[jrockway]

> whatever happened to flying at mach 0.9

Someone made a website showing which airlines have the most delays, so airlines just added an hour of padding to every scheduled flight, and then fly slower / burn less fuel when there aren't delays. We do the same thing with commuter trains. Someone was mad that they were late to work one day during a snowstorm or something. Now trains with a top speed of 80mph take 80 minutes to go 40 miles. But are on time 99% of the time! Look at all the time saved from not being late to work!

Personally, I'd rather be 4 hours late to work once a year and save 1 hour commuting every day. But the masses have spoken and decided the opposite. I work from home, so not my problem, I guess.

[groby_b]

Meanwhile, Japan operates trains at 200mph and operators apologize profusely should they actually experience a 25 second delay.

Maybe the issue isn't that people complain about shitty service, but the fact that the service is shitty in the first place. At 80mph and at 30mph.

[jrockway]

Japan is better than the US, but I've definitely been standing around in Shinjuku station waiting an extra long time for a train, freezing my butt off, while the signs scroll "because of heavy snow in Gunma prefecture, trains are running with 15-30 minute delays." Weather is weather.

My favorite US-ism is when Andrew Cuomo (the governor of New York at the time) shut down the NYC subway because of a forecast of 24" of snow. The reason the subway was built was because of the transport disruptions caused by a big snowstorm in 1910. To close it for a snowstorm was the ultimate irony. The snowstorm didn't materialize and he looked like an idiot. The MTA then developed an actual service plan to keep the subway open during snow, and it hasn't been a problem since. (Well, not for me. For people that live on non-underground lines, they are probably annoyed. I think the pre-Cuomo policy was "play it by ear and hope for the best". That was rarely ideal but probably let a few people get home from work before trains started getting stuck. Now nobody gets stuck, but they also get stranded when the snowstorm ends up not being bad.)

[nerdponx]

Has NYC even had a comparably large snowstorm since then?

The reason Cuomo pre-emptively shut down the subway was because a few years prior there had been a serious snowstorm that did severely disrupt subway service. He was trying to avoid a repeat of the same scenario. It turned out that the weather forecast was wrong, but if we actually did get 2 feet of snow and the subway was up and running the next day, with nobody stranded in tunnels or on bridges, he would have looked like a genius.

Cuomo did a lot of stupid stuff (e.g. spending millions on pointlessly renaming bridges and setting up illegal highway signs), but that particular move was not one of them.

To this day, the MTA says that over 12" of snow would still result in system disruption and service suspension: https://pix11.com/news/transit/how-much-snow-will-shut-down-... ("Posted: Jan 5, 2024 / 09:24 AM EST")

> The MTA predicts that over 12 inches of snow or blizzard conditions could cause “significant service suspensions” or a full system shutdown. However, before that, there are several contingency plans in place for winter weather and extreme snowfall.

[jrockway]

> Has NYC even had a comparably large snowstorm since then?

14 inches in 2021.

> To this day, the MTA says that over 12" of snow would still result in system disruption and service suspension

I think the MTA's "underground only" service plan is fine: https://new.mta.info/map/9471. This popped up right after the big shutdown. I don't see why 12" of snow would have to go to a full shutdown, unless MTA employees can't get to work. (I don't know how likely that is.)

Maybe we'll find out tomorrow! (I'm personally placing my bets on "100% rain".)

(Edit to add: apparently we got 27 inches of snow on 1/23/2016 and all underground subway service ran. I have absolutely no memory of this. I might have been in Vermont skiing.)

New York's snow woes really surprise me. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and really only ever heard about snow days on TV. We would get 3 feet of snow and still have to be at school the next morning. Every winter, I dreamed of the "phone tree" being executed. I learned the weather patterns that would result in a lot of snow. I looked at the weather page in the newspaper every day, and glued myself to the TV after school if it was looking good for snow. A few times a year, I would get really excited. It was looking like a big one. I'd stay up late and look at the snow piling up on our deck. Higher than I'd ever seen! The next morning I'd wake up and turn on the local news and watch the list of school cancellations, as my parents got ready to go to work. Never mine. Not once. I think my parents would usually drive me to school, though, which was nice.

So I guess I'm just surprised how in New York we just shut down the city upon the forecast of a couple feet of snow. Maybe it's necessary at scale. Or maybe we're just wimps.

> Cuomo did a lot of stupid stuff (e.g. spending millions on pointlessly renaming bridges)

I'm still mad about this one.

[TylerE]

I guess the issue is that the yards where the trains are stabled are all above ground. If you can't get the crews to them, inspect, and operate them safely, