I would be very surprised if this could happen in central london.
1) the tubes are packed and the cabs locked.
2) they would have be murdered by the other commuters.
3) you can't get in or out of the station without being seen on CCTV
4) each train has CCTV coverage.
5) its almost impossible to get out of the tube via the tunnels, without being electrocuted or run over (All but the cut and cover tunnels are <1' bigger than the trains)
For point 2, even in legitimate cases where someone has keeled over, you get death stares. The only time its seen as acceptable is when someone falls inbetween the gap between the train and the platform edge.
From memory, the NYC subway has a lot more space in tunnels, making this much easier to do. The London underground has very tight tunnels and you'd probably be turned into mince if you tried this there (that is, if the commuters didn't get to you first).
Fun fact - the tunnels are so tight in the Underground that there's not much room for much airflow around the trains and the clay surrounding the tunnels has absorbed so much heat that it can't take in any more, which is why it gets so stifling in summer. People used to go down to the Central Line to cool off in summer! https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2017/06/10/cooling-the-tube...
I'm 6'2'' and can stand upright in the middle of the carriage on Central line. The doors however have this annoying curvature so I do have to hunch when I'm standing close to them - which is quite often if you get on at a busy station.
Preach brother, 6"4' here and if I can't get a seat (so always) or am able to stand in the middle of the carriage I'm doing my best hunchback impression.
That said I rarely use the tube these days as it's quicker to get an Uber/Taxi (by a good 15 mins) between Waterloo and my office.
Yup, the roof curves but in the middle it's perfectly fine to stand straight at 6'4" and with some leeway. The time you get stuck by the door, well it's going to be a sad 20 minutes
That matches my recollection of being just barely able to stand straight in the middle of the car, I can't imagine the neck/back/knees of 6'5 londoners. For starters I assume they wear a helmet with a face shield so they don't eat the lintel every time they step into the carriage.
All the more horrific when people can’t get on a train, but get their clothes caught in the doors, get dragged along the platform and then slammed into the wall at the tunnel entrance.
That would leave about a thousand people traumatised. I hope they can retrofit platform doors into the stations soon.
Interesting fact that maybe I'm the last person to discover, but...
I'd long wondered why underground trains came in 2 obviously different sizes, ie. the central line AKA the sardines express vs the district line, the carriages thereof being properly capacious.
Was talking to a TFL'er who said it annoyed him that all tube trains were collectively referred to by the public as 'underground trains' when there were actually sub-surface trains (the big ones) and proper underground trains (like the central and northern). I really hadn't known.
Edit: he could also tell the line a (proper) underground train was on by the metallic shriek it made. I asked him what caused that and he thought it was the wheel flanges rubbing on the sides of the rails during tighter turns.
> I'd long wondered why underground trains came in 2 obviously different sizes, ie. the central line AKA the sardines express vs the district line, the carriages thereof being properly capacious.
Because the original lines were opened in the mid (sub-surface) to late (deep) 19th century. The sub-surface lines were built cut-and-cover and thus easy to make roomy with the technology of the times, digging from up and covering was well within easy means, however the deep lines were built using pre-TBM tunnelling shields, limiting their diameter due to effort and sheer technology. The deepest station in the underground was opened in 1907, remains one of the deepest stations in the world, and pretty much all the deeper ones opened after WWII.
Later deep lines (Victoria and Jubilee) I'm guessing were kept at the same diameter for convenience (of sharing structure, infrastructure and rolling stock), and possibly existing sections being "moved" from one line to an other.
> Was talking to a TFL'er who said it annoyed him that all tube trains were collectively referred to by the public as 'underground trains' when there were actually sub-surface trains (the big ones) and proper underground trains (like the central and northern). I really hadn't known.
Technically they're all underground trains, as in trains which are part of the London Underground. The sardine express ones are "deep-level" or "deep-tube" (they used to be the actual tube lines but the term has expanded to basically be the same thing as the Underground).
Regarding 5, emergency brakes in London won't stop the train in the tunnel. They just send a signal to the driver to wait at the next station and inform staff at that station and/or emergency services.
Pulling the emergency brake therefore isn't necessarily a bad idea. If someone has fallen ill on the train (esp. common in summer), it's the best way to ensure that help will be available as soon as possible.
As you said, evacuating trains in the tunnel is dangerous so it's only done if trains physically can't move to the station (e.g. another train blocks the tracks). And even then, evacuation is only done after electricity has been switched off via the end of the train.
Maybe you're thinking about the emergency "brake" cord ? That works the same way in NY subways. They alert the driver and conductor to a possible problem in a train car so that they can get police assistance and/or bring the train to a controlled stop.
The emergency brake that is discussed here is different. It's inside the operator's locked cab, and releases air brakes that stop the train with maximal acceleration to the extent that the wheels can be damaged by grinding against the rails. They are only used in a last resort but they have to be available and functional in the event that the human operator finds itself unable to make a controlled stop. The same subsystem activates when the train incorrectly passes a red signal or hits a large obstruction in the tracks.
TFA explains the break is located an area that should only be accessible to MTA personnel
>He climbs aboard the rear of the train as it departs a station, unlocks the safety chains, somehow gets into the rear cab, and triggers the emergency brakes.
As for pulling the emergency brake for someone who is unwell, there are frequent announcements on the tube telling you not to do that. The advice from TfL is to wait until the next station and help the person get off.
I find it weird that there's so much confusion about the way emergency brakes work and when to use them on the London Underground. If people on HN can't agree on it, how can the general public? Confusion about this sort of thing can be dangerous.
That is because people on HN are the general public in a lot of ways. Just because most are specialized knowledge workers doesn't mean they are inherently more intelligent in other areas of life.
Intelligence isn't the right word. There are some sort of jobs that do select for high intelligence. Any sort of work that requires abstract reasoning and novel problem solving is going to be inaccessible to people with lower intelligence.
Rather, it should be said that tech workers are not inherently more knowledgeable in matters unrelating to tech than the general public. In this case, knowledge of train function and etiquette is in question, not intelligence.
