
Why New York Subway Lines Are Missing Countdown Clocks - jsomers
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/why-dont-we-know-where-all-the-trains-are/415152/#hn?single_page=true
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jessriedel
The meat of the story is that the MTA purposefully allows their system to
remain crippled to drum up public money.

> That’s why the MTA has tried to associate CBTC [a enormous overhaul of the
> signal system for the subway] with countdown clocks. New York riders crave
> realtime information about trains. They don’t care how they get it. So when
> Transit wants to drum up support for an obscure, costly, many-decades-long
> capital project to upgrade to CBTC, they always point to the clocks.
> (“Sustained Investment Makes Real-Time Information Possible,” declares one
> 2012 press release.) Reporters, struggling to make sense of a half-dozen
> interrelated projects, follow the MTA’s lead and assume that realtime train-
> location information depends on signal upgrades.

> But that would make for some pretty expensive clocks, and it would make them
> awfully long in arriving. The F train, for instance, if it had to wait for
> CBTC to get realtime arrival information, wouldn’t see it until 2035.

>It’s a misleading narrative. You can get countdown clocks without touching
the signals. The MTA knows this.

The analolgy with the ACA website comes at the end:

> I keep thinking of Healthcare.gov. Everyone knows that the initial project
> was a costly disaster, but less well known is that a small team came along
> and saved it. The story includes this remarkable fact: The old system cost
> $250 million to build and $70 million a year to maintain. The new
> system—which actually worked—cost about $4 million to build; its yearly
> maintenance was about $1 million.

~~~
krschultz
Arguably the non-cynical way that the MTA is thinking about it is that if CBTC
gives you countdown clocks, bolting on an additional system just to do
countdown clocks is extraneous cost. Basically $(CBTC) + $(Separate Countdown
Clocks) > $(CBTC).

Of course, that's how requirement creep often sets in. Wouldn't it be cheaper
to just throw another feature in there while we're at it? That has to be
cheaper than building a whole other system right? What is missing in that
original function is how adding in the requirement for countdown clocks
powered by CBTC increases the cost of CBTC itself. This plays out over dozens
of features big and small, and next thing you know you have the F-35.

I'm relatively familiar with this story already so I wasn't shocked by the
countdown clock portion of the system. I think everyone at the MTA knows that
you could build a system that just provided countdown clocks for passengers
for not that much money. Keep in mind the ATS system they mention that powers
the A division countdown clocks is actually as safety critical as CBTC and
therefore is engineered (and priced) like an airliner. It's not priced like an
Arduino broadcasting the trains location to receivers that guesstimate when
the trains will arrive but only works 95% of the time.

The real meat of the story for me is that the MTA doesn't have a realistic
plan for rolling out CBTC at all. They basically have the constraint of never
shutting down a subway for a significant period of time, and also that to
realize the savings from CBTC you have to eliminate the block control system
from that stretch of line. It seems like they can't make a hybrid system work
unless it covers the entire line (that's why they started with the L).

I think if they work on that core problem the whole thing becomes tractable.
How do you safely manage the transition of a train from a CBTC "block" to the
old style block? If they do that then you can start at the end of the line and
incrementally rip out the old system and put in CBTC through weekend work.
They were able to replace the entirety of the 7 line's trackage in about 2
summers, and if they didn't have replace the old style signals it sounds like
it's not much more work than that to bring in CBTC.

~~~
citiguy1
The article mentions the MTA has a constraint of never shutting down a line,
but this conveniently ignores the fact that the B line was split into two
pieces for ~ 18 years (1986-2004) while the track on the Manhattan Bridge was
being reworked. The fact that it took 18 years to rework this 1 mile length of
track points to the real issue, not the fact that NYC cannot accept
"downtime".

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jsizz
It's worth pointing out that the Bernard S. Greenberg mentioned in the article
in connection with NXSYS is the celebrated Multician who ported Emacs.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Greenberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Greenberg)

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mschuster91
Well, if all they're after is a system to inform the ops where a train is...
put active microwave beacons on the train ends, and recievers in regular
distances in the tunnels. Problem solved.

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scoot
By way of contrast - not only does the London underground have countdown
clocks on platforms (accuracy +/\- 1 minute), they also have an API allowing
3rd party developers to integrate tube (and bus) times into transport apps.

[https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/open-data-users/](https://tfl.gov.uk/info-
for/open-data-users/)

~~~
fennecfoxen
For what it's worth, the London Underground has significantly less complicated
interlocking patterns (with more transfers between trains instead).

Check out some of these crazy layouts, like the Dekalb area or the 47-63rd St
map:
[http://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway_Track_Map...](http://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway_Track_Maps)

~~~
Symbiote
London Underground doesn't yet have CBTC on the complicated lines, though it's
in progress and due to be completed in 2022. The cost is over £5 billion,
which based on the numbers in the article doesn't seem a likely level of
investment for NYC.

They try and explain it to the public: [https://tfl.gov.uk/campaign/tube-
improvements/behind-the-sce...](https://tfl.gov.uk/campaign/tube-
improvements/behind-the-scenes/signalling)

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listic
In Russian metro there are count-up timers. Not that this is a big deal,
though, when intervals between trains are shorter (2-4 minutes in
St.-Petersburg; less in Moscow).

~~~
seiji
count-up timers like "you missed the last train by 30 seconds! haha?" Seems
like a very tauntingly russian thing to do.

~~~
csydas
I guess you could see it that way, but everyone knows that the trains run
regularly every 2-3 minutes so it's more you know how long of a wait you're
going to have. For the most part all it does is let you know how long you're
going to be waiting on the platform and how on time the trains are that day.

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iSnow
CBTC and moving-block signalling systems like ETCS are nothing new though?
They have been in use on main line railroads and subways all over the world
for years now.

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axis967
I'll take the New York Subway system any day over what Boston has (MBTA).

~~~
axis967
To better clarify, I feel this battle around the spending on NY subways is
trivial compared to the fundamental infrastructure issues in other cities (for
this example, Boston).

~~~
citiguy1
How so? Do you ride the NYC subway? The MTA is more an employment agency than
an agency of change. For example, they have been working on the 2nd avenue
subway, phase 1 only (a total of 3 stops) since 2007 and it's still not done.
Projected completion is now December 2016. This two mile section of track is
billions over budget and years behind schedule.

