Non-US Countries Have Gates That Would Have Prevented NYC’s Subway Death

January 20, 2022 5:38 PM

The recent killing of a woman pushed onto the NYC subway tracks brings up this issue: Advocates have been calling on the MTA to install subway platform doors for years to prevent exactly this kind of tragedy. Instead, the MTA hasn’t built any.

Referenced article in above link: The case of the missing platform doors

posted by ShooBoo (60 comments total)

I like that the societal response to a hate crime is that we need underfunded public transit agencies to install platform doors so that the hate crimes can happen elsewhere

Guess we're all tapped out on outrage for anti-Asian hate in the current news cycle
posted by paimapi at 5:59 PM on January 20, 2022 [18 favorites]

I think its a good idea. The NYC subway system sounds like its long due for updating work. Subway platform doors are really important, because even absent racist people, have you experienced the amount of shoving and inconsideration that happens at a subway platform? You can't reduce assholic behaviour in people, unless ... something amazing happens, but at least the vic doesn't get killed on the subway TRACKS (they might die in other ways haha).
posted by Didnt_do_enough at 6:15 PM on January 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

r/nyc discussion
posted by lalochezia at 6:39 PM on January 20, 2022

The killer seems to have been an unmedicated schizophrenic. I'm not even sure we know this was a hate crime (the other woman he menaced before was, I think, Latina). Platform doors would conveniently have saved her life either way.
posted by praemunire at 7:14 PM on January 20, 2022 [30 favorites]

I live in NYC and I am an Asian American woman. I was attacked in my neighborhood last year by a mentally ill homeless man. I live next door to police headquarters and immediately ran to a police officer and the police did nothing even though the man was still threatening people behind my apartment building. I had to warn off pedestrians who were planning to walk down that block. Platform doors are not the solution we need for this kind of problem. In places like Japan and South Korea, platform doors were installed to address the safety problems of overcrowding where people may accidentally get pushed into the tracks and suicides. In NYC, we have a violent mentally ill homeless population who don't only push people into tracks - they stab people with knives, attack people with broken bottles, aggressively attack people with feces and urine, threaten people until they give them food, etc. Installing platform doors would not really solve this problem. No one wants to touch the mentally ill homeless problem in places like NYC and SF. Politicians talk a lot but the real solutions are out of reach and/or not politically feasible. It is literally a shit-show. I often wonder if it is possible to develop a sanitary and kind version of an asylum to house people who need round the clock care where they do not hurt others or themselves. The problem with asylums are the potential for abuse is really high because money is not often allocated to these institutions and it is difficult to find people willing to work with this population for minimum wage.
posted by ichimunki at 7:16 PM on January 20, 2022 [55 favorites]

we need underfunded public transit agencies to install platform doors so that the hate crimes can happen elsewhere

I don't understand the argument presented here. Platform doors are used elsewhere and save lives. Platform doors would have saved her life here. She wouldn't be dead.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 7:17 PM on January 20, 2022 [15 favorites]

The problem with platform doors is that it is a ton of money being spent on a tight NYC government budget to save 1-2 lives a year when the root of the problem lies elsewhere.
posted by ichimunki at 7:20 PM on January 20, 2022 [21 favorites]

see: police body cameras
posted by eustatic at 7:23 PM on January 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

There are two issues with platform doors. It's not just a matter of simply installing the doors. Work has to be done to the trains to signal the doors, probably some extra work to wire up the control systems, and add some safety systems on top of that so people don't get stuck between the door and the train. That costs a lot of money, especially in a retrofit situation. It's a lot cheaper to do on a new line with new rolling stock.

Second is that, for that same expense, there are almost certainly things the money could be spent on that would save more lives.

It would be a pretty stupid argument to say that platform edge doors wouldn't be a good thing. It would probably be wrong to say that new construction should either have them installed or at least include provisions for installing them cheaply later if the new station is on an existing line.

When the question is retrofitting existing infrastructure when there are other needs, it becomes a lot more muddy. Even assuming the MTA was to get a wad of cash for upgrades, there are still a bunch of stations inaccessible to people with limited mobility. Given the low rate of deaths that would be prevented by platform edge doors, it's not at all unreasonable to say the money ought to be spent making the system accessible to everyone instead. And that's just one example of a competing need. The signaling system is still largely fucked from Sandy, and if that doesn't get fixed soon doors and accessibility both will be moot since nobody at all will be able to use the system since trains can't run without working signals.

