz
> Display signs may just duplicate info people can get on some phone app.

Public transit should never require ownership of a smartphone. All features
should be accessible equally to everyone. Having an app is great, but you
can't reasonably advocate for the removal of physical signs in public
transport.

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andrewla
I believe the GP was referring to the train arrival and other dynamic signage,
rather than the static signage that exists now.

Bang for the buck, it feels like getting wifi (and cellular data) into all
stations is way more useful and future-proof than a bunch of displays that are
going to look quaint and outdated a year after we spend billions getting them
installed.

If you want to know which track is downtown, or what the stops are on the
express, the existing maps and signage will get you there. If you want to know
about service interruptions and arrival information (or potentially connecting
train information or more detailed trip estimates based on subway traffic in
the future), then unless you can understand the static coming out of the
loudspeakers, you're out of luck.

It's taken them more than 10 years to get arrival signs into the stations, and
(as above) they already seem very outdated, with insufficient information many
times (because three display lines is not enough lines for busy stations when
you're waiting for a 6). Plus most stations still don't have them, which seems
absurd given that every other subway system in the world has them.

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hx87
How about A/C in the stations for once? Or turning on the A/C when
temperatures are moderate but humidity is high? With low enough temperatures
and humidity, a surprising amount of grime and overcrowding becomes bearable.

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jimktrains2
Instead of AC, I always thought it would be fun to use the heat to do
something productive (like make electricity), even if not effect, it could
consume the heat?

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hx87
I'm not sure if using recovered heat from the subway system to generate
electricity is economically feasible (probably not). In the end you'd have to
eject the heat anyway, probably to the Hudson and East rivers.

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jimktrains2
Or into the buildings above. Could the heat be used to pre-heat cold boiler
water in buildings? Of the low efficiency (but no carbon?) electric could run
LED lights or other small electronics. There would be a loss in converting to
electric and a loss converting back to heat.

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pavel_lishin
I don't care about clean stations, I'd rather have stations with elevators and
escalators, so the handicapped and the elderly can actually use them.

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noobermin
I for one mourn the fact the forces that be in my city are intent on pulling
us back to 1960 transport wise.

We are poised to break 1M within the next decade, and some have been floating
some form of light rail to serve the quickly growing city. Unfortunately,
looking at the ten year plan published recently shows that what made it in
from those discussions were...widening roads.

Good on NYC for attempting to put somewhere in the US on parity with other
first world metropolises.

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CDotDot
Something as simple as the new grab bars in the middle of the car will be a
great improvement. Although I'd rather it be a 3-bar split as opposed to the 2
in the mockup. That way we can still have the annoyingly frequent bar leaner
and still have a place to hold on to.

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mc32
On paper the improvements look nice. I don't get the preservation portion.
That adds cost with little utility.

Clean the stations, make them less grimy, eliminate the dark dungeon feel,
dress up the load bearing beams a bit with a material where grime and soot can
be easily cleaned.

Put in some women only cars on the crowded lines to prevent groping... Maybe
one day get a north-south line to join the outer borough lines (a peripheral
line). Most lines are in and out of Manhattan, as if people didn't move
interborough.

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ksenzee
Is there data on whether women-only cars work? What happens when you jump on
the subway at the last second and end up in one of the other cars?

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noobermin
Not to mention that it stinks very much of segregation, which was said below
by some posters although sarcastically.

I think the right thing to do is to attack the pervs and the criminals. That
is where the actual blame lies, right?

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galdosdi
What a complete waste of time and money. These are all very marginal nice to
haves. What people want is for their subway commute to take less time, end of
story. Or for those on crowded lines like the 4/5, less crowding. Maybe ease
the crowding enough that you could even reach your hands into your pocket to
grab your USB device to use those new USB outlets they're hyping (there's no
way you could currently on many lines during peak)

The only new feature worth a damn in that whole story is adding more countdown
clocks, but even that just quantifies but does not in any way reduce the
waiting time.

Typical case of totally different priorities between NYS and NYC. Cuomo
obviously does not ride the subway. NYC needs to secede already

Edit: I didn't notice the price is $27 billion. This makes me angry. That's
enough to make some pretty substantial "real" boring improvements that would
actually improve service. According to wikipedia Phase I of the Second Ave
Subway cost "just" $4.5billion. And we're going to blow $27 billion on
prettier signs? Are you !@#$% kidding me? I wish I could vote against you more
than once, Cuomo

Edit 2: To be fair, there is one useful feature of the new trains: More space
to pack more passengers with the "open gangway" design. But the rest is a
waste

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jpwright
To be fair, the $27 billion includes 1,025 new subway cars (which tend to cost
more than $1 million each) plus extensive renovations to 31 stations. Also,
the "open gangway" design in combination with the other improvements (wider
doors, collapsible seats) will reduce crowding on trains, which in turn
reduces crowding on platforms and dwell time. During rush hour that will have
a noticeable impact on travel times. Outside of CBTC, which would allow
running more trains per hour, there aren't really other ways to make the
existing system run faster.

I do think the $27 billion tag is too high, though.

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galdosdi
I'm willing to exclude the new trains entirely from the criticism, except for
funds which go towards new features other than more space. 1 or 2 million per
car @ about 1000 cars is "only" 1 or 2 billion out of the 27 billion though.

Most of this money is going towards making the system shinier and prettier,
instead of actually improving commute times for anyone

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davidf18
The most important thing that they can do besides buying more subway cars is
to computerize the driving of the subways which would double the throughput.
They started experimenting with this (on the L or 7 lines?) but they should
implement it more quickly.

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typetypetype
New cars and polished stations. but I don't see anything about improving the
actual infrastructure with more tracks, better signaling, etc. I guess we hope
that those sorts of improvements are happening but are not interesting enough
to write about?

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parent5446
I don't have sources available on my phone, but I believe it is something they
are actively working on. The problem is it's just so much more expensive,
takes a long time, and doesn't affect public opinion as much.

The Wikipedia article "Signaling of the NYC Subway" has a lot of information.

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lg
i know they are working on this. but as a member of the subway-riding public,
far and away the number 1 thing I have a strong opinion about is delays, which
almost always are blamed on "signal problems"

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parent5446
I agree. Problem is the general public is even less informed than the people
commenting on this article. They'll probably just think it's a waste of money.

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terminado
Why do the new subway cars always smell like bad breath is coming through the
ventilation system, even when empty and recently cleaned?

Is it some kind of anti-vagrant odor, like the repellent counterpart to Subway
restaurant's fresh bread fragrance?

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kaiizen
So just like Seattle's light rail cars? Just much more traffic?

