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Work began in 1999. It wouldn’t be fully operational until 2011. At the current pace of installation, the subway system as a whole won’t be converted to CBTC for another 175 years. It will cost $20 billion.
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I was there to find out why CBTC was taking so long and costing so much.
“You try to benchmark New York to other places and you can’t,” he said. Everything is harder here. Everything takes longer here.
He explained that the Canarsie pilot suffered from problems that weren’t unusual for big transit projects in New York. The first was outmoded work rules. CBTC is designed so that trains can run themselves. But the L still has two-person crews on board every train. They’re not very busy: An April 2007 article titled “Look, Ma—no hands!” in the trade magazine Railway Age featured a delighted train supervisor named Lance Parrish riding in a CBTC-equipped train on the Canarsie Line. “All Parrish has to do is scan the onboard displays and acknowledge a flashing/beeping alerter every 20 seconds.”
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The second was a fear of change. It costs $168,000 per track-mile per year to maintain trackside signals, 90 percent of which is spent on labor—much of it done overnight and on weekends, qualifying the workers for overtime. If those signals were eliminated, millions of dollars could be saved each year. But New York decided to run CBTC on top of a reduced form of the old fixed-block signaling system, requiring that both be expensively maintained, despite evidence from other cities that no backup was necessary. (In Vancouver, the SkyTrain has had no CBTC-related accidents in more than 26 years.
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The project was in many ways a success: It brought old signals into a state of good repair, it created a (very cool-looking) centralized Rail Control Center, and it delivered countdown clocks to the 1-6 lines. But all of that was supposed to take nine years; it took 14 instead. ATS is now remembered as a classic case of mismanagement.
A post-mortem by the Federal Highway Administration details how from the start, an agency which had had little experience with large “systems” projects tried to wing it.
Until the MTA get's enough leverage over the TWU in the next collective bargaining agreement, things won't be changing anytime soon. Years ago, the MTA tried to do away with the two-man crew, but the courts stopped them, as it violated the union agreement.
Lets all go back to 14 hr days and 7 day work weeks then. Oh yea, bring the kids!
The jobs aren't mostly manufacturing anymore. Unions were needed when the jobs were mostly manufacturing. Nowadays unions are in cahoots with manufacturing's replacement - civil service.
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"The man who sleeps on the floor, can never fall out of bed." -Martin Lawrence
Lot's of fallacies in that article, I figure I'll address some things.
CBTC was/is a huge failure on the L. If something were to happen between 8th avenue-Aberdeen street you won't be able run any service because every-train on the line would go BIE until the problem is rectified. The 7 lines CBTC project will use a combination of automatic and wayside signals in order to prevent such a thing.
CBTC also doesn't do much in terms of capacity do to the constrains of terminals. You can't magically run trains at two minute intervals because terminals can only handle a certain amount of trains per hour without causing delays, and on the L line in particular that number is lower than other lines due to bumper blocks and the lack of layup or relay tracks.
If you want capacity we need more lines to be built like the SAS and they need to be done quicker.
Lastly, it would be downright dangerous to only have one person or nobody at all on the train. We run 600 feet trains (B division) and 510 feet trains in the A division. Do you think it's safe to have one person closing the doors with hundreds of people on board from the first car? Keep in mind it's part of the conductors responsibility to observe from his/her position and make sure nobody's being dragged from being caught in the doors. How would that be possible with one person in the front? In an emergency situation where the operator somehow becomes incapacitated and there's nobody to guide/instruct you on what to do for 15-20 mins what would you do?
The jobs aren't mostly manufacturing anymore. Unions were needed when the jobs were mostly manufacturing. Nowadays unions are in cahoots with manufacturing's replacement - civil service.
Track workers have dangerous jobs, one was killed a couple of weeks ago. All workers have rights even in non-hazardous fields and are better off unionized. Obviously unions have started to become bloated and corporatized but the concept of a unionized workforce will never be outdated, as long as there is work for humans to do.
CBTC also doesn't do much in terms of capacity do to the constrains of terminals. You can't magically run trains at two minute intervals because terminals can only handle a certain amount of trains per hour without causing delays, and on the L line in particular that number is lower than other lines due to bumper blocks and the lack of layup or relay tracks.
Doesn't that only apply to lines that run by themselves and don't merge with others? Most trains merge into a trunk line in Manhattan, and that's really where the congestion happens. If you can run a train every 2 minutes along the trunk line, you're not turning trains around every 2 minutes at the terminal because there's more than one line/terminal.
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