Why does everything have to be so complicated? *sigh*
posted by wierdo at 7:31 PM on January 20, 2022 [22 favorites]

If you read the article it points out that the agency finds plenty of money for beautification when it wants to, that its estimates of cost seem very inflated, and that the program wouldn't just prevent a few pushing incidents but also suicides and accidental falls, and even trash falling in and catching fires. All of which also cost money.
posted by emjaybee at 7:32 PM on January 20, 2022 [24 favorites]

Right. Can we agree that quicker, short term solutions won’t solve racism nor the rise in Asian hate crimes, AND agree it’s probably a good idea to address the immediate danger that could have prevented a preventable death?
posted by [insert clever name here] at 7:36 PM on January 20, 2022 [4 favorites]

The solution to "they don't have any money" isn't "therefore no improvement ever". These things were built in the 1900s, how many things are there where we said "yeah the beta version of this from when women wore button up boots is probably the pinnacle of human accomplishment". Conveniently we only say that about things the public funds and people of color use.
posted by bleep at 7:37 PM on January 20, 2022 [23 favorites]

the other woman he menaced before was, I think, Latina

Not to get into phrenology here, but a lot of people are racially ambiguous - I have Asian friends who are often mistaken for Latina, and the reverse also happens.

In any case, Asian women and seniors are seen as easy targets, so even if the motive is not straight-up "I hate Asians" we still get attacked because "they won't fight back and the police won't give a fuck". This New Yorker cover captures the feeling all too well.
posted by airmail at 7:39 PM on January 20, 2022 [16 favorites]

we have a violent mentally ill homeless population who don't only push people into tracks - they stab people with knives, attack people with broken bottles, aggressively attack people with feces and urine, threaten people until they give them food, etc.

We do not have a violent mentally ill homeless population, we have a mentally ill homeless population. A small percentage of them are violent, just like any other population. Every single problem a mentally ill homeless person has is public, so someone yelling at the air on a subway platform as "menacing." Someone yelling in their home is just yelling. People have to poop, and NYC has almost no public bathrooms. It's awful to see human feces on the trains, but it's worse to have to perform basic bodily functions in public. News coverage of homeless people with mental illness has been largely cruel, ableist, and focused on what it's like to watch people suffer instead of, you know, the actual suffering. The vast majority of homeless people with mental illness are not violent and are themselves extremely vulnerable.

And the thing is, $7 billion would probably solve the problem of the minority who are violent if you spent it on housing, treatment, and support services for all people with serious mental illness. I've had many many clients hospitalized involuntarily who could live in the community with support. Some people need to live in residences with full-time staff, some can live independently with daily visits, weekly visits, or monthly visits. These programs all exist, but not enough. The number of ill homeless people who have to live in the NYC subway system should be a scandal because of the harm and suffering that is ongoing to the people with mental illness. Then something horrific like this happens and it's all cops and jails and asylums. And this was horrific. Someone is going to come along and accuse me of minimizing this tragedy. I've lived in NYC for almost 30 years. I remember Kendra Webdale. This should not be happening. Seriously ill people should not be living on the subway because it's cruel and inhumane. Most of these folks are vulnerable themselves and don't need or deserve to be swept up into asylums or jails.
posted by Mavri at 7:51 PM on January 20, 2022 [97 favorites]

The problem with platform doors is that it is a ton of money being spent on a tight NYC government budget to save 1-2 lives a year when the root of the problem lies elsewhere.

After doing some searching, I'm not entirely sure about that number. But it seems the main point is that safety measures aren't there to stop hate crimes. They are there to save lives. And the city has plenty of money to spend on improvement projects when it wants (as the article notes).
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 7:53 PM on January 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

If anyone is interested in learning more about how NYC has failed our mentally ill neighbors, this article is an accessible overview. It was written in 1999 after Andrew Goldstein pushed Kendra Webdale in front of a train. Not much has changed since then.
posted by Mavri at 7:54 PM on January 20, 2022 [7 favorites]

Not much has changed since 1980 and the great deinstitutionalization. Remember when they actually had storage lockers in Penn station?
posted by Melismata at 7:58 PM on January 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

The initial studies from MTA were that only 1/4 of the stations are currently able to be retrofitted and just to do those stations would be over $7 billion. Over 2 million people ride the subway every day. These incidents are extremely rare. People do attempt suicide or fall by accident and get hit by trains about 145 times / year; only 1/3 of those are fatal.

