These 5 Technologies Could Save the New York Subway

New York City's subway system is old and busted. Here's how to bring the underground into the 21st century.

AEMoreira042281 at en.wikipedia
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AEMoreira042281 at en.wikipedia
5 Technologies That Could Save the New York Subway
Spend some time in New York and you'll soon hear a familiar litany of laments about the subway. Long wait times. Aggravating stoppages due to "train traffic ahead." Seemingly arbitrary line closures. Sweltering summertime platforms.

Sure, New Yorkers love to kvetch. But when it comes to their subway system, the Big Apple's straphangers have good reason. Today the New York City subway marks its 110th anniversary of underground service, and some parts of the transit system still rely on century-old technology.

With that in mind, we present the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), the public benefit corporation that runs the NYC subway, with five technologies that would bring the subway into the 21st century.

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Bombardier RCS at en.wikipedia
Smarter Signaling
The subway's ancient signaling system would be a fine place to start the tech makeover.

Today's fixed-block signaling system, which dates back to the subway's founding, works as follows. Tracks are broken up into 1,000-foot chunks. Green, yellow, and red light signals—the same kind used for vehicle traffic—tell motormen when to go, slow, or stop. If any part of the train ahead of yours is within a block, that block is considered occupied. Because of this imprecise 1,000-foot system, MTA uses an additional yellow buffer zone to keep trains safely apart. As a result, fewer trains are run on a track than the spacing would allow.

"Right now we really have a lot of wasted space between trains," says Richard Barone, director of transportation programs for the Regional Plan Association, an urban research and advocacy organization for the New York–New Jersey–Connecticut tristate area.

A solution: communications-based train control (CBTC). In this system, trains transmit their exact location to a control center. The center creates a moving buffer based on each train's speed, using track space more efficiently.

"CBTC allows you to close the gap and fit more trains on the same line," says Barone, who wrote a recent report advocating the technology. That means less waiting, less crowding, and better service.

Additional benefits: CBTC, which uses plastic-encased transponders that are impervious to salt water intrusions, like those from Superstorm Sandy that wrecked some of the subway's old-school hardware. The system works with driverless trains too.

MTA has started changing over to the global standard of CBTC. Yet even with the stated goal of converting 16 track miles annually, the project won't be done until the year 2064. And even that might be optimistic—since 1999 only 4 miles of track have actually been upgraded.

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Wrightbus at zh.wikipedia
Maintenance Managed by AI
New York City's subway is perpetually falling apart. These things happen when you have a sprawling, century-old network running around the clock. Maintenance teams fight the forces of decay across 840-plus miles of track, 468 stations, and more than 6,000 train cars. Scheduling all the needed emergency and routine maintenance tasks is a logistical nightmare and, with line closings and reroutings, a constant nuisance for riders.

About a year ago Hong Kong's Mass Transit Railway (MTR) subway system demonstrated a smarter, more efficient way forward. MTR turned to an artificial intelligence optimization algorithm to schedule it maintenance.

The program prioritizes from among 2,600 engineering tasks per week, assigning them out amongst 10,000 maintenance personnel. "The system decides which work should be done, when, where, with what, and by whom," says Andy Chun, a professor of computer science at City University in Hong Kong who designed the AI system.

Letting a computer crunch the numbers means the humans at MTR can save the two days per week they spent hammering out a repair schedule. Thanks to timely fix-ups, the Hong Kong subway is posting a phenomenal 99.9 percent on-time rate for its trains. Finally—and the cash-strapped MTA should take note here—the AI has boosted MTR profits, giving it a 186 percent fare-box recovery ratio (a measure of the percentage of operating expenses covered by passenger fares). That's almost four times what New York can claim.

Chun estimates that a project applying the AI system to the New York City subway could be finished in less than four years.

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Reaperexpress at en.wikipedia
Articulated Train Cars
During rush hour NYC subway trains look like sausage links, with segments tied to each other by a thin connector. Crammed passengers jostle to get off overloaded cars, while would-be riders scurry up and down platforms for a train car they might mash themselves into.

It needn't be this way. Imagine a set of several open-ended, doorless train cars connected by those accordion-like passageways you see on buses. Passengers could roam freely. This open-gangway approach would improve door usage during boarding and unloading, cutting down on so-called dwell time when trains sit idly at platforms. Train capacity would also increase by roughly 3 percent, while "permanently coupled train sets could also be lighter and therefore more energy efficient," Barone says.

Most other major subway systems around the world, from Berlin to Toronto, have switched to open gangways with excellent results. The MTA proposed adopting the system in a 2013 report that looked at the agency's big needs over the next 20 years.

Be warned, though, that the current segmented trains are better at isolating fires, as well as (hey, this is New York) mariachi bands and dance teams.

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Javierito92 at ca.wikipedia
Platform Screen Doors
When the mercury rises aboveground, New Yorkers feel the worst of the heat down below. One hot summer day when the temperature in the city soared to 92 degrees Fahrenheit, New York public radio station WNYC recorded a temperature of 106 F on a platform at Times Square. Subway riders got a reprieve when air conditioning finally came to the cars, but those a/c units dump additional heat into the underground. With more days of intense heat to come in our planet's warmer future, it's a serious public safety concern, Barone says.

Because of the open-air nature of the subway tunnels, climate control for the most of the platforms is out of the question. So making them more tolerable will require the more radical technological fix of actually separating the platform space from the track space.

A barrier of see-through plastic or other material could seal off the tracks from the platforms, except for doorways aligned with the train doors. Entranceways from the street would also need doors of some kind. The resulting enclosed platform space could be cooled, Barone says. Many transit systems worldwide have been retrofitted in this manner. "It should be a standard item on metros," he says.

As an additional bonus, no one could accidentally fall (or be pushed) onto tracks in front of an arriving train. Nor could anyone trespass on the tracks or throw litter on the third rail. "People think tracks are like a garbage can," says Barone, "and screen doors deals with that."

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Ben Schumin at en.wikipedia
Next-Generation Ticketing
New York's magnetic strip MetroCards seem cutting-edge compared with the tokens of yore. Yet this mode of fare collecting is already outdated and inefficient. "Magnetic strip technologies have been sort of passé for years," Barone says.

The MTA admits this. It has announced its intention to switch to near-field-communication (NFC) payments by 2019, making subway payments contactless. Passengers can brandish a smartphone app, or tap a credit card– or RFID chip–enabled keychain to gain subway access. Vending machines could remain in stations to allow riders without these tools to deposit cash and get a contactless card.

Here, too, additional benefits would follow. The MTA would save money by not having to back-end process all of today's platform vending machine transactions. Custom fare pricings could be introduced, tailored to riders' needs. The same NFC ticketing could be used on MTA buses and other rail systems, relieving passengers of the trouble of juggling multiple types of fare cards.

Again, New York trails the world and other cities in the United States, like Washington, D.C., with its SmarTrip system, when it comes to NFC ticketing. "It's a major piece of a future transit system," Barone says. "We are really behind."

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