About thirty years ago, the Antiplanner’s first visited the East Coast, traveling there by Amtrak and riding rail transit lines in as many cities as possible. The Washington DC subway looked like a set from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, with gleaming trains quietly zooming into and out of clean stations that mostly featured high arch ceilings. In contrast, New York City subway cars were covered with graffiti, stations were grimy, and crime was a serious worry.
How things have changed. In the 1990s, Mayor Giuliani saved the city’s subways by, in part, cleaning up the graffiti and controlling the crime. A recent report from the New York Public Interest Research Group finds that New York subways are, for the most part, getting better still, with car breakdowns only once every 170,000 miles in 2010, a 26 percent improvement over 2008.
Meanwhile, Washington subway cars are experiencing breakdowns every 43,500 miles, or more almost four times as frequently as New York’s. One group of cars breaks down every 30,000 miles. A Metro board member calls these cars “dogs,” but he shouldn’t be very proud of the fact that the agency’s newest and most reliable cars break down every 90,000 miles, twice as frequently as New York’s fleet. But perhaps they can take satisfaction in the fact that New York’s worst trains break down every 60,000 miles, or only 38 percent less frequently than DC’s subways.
These days, the internet technology has transformed news distribution viagra canada overnight and communication into instant processes. Erectile problem is a common problem treated by certain drugs like viagra for uk and viagra. You need to fill up a side effects from viagra form with your personal details like name, address, age etc. In order to buy dianabol, you need to visit Pharmabol’s web site, create an account and start purchasing right away. cialis online discount
Trust Metro to find the right solution to this problem (right, that is, if you are bureaucratic dunderhead): lower standards. The agency has reduced its on-time goals from 95 percent to 90 percent for trains, and from 80 percent to 78 percent for buses. It has also reduced its escalator-performance goal from 93 percent to 89 percent. The reduced goals are compounded by the definition of “on time,” which is no more than two minutes late during rush hour and four minutes late during off-peak hours.
Metro board member Mortimer Downey–who was previously the head of New York’s transit agency and then deputy secretary of transportation–commented that the reduced goals for buses was “like weather forecasting,” telling riders they could expect a bus but not when. But buses at least have the advantage that, when one breaks down, others can pass it by. When a subway car breaks down, there are often no passing tracks so every train on an entire route can end up being delayed.
I have spent roughly 2300 hours riding the WMATA trains over the past 5 years. Only one breakdown stands out in my memory, there was still one car still in the station so we could all exit through that one car. There have been plenty other breakdowns but the train always made it to the next station so we could off-load, actually one other one stands out in my mind – and that was because of the smoke involved. I’ve never had to walk on the tracks or transfer to another train.
The WMATA is no-longer the “Logan’s Run” futuristic underground city. It seems to resemble the “City of Ember” underground city more. The public address announcements are always about broken things (escalators, elevators, trains, switches), the filth seems to be accumulating. The trains are also dirty, with over-powering mildew odors during wet weather. I’ve seen fisticuffs, verbal jousting, and inappropriate movies playing on laptop computers. I’ve been “squished” in the seats by huge and hugely overweight train riders. There are outdoor WMATA stations that cannot keep their outdoor tile platforms in good repair, always some loose tile somewhere. Parking and riding the metro was costing me nearly $12/day – an expensive “public” option.
BUT, when I rode the Metro, someone else was doing the driving and I estimate I got a seat more than 2/3 of the time.
I’ve seen “2001” it’s one of my favorite movies. 2001 is “perhaps the most thoroughly and accurately researched film in screen history with respect to aerospace engineering. The design of the ships was based on real engineering considerations rather than made to look aesthetically “futuristic”. Many other sci-fi films give spacecraft an aerodynamic shape (aerodynamics are useless in a vacuum). The irony is the gleaming white futuristic settings in the fiction were examples of private ownership. The shuttle was from PanAm (ironically defunct before the 90’s). The wheel-shaped space station hotel was a derivative of Hilton Hotels. The corporations IBM, Aeroflot, Howard Johnson’s, and Hilton Hotels, all of which appear in the film, have survived beyond the year 2001.
Overall, white is never timeless. It’s not a good color for clothing, automobiles or interior finishes. And as demonstrated in the film the black and white futuristic setting created a deeply psychologically disturbing atmosphere for Bowman and Poole. No colors, no plants, no ambient sounds and despite all this the HAL computer went insane first.
In the 1990s, Mayor Giuliani saved the city’s subways by, in part, cleaning up the graffiti and controlling the crime.
Mayor Giuliani had nothing to do with it. The subways were cleaned up by NYCT General Manager David Gunn during his tenure from 1984 to 1990, who also initiated the service reliability program and solved the car failure and maintenance problems by getting the union shop maintenance workers to actually perform work.
Giuliani was elected in 1993. The graffiti and maintenance of equipment problems on the NYCT were all solved by then, and subway crime was under control, allowing Giuliani to incorporate the Transit Cops into the general city police force to provide more police presence elsewhere in the city.
WMATA is simply suffering from the same problems NYCT did then – out of control union maintenance workers who refuse to do their job and compete for plum opportunities to not work while collecting a check. A management crackdown and focus on results based performance would quickly end the problems.
But that disadvantage is mitigated, or overwhelmed, by the fact that the subway, or any fixed rail with its own right of way, avoids the street traffic entirely.
Which is why Portland’s streetcars are the stupidest of the stupid. They are basically immobile buses.
Subway and rails can avoid traffic. However the fact is the rail may go one place or in a pattern disadvantageous to you. Remember it’s a line. You may have to wait 20-30 minutes for some trains to pick you up. Some train trips along the line take as much as an hour. If it starts going north and your destination is south, your screwed. Buses can get you in less than a few minutes. Buses can have right of ways. Independent lanes that buses and taxi’s can only use. Or traffic signal priority to avenues typically filled with buses. For most people rail doesn’t start where you are and doesn’t always go where you want it to. For the most part rail transit is obsolete. Financially, functionally, technically. Rail freight makes economic sense but passenger rail travel is obsolete. It does not make sense to spend billions on rail payed for with burrowed money and watch slowly as the system rusts and falls into a ruined status barely breaking even then burrow more money 30 years later and hope it works out again when passenger ratios decline. I like trains, I’ve had a love of trains, I collected toys of them when I was little. I still have my 100 decibel locomotive alarm clock. But I have to admit the passenger rail industry is largely obsolete.
Lazy;If it starts going north and your destination is south
THWH: Then you didn’t read the signs.
Get off at the next station & change trains.