I’m reminded of this Mitchell and Webb sketch about The success of Westchester’s anti Drowning Campaign
posted by interogative mood at 8:01 PM on January 20, 2022 [6 favorites]

I think there's a strong argument to be made that any funds that are available for transit would be better spent improving service and getting more people out of cars and taxis, thus saving lives on the streets, including pedestrians and cyclists, rather than on platform doors, which are likely to save a lot fewer lives. Or spend it on better cycling infrastructure, pedestrian infrastructure or any number of transportation infrastructure improvements that will save more lives.

That's not to say that platform doors are a bad thing (and they definitely should be installed in new stations), but I'm pretty sure they'd come out way down the list in a cost benefit analysis for retrofits, especially in NYC which has notoriously decrepit signalling and sky-high subway construction costs.
posted by ssg at 8:06 PM on January 20, 2022 [8 favorites]

New York's subway system is an embarrassment to western civilisation.
posted by moorooka at 8:31 PM on January 20, 2022

Not to get into phrenology here, but a lot of people are racially ambiguous - I have Asian friends who are often mistaken for Latina, and the reverse also happens.

This man literally believes (possibly past tense if he's being forcibly medicated now) that he is God. Anti-Asian hate crimes are a very real problem, but I have to say I'm pretty goddamned disappointed to see people acting like a homeless sixty-year-old in the midst of an untreated psychotic episode should be classified with Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz.
posted by praemunire at 8:37 PM on January 20, 2022 [11 favorites]

On the bright side, by the time the $7 billion project is completed, these safety gates will save several dozen people a year from falling off a subway platform and drowning.
posted by bartleby at 8:52 PM on January 20, 2022 [9 favorites]

Women generally are often targeted in and around public transit by men who hate women, and this country has a particular history of men fetishizing and then resenting Asian women. Based on what we know so far, it could easily be intersectional hate.

Add to that the unfortunate fact that public spaces, and the right to a recognized mental illness, always “belong” to white men first and foremost; the rest of us are afforded only whatever fragments are left. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen men behave this way on public transit, especially here in a decidedly minor city where mental illness and misogyny alike are both endemic, and both problems are consistently framed as the fault of the nearest woman.
posted by armeowda at 8:57 PM on January 20, 2022 [16 favorites]

Platform doors would solve more problems than deaths, by the way. For the underground portions of the system, it would dramatically reduce litter on the tracks, which should both reduce cleaning costs and improve on-time performance due to a reduction in trash-caused track fires.

Is it the best use of money the system might have? I don't know. But it's not the prevention of a couple of suicides or murders we're talking about here. And pitting the subway against other forms of non-car transit is...let's just say ill-thought-out.
posted by praemunire at 9:00 PM on January 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

New York's subway system is an embarrassment to western civilisation.

Laying it on a little thick? I’m a lot more embarrassed by how many US cities don’t even have functional public transit.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:02 PM on January 20, 2022 [41 favorites]

Women generally are often targeted in and around public transit by men who hate women

Yes, thank you, I am a woman who has lived in NYC for nearly two decades and before the pandemic relied on public transit to get just about everywhere, I am well aware.

Add to that the unfortunate fact that public spaces, and the right to a recognized mental illness, always “belong” to white men first and foremost; the rest of us are afforded only whatever fragments are left.

The individual in question is Black.
posted by praemunire at 9:04 PM on January 20, 2022 [12 favorites]

(I really do hate to link to the Post but I would really encourage everyone to read my link above before making any more comments that are based on the assumption that this is some thirty-year-old white guy wearing a battered tactical backpack who's being described as mentally ill because how else could you explain a white man doing anything bad. This is a sixty-year-old Black man who seems to have been in and out of hospitals and intermittently on the streets for about twenty years. Obviously anyone can be racist, and it would not be shocking if his delusions reflected anti-Asian rhetoric he picked up in his environment, but come on.)
posted by praemunire at 9:11 PM on January 20, 2022 [16 favorites]

Sorry, that’s…not what I was getting at?

But yeah, of course the NYPost will point out that he’s Black and dERAnGeD!!!1!. If he were white, they’d probably hold off until they could do a deep dive into the REAL TRAGEDY of his “sex addiction” or whatever.

Dollars to doughnuts, when the justice system is done with the (almost-certainly-mentally-ill) perpetrator who still (pretty obviously) hates women, and plausibly also hates Asians, and who happens to be Black, I think my point about who gets special consideration for this kind of violence will stand.