(Note also that intelligence does not confer knowledge (although it makes knowledge easier to acquire) and that it's quite easy to find examples of people with modest intelligence but exceptional knowledge. Furthermore the work/intelligence selection process only really applies in one direction; there are a lot of high intelligence people who choose jobs they find undemanding because they have different priorities or have had different opportunities in life.)
Part part of the issue is that it changed about 20 years ago. The emergency brakes used to actually apply the brake, rather than signal the driver. But even when I was a lad, there were signs on the trains saying 'if someone is unwell, don't apply the brake until the station - help will get to them faster'.
Makes a lot of sense and is very logical --- that person still has to get off the train somehow, and better at a station which the train is already going to, than to stop and wait somewhere between stations for help to arrive. Perhaps the reason people pull the brake is more of a panic reaction.
I can see that it could be wise to pull the emergency handle at the station to prevent the train moving if, say, someone were having a heart attack and couldn't easily be moved to the platform.
But pulling it between stations would only prolong the time it took for the person to get help.
It won't as there are no emergency brakes on Tubes, they're just called emergency brake. The train continues to the station and will then remain there.
Regardless of whether the emergency handle is connected to a physical brake or if it sounds a alarm, there is an emergency brake. If the driver removes their hand from the dead man's switch, the emergency brake engages. But that's a side-road to this discussion.
Unless you can point to official advice from TfL that states otherwise, I'm just gonna come out and say that I think it's best to stick to the advice TfL give at stations which is not to pull the emergency handle if someone is unwell. Whatever the precise action that results from pulling the handle (whether that's sounding an alarm, engaging a brake, or whatever), I don't see what it would achieve between stations and especially when TfL say not to do it.
Yes, but the audio quality is not very good. There was a recent incident that was exacerbated by a driver mishearing "there's a fire" as "there's a fight".
The process to reset the brake can easily take 30 minutes or more, delaying 20,000 people or more (all people on the train, plus the trains behind, and the trains which can't start their journey because they're stuck in the wrong place, and the trains which have to be cancelled because it's now the end of the drivers shift).
The real solution is to practice till the time to reset an emergency brake is 1 minute or less. It should be simple - someone in a control room checks all CCTV cameras to see the situation, and presses a button to restart the train.
TFL's cameras mostly aren't digital and can't be watched remotely, so they're miles off ever being able to do this.
Last time I was in a tube when the emergency brake was pulled (not in NY or London), it was by a mom who had left her kid behind at the last station. All it did was stop the tube between two station, the driver had to go check what happened then go back and restart the tube.
Happens quite often on the Jubilee line, and whether it’s the brakes being applied or motors cutting out, the upshot is the train comes to a very abrupt stop, seemingly with no action from the driver.
This is usually followed by a frustrated driver coming over the PA system to implore people to stop leaning on the doors, because they are unable to move the train until they do so.
I take the central line regularly and this happens once a week. Big yank, followed by a "Please don't lean on the doors, it will slow down the train", it's par for the course.
The old district line stock used to do it, but they’ve all been replaced now. It didn’t stop the train it would limit the maximum speed. The driver would keep announcing to stop leaning but in heavy traffic that wasn’t always easy.
> For point 2, even in legitimate cases where someone has keeled over, you get death stares.
And with good reason, because that is not a legitimate case. It is displayed on signs on many routes that the emergency services can best help/reach you on the platforms. Pulling the emergency brakes in the tunnel is actually counter productive if someone keels over.
I wrote it in the other comments, but emergency brakes on London tubes are not brakes, they just alert the driver. It therefore is a legitimate way to inform the driver of any unusual activity that warrants a longer stop at the next station.
I've always heard never to use the emergency brakes for a medical emergency because then you'd just stop the train in the middle of a tunnel and greatly delay responses.
Is point 5 true for the newest tunnels like the Jubilee Line Extension? I think the DLR has an emergency walkway in the tunnels to Bank. I am expecting Crossrail will too.
With my tinfoil hat adjusted: maybe this is a plan to push for CCTV acceptance in NYC. Annoy commuters enough, present surveillance as a solution, get agreement.
There's a conspiracy theory guy (David Ike) who claims there's always the same pattern here: problem - reaction - solution.
You create a problem to provoke people reaction and then offer them a solution, which ultimately results in taking more and more control over them.
> 2) they would have be murdered by the other commuters
In the spirt of HN's policy of not being snarky I will attempt to temper my reply. As a native NYer: I find it Laughable that a Nation which, in effect, gave up its Sovereign Government to the EU and, outlawed Free Speech by banning "hate speech" (which is in fact--Anything that your Overlords say it is), would attemp to draw the line at someone pulling the EBrake on a train.
Sorry, but that is as Non-Snarky as I could make my reply.
Was this bizzare unprovoked statement really necessary?
I simply don't see how 'free speech', which is a concept almost entirely unique to the USA, is related to being annoyed that your hypothetical commute was interrupted.
If you dispute the idea, I suggest you try pulling the emergency brake as a joke and see how fellow commuters treat you.
one night i woke up flying across a subway car before slamming into one of the vertical hand poles
i was sitting, sleeping, facing the direction of travel and someone had pulled the emergency stop
it was 3am so the only people on the train where fellow transients
this fact must have been prominent in the mind of the person conducting the train because immediately they got on the comm and yelled, 'WHO THE FUCK PULLED THE EMERGENCY STOP?!'
the absurdity of it all helped me ignore the pain in my shoulder
i always slept with my back to my momentum after that night
train? unsure, the car i was in... maybe 2 other transients?
more nyc subway information than you'll ever need:
- nyc has a globally rare subway in that it is 24hrs
- you need to be sitting up to sleep on the train, if you lie down you can be removed (was so told by a cop when i was first arrested for sleeping on the train that this is 'the law')
- subways run the full length of a track, then back, then swap drivers
- when a driver swaps they have to remove everyone from the train so all transients get up and go across the track to the next train that is waiting to drive off
- the two longest trains: ORANGE(D,1h-1h15m before driver swap), RED(2,1h30m-2h before driver swap)
- meaning you could get about ~1h30m of uninterrupted sleep
- that was until i discovered the L train is driven by software and the conductor is there as a failsafe
- as such there is a different driver procedure and you can run the train back and forth all day all week without being removed, thats eventually how id get 8h+ nights
someone down thread said 480$/mo for tickets, but id rarely pay
> why not more?
