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OMNY Implementation/Metro-Card Retirement Discussion Thread


Lawrence St

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4 hours ago, RestrictOnTheHanger said:

Since when has Jackson Heights Roosevelt Ave had OMNY? Smart move to install it there IMO with the hospital nearby. 

On a side note the rollout suspension note appears to have been removed from the OMNY site. With service and construction slowly coming back, I wonder if/when/how installation will resume. 

Reportedly they've still been getting parts delivered from the vendors but just haven't installed them due to social distancing.

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because that's something called "Logic"... and we plebs are not allowed to use logic on our own, we must accept the logic of our God Emperor Cuomo.

 

Same argument I had with them about what happens when a train has to be taken out of service after 1 AM, hasn't finished it's run and there's trains behind it with passengers still on. I used logic of "let them on the following trains, the didn't want to get off." They just said orders are orders, they have to leave. 

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1 hour ago, Kamen Rider said:

Well, they could always do something overnight... make use of the time.

It's not about what time they're installing them (it was mostly overnight jobs already) but that the MTA doesn't want employees in close quarters with each other like an OMNY installation job would require. (see Seven Eleven's post in the bus OMNY thread)

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Yeah, trying to speed up the work would be rather counterproductive if all that did was get workers sick and then no one's able to do the work anyways.

And given that there have been numerous MTA employee deaths due to COVID this isn't a totally unreasonable position.

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If they really wanted to, one could come up with a procedure that could allow one person to do the actual install alone. Some low density, low traffic stations with only a handful on entrance turnstiles could be done slowly over, say a week. Done right... they could wire up places like Broad St and Bowery and no one would be at risk...

 

The nearest station to my house is Forest Avenue. We have a grand total of 3 turnstiles. How long would that take?

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9 minutes ago, Kamen Rider said:

If they really wanted to, one could come up with a procedure that could allow one person to do the actual install alone. Some low density, low traffic stations with only a handful on entrance turnstiles could be done slowly over, say a week. Done right... they could wire up places like Broad St and Bowery and no one would be at risk...

 

The nearest station to my house is Forest Avenue. We have a grand total of 3 turnstiles. How long would that take?

Forgetting work rules man. How many MTA workers/contractors does it take to change a light bulb?

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1 hour ago, CenSin said:

Forgetting work rules man. How many MTA workers/contractors does it take to change a light bulb?

About 3 workers, and how long it takes depends who ordered the light bulb to be fixed:

Stations department: 3 hours per bulb

Agency president: 2 hours per bulb

Governor Cuomo: 5 minutes per bulb.

Say what you want about the Governor, but once he orders an MTA department to do something, that's when they get up off their ass and actually get things done in lightning speed.

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1 hour ago, Kamen Rider said:

If they really wanted to, one could come up with a procedure that could allow one person to do the actual install alone. Some low density, low traffic stations with only a handful on entrance turnstiles could be done slowly over, say a week. Done right... they could wire up places like Broad St and Bowery and no one would be at risk...

 

The nearest station to my house is Forest Avenue. We have a grand total of 3 turnstiles. How long would that take?

I would imagine that setting up an OMNY reader is a touch more involved than following IKEA instructions. There are things that legitimately take more than one person to do.

But of course everyone on this forum is now a certified Internet engineer 🙄

Edited by bobtehpanda
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Does a pediatrician know how to do open heart surgery because they went to med school?

It's worth noting that the Metrocard turnstiles are a proprietary technology dating from the early '90s. Cubic almost certainly did not have any incentive to make it easy to run off and plug in off the shelf parts, which is probably why they won the OMNY contract in the first place.

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10 hours ago, bobtehpanda said:

But of course everyone on this forum is now a certified Internet engineer 🙄

I’m almost certain that some qualifying documentation is needed (college degree, certification from a small pool of authorities, etc.) if only to thin out the pool.

But realistically for personal projects I find it not too difficult to get up-to-speed with in other disciplines with a bit of (self-)training. Not trying to flex here, but I’ve got a pretty broad range of skills which I have no formal qualifications for, but which I found to facilitate learning other skills (e.g.: JavaScript ⟶ Visual Basic ⟶ C♯ ⟶ Linux shell scripting; Adobe Illustrator ⟶ AutoCAD; Italian + historical phonology ⟶ Portuguese). Am I going to get hired based on those claims? Probably not. Am I going to do a better job than someone whose education was laser-focused on those particular disciplines? Unlikely. But if there’s an in-house job that needs extra hands with any of those particular skills, then management knows to look for me. And I’d say that a lot of the skills I do have come from such tasks.