(And maybe we’re talking at cross-purposes, a little? I’m white, but I’ve been reluctantly Female on Transit™️ since the turn of the Millennium, just mostly here in Podunk. I’m not ‘splaining at you.)
posted by armeowda at 9:42 PM on January 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

I don't need to re-link the stats here for the millionth time, but anti-Asian hate crimes have gone up substantially since COVID, and many Asians, including myself, feel very vulnerable, especially since the authorities tend not to take crime against us seriously. We don't always know when someone who shoves an old man in Chinatown is actually racist unless they say the magic hate crime words, but we do know it keeps happening. Honestly, in this moment, I really don't want to litigate what actually counts as a hate crime. I'm just really sad and angry. It is a complicated anger, because the assailant here was failed by society and literally insane. It feels like no one is ever going to get the help they deserve and this city is just going to be broken forever.
posted by airmail at 9:46 PM on January 20, 2022 [20 favorites]

almost-certainly-mentally-ill

Josette Simon, who lives outside Atlanta, Ga., said her brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia, with his conditioning worsening after their mother died 23 years ago. “She was taking care of him,” Simon said. “She had to call the police on him a couple of times, but after that, he went downhill. He’s been in and out of mental hospitals at least 20 years.”

[...]

“I remember begging one of the hospitals, ‘Let him stay,’ because once he’s out, he didn’t want to take medication, and it was the medication that kept him going,” his sister told The Post.

"The last time we spoke, he said ‘they’ were coming after him,” Josette Simon said. “I could tell it was his sickness. He swore that they were watching him, hiding in closets.”

I don't understand the resistance here to fairly basic and well-known facts about mental illness. Who knows what his actual reasoning was, but it wasn't actually reasoning as we understand it. This guy is not the face of anti-Asian violence in the city. He's the victim of a terrible illness our neglect of whom claimed indirectly a second victim. What prevents a man like this from hurting others or himself is not what stops anti-Asian violence (or other hate crimes).
posted by praemunire at 10:07 PM on January 20, 2022 [8 favorites]

many Asians, including myself, feel very vulnerable, especially since the authorities tend not to take crime against us seriously

And I hope I haven't given the impression that I don't think that's legitimate. I'm appalled at some of the things I've seen in this city recently, just appalled.
posted by praemunire at 10:09 PM on January 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

I don't understand the resistance here to fairly basic and well-known facts about mental illness.

Such as: we live in a country that’s agnostic about mental illness, except as a defense for a guy killing people he considers beneath him?

You couldn’t have known this, but your quoted anecdote from NYPost sounds almost exactly (except in terms of racial demographics) like my uncle. Spoiler: he hanged himself in his 40s. It was the kind of suicide where you’re agonized that it took place, but also (guiltily) relieved that he didn’t take anyone with him.

You also couldn’t have known this, but l now support mental-health researchers for a living. I’ve reviewed their research proposals. I’ve seen the careful consideration they apply to demographic representation in the population samples they recruit. I’m the killjoy who tells them when their optimistic, idealistic budgets might run afoul of state law, federal regulation, or bizarre-ass sponsor policy.

From this, I even know that people with a diagnosis are a vulnerable population. I know they’re more likely to be victims of a crime than perpetrators.

Still. TFA is about a safety measure that could save lives if implemented and which doesn’t make value judgments about which rules apply to whom. Seeing how far we’ve meandered from that point, I regret my contribution to it.
posted by armeowda at 11:01 PM on January 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

Laying it on a little thick? I’m a lot more embarrassed by how many US cities don’t even have functional public transit.

We’re going to have to do a deep dive on what the word “functional” is doing in that sentence. US public transit systems are typically unmaintained, and are decaying monuments to functionality.
posted by mr_roboto at 11:13 PM on January 20, 2022

This is a tragic occurence that stands at the intersection of a variety of hot button topics, and I've been talking to a few friends on FB about it and noticed a tendency of people to want to collapse it to one of several lenses, and that it makes people fighty on FB.

You know when your friend posts their hot take and someone argues, and then the FB algorithm gathers their friends by popping it into every feed, like a school yard chant of "Fight! Fight!" in a teen drama? That basically happened and like 30 vitriolic comments later, the post was deleted. Those people are ostensibly friends, so people here, who don't know each other, I'm a little worried about the way people are talking to each other.

This was a terrible event, I can see how people feel scared and vulnerable and worried about how Asian people, Women, Black people, the mentally ill and the unhoused and the MTA and other groups might be hurt by it. There lot of other ways to view this, or aspects that folks can feel are related, but I'd hope it would bring people together, but maybe that's too pollyana.

I just can't handle a fighty thread again today and I'm worried this is heading there so I'm going to bow out rather than share my viewpoint. I'll just say this I think we are all united in not wanting something like this to happen, in thinking it was bad that it did, and we can talk about multiple contributing factors to this woman's death and this man's actions, a variety of related aspects, and yes possible solutions. Hopefully we can avoid getting all raw and upset with each other and taking each other's words harshly, or saying them harshly.