i wondered the same thing, its warm, even in winter, and heavily populated, protecting you from assaults
im unsure what percentage of people without places to sleep choose the subway, but there are some options
there are shelters, but after my experiences there: caging you in or out after curfew, once shut a lawlessness among the people, being placed in rooms with territorial long termers, structurally and hygienically questionable building; i decided id rather risk the street
but it was a winter with a foot of snow on the ground so i tried to sleep in a decommissioned subway stop where there were others sleeping but was woken up by the blunt end of a cop's foot
when i explained i thought it was okay to sleep here because i saw others doing the same the cop responded, 'that guys been there 7 years, get the fuck out of here kid'
hostels at the time cost about 30$/nt for a bunk in a room with 40 people, in brooklyn, so out of my price range but once i got a job i would stay in one once a week to take a shower
> how was that allowed to happen?
compassion, human decency, empathy
i jape, though thats why, im guessing, most riders accept it as a reality
but its probably more to do with poorly handling government resources to address the issue that some people need to sleep sitting up on a subway to have a warm place to rest
I appreciate your story and hope you're doing better now. I wonder why there's so little done about not only homelessness, but simply shelter. The homeless don't want to get in the way of people and the people don't want the homeless to get in their way. Yet the side with the resources doesn't seem to care to do much about it.
This is the fundemental reason urban places vote for social programs (Democrat) and rural places vote against them (Republican). Homeless people on subways don't affect people that live on farms. The rural urban divide is rational self interest manifested in politics.
First let's dig more shallow. Op asked why we don't do anything if everyone involved wants something done. The answer is we vote for it and we do do something. It just so happens the severity of the homeless problem is in equilibrium with political will. Now to dig deeper.
>You’ll find plenty of dirt poor rural people that would benefit from entitlement programs just as much.
The big difference is in an urban area even the non homeless want to solve homelessness because it's a public nuisance that directly affects them. See any thread here complaining about sf. In rural areas poverty is a much more private problem.
As for Vermont, you're cherry picking. By and large it is undeniable that the Republican/Democrat divide follows an urban rural line. The exceptions are parts of the deep South (where the racial divide is more prominent), and parts of the coasts where liberalism is so dominant even the rural areas are blue. I don't know the mechanism for the latter, but if I had to guess I'd say a big part of the rural population in those areas aren't farmers but retired professionals living in mcmansions. I know people like that but let's not get into anecdotes.
I'm going to double down here. It's not just attitudes on entitlement programs that are influenced by rational interest among urban and rural residents. Literally every hot button political issue can be understood in these terms.
Take guns for instance. Guns in cities are synonymous with gun crime. Owning one is deeply impractical and police response times are fast enough that you don't need one. In a rural area guns are still practical and police response times are slow.
Take endowments for the arts. Guess where the all the state subsidized art ends up. Hint: it's not Topeka Kansas.
So it sounds like a more distributed government is a good idea. Metropolitan areas living as city-states, with rural areas having their own rules and laws. Both having separate budgets for local issues.
Speaking of which - if cities and their urban populations want to solve homelessness, why can they not do it on a city-by-city case, locally? A tragedy of the commons type issue, where a city that takes care of the homeless better will have more homeless people heading there?
This is a great idea! Maybe restructure the nation as some sort of constitutional republic where the federal government holds limited power (foreign trade, interstate commerce, defence) and the states are left to run day to day matters themselves. We should form a party we could call ourselves Republicans.
I kid but this has been a known problem for two thousand years. The solutions are continually rediscovered, reimplemented and then ignored by later generations that "know better".
"Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms."
You could do what the EU does, and make the upper house consist of the state governors. That way, for the upper house to approve an increase in federal authority, they actually have to vote to move power from themselves, as individuals, to the lower house (this is a part of why the EU is relatively unimportant compared to the constituent EU nations).
Except that senators were not popularly elected, but elected by the state legislature (so corruption was easier). Sending the governors themselves to DC would shift powers back to the state (a good thing, imo), but governors wouldn't have much time left for governance.
I think we could improve upon on current system by adding a vice-governor to the governor's ticket, and subjecting the ticket to the popular vote. Then the governor could send the vice-governor, his popularly elected subordinate, to Congress, which would help shift power back to the states. As it currently stands, senators do not feel a need to pay heed to their states' governors.
I'd say the power to leave is also a nice feature, it forces the larger government to provide some sort of value and not step on too many toes or risk being disbanded.
Imagine if California was free to regulate all of healthcare for itself. They could write whatever socialized medicine program the voters desired all while not burdening the people of Texas with the cost who perhaps prefer a free market solution of some kind. As different states implement different programs people would be able to vote with their feet as to what was the better deal, causing states to compete with one another to offer the best deals to its population.
States are too small to effectively implement what they want? That isn't a problem as they can contract with each other and if that goes south look to the federal government to resolve the dispute.
Still wrong. Maricopa county voted for Trump in 2016 and barely went Blue in 2018 despite being a massive city and not being in the colloquial “racist South” to which you refer.
You’re too shallow in your assumption that everyone wants free stuff from the government and only votes against it when they don’t benefit.
>Take guns for instance. Guns in cities are synonymous with gun crime.
Boring trope. Owning a gun in any Texas city isn’t a problem at all, including Austin, which isn’t exactly a conservative stronghold.
What do you mean allowed to happen? You pay the fare, no one is checking on you. Of course, some people go overboard and set up camp (blankets, shopping cart, etc), but even taking up space and carrying bulky items isn't prohibited AFAIK, I've put my feet up and carried luggage with me. Just aren't a lot of rules down there.
As far as why not more, it's not a great place to sleep...
A significant number of homeless people in London sleep on night buses. It's warm, it's reasonably quiet on the top deck, there's full CCTV coverage and the weekly fare cap is £21.20.
The subway is a flat fare, $2.75 no matter how long you ride or how many transfers you make. Not to mention it's really easy to get on without paying.
As for why you're allowed to stay at the end of the line -- it's probably a mix of liberal policy, lack of manpower, and general "not my problem" attitude.
