

Building a Better Train to Brooklyn - dshipper
http://danshipper.com/building-a-better-train-to-brooklyn

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Animats
Here's the better train to Queens, under construction.

Overview:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdIq8EqRl_w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdIq8EqRl_w)

2014 update:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foE_mvdXDP8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foE_mvdXDP8)

Miles of new tunnels. A giant cavern under Grand Central Station. New river
tunnels. Most of the blasting and digging is done; now the MTA is building the
railroad in the tunnels.

That's what it's like to really do that job.

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glittershark
As someone who commutes on the L train daily, I was really disappointed to see
that this was actually a metaphor. I want a literal better train to Brooklyn!

~~~
patmcguire
There's a source that I can't find that explains why the L in particular so
bad. It's basically that most subway lines (e.g. the 2 and 3) have heavy
traffic both ways at both rush hours, because they begin and end in
residential areas. The L trip profile is lopsided, westbound in the morning
and eastbound in the evening, so the marginal gain in capacity of adding
another train to it is less than to another line and the MTA is broke enough
they have to make those kinds of choices.

~~~
weeksie
I think it's that the tunnel isn't wide enough to have an express. They
already run a shitload of trains on the L track, but there's an upper limit to
capacity.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Would an express help with the ludicrous crowding at Union Square? A few
months ago I was heading to Brooklyn, and I had to catch it from Union Square
to the 8th avenue terminal - otherwise, there was no chance of getting on an
eastbound train. (The westbound train was full; when we arrived at 8th, maybe
five people got off. Everyone else was just trying to take the long route to
Brooklyn, because it was the only option.)

~~~
weeksie
Express trains would help with volume. If an express traveling on another
track was just hitting Manhattan stops plus Bedford, Morgan, Myrtle-Wyckoff, .
. . That would take care of a lot of the volume that gets packed onto the
always-local L.

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rayiner
> How do I decide which features to include in my product and which ones to
> leave out? How do I know if one of the new features I’ve come up with is a
> good idea?

Here's a key difference between software engineering, and well, engineering.
Engineers, in 2015, don't come up with an idea and start pounding on sheet
metal. The 787 flew in simulation thousands of times before one existed in
real life. Every significant feature was measured and justified with a trade-
off analysis, backed up with simulations. When they built on, they had a very
good idea of what they were going to get.

~~~
bigger_cheese
Typically in (non software) Engineering the problems are pretty well defined
usually along the lines of: "Here is an X make it more efficient"

Where X is Engine/structure/Industrial Process etc...

And the defintion or at least the intent behind the meaning of "more efficent"
is well understood i.e. Weighs Less, Consumes less Engergy, produces more
torque etc.

In the software world there is a much looser definition of what an improvement
is which complicates the issue.

"Engineers, in 2015, don't come up with an idea and start pounding on sheet
metal"

There is a good quote from Tesla I was taught as an undergraduate Engineer:

“If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with
the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the
object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a
little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his
labor.”

Edison went through numerous protypes trying to design the light bulb. I guess
that would be the equivalent of the pounding sheet metal approach.

As we were taught Edison was an inventor, Tesla an engineer.

The modern day equivalent of the inventor would be the achitects and
industrial designers of the world, they come up with crazy ideas (by pounding
the metaphorical sheet metal) and some poor engineer has to make it work.
Maybe software needs the same thing a looser coupling between software
designers and software engineers.

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bigger_cheese
In materials engineering there is a similar technique to the articles "misfit
analysis" used for materials selection. It is not uncommon to have competing
constraints. For example to address a problem like designing a beam section
optimally you want a beam thats as light as possible, meets the minimum
stiffness requirements (usually with an added safety factor) and is still
competitvely costed - depending on how the constraints are weighted (cost vs
weight vs performance) it could mean the difference between aluminum, steel or
carbon fibre for example. The real science lies in expressing the constraints
and weighting them against one another correctly.