I hope we can remember to be kind to fellow human beings who sit behind these accounts, but I suppose we'll see. I might be back tomorrow, or I might just skip this.

Anyway, thank you to ShooBoo, Mavri, armeowda and others for your links, reading through.
posted by Chrysopoeia at 11:24 PM on January 20, 2022 [14 favorites]

This discussion is sad.. our imagination is so constrained! It is possible to live in a country that spends adequately on transit, safety infrastructure, AND mental health! And that funds anti-racist interventions and education! We have money pouring out of the fucking toilets at the pentagon. We HAVE the money to fund these not-at-all radical infrastructure, health care, and transit proposals! Many countries spend more money on all of these things?? We do not have to choose just one.
posted by latkes at 11:33 PM on January 20, 2022 [24 favorites]

Contrary to the above opinions, this is a great example of anti-Asianness. The everyday sort of racism we get is implicit and structural, not intentioned. And intersected with other marginalizations of class, poverty, mental health, etc.

The idea that this is not anti-Asian is the privileged liberal's way of being anti-Asian. We are always told that white people are being racist because of economic anxiety. We are always told that mentally ill people don't know what they're saying. We are always told that unless it is overt racism, there's no racism.

When I was a college senior, I was called a faggot, also by a homeless black man, for being a scrawny Asian male walking down the street with a couple of other Asian friends. I was too ashamed to discuss this with my friends, all of whom obviously heard it. When I read about this last week, that was what I remembered immediately. Except I didn't die.
posted by polymodus at 12:54 AM on January 21, 2022 [11 favorites]

The question of platform edge doors has come to the attention of infrastructure wonk Alon Levy; their view is that it probably won't happen due to organisational dysfunction within the MTA (for instance, refusing to do anything to improve accessibility to avoid expensively voiding its exemption from the Americans with Disabilities Act). Though the idea that American public transport institutions are structurally dysfunctional is one of Levy's recurring theses.
posted by acb at 1:15 AM on January 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

I don't know if people think that it's somehow comforting to give a blanket assertion that a crime against a particular ethnic minority definitely wasn't racially motivated, but it's not. It can come off as dismissive, even as gaslighting.

In this and similar tragedies, the police always seem in a rush to announce, particularly with Asian victims, that the situation doesn't look racist, and definitely not anti-Asian, nothing to worry about. So if you happen to be worried, they're saying your feelings are hysterical and unfounded. They're saying that off the bat they don't see any reason to devote extra resources to protecting Asian women. I'm neither Asian nor a woman, so I'm speaking totally out of turn, but it feels hostile.

There's an intersection of issues here. The United States devalues public transit, and devalues spending tax dollars on things that don't benefit rich people. So it's hard to even maintain the current level of decay in the subway system, much less to make major capital improvements. Social services for black people are considered a waste of money unless they involve incarceration, so this man didn't get the help he needed. People without homes in NYC and elsewhere in the country have few safe alternatives and many of them find the subway the least bad of many bad alternatives. In particular older individuals with mental health concerns living on the street are unlikely to receive assistance that will improve their situation. Widespread systemic racism against Asians means that individuals with executive dysfunction are susceptible to absorb the prevailing anti-Asian sentiment and act on it, whether or not they recognize the source of their behavior.
posted by xigxag at 1:37 AM on January 21, 2022 [14 favorites]

Focusing particularly on this one homeless man's motives/mental health seems a little beside the point when talking about a longstanding structural issue. For example, when talking about cops who murder Black men, the cops who do so are often not klansmen white supremacists (although, of course, they sometimes are), yet have implicit biases that compel them towards murdering Black men. These implicit biases are cultural, woven into the fabric of Western society. I don't really give a damn about the personal beliefs of each individual cop who murdered a Black man -- I care about the pattern.

Similarly, there are underlying cultural biases that make people in America see Asian people as subhuman. For upper-class Asians, these biases often present as white dudes being creepy/asking what type of Asian you are, random people on the street calling you a faggot, etc. For lower-class Asians, these biases often present as violence: muggings, killings, sexual violence, extortion from police, etc. Although these issues are getting more coverage now in the COVID era, they've been around since Asians have been here in America. My dad, 25 years ago, warned me and my siblings to stay away from the tracks because "they like pushing Chinese people down there." I didn't believe him until I moved to the Bay Area later and heard of it happening there through the whisper network. These stories generally don't get told because lower-class Asians do not have a voice: poor, marginalized, prefer to keep to themselves, and *do not speak English*. (And yes, I know the woman killed in NYC was not lower-class -- consider why that proves my point instead of disproving it.)