Not all of NY subways are loop lines right? From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway#/media/Fi..., I can't identify a loop line in the NY system at all, not like Beijing that has a couple (line 2, line 10), and of course Tokyo's inner city rail loop lines.
Usually, if a non-looping subways hit EOL, there will be a sweep and a rest period. Looping subways might just change drivers and keep going...well, it can suck when you are on a train that is retiring (in Beijing, they just dump you out and tell you to wait for the next train...).
After the Queens Blvd locals (M/R) terminate in Forest Hills, they loop around through Jamaica Yard, meaning non-revenue track. Stragglers being asked to alight is a common sight.
> Usually, if a non-looping subways hit EOL, there will be a sweep and a rest period.
Generally this is a short rest period, ~ 10-15 minutes max during peak times and 30 minutes max otherwise. Nobody's kicking you off, you can just wait until the train starts back the other way.
It's also generally the least busy part of the line.
The second greatest problem on NYC's subway for people who wish to "live" there (after rush hours) has to be the light. The fluorescent is unavoidable.
It is a loop, but passengers are not allowed on that segment. If you manage to stay on the car, you also get to take a quick peek at an abandoned station.
Ahhh, yea, in that case I believe the bottom of the 1 is as well in the Financial District. Very small loop. Always interesting to get on there because I think it's the tightest curve I've found and the trains probably at a good 6 or 7 degree tilt there. Neat stuff.
The motorman has to move from the back to front, if he's staying on. Or he's off and someone else is taking over. So yeah they're there for at least like 10min.
Or the train is being removed from service. That's not really going to happen in the middle of the night but definitely happens during times when they are decreasing service (after rush hour, after like 11pn)
Peak service on London Underground is done by "stepping back". You bring a train in, switch off (allowing your driving cab to become a trailing cab in a second) and step out of the cab, then another driver steps in at the far end, switches that on, and the train announces its new destination and reconfigures appropriately. You begin walking down the platform. The train leaves, but in the time it takes to stroll to the far end another one arrives, so you get in and drive that one away. Thus drivers "step back" by one train each time they do this.
I don't know about the NYC subways, but a number of jurisdictions in the US see metro councils / transportation authorities deciding to not check tickets at all, because of "disproportionate impacts" for certain racial groups.
It seems absurd to me to advocate petty lawlessness, but the public transportation systems are all so far underwater that checking ride tickets isn't going to practically move the needle anyway.
That is indeed the argument I have heard for not checking fares / tickets, and I think was the last link I proveded elsewhere on this thread.
One of the light rail trains near me is subsidized to the tune of 30 or so dollars per ride, so it's not like catching the small percentage of evaders will actually make a dent (that's probably 6 or more times the fare cost).
But it does seem like encouraging it by doing nothing at all is a bad idea.
That's a ridiculous assertion. In most major cities, you don't buy "tickets" for public transportation (except maybe light rail). Everything is fare based (used to be token based, but have mainly switched to cards). You pay the fare, you ride the subway or the trolley or the bus until you get off. The fare is the same no matter how far you are going. Most of these things travel in loops. You get to the end of the line, it either turns around, or just goes in the opposite direction.
Those were the top of a very brief search. If I looked a bit more, I'm sure I could find more examples backing up my original claim. There's nothing ridiculous about the assertion at all.
In Shanghai, it's fare based, but the fare is definitely not the same no matter how far you're going. The fare is determined as a function of where you enter the system and where you leave, with longer trips being more expensive.
There's no time limit; one entry will let you stay in the subway system all day. But you can't just live on the trains, because they shut down at night.
Somehow I suspect that if Shanghai can shut down the subway overnight, New York, with half the ridership, could handle doing so too, so the question "why is this allowed to happen" seems valid.
In nyc they have multiple tunnels for the same line, so one can be maintained while the other is active. Cities that shut down their metro do their maintenance then, because their lines don’t have a backup track.
Not sure about Shanghai, but in most countries there are (generous) time limits associated with fares, measured from first entry. Obviously this isn't enforced "in flight", but the gate will not let you out when you try to leave and you'll need to explain to staff why you've just spent 4 hours traveling one stop -- since odds are you actually went somewhere else and jumped the turnstile both ways.
I don't think there is a limit in Shanghai. A few years back there was a heat wave and the subway stations were full of people who just came to hang out where there was air conditioning.
Shanghai subway closing at 11pm or earlier is a huge inconvenience, especially for destinations on Pudong side where distances between locations are quite big. It is generally a big (positive) deal when a subway announces it can do late night services.
Zones are used for the light commuter rail service that connects to counties external to city limits.
Inside city limits, the distances travelled are so compressed (even interborough), that most trips are less than ten minutes of actual train ride.
Once you start dealing with zones, you also have to start operating on fixed schedules. The New York City system does have time tables but they don't really operate to the minute. The listed times are mostly just targets. More important is the frequency of trains, back to back trains (double capacity) with five minute frequencies during rush hour, and graveyard has 20 minute frequencies, everything else aims for ten minutes between each individual train.
Again, most people are travelling less than 45 minutes on trains set for 30MPH speed limits.
Hong Kong is significantly smaller than even Manhattan and still employs distance-based fares quite successfully.
I can go from my local station to the CBD (2 stops, around 5 minutes) and it costs roughly US$0.60; another 5 stops on the same line to get to my favorite restaurant bumps the journey to about 12 minutes and costs me ~$0.90. Crossing the harbor from Hong Kong island to the Kowloon peninsula takes less time but actually costs more (almost $1.50) thanks to tunnel fees.
On a side note, public transit timing is one thing that has been irrevocably ruined for me by living in HK. On my usual travel routes the train frequency is typically 2-3 minutes and during rush hour it’s on the order of 30 seconds - the next train often enters the platform just as the last car of the previous train leaves. Granted it does shut for a few hours each night, but even the other top Asian metro systems can't match it.
When I used to spend a lot of time in NYC (before moving to Asia) I had no problem with the subways; now it’s a significant consideration for me when thinking about moving.
