REPLACE OLD SIGNALS WITH COMPUTERS
3 Richard Barone, vice president for transportation at Regional Plan Association, an urban-policy organization in New York City
When your train gets stuck to the point that commuters bail and start calling for Ubers, the reason is often due to signal failure — one of the greatest causes of mechanical delays.
Signals are the all-important lights that turn red, yellow or green and control the flow of train traffic. When a signal fails, often due to mechanical issues, trains are instantly braked and unable to move in order to avoid collisions.
But much of this system is ancient. “There are a lot of old components that date back to the 1930s, and [Hurricane] Sandy did not help,” said Barone. “Salt water got into copper wiring, which has been fixed [but not necessarily replaced] and that is resulting in more frequent failures.”
Today’s trains cannot communicate their locations and must, for safety’s sake, stay separated by hundreds of feet. This makes for choppy service.
Barone recommends the MTA go “from analogue to digital” by discard- ing the old signals and installing modern train controls run by computers. It’s “a new type of system where the train and tracks talk to each other,” Barone said. “Every hundreds of feet [on the track] there is a transponder that is coded with its location.” Using radio signals, a central computer tracks all the trains’ locations in the subway system, allowing them to run closer to each other safely and arrive at stations more evenly spaced, resulting in fewer standstills.
Barone dismisses critics who say the NYC subway is too old for such an upgrade. He points to the Paris Metro, founded in 1900, which started getting retrofitted with modern electronics in 2007. “Paris has a system that is just as old as ours and today its oldest line is driverless.”
That said, Barone will not be looking to Tokyo for ideas on how to get the trains running efficiently. Asked about adopting the white-gloved “pushers” (this is their actual job title) who are known for shoving passengers onto the super-packed Japanese subways, he demurred. “I don’t think the MTA can get away with physically pushing people without there being a lawsuit,” Barone said.