Back to TFA: why do I get annoyed when I see well-intentioned articles about subway platform doors? Because the article does not mention the words "Asian" or "hate" even once, not even in passing. Because white-led media will constantly tell us each individual murder is "not racially motivated because of mental health/economic anxiety/the same excuses used to downplay right-wing extremist violence" despite the pattern of anti-Asian violence. Because articles like this, which choose to only focus on the very real issues of homelessness/mental health in NYC, omit the fact that this murder is also part of a larger pattern of anti-Asian hatred. Is it so hard to provide a single sentence acknowledging that? Fix the transit system, help the homeless and mentally ill, and stop the anti-Asian violence. The issues are not at odds with each other.

Two elderly Asian men were murdered in my hometown last month -- one of them blocks away from where my parents live, and the other right next to where we get food all the time. I'm angry because of the killings, but I'm also angry because I know that if any of my loved ones ever get murdered, many metafilter/twitter/instagram comments will say "well ACTUALLY, it's not racially motivated because the murderer was financially motivated/mentally ill/attacked a non-Asian person earlier."
posted by bongerino at 2:28 AM on January 21, 2022 [34 favorites]

What an awful event.

It is surely worth nothing that we do not typically treat technological solutions to structural racism and hate crimes as entirely serious or well intentioned when the victims are not Asian.

Interesting that the first link was to a UK newspaper because of course the older London Underground lines also do not have PEDs while the newer Jubilee extension and Crossrail / Elizabeth line do. Other very old systems such as Moscow also don't have them. Paris has them on some of the lines that have received extensive automation and new trains most recently which is really the key.

If you look at the map in this link: The Case of the Missing Platform Doors then I don't think it supports a thesis of North American uniqueness, the older systems typically don't have them. Newer systems, and ones which have been extensively modernised in the last two decades do. In places like Paris and London, this repeats at the line-by-line scale with the same logic.

There is a pretty complex series of things that older systems have to do in sequence to get to PEDs:

1) First, they often need to be re-signalled so that they can support high precision tracking of trains. There are a few different levels of train control ranging from track-side signalling that train drivers have to read and act on, to automated train protection that prevents collisions as a last resort coupled with in-cab signalling, to block based automated train control, to finally the newest systems which can measure train position to within a cm at low speeds. It seems like this would be really easy and in newer systems it's not *that* hard but retrofitting critical safety systems in the crowded, wet, and noisy RF (and no GPS) environment of an underground tunnel is not that easy. Especially on an operating railway that can't be disrupted.

2) Then new rolling stock needs to be introduced that can use the new signalling and positioning to do cm level positioning. Given the long life of railway assets, this means planning well ahead.

Note that you need to either get dual signalling system capable rolling stock *or* build the new signalling system in parallel to the old one if you're retrofitting. A problem not faced by newbuild.

3) Once you have done those things and can consistently dynamically position trains precisely enough to match doors, then the doors can go in. I'm not so convinced by the supposed difficulty of doing this on larger platforms like NYC or the London subsurface lines but it would be harder on the London deep level trains because of how small and round the platform bores are.

I know that London is slowly moving to a complete resignalling of all the systems and a replacement programme for all the rolling stock so we probably will eventually see a network that is ready for PEDs.
posted by atrazine at 3:52 AM on January 21, 2022 [12 favorites]

it would dramatically reduce litter on the tracks

So we are going to have to throw our half-eaten pizza slices over some kind of barrier just to save one or two lives a year?
posted by snofoam at 4:05 AM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Don't they have specially trained rats to deal with those?
posted by acb at 4:08 AM on January 21, 2022 [8 favorites]

New York's subway system is an embarrassment to western civilisation.

And it's still better than any other system in the US.
posted by octothorpe at 4:16 AM on January 21, 2022 [6 favorites]

New York's subway system is an embarrassment to western civilisation.