I think that the gap between trains and the number of trains per hour is different. I can believe that there are sometimes merely 30 seconds between trains, but train frequencies don't really exceed, let's say, 50 trains per hour (and this is being very generous) because of a combination of signalling constraints and the need to reverse the trains at the end.
You're correct, but this is a mostly academic distinction on a network like Hong Kong's. The gap between trains is a much more important human metric, and it changes based on where you are in the network.
An example: you could fill as many trains as you could physically fit on a track coming from Central (the CBD) during rush hour; a train every 30 seconds or so is crucial to keeping things civil on the platform. As you get farther from Central, utilization falls until you reach a terminal station, where the time between trains can be more like 2-3 minutes without any problems. Through clever signaling you can achieve a much higher perceived throughput on the busiest stretches without actually running more trains.
In the Netherlands all public transport (from city buses you only use for one minute to intercity trains to the other side of the country) use the same chip card. You scan it where you enter the bus/tram/metro/train and scan it where you leave, you pay depending on distance travelled. The buses use GPS to calculate your cost.
It's usually fine for high frequency metros, particularly in peak times with more trains, but time-based zone fares aren't always reliable in other cases.
For example, in most of Switzerland and probably Germany that uses unified zone systems for everything (intercity trains, local buses, boats, funiculars, etc.) the frequency of most train routes is nowhere near those of a typical bus.
Zones aren't usually time based though, they're based on where you got on and how many zones that is away from where you are when your ticket is checked.
The flat fare is actually more progressive when it comes to transportation. In a large city, poor people generally have to travel further for work, so a distance-based fare hits them harder.
Well, perhaps both approaches are unfair. Perhaps you cannot have a system that's perfectly fair for everyone. That's not to say that you shouldn't try.
Yea as a NYC resident who travels to SF I’m always amazed at the cost of the BART system. Seems super shitty for low wage workers traveling long distances.
And it adds up so quick, with no unlimited option.
I guess it’d be like taking the Metro North or LIRR to work everyday but it still seems like a lot of money to me.
Denver’s RTD is zoned. The bay’s CalTrain is zoned. Atlanta’s MARTA is not zoned (it is a considerably smaller system though). Those are all my data points.
In most major cities you swipe a metro card that calculates the fare where you got on and got off, or applies zoned travel on a daily, weekly, monthly, or annual rate. In some cities you can just swipe an NFC bank card. To have a 'ticket to ride' seems ridiculous.
In New York, for the subway, you pay your fair (usually with a swipe card) before you even get on the platform, and as long as you don't leave through the exit gates, you're free to transfer at any stop. They have no idea when you get off, and the fair is the same no matter where you're going.
Anecdata: I've fallen asleep on a late night Metropolitan Line train heading towards Aldgate before and I woke up by myself going the other way, at Northwood. I wasn't woken by any well meaning passengers or employees, nor was I robbed of my two holdalls on the seat next to me.
$16 × 30 days would be $480/month. Expensive for commuting, but cheaper than most apartments even in the cheaper parts of the US, let alone (surely) London.
You can't really compare living in an apartment with living on a train.
Also, generally for $480 per month there will be somewhere non-moving that you'll be able to stay, such as a hostel or a roomshare apartment (which isn't necessarily legal, but common in larger cities).
A round trip or two on the circle line was not very popular, but popular enough, for cohorts of bankers sleeping the night or lunch off. I never did it myself.
This is the why I always choose the reverse seats if possible.
Of course if someone is sitting opposite to you then they’ll slam into you in case of an accident, but I still think the chances of survival are better when facing rearwards.
You're correct, on any vehicle involved in an accident you're more likely to survive with your back facing momentum.
This was scientifically proven through the work done by John Stapp[1], who attached himself to a rocket sled facing both directions and at one point became "the fastest man on earth" by breaking the land speed record at 632 mph and sustaining 46.2 g's.
His research is the reason why most military transport planes have seats facing backwards or sideways.
The takeaway should be "make sure you can't hit anything". Sitting with your back to the stop often helps you not go flying and hit anything when no proper tie downs are available but it's just a rule of thumb. If you have even just a lap belt your going to be better off facing forward in the event of a crash because of how the human neck works.
Find it strange that planes don't use them more often. I ended up flying BA business once and half their seats are backwards. It was quite novel, takeoff felt a bit weird but besides that no difference.
Went researching it after the flight and apparently reverse seats are far safer for injuries, especially neck and torso related.
Because motion sickness. I can absolutely never sit backwards even on a train, and plane take offs make me queezy as it is. I suspect there are people with much worse motion sickness issues
Military passenger planes often have the seats facing aft. Even when they're the same model with the same chairs as a commercial airliner, they just install them facing aft.
As a south indian who has travelled pretty much all over the world, I cant even describe how I feel reading this article. Because you see, in India, the trains don't even have doors. It is the travellers responsibility to not fall out :D. And then there is such an Emergency pulley in each car with the handle painted red. But since no one has ever used it or changed in multiple decades, it is completely rusted and sealed with dirt. So it is near impossible for any individual to completely pull that lever down. The levers are also directly connected to the trains brake system, meaning you are actually directly applying the brake. I have seen 4 people pulling and hanging on to that lever handle to actually stop the train. Sigh!
Okay. This is a bit of an exaggeration. The poster above is talking about long distance trains while the article is about subway trains.
1. Most trains in India do have doors.
2. Almost all modern subway in Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai etc do have doors. The trains won’t move till the doors are completely shut.
3. Mumbai is one of the few cities which has an ancient train system which overlaps with the national long distance trains and is separate from the subways but still carries the bulk of the people. Trains/EMUs on this do have doors but people generally don’t close these in rush hours.
4. These days even long distance trains in India have their doors closed shut and you do get reprimanded for trying to keep the doors open (happened to me multiple times)
5. The part about chains being rusted and difficult to pull is probably true.
6. Delhi metro (and I suspect others too) don’t have chains. You have a button and speaker near every other door to talk to the driver in case of emergency.
7. Trains have doors. People just don’t close them.
Didn't mean to exaggerate and it is true that the metros build in the last few years are great. But this is the image of today's suburban train in Chennai. May be I should have clearly mentioned that this is the status in south india rather than india as a whole.
