CenSin

Please elaborate on what it means to “clear them out.”

I mean… that’s still consistent with what I said. The solution (software, hardware, configuration) remains the same, but the data that it processes (i.e., the audio files) changes. All it takes is one weak link in the chain requiring backwards compatibility to spoil the potential tech advancement options for the rest. For example, the original SD standard capped memory cards to 2 GB. If some hardware were developed around a platform that hadn’t updated its controllers, then every future product developed around that platform would be held back on SD card capacity.

You would be amazed how slow tech moves in some industries. There are also many considerations besides “it can be done.” For example: what has been working and shouldn’t be touched? That’s why you find ancient programming languages like COBOL being used in financial systems or nuclear weapons systems still reliant on floppy disks. The same is true for consumer markets. ECC RAM exists to prevent memory corruption from irreversibly ruining digital archives (e.g., your family videos, tax returns PDFs, etc.). Market segmentation prevented most consumers from benefiting from it even though it’s been used for decades in the enterprise and industrial segments. Perhaps the MTA leans a little too conservatively and needs to make a clean break with its past.

The question is: where are these people ultimately coming from and in what proportions? Assuming the switch is made: People (the NYP staff) east of Forest Hills would be the biggest losers. People along the local stops from Forest Hills to 36 Street would be the biggest winners. People getting on at Forest Hills or Jackson Heights (including those from Woodside, Elmhurst, Corona, and Flushing) would be somewhere in between. Also to be taken into consideration: The NYC Health + Hospitals / Metropolitan at 96 Street () Northwell Health at Lexington Avenue/53 Street () NYU Langone Health at 33 Street and 1 Avenue () NYC Health and Hospitals / Bellevue at 28 Street and 1 Avenue ()

The whole of 2 Avenue is basically lined with hospitals. Two of my friends worked for NYU Langone, which is located at around 34 Street and 1 Avenue. They’d walk to/from Lexington Avenue to avoid taking the bus. So I guess in either service setup, one group will win and the other will lose. Ten years ago, I told the two of them that SAS was coming to save them. I chuckle at my naïveté today.

Might makes right. Squeakiest wheel gets the grease. Yada yada…

lol Imagine people get a taste of via 53 Street and then community pressure demands that the MTA make it permanent with the on 63 Street.

I can’t imagine any normal (or reasonable fantasy) scenario where backtracking to Roosevelt Avenue is a better option than taking the local in the right direction and just transferring in Manhattan.

128 GB industrial SLC MicroSD cards don’t exist. In fact, 64 GB only just came out. And a few years back, the highest capacity was a mere 16 GB. Now, it’s only speculation that the MTA uses MicroSD cards for its embedded storage, but the same performance/capacity characteristics apply to pretty much any memory you’d use in critical equipment. I would keep this in mind: Also keep in mind that just because something new came out now doesn’t mean they can just switch to it. New components require costly validation cycles to make sure everything works together. The trains rolling onto the tracks now are probably trains designed when even 16 GB cards weren’t on the market. If you’ve ever checked out the market for Wi-Fi routers, you’d notice that every couple years, a faster Wi-Fi standard gets announced, and somehow the likes of Netgear has a product supporting it before the standard’s even finalized. Often, these products end up not working the way the standard intended and have problems down the line. That kind of bleeding edge is for people like you and I who can just go out to Best Buy and switch out a shoddily designed router when the internet goes down. You can live for a couple hours without Netflix or League of Legends. Not so for hospitals, banks, vehicles, etc.

1 TB of what? Among the memory products out there, the industrial memory products are always lower capacity and slower. Take the MicroSD card for example. This form of memory powers many embedded computing platforms like the Raspberry Pi. Normal MicroSD cards like the kind you would use in a phone or camera are designed to be fast and expendable high-capacity storage chips. The industrial kind are slow, low-capacity, but reliable. Remember that the trains have to go through rain and sunshine, hellfire and hell freezing over, while meeting reliability levels greater than can be provided by consumer-grade electronics.

The Steinway Tube is laughing at your right now.

The fact that any track connection is planned is more than any fantasy R.O.W. that’s been discussed.

Is anyone complaining about 60 Street not having access to both Queens Boulevard local and express? Or 63 Street not having access to both Queens Boulevard express and local? Which combinations are nonnegotiable, because “all of the above” calls for 6 different routes to cover all the combinations? The SAS branch on Queens Boulevard express doesn’t seem like a big loss to the local stations. It’s not like they’re starved of options given that the both have pretty easy transfers to the Lexington Avenue line while the is the sole Queens Boulevard express to have an in-station transfer to the —and only the . It would seem fair that an SAS connection runs express.

How about a third option: move the point where these thresholds cross over. Defensive design exists because of homeless people making the subway their home. Homeless people make the subway their home because X. X because Y. … Then you eventually reach a point where you ask: why are there so many homeless people—the real root of all the problems? You can keep sweeping them here and there and put up barriers to stem their flow into the system, but in the end why do they exist in the first place? Almost every conversation is about keeping homeless people out of some place (e.g., rich neighborhoods) or keeping them sequestered in some place (e.g., Chinatowns and brown neighborhoods). If we could hypothetically approach the limit of zero homeless, then the stock of defensively designed infrastructure would be in free fall until there wasn’t any. Speak nothing of “putting up” with stuff.