It has more stations and more services /lines than any other system in the world. In terms of capacity, service area, and utilization it out performs most mass transit systems anywhere else. It has its problems related to age and chronic underfunding — but it isn’t isn’t an embarrassment to western civilization.
posted by interogative mood at 4:38 AM on January 21, 2022 [16 favorites]

I find the lack of funding to all public transit to be deeply embarrassing, and depressing. I don't look at these problems and think, well, they are still better than others.
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:37 AM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

armeowda, I think we were talking at cross-purposes and I apologize for my tone.
posted by praemunire at 7:10 AM on January 21, 2022

Both Shanghai and Beijing metros have more stations than NYC (and are rapidly expanding). In terms of ridership, NYC isn't even top in North America and has about a quarter what the big Asian cities do. Not saying anything either way, just wanted to add the facts.
posted by ssg at 7:54 AM on January 21, 2022

NYC is very much top in North American transit systems in terms of ridership. Mexico City is second but quite a bit smaller.
posted by octothorpe at 8:10 AM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I dug deeper on NYC versus CDMX ridership (the data on Wikipedia is bad) and it's pretty much equal. 2018 is the latest data for NYC and comparing the two, NYC was 1.68B annual and CDMX was 1.65B.
posted by ssg at 8:35 AM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

NYC subway rolling stock is all over the place and uses a variety of door positions which makes this a non-starter. They just retired the R32 which had been in active use since 1964!
posted by rhymedirective at 10:13 AM on January 21, 2022

NYC subway rolling stock is all over the place and uses a variety of door positions which makes this a non-starter.

Platform edge doors capable of accommodating multiple types of rolling stock apparently exist; they open vertically, and are undoubtedly more complicated and expensive, though not impossible. Though it may well be that reducing rolling stock to one variety per line is more economical than installing multi-configuration doors on every platform.
posted by acb at 10:32 AM on January 21, 2022

Platform edge doors capable of accommodating multiple types of rolling stock apparently exist; they open vertically, and are undoubtedly more complicated and expensive, though not impossible. Though it may well be that reducing rolling stock to one variety per line is more economical than installing multi-configuration doors on every platform.

This is true, although they in fact are more expensive and costlier to operate as they are less common and thus harder to repair.

The NYC subway operational model is heavily dependent on interlining, so I doubt they will ever be able to limit each line to one model of rolling stock without a massive cultural shift at the MTA.
posted by rhymedirective at 10:36 AM on January 21, 2022

This event was terrible. Making things safer is good.

But, we also make cost-benefit trade offs every day and decide not to spend money on things that kill hundreds of times as many people as this. If you want to save as many lives as possible, we'd probably be better off spending $2B on free swimming lessons or pool fences, or free naloxone distribution, or traffic calming measures, or protected bike lanes. Subway doors are a fine thing. Let's not forget that 15 people die each year in NYC because they don't have a place to be warm. I don't know that it's true, but I suspect more than a few of them were turned out of the subway.
posted by eotvos at 11:29 AM on January 21, 2022

they open vertically, and are undoubtedly more complicated and expensive

I wonder if one very long fence that rises vertically on a few hydraulic cylinders could in fact be less complicated and more reliable than a series of fences and gates with multiple configurations. No need to stop the train on a precise point, either.

Make sure it has horizontal slats so someone trapped on the tracks can climb out. If someone choses to take advantage of that design to climb onto the tracks, that's on them.
posted by CynicalKnight at 1:18 PM on January 21, 2022

First, they often need to be re-signalled so that they can support high precision tracking of trains

The Jubilee Line Extension had manually driven trains for its first decade or so. The wetware at the controls is capable of sufficient precision for PEDs.

On the other hand they mostly exist for ventilation reasons as the safety reasons alone don’t justify them. The brand new above ground platforms on both the JLE and Crossrail do not have them.

And the just-opened underground stations on the Northern Line extension don’t have them either.
posted by grahamparks at 2:06 PM on January 21, 2022

The thing is that all those countries (except maybe China where most subways are really new) that n ow have subway gates originally had subways without gates and added them later, they spent that large amount for safety because they thought they were a good idea at some point. Cost is not a reason not to put them in, it's an excuse
posted by mbo at 7:16 PM on January 21, 2022

I just love threads where white people consistently dismiss or redirect concerns by APIDA folks advocating for their own safety

it's 2021 and white people still love dismissing/minimizing/ignoring POC speaking up for themselves even while they drop so many ten dollar words signifying their political progressiveness. can't take a minute to pause, must react to the POC speaking, how dare they present a different political analysis than mine, which is obviously free of any racial biases?

no, not even if half a dozen POC start speaking up about their lived experiences will I ever center their experience of a tragedy that happened to one of their fucking own, whose vigils are being organized by their community, whose experience has felt so resonant in this time of anti-Asian violence. I, a well meaning white person, require at least 3000 words of convincing rhetoric before I will consider vaguely apologizing for dismissing their experience in so many words which I will, of course, clarify by saying I obviously didn't intend to be dismissive, of course, so how could they be so offended