Gotta say, for anyone worried about the surveillance state and stuff, NYC is the perfect city. Through a unique combination of a dense, diverse, super populated metropolis and pure incompetence, you really can disappear in the crowds.
That’s simply not true anymore. Our NYPD operates the so-called “Domain Awareness System”, which is a combination of good old database connected to terminals in patrol cars and precincts, as well as metadata-rich security cameras. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Awareness_System
The system doesn’t get talked about very much, but even regular patrolmen are trained to use it effectively. It’s built to accommodate a variety of use cases ranging from tactical support (“suspect headed north on Amsterdam Ave, but then we lost him - where did he go?”) to general investigative duties (“who usually comes by this store on Mondays at 9am?”) and, based on what I’ve heard from cops, works really well.
He was caught sleeping on the street at 10:30 AM, so maybe not exactly a master of evasion, but still, 2 days to catch him ain't bad.
He was caught 2 hours after the police sent an alert to people's phones by someone who got the alert, but not too quickly for Anil Dash to criticize the alert as useless:
The use case is some sort of emergency that the driver may not have seen.
SF's Muni is in the process of onboarding new trams from Siemens. Someone recently stuck their hand in the doors as they were closing. On pretty much any newish tram or subway vehicle this will cause the doors to open again. It's shitty behavior, but that's what people do. Typically trams in the United States have door interlocks such that if the doors are open the vehicle doesn't move. The new Siemens cars apparently don't have well calibrated pinch sensors and the damn thing took off with some idiot woman stuck in the doors, dragging her down the platform.
I've had similar experiences with the older ones (where the drivers would deliberately disable the interlocks — this was before they put tamper evident bits on the override switch). The driver closed the doors as I was boarding. Without looking at his/her mirrors the driver took off as I had one foot on the street and one on the vehicle.
Same deal with people who've fallen onto the tracks.
In San Francisco the emergency stop button in the (older) trams will indeed trigger the emergency brakes directly. I'm OK with this — take a look at the Eschede disaster. One of the passengers was suspicious of all the vibration but decided he didn't have the authority to stop the train. Turns out the eventual derailment stopped the train.
Here’s a story: landed in Schipol (AMS) from Berlin with a good friend of mine. Jumped on a train and was half asleep when the train rolled in to the station just before Amsterdam proper. I forget the name.
Just as he train was about to pull off, a man approached us and said something incoherent in Dutch. Before we could even utter our confusion, he grabbed the backpack on my lap and ran for the doors. I followed him but not nearly as fast as I would like. He was jammed between the automatic doors and I caught a glimpse of him yanking himself onto the platform, where he stumbled and started sprinting.
My cries alerted other passengers who immediately pulled the emergency break. The doors opened and we went into hot pursuit.
Sadly, we never did catch the man that day. The backpack had my laptop and many important documents, but by the grace of some Unknown or my own laziness my passport was still in my pocket. In fact when we got to the police station I thought it was in the bag, and their attitude there visibly changed when I was able to produce it. They took a statement and that was that.
So the emergency brake is useful in some situations...never did get that bag back though ;)
Using the emergency brake while the train is still at the platform makes sense. Once the train has left the station, it makes no sense to stop the train.
> the train rolled in to the station just before Amsterdam proper. I forget the name.
No. This is not. They are using the emergency break lever in every car by either door that is on both ends of the car. It is unlocked and available to all. I once almost pulled it accidentally because the train braked hard and it was so crowded i was holding on to the ceiling.
You need to read the article again then. Although the break pulls you describe are present in every car, the article clearly states that the one being activated is in the unused control cab in the back of the train (the cab used by the conductor when the train travels in the other direction)
- if the train is within the station limits, that lever can be active
- in case of fire the lever should alert the conductor. And the conductor should quickly make the best correct response. Often the passengers don't know that a station could be 20 seconds away and could clear out the train faster. The dispatch could clear a path for the train to speed to a better location than stuck in a tunnel with potentially nearly no place to evacuate to. Do you evacuate to ongoing train traffic? hell no! We have fire detectors, we could install them in every cart.
Modern subways have interlocks preventing motion while the doors are open, and preventing the doors from opening while the train is in motion.
Yeah, until the drivers decide that the doors are so unreliable that it's faster to override the interlocks and hope nobody's caught in the doors (which will eventually reset themselves and close properly).
On Muni's older Breda trams the interlock had a little toggle switch on the circuit breaker panel (conveniently located in the cab) you could use to override it. On the newer ones, it looks like the doors didn't detect a "pinch", the interlock decided the doors were closed enough, and the driver couldn't be bothered to check the video cameras.
>It's like saying there's a "turn engines off" lever on an airplane next to the bathroom.
No, it's not, it's like saying there's plane controls in the cockpit. The break is in a cab that should be inaccessible to riders.
>He climbs aboard the rear of the train as it departs a station, unlocks the safety chains, somehow gets into the rear cab, and triggers the emergency brakes.
I've been wondering - how much would it cost to hire people to subtly sabotage a large city in order to cause financial losses. Say you're a nation state and want to mess with your rivals. There's some optimum for how much you can spend to cause your rival to lose a dollar and still come out on top. That will depend in who you are and who your rival is.
It seems like it should be fairly good bang for buck, in this sense, to just hire people to drive around kind of slowly and badly. Nothing overtly aggressive, but a few dozen people driving slowly around a few select traffic circles around rush hour should really gum things up.
Even better if you can cajole some people into, say, pulling emergency stops on subways. Note I don't think that's what's happening in NYC, but this case does seem to show that a few people could cause outsized disturbances just by being assholes.
If you want financial losses, you're thinking too small. There's a ridiculous amount of infrastructure one can break. Mostly telco / power / water / ... It's a great testament to how people are mainly not dicks, given how everything keeps working.
I'm thinking of a nation state wishing to avoid a major diplomatic conflict. So I think it needs to stay low-level, legal or minor infractions only, and of course deniable. Also if it's hard to even notice something's being done, that's a real plus.
SCADA systems running public utilities plugged directly into winxp machines that are on the internet is something I have seen in person for 5 different organizations.
the CFAA and foreign states not wanting to start a war is seemingly the only thing stopping massive grid failure.
