bobtehpanda

Right. NYCHA projects are full of cameras. But at the end of the day, some dude remotely watching the cameras is probably going to take 10+ minutes to get to you, and you can do a lot of shit in ten minutes.

what are you referring to?

The current locomotives are breaking down right now, so unfortunately we don't really have the luxury of waiting around for electrification to finish. Also, my understanding of how European locomotives work (and what the Siemens Chargers are ultimately based on) is a modular system where a diesel generator hooks into an electric drivetrain, so it would technically be possible to just remove the generator at a later date if electrification was extended.

Running a city based franchise has always been tough, because corporate wants you to run the same deals in Midtown or the Bronx that they're running in Tulsa, but the running costs are obviously not anywhere close. Fast food makes more sense once you realize corporate usually owns the land and rents it to the franchisee. The fast food companies are real estate businesses that happen to help run restaurants on the side.

As a more practical reason: Columbia and NYU are institutions that do research and have conferences, and to some extent so do City College and Hunter College, so you have a fair amount of infrequent visitors who need to know where to go. Community colleges, less so. (I don't really care, but hopefully New York can avoid some of the DC Metro sillyness around extremely long hyphenated station names like "U-St/African Amer Civil War Memorial/Cardozo") If anything, I would suggest that hospitals are probably a more relevant renaming candidate than colleges, since those always have people visiting. Or even one-offs like "Woodhaven Blvd-Queens Center."

Low platform + high floor is really, really inefficient. In the days of the high-floor buses, the entire line could be held up by grandma struggling up the steps. Or a wheelchair lift taking forever, and possibly breaking down. More inefficient = more time spent on the trip. More time spent = needing to hire more people and buy more trains to run the same level of frequency. Which is bad. So I agree that that would be really stupid, and also half the think tanks are on some shit (like really, a mega-station in Port Morris? I want whatever they're smoking) I will say that, in the event a real through-running plan shows up, it would be likely that we would see significant reconfiguration of the approach tracks around Penn Station anyways because they are a major slowdown point on the NEC; and it would probably be good to have a second, north Empire Connection track anyways if something like Penn Station Phase II is ever going to happen.

Through running usually never actually means "every single train will through run." There will still be terminating trains. Most major train stations in systems with through running have a mix.

IIRC, the proposal way back when was to build two extra lanes, which would almost certainly involve significant property taking along the entire route (the highway through Queens is super tightly constrained)

For future reference: in pdfs you can link directly to the page number like so: https://new.mta.info/document/89781#page=45

The issue there is that the West Side Line is a lot trickier to build the stations at. 62 St is in the tunnel. At 125 St the line is right up against the Henry Hudson Parkway. The Bronx stations are a lot less site constrained. For similar reasons, we're not getting an Astoria station on the Hell Gate line, because they studied it and found that they might maybe be able to squeeze in a 4-car platform but it would be really expensive.

What are the Chinatown vans doing these days? Though, tbh even back in the day going east was kind of a crapshoot. You knew shit was going down if the vans started detouring through industrial Brooklyn streets. LIE gets f**ked up (particularly around Queens Blvd and Corona Park), GCP's f**ked up by LGA, BQE is the BQE, etc. The Asians in the community take the Chinese vans, which are very well patronized. They're faster, and cost less, than MTA routes, which is why the X51 failed in the first place. I'm not super convinced that you would be able to convince them to pay more money to switch to slower MTA service.

Honestly, I doubt in practice there will actually be increases in diesel territory. There are barely enough trains to run the current level of service, even when they're all working.

So, normally the way these kinds of projects work is that the funding requests to the feds also include a plan of service and how it is going to get paid for. To some degree, this plan has to be followed, otherwise Uncle Sam gets testy that you didn't build and operate what you said you were going to, and they demand their grant money back. That being said, ESA blew out its budget 3x, so who even knows? But technically these expenses have been known for years and are supposed to be budgeted for in advance. Operations is, thankfully, a place where the budget can't blow out 3x, unless the MTA somehow hired 2x ghosts for every employee they actually hired.

I mean, we have long since sailed past the deregulation-era "but the private sector can do it better!" nonsense. CAHSR was, for the longest time, a consultant-led operation, and look at how well that went.

So on April 18, a federal judge in Florida issued a nationwide injunction on this mandate. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/classroom/2022/04/a-judge-struck-down-the-travel-mask-mandate-heres-what-that-means-for-you/ While that makes its way through the legal system, the mandate is not actually enforceable.

More than the subway, but less than the express bus.

The MTA has not built any rail line this long in... well, ever. They choked the last couple times they tried to build big extensions (the '70s 2-phase SAS, the Archer Avenue Line, the QBL bypass, etc.) Alas, one must learn to walk before they can run. --- They still haven't released the big study, right? In what universe is "conventional rail" slower than a bus? Are they using horses to pull trains?

This was tried out during the 2010 service cuts for bus routes that were replaced. It was, to put it mildly, a disaster. In general, the Chinatown vans make a good deal of money (the model is essentially driver takes the fares) and don't want the MTA/City to ruin a good thing. Working with them means more regulation and bureaucracy, accepting free transfers cuts directly into their income, etc.

The problem there has always been that the Chinatown vans are cheaper and faster than anything MTA could run. It's why the x51 was cut in the first place. It would be nifty if they could be brought "into the fold" and take OMNY with transfers, but I think that's a whole can of worms that the drivers themselves are not interested in.

The East River is also quite shallow. There's no reason to split it across two branches, especially if you consider the construction/capacity/connection issues on the line through Hell Gate. And Hunts Point is across the East River from LGA.

I mean, the service plans published years ago were really not all that complicated. every train alternates between Penn and GCT. Part of the whole Jamaica area reworking was to eliminate the possibility of Change At Jamaica being a thing that needed to be done for non-Brooklyn customers. I get the sense that they didn't like how having to hold for connections impacted things like OTP.

CBTC is the next generation of signaling technology. At this point it might be that they're triaging which parts of the system have the oldest, original signaling systems. But really no one really installs new fixed-block if at all possible; CBTC means less wayside equipment as well.

At this point, doing so would basically be free money for the MTA, since zero people currently make that trip right now due to how much of a PITA it is, and how expensive it is. The Atlantic Ticket was actually revenue positive despite the fare cuts, which is impressive if you consider how poorly it was advertised.

They are extending a pocket track at Great Neck probably for that reason. https://patch.com/new-york/portwashington/mta-lirr-port-washington-branch-service-reduced-weekend

The subway+bus is so much slower that waiting at most 15 minutes is not a huge deal. Also, I'm pretty sure they were running four trains an hour already during peak pre-COVID. that equipment didn't just all disappear, and the train orders to literally double service on all of the LIRR were made before the pandemic.