New Yorker Magazine [jul 02] by calibre

Author:calibre [calibre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: News, New Yorker Magazine
Publisher: calibre
Published: 2018-07-02T09:01:55.046000+00:00

The Canarsie local, a.k.a. the L train, runs from Eighth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, in Manhattan, to Canarsie, in southeastern Brooklyn. That’s ten miles, twenty-four stops, with a scheduled running time of thirty-seven minutes. The L train gets crowded, but its on-time rate, above ninety per cent, is by far the best of any line in the system. Its outstanding performance is apparently the result of a computerized signalling system, installed more than a decade ago, called communications-based train control. C.B.T.C. has provided transformative improvements to train service in cities throughout the world, but in New York the L is so far the only line using it.

Traditional signalling, known as fixed block, divides the track into segments, or blocks—on New York’s subways, they’re usually about a thousand feet long. As a train enters a block, it trips a circuit, which prevents following trains from entering until it has left. Fixed block has been around since the nineteenth century and, barring grievous human error, it is reliable and safe. But its understanding of the location of a train is crude. All it knows is whether a block is occupied or unoccupied. C.B.T.C., by contrast, uses radio signalling to create a moving block, which allows a controller to see each train’s precise location and speed. The moving block, constantly updated and reconfigured, is smaller than the old fixed block, which means that trains can travel closer together—exactly what is needed to solve “overcrowding.” C.B.T.C. signalling is also significantly cheaper to maintain and, according to most analysts, even safer than fixed block, because it removes the “human element.”

On a recent morning, a train operator named Philip Dominguez checked the brakes, tooted the horn, and tested the P.A. system. The Canarsie local was ready to leave Eighth Avenue. The conductor, whose cab was in the middle of the eight-car train, closed the doors, and the train accelerated smoothly out of the station, heading east. Dominguez sat in front of two screens that showed the train’s speed, its next stop, its destination. But, because these were C.B.T.C. screens, their overarching message was that there wasn’t much to do: an onboard computer was running the train. The red steel pillars of the station hurtled by, and then the grotty cavern walls of the tunnel, its bare light bulbs and heavy cables telescoping past.

Dominguez didn’t seem entirely smitten with the system. It was, after all, the competition. C.B.T.C. is supposed to make perfect stops at every station. As we traversed the L-train stations of Manhattan, following Fourteenth Street, Dominguez studied each of the computer’s stopping points critically, and then made a face that seemed to say, “Not bad.”

The M.T.A. first started looking into C.B.T.C. after a bad wreck, in 1991, just north of Union Square—five people killed, more than two hundred injured, in an accident attributed to operator inebriation and excessive speed. Eight years later, after a typically thorough set of studies, the M.T.A. hired Siemens, the German multinational, to install C.B.T.C. on the Canarsie line. The

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