I live in ATL where homelessness and underfunded transit systems are huge issues. the pitched political battles to pass even just a one cent sales tax to fund our transportation system, which the state refuses to help unlike every other state with a major metropolitan area, along with resistance by outlying counties by white people, all of this is, of course, just a transit issue, having nothing to do with race

the homelessness issue? definitely not related to historically racist federal, state, and municipal policies. the number of homeless folks in ethnic enclaves or public housing units in the same? definitely not a race thing having to do with how rich neighborhoods are hyper-policed. the fact that Asian Americans have been historically targeted for hate crimes due to publicly funded racist campaigns? that cultural milieu, why that disappeared after Crazy Rich Asians, didn't you see how I bought one ticket to that film and suddenly understood the entirety of the Asian American experience? couldn't you tell that I listened to Crying at H-Mart at 1.7x speed and now know how you Asians, excuse me, how BIPOC grieve?

the CEO of our transit system most recently committed suicide throwing himself in front of the train at the station closest to me. the spa shootings that happened in Atlanta occurred a mile down the road from where I used to live. I organize in my community for voting rights, I volunteer and regularly donate to mutual aid causes like the ATL Free Fridge and Soups Not Bombs, I personally know and am friends and organize with the Housing Justice League and with activists who are regularly out in the streets helping homeless individuals but fucking no, I, a mad Asian American, obviously don't fucking understand that this is an issue predominantly about homelessness and transit policy decisions

I had to avoid this fucking thread after that first reaction by someone who has repeatedly minimized multiple times when I mentioned racism as a central analysis and now I have to see this fucking thread dominated by white people persistently resisting Asian Americans speaking to their own fucking experience

this site is supposed to have had a racial reckoning right? what the fuck happened to that? is George Floyd too many days dead and your comments in NUMTOTs too liked for you to center anti-racism as your cause celebre anymore?
posted by paimapi at 8:28 AM on January 22, 2022 [8 favorites]

....So, I actually have been a little uncomfortable about my comment way upthread - I 100% hadn't meant it as a lessening of the problem of APIDA hate at all. I was intending it as more of a "yes and" kind of comment.

But I have been kinda wondering if it sounded more dismissive than I meant and have almost asked the mods to kill it but thought I was overreacting...but Paimapi, you've just convinced me that I'm not, so I apologize. I am self-flagging now, but wanted to put this here as an apology until the mods actually delete it.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:39 AM on January 22, 2022

the framing of this murder as an infrastructure issue is absurd. it's like if the defense at a shooting murder trial said "guns were available everywhere! he practically HAD to shoot her!"

would infrastructure changes make it harder to commit this type of murder? sure. but that does not address the desire of the people-- the People, the society-- to have this moral outrage addressed. especially given the racial aspect.

you hate cops? i get it. they can be awful. so propose another answer. a modern community-based security organization who monitor their own neighborhoods. don't tell me about fucking railings and "mental health" interventions that could've talked this dickhead out of murder, or why somehow he is not responsible for his actions.
posted by wibari at 11:53 PM on January 22, 2022

this site is supposed to have had a racial reckoning right? what the fuck happened to that? is George Floyd too many days dead and your comments in NUMTOTs too liked for you to center anti-racism as your cause celebre anymore?

well, there's a bipoc advisory committee which has met... three times, and gotten so far as to decide what format the meetings should be in, sorta, mostly? and tabled most other topics.

which, of course, only formed after *years* of repeated metatalks after conflagrations, and a hefty exodus of bipoc members.

and the wild thing is, white folk here, by and large, tend to think that they're one of the good ones, that they couldn't! possibly! carry out racist actions or processes. which is why you have so many here, once again, trying to minimize anti-asian sentiment and telling asian diaspora they're overrreacting and then saying they're just so appalled.

what was it that anti-racists keep saying? about how impact matters more than intent? who the fuck knows what was going on inside dude's head? maybe it matters for how he's eventually charged and rammed through the carcareal justice system. but when you get down to it, we have yet another asian woman murdered during a time when anti-asian sentiment has skyrocketed and somehow asian diaspora saying there's a racial component is beyond the pale?

yes, platform gates would be great. it's helped a lot of stations in asia climate control their stations and save lives and time. yeah, if the cta, the mta, the wmata, and so on all installed them. but it's also not speaking to the other big question which was raised, and it's doing no favors to anyone when "allies" try and look past this shit.
posted by i used to be someone else at 7:05 AM on January 24, 2022 [2 favorites]