Major cities should probably be more worried about their own countrymen. If the "boogaloo" ever happens the power lines are probably gonna get shot on day 1.
We're already talking in the context of: "subtly sabotage a large city in order to cause financial losses" so if it was beneficial in some way, I'm sure you could pay people off to do it for you. They'd either be aware it's illegal, (break this) or not (pee in this lake for $100).
I remember a story of someone shooting industrial transformers. One bullet from a sniper rifle, and the whole substation is down, millions of dollars in damage.
Two people can rent a couple of UHaul trucks and block almost any highway. It will take hours to get the trucks away.
I also remember an estimate that ~10000 trained saboteurs can bring the whole country to a grind. It's quite cheap and fast to blow stuff up, and much more expensive and slow to restore it.
>It seems like it should be fairly good bang for buck, in this sense, to just hire people to drive around kind of slowly and badly. Nothing overtly aggressive, but a few dozen people driving slowly around a few select traffic circles around rush hour should really gum things up.
I see this as a complete win. It would quickly result in cops aggressively enforcing the existing traffic laws that already make this kind of behavior ticket-able.
It will be a glorious day when driving like a slug carries more risk of being stopped and ticketed than speeding, rolling an empty 4-way stop or otherwise driving like a normal person.
This was the premise of "The Cool War" by Frederik Pohl. It's been a long time so I can't remember whether it was a great read, but definitely an interesting idea.
You can look at the impact of the various train and tube driver unions strikes in Paris, there's usually at least one every few years and the cost are usually in the millions
I recall listening to either a video or reading an article but:
You can screw over an entire city for a week+ by renting a car, parking it in a particularly busy street, and then leaving it there. If you + a few of your friends do this, then you can gridlock the entire traffic flow of a city, as tow trucks cannot get into the area.
Recently we had that in the UK. A Brexit Remain demo was the main gig for the day and a bunch of Brexit Leave supporters did their best to do a go slow on the motorways, to cause traffic problems and impede the progress of those wanting to go to the demo.
The police were able to pull them over and sort them out. I forget what 'public nuisance' law they used, but the police have a wonderful set of things they can arrest people for. Breach of the peace, public order or a good one is conspiracy. Conspiracy can be proved in court but the act at the heart of the conspiracy does not have to be illegal. You could prosecute people for conspiring to share a chocolate bar in theory.
One law the police can truly hang/draw/quarter people for is arson. An 'accidental fire' need cost no more than a box of matches and can definitely sabotage a city. Hence the vast prison sentencing options. I lived somewhere where there was someone setting light to cars at night on our street, they got away with it six or more times and it was crazy how cars would explode the fuel tanks of neighbouring parked cars and melt the windows and guttering of the houses. We had pitchforks at the ready for kids from a neighbouring estate but it didn't turn out to be them. It just took one mentally ill person to put us all on this 'war' footing, suspicious of our neighbours and paranoid.
During the fun years of 'The War Against Terror' the government had to make the threat real with lots of terror drills and implausible scenarios. At one stage there were 'ricin' terror plots where some innocuous plant in someone's front garden was going to kill us all, there was another funny plot where the alleged terror operatives had bought several trillion smoke detectors to get the radioactive gubbins out of them and make a 'dirty bomb'. Obviously this would have killed us all but luckily the 'intelligence' services were onto the bad guys and 'saved the world'.
There was no foreign nation state doing this, the UK government managed to do it all by themselves. They even shut down London's Heathrow in one of these colour coded terror events, inconveniencing many but making the threat seem plausible if nonsensical.
Oddly the terrorists never had a plan that would actually work. There was always a flaw to the story, for instance the likelihood of being able to buy an absurd amount of smoke detectors or the realities of the ricin yield from the castor beans.
It was a bit like video games and movies where the bad guys are predictable and stupid.
Industrial action has been an area of subtle sabotage. In the UK this was a common thing in the 1970's. Cars would make it to the end of the production line with rattles and other defects that just made mass production a farce.
I think the CIA have a manual on how to do this, so a resistance movement in an occupied country can make things grind to a halt, just by being useless at their jobs, never doing anything that could be seen as 'terrorist'.
Makes you wonder why trains even have an emergency brake. A button to alert people to an emergency, sure, but when does stopping a moving train in a tunnel or the middle of nowhere fix a problem with passengers?
If I designed a massive, fast-moving, unmaneuverable tube holding dozens of human lives, I think affording it a relatively safe way to arrest that momentum would be essential.
This guy appears to be using the break in the driver cabs (the unused one meant for when the train is moving in the opposite direction), so unless we got rid of those too it wouldn't matter.
Ethnicity is often ambiguous or complicated or both, especially in big American cities. If we knew this guy was the child of a Polish Filipino and a Chinese Irish parent would that help us? Thinking that ethnicity is simple and allows people to be easily sorted into meaningful groups is dramatically false.
NYC is not some small town somewhere. It can be a little difficult to get ethnicity correct. For instance, is that robbery suspect white with a tan? Latino? Or just a mixed black guy maybe?
Oh wow! Turns out he was Armenian and the other was Arab. Who knew?
That sort of nuance may not be important in a place like small town, Flyover Country, but it's critical in a place like NYC. That's why places like NYC are so big on police artist sketches. They are more helpful in that context than, "White looking guy, medium height, medium build."
People think it's racism that police tended to state the race when the suspect was black. The reality is that blacks were one of the only race groups that would not be easily confused by laymen. (Asians as well.) But we even messed that up because of unreliable witnesses, etc.
Now a days with cameras everywhere we can just blast the suspect's face over the local news and we don't have to worry about figuring out if the suspect is white, or arab, or latino or what have you. With video evidence, you don't run that same risk of people in, say, the Bronx being less vigilant because, "They're looking for a white guy."
The way I understand it is that emergency brakes are for when the train desperately needs to not leave the station. Either someone very sick is on the train, or someone dangerous gets on, or there is some other emergency. When that happens, you need a way to absolutely 100% prevent the train from leaving the station, where help is most readily available. Unfortunately this requires trusting passengers to not pull the emergency brake on a whim
From a 2010 article, "...nearly half of the subway system’s 4,313 security cameras that have been installed — in stations and tunnels throughout the system — do not work..."