10 hours ago, bobtehpanda said:

Does a pediatrician know how to do open heart surgery because they went to med school?

For life/death situations or something very costly, I would not trust anyone without specific specialized knowledge to help me. But that’s an extreme degree of assurance which doesn’t apply to working on MetroCard turnstiles. Nobody dies if a turnstile doesn’t work.

10 hours ago, bobtehpanda said:

It's worth noting that the Metrocard turnstiles are a proprietary technology dating from the early '90s. Cubic almost certainly did not have any incentive to make it easy to run off and plug in off the shelf parts, which is probably why they won the OMNY contract in the first place.

Gotta love Microsoft-style vendor lock-in… /s

This is probably the real reason; looking at the difficulty organizations have faced moving from Windows to Linux is telling. But I’m willing to bet that the turnstile system is much easier to migrate than Windows to Linux since it serves such a simple function:

  1. Read the card.
  2. Transact with the back-end database:
    1. Deduct 1 fare from the card if sufficient and enable the turnstile.
    2. Otherwise, return error message.

Of course, the Devil is in the details. Does the MTA demand that a turnstile be able to accept both MetroCards and OMNY? Then Cubic is probably the most cost-effective solution since MetroCard integration is necessary. Is the MTA willing to accept temporary inconveniences to divorce itself from Cubic? Certainly, the MTA could rip out Cubic hardware from half of the turnstiles and reuse the turnstiles with new fare payment hardware and a parallel back-end system for tracking fares.

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1 hour ago, CenSin said:

Of course, the Devil is in the details. Does the MTA demand that a turnstile be able to accept both MetroCards and OMNY? Then Cubic is probably the most cost-effective solution since MetroCard integration is necessary. Is the MTA willing to accept temporary inconveniences to divorce itself from Cubic? Certainly, the MTA could rip out Cubic hardware from half of the turnstiles and reuse the turnstiles with new fare payment hardware and a parallel back-end system for tracking fares.

I’m pretty sure there’s language in the contract that’d require Cubic to provide transition support if (MTA) picked another vendor.

Also, it’s not like companies don’t do teardowns to see what their competitors built and how.

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3 minutes ago, Deucey said:
1 hour ago, CenSin said:

 

I’m pretty sure there’s language in the contract that’d require Cubic to provide transition support if (MTA) picked another vendor.

Better to just pay them once and never look back…

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1 hour ago, CenSin said:

Nobody dies if a turnstile doesn’t work.

Gotta love Microsoft-style vendor lock-in… /s

This is probably the real reason; looking at the difficulty organizations have faced moving from Windows to Linux is telling. But I’m willing to bet that the turnstile system is much easier to migrate than Windows to Linux since it serves such a simple function:

  1. Read the card.
  2. Transact with the back-end database:
    1. Deduct 1 fare from the card if sufficient and enable the turnstile.
    2. Otherwise, return error message.

Of course, the Devil is in the details. Does the MTA demand that a turnstile be able to accept both MetroCards and OMNY? Then Cubic is probably the most cost-effective solution since MetroCard integration is necessary. Is the MTA willing to accept temporary inconveniences to divorce itself from Cubic? Certainly, the MTA could rip out Cubic hardware from half of the turnstiles and reuse the turnstiles with new fare payment hardware and a parallel back-end system for tracking fares.

If a turnstile doesn't work the MTA can't collect its fares, and the MTA was never in a financial position to take any kind of revenue hit, let alone now. It's why there is a dual-period for both Metrocard and OMNY acceptance, similar to how tokens were taken long after the introduction of the Metrocard.

The hardware and software in the Metrocard system is bespoke, it's one of the reasons why sourcing replacement parts and replacing it has been a major PITA and no major upgrades have happened to Metrocards since the introduction of the free transfer. It's also bespoke from the '90s. Given that the parts are hard to find I would also assume that the parts to integrate OMNY into the new system are also not easy to source.

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3 hours ago, Kamen Rider said:

We have a June list!

 

complete the Flushing line

the Astoria line

the broadway line as far south as at least 34th, maybe further. (so 5th, 57th/7th and 49th are a definite)

the Franklin Shuttle

the F at York Street.

 

 

Where did you get that list?

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8 minutes ago, Kamen Rider said:

I used my feminine charms...
 

I got it off the OMNY website, they updated the map on the rollout page.

Found it, though I’m surprised they didn’t include 96th, 86th, and 72nd Street on the (Q). That would’ve completed basically all of the Broadway services north of 34th.

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