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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

There's an attempt to make this all sound like a conspiracy, but it all makes sense to me.

There were accidents. They slowed the train to improve safety.

The train is about as safe as ever. Why? Many, many more people are using than the trains than before. It's harder to keep that many people safe, so more caution is warranted.

The only problem I see, if it's true, is that they classified delays stemming from maintenance under the wrong heading. And so far as I can tell, there's no real proof of that.

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The story I got was rather different; first that the safety measures were implemented in a ham-fisted manner and secondly that they failed to model or recognise correctly the overall effect that the measures would have on carrying capacity, and they are still failing to recognise it.

I don’t know how fair these accusations are, of course.

But beyond a certain point slowing the trains gains little safety but (eg) pushes people back to the road where (in the UK for example) we spend 10x less to save a life than on the trains.

Thus, overcaution on the trains will kill more people.

Wonder how much further you can take it. If you lose a little safety (trains) and take more people off the road, you increase the risk of a train accident. How many people go back to the roads after a train accident? Is the backlash greater (my 0 data thoughts would be that more people would return to the road then just if the train was slow). I heard somewhere that more people died through increased car accidents after 9/11 (forget time span) that would have flown but didn't.

You don't really need to propagate it all the way to actual lives lost. If there is an hour of life lost on a too safe train, that's a fraction of a life lost.

You can only take it so far as you're willing to hold accountable the people making the decisions.

More importantly, they used the overcrowding excuse as a means to raise $800mm+ from New York taxpayers. If this capital wasn't necessary given the problems they cited were non-existent, this amounts to fraud.

That's not a really fair way to put it as the signaling system is still the root cause of the slowdown.

1. Outdated signaling system cannot handle current load at high safety threshold

2. Network could not upgrade signaling system due to lack of money

3. Network responses by slowing down critical paths and putting in more locks

4. System capacity drops

So yeah, you still need the money to fix slow things.

That rationale implies that your assumption in #1 is true, which seems not to be the case.

Yes, the signals system needs to be upgraded if they want to increase the number of trains (and their speed) on the lines, but even without the signals system upgrades, they can still run the current loads at acceptably-high levels of safety.

Put another way, they are slowing the trains down and increasing delays while not actually increasing the capacity of the system.

I'm rather familiar with the L. Signal upgrades wont create a large improvement - it is already a fully automated line ( there's a sign at the end of every platform that spells out that the trains of the L are under automated traffic control ). It was just designed in the bone-headed way - just look at the 8th ave termination point or realize where the switches are in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Yup - need to pay to get the signals sorted. I guess the you might unearth a bunch of other things, that need sorted... but it just needs doing.

Well, fraud only if it were deliberately misleading. It seems highly likely that the MTA believes what it is saying, even if it happens to be misguided, and driven by the right motivations.

It is fraud though: they have/had an "other" category, but they called it "overcrowding" and then used the confusion on what overcrowding means to get funds (I'll bet when you hear overcrowding you think too many people not any of the many random things that can go wrong). Maybe it really is overcrowding, but since the category is really other we don't know.

Overcrowding is NOT a misc category, it is a specific situation with a specific definition (the exact definition is something they use should be published so we can decide if we agree with it), with specific training on how to tell if this is really overcrowding as opposed to a failure to get a normal crowd through in time since the solution to the two problems is different.

Other/misc is an import category to have - every system of collecting data needs to have a none of the above because there is always something you didn't think of. What is normally missing is that when other is used there needs to be a text explanation of what happened, and then an investigation to see what should be done. You collect data for things like "medical emergency" because from the category alone everybody understands that the delay is beyond control. When something is misc that means you didn't expect it and need to redesign your procedures so it never happens again. Thus the misc category should be something all operators hate to use: they get sucked into meetings on how do we ensure that it doesn't happen again.

It's either fraud (deliberate) or incompetence bordering on fraud. They have declining ridership, yet are claiming increasing overcrowding.

In either case, probably time to clean house and get rid of the "better safe than sorry" crowd.

If they’re running fewer trains slower, then declining ridership is not incompatible with increased overcrowding.

That's not what I got from reading it.

My reading is that an accident that was most likely caused by a driver falling asleep resulted in cover-your-ass style changes that have little to no measurable effect on safety, but cause massive real problems with the system that negatively affect millions of riders. And beyond that, they're shuffling blame around and waving their hands to distract people from systemic problems.

I mean, if the delays are caused by slowing the trains down, they should say "we've slowed the trains down due to safety reasons, and that's why there are delays". Then people can either accept that and move on, or do actual studies into the problem to determine if their course of action is correct, and if the trade-offs made are worth it.

I don't think it's some big hush-hush conspiracy; it's just garden-variety corruption and a desire to avoid fixing root causes of problems because they're complex and expensive. Easier to just keep collecting that paycheck while using "overcrowding" as an excuse to get more public money diverted to your agency.

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