I’ve been questioning this since the plan came out. Looking at Coney Island, it’s clear that they wouldn’t be able to turn trains fast enough to hit 19 TPH. Some of them are physical constraints (switches being far from the terminal). Others are logistical (train crew being often late to man the departing trains). There is nowhere along Broadway or Brighton that they could short-turn trains since all the times they would run 19 TPH are also when the is running at its peak. Astoria’s going to have to give up some more or they’ll have to siphon off the (after building a local track connection to 63 Street).

East 37 Street to East 35 Street is the only area without the weight of skyscrapers to do a diagonal cut through from 2 Avenue. While on the surface it seems like a good idea, because the catchment area is enlarged, south of Houston Street the alignment gets tantalizingly close to three existing stations, but would be just far enough to make a connection non-viable—at least not without incurring the expense of building a passageway à la Times Square–42 Street. Together, you would get the crappy blocks-long transfer passageways both north and south of 63 Street, with the and being the only routes with nothing to lose from the shift.

Yea. Brooklyn connectivity should be considered, but we’re talking about cost-cutting measures that would still yield a useful trunk line. Stopping at the , people would miss out on a lot. The dump a lot of people on the . Having only the leaves large swaths of Brooklyn with only the Lexington Avenue options without the connection.

IMHO, phase 3 to Houston Street is probably the last important phase of SAS. It’ll take a whole load off the . Phase 4 won’t do much because the alternative is much more attractive: express service down the entire length of the east side to City Hall, and then all stops in the Financial District where the majority of phase 4 will be. Having worked in the area, the aren’t so far from where the will be that people would choose the slower route. There are two stations to the ’s four stations, and half the amount of service (remember the reverse split at 72 Street). It’s likely the walk to the will be shorter for more people and the wait half as long too. If there could be a phase 4A that extended the SAS one more stop from Houston Street to Grand Street with a transfer to Bowery to cover Financial District, the MTA could honestly call it a day. Nassau Street is underutilized, and could use some more traffic from up north. The side benefit to those living along Broadway/Jamaica Avenue might be more TPH.

Don’t the tracks turn southeast beyond the terminal?

That doesn’t explain the lack of a neighborhood/landmark designation for Church Avenue or 8 Avenue, which you glossed over, because their names would not be too long compared to the examples you gave, and they would also not duplicate neighborhood/landmark designations assigned to adjacent stations: Kensington–Church Avenue (24 characters) Chelsea–8 Avenue (16 characters) And the length of the name surely did not prevent these, each of which are equal in length or longer than the longest hypothetical station name you gave as examples of “too long”: Aqueduct–North Conduit Avenue (29 characters) Coney Island–Stillwell Avenue (29 characters) Jamaica Center–Parsons/Archer (29 characters) Ozone Park–Lefferts Boulevard (29 characters) Van Cortlandt Park–242 Street (29 characters) 116 Street–Colombia University (30 characters) Rockaway Park–Beach 116 Street (30 characters) Atlantic Avenue–Barclays Center (31 characters) West 4 Street–Washington Square (31 characters) West 8 Street–New York Aquarium (31 characters) 47–50 Streets–Rockefeller Center (32 characters) Flatbush Avenue–Brooklyn College (32 characters) Jackson Heights–Roosevelt Avenue (32 characters) Christopher Street–Sheridan Square (34 characters) Middle Village–Metropolitan Avenue (34 characters) 81 Street–Museum of Natural History (35 characters) 42 Street–Port Authority Bus Terminal (37 characters) Westchester Square–East Tremont Avenue (38 characters) Sutphin Boulevard–Archer Avenue–JFK Airport (43 characters) Now onto the issue of consecutive stations with the same neighborhood/landmark designation: the real reason is probably consecutive stations with the same neighborhood/landmark, although that hasn’t prevented the following two station names: Franklin Avenue–Medgar Evers College (36 characters) President Street–Medgar Evers College (37 Characters) (Astoria Boulevard and Astoria–Ditmars Boulevard are close calls. 😉)

The practice is pretty arbitrary. New Lots Avenue Nereid Avenue Bedford Park Boulevard 168 Street Church Avenue Broad Street 8 Avenue 96 Street Franklin Avenue

Preferably none of us. Search is a computer’s job now, and by extension, a programmer’s job to implement. The search functionality on this site is janky though, and the relevance of the results is hit or miss.

Maybe they will think ahead and give it a crosstown friendly name, given that they did entertain the idea of going all the way across 125 Street. They can pay to replace signs once, or they can pay to replace them twice. (And one more time when the comes around.)

PDFs were not made to be editable other than those produced by Adobe Illustrator which deliberately embed enough information to enable lossless editing. The PDFs you find floating around are almost always “finalized” by subsetting fonts, flattening shapes, clipping invisible parts of objects, and/or encryption. That said, when I was editing the MTA map many years ago, the greatest difficulty I ran into was finding substitute fonts for the text and letter bullets. The lines themselves are fairly easy to manipulate but cutting, changing colors, and/or creating parallel lines (i.e., to add your own fantasy route running with an existing differently colored route).

The alternative might be to replace it in a jiffy and have the shoddy work cause another rail break much sooner. a.k.a., get me moving now, and to hell with planning for the future.