> I thought: In 2024, why aren’t officials investing in technology that makes it difficult to push someone in front of a train or prevents deaths by suicide on the tracks?
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.
I normally can look at a government project and understand where bloat and delays come from... but 7 billion dollars for installing subway gates is absolute insanity.
Full height barriers would require extensive rework of many aspects of the subway system -- it's not just a matter of bolting walls to the floor. There are only a handful of people who are killed when they are pushed or fall onto the tracks at a station each year. A few billion dollars could save a lot more lives deployed elsewhere in NYC.
Okay, but is it not possible to spend much less to receive most of the benefit? The article, study, and GP are all talking about big full-height barriers. What would be the cost of a 4- or 5-foot fence with some automatic gates in it (per station)? Sure, some people could hop over it. Sure, it might not go the way to the end of the platform. But it would be _something_ and it would not cost anything like what they are proposing.
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.
What do you mean by “full height barriers”? Because in Japan, the barriers that exist are probably 4-5 feet tall, and pretty much are essentially walls bolted to the floor. I fail to see how those wouldn’t achieve the result while not costing nearly that much.
> 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.
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.
That money is going to be used to offset the loss of income due to all the people not paying their fare. They can't cover operating costs, how will they do this?
I don't think there is a lack of knowledge, it's there is no incentive to be on time and under budget with the corrupt contractors and unions involved.
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.
Hard to believe Adams is clueless about plastic guns [such as the Liberator (edit)]. Gun detectors are pure graft unless he is planning a full TSA strip search to use the subway.
If you're talking about "plastic guns" like a Glock, the barrel is still metal, and parts of the trigger assembly may be metal as well. If a metal detector at the airport can trip due to a belt buckle, why couldn't it trip due to a gun barrel?
OP is probably talking about 3D printed devices. There are devices made of nothing but polymer (and maybe a spring? although I believe elastic can be substituted) that do function. They don't get many shots, but they will still put some projectiles downrange before malfunctioning. Some even have profiles which look nothing like a handgun, you can't rely on a human operator to recognize them when scanning bags.
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.
I assumed even “3d printed” guns required a metal barrel. Can polymer withstand even a single round being fired? Are we talking 22LR only or something?
Breach only makes a lot of sense. That would indeed be hard to detect, and would likely solve the above.
Interesting. I haven't kept up with 3D printed firearms at all because it seemed like they were simply not useful due to the fact that they were made out of polymer.
Having witnessed someone lose their legs to a subway train at Union Square (a station where the barriers are likely not currently feasible), these changes need to happen faster. Eliminating incidents of passengers entering the track area would also reduce delays.
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.
> I’m sure there is a way to make barriers happen even at the most difficult stations
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.
The metal barriers currently being tested, while not an ideal solution, are one example of a solution that could save lives with minimal cost. Barriers that are not aligned to the doors and move up vertically from the edge of the platform (but stay down if someone is in the way) once a train approaches could be another idea.
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.
> 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?
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.
Rolling stock doesn't le
ast forever. Much of nyc rolling stock should be end of life anyway. Just order new trains and remodel stations and keep compatible trains on that line. Then in two years do the next line. In 30 years they have done everthing and are ready for what is next.
> Much of nyc rolling stock should be end of life anyway
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.
The widths are fixed depending on the line and there isn't usually more than three car variants using any given line. Those that have common door patterns can easily have barriers. Worst case, they'd have to give up the nostalgia rides on the old rolling stock.
> 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.
The number lines (A division) are narrower than the letter lines (B division). The cars that run on each can't be mixed. This is a consequence of IRT being narrower than the BMT and IND lines.
A big problem is that platform barriers require that the train stop within a few inches of the opening, or the doors don’t match up. That isn’t practical with manual train control. And upgrading the rails and trains for ATC is super expensive. And that’s before even installing the doors.
I haven't spent a ton of time in New York, don't know how bad things get. So grain of salt here. But I really dislike enclosing spaces. So much modern policy is about adding constraints, safety safety safety, and it all feels bad to me.
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.
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.