From riding the MTA I imagine its actually a very challenging environment between the leaking mystery fluids and the electronic noise, but of course I don't mean to take the blame off the multi-billion dollar organization that should be able to handle installing some security cameras, but the infrastructure is just falling apart in every way.
I'm regularly astounded about how the U.S. has so much money in general, but can/won't invest in betterment of its citizens (current and future) because it's either self serving or in a state of decline.
The money is there, we have the largest federal budget on the planet. It’s just tied up in endless wars, incarcerations, and pork barrel projects. And those things individually aren’t necessarily bad but we do it with such largesse it leaves very little room for anything else. The way our politics work is no one can plan multi decade projects if you can’t do it in one term then don’t bother.
For the MTA specifically it isn't a matter of money. They are so insanely inefficient and poorly run that the entire NY + NYC budget wouldn't be enough without serious reform.
The US is terrible about infrastructure maintenance. I think it's a combination of two things: Firstly nobody gets their picture taken cutting a ribbon for a maintenance project, and secondly if infrastructure is crappy then nobody wants to pay more taxes because obviously the government doesn't know how to take care of things. It's a double whammy of failure.
The emergency exits in the stations used to, and the signs still say "alarm will sound if opened", but they were disabled around 2014 because there were too many false alarms. Mostly because the emergency exit doors are also used for strollers, luggage, etc. that can't fit through the turnstile, or as a general exit when there's a large group of people exiting.
Case Neistat did a New York Times Op-ed video on YouTube about it, before they were disabled: https://youtu.be/aUcP5OD-ctQ
Wrong emergency exit. What they meant was the emergency exits from the tunnels themselves, which are located halfway between each pair of stations and lead directly to the street via unassuming yellow hatches in the sidewalk.
You'd be paying somebody to stand there all day at multiple points for each station. This isn't a situation that happens once a half hour, it's every minute or so.
What's an alarm going to do? Unless someone is right there to apprehend the suspect, and that's unlikely, the alarm is just going to go off and then what? Someone disables it 10 minutes later? That doesn't help identify the suspect.
The cameras are probably deployed to prevent crime, and there's very little crime in the tunnels because very few people are stupid enough to risk their lives by entering them. Besides, the tunnels are dimly lit.
There's 220 miles of subway tunnels (though not all are underground). On top of that one can simply just use a dollar store ski mask to avoid camera identification.
But they have to get into the tunnel first, probably from the station. If anyone is able to enter the tunnel from outside, then it is dangerous, because they can put a bomb or a crowbar on the rails.
The MTA, which runs the LIRR and Metro North commuter railroads as well as the subways, has recently been installing surveillance cameras inside the LIRR trains. I expect they'll be coming to the subways soon.
A few people used to live in the Amtrak tunnels on the Hudson River side of Manhattan. There was a documentary made about them [0]. They were evicted, and the tunnels fenced off, in the late 1990s.
I would be quite surprised if anyone was living in the subway tunnels. Compared to the Amtrak tunnels, they are much narrower. Additionally, people were living in the Amtrak tunnels during a time when the tunnels were unused or seldom used by train traffic. In contrast, subway tunnels see lots of traffic 24 hours a day.
Depends on how you look at it, I suppose. It slows him down, a very efficient metropolis would be able to cause much more harm at much greater speed. Strategic sabotage can hinder the war efforts, and it doesn't have to be one large bomb, a thousand needle pricks might have an effect, too, and they are much easier to disguise as incompetence.
"Sorry, we didn't mean to put an ad in front of this important information, we just hadn't considered that people coming up the stairs wouldn't be able to read it."
Commute hassle does not come out of productivity. Workers are simply forced to leave their homes earlier and return later, spending less time outside Moloch’s grasp.
“Cars ending in 1, 5, 6 and 0 have single full-width cabs and are known as "A" cars.
Cars ending in all other digits have no cabs and are known as "B" cars”
, I guess it is about 40% of that, or 2,600.
So, about 2,600 cameras (motion detectors might already be enough, if the culprit spends sufficient time in the cabin) in the cabs likely would solve the “what do they look like?) problem. Because of the differences in car widths, you even likely need fewer to cover the lines where this occurs a lot.
Don't you think it's a bit less of a problem when it's isolated to a single vehicle intended for private travel? By this logic, it applies to every single road vehicle. What does it matter about whether it has a human or machine brain inside?
Seems more likely that something is triggering the emergency braking system than some rogue, random dude risking his or her life to pull this stunt that often, AND go undetected.
Did you even read the article? People have seen the dude getting on and off trains. There's physical evidence in the form of unlocked safety chains. How does reality "seem unlikely" to you?
I opened that link and was going to comment on the use of IPA - because in the first line I noticed it was using the British pronunciation, 'kriːʧə, rather than the North American pronunciation, 'kriːʧɚ. But in double checking myself, I found something more interesting - the wikipedia article [1] on R-coloured vowels (like the sound at the end of creature, that I was talking about). I thought I was pronouncing the r consonant separately, but instead it's just changing the vowel sound, which is linguistically kind of rare. Neat!
The Economist has this delightful article [1] about the history of some words that look like there should share common roots, but don't.
Examples from the article: the chess pawn and 'to pawn', Repair (to fix) and repair (as in “let’s repair to the smoking room”), Isle and island. All descend from different root languages with different meanings.
Not to be snarky, but before writing such a comment you should probably read the article:
> Every New York City Transit employee gave the same description of the “surfer” they saw riding the back of the train or darting across the tracks: young, male, wearing black clothing and white sneakers.
I would be very surprised if this could happen in central london.
1) the tubes are packed and the cabs locked.
2) they would have be murdered by the other commuters.
3) you can't get in or out of the station without being seen on CCTV
4) each train has CCTV coverage.
5) its almost impossible to get out of the tube via the tunnels, without being electrocuted or run over (All but the cut and cover tunnels are <1' bigger than the trains)
For point 2, even in legitimate cases where someone has keeled over, you get death stares. The only time its seen as acceptable is when someone falls inbetween the gap between the train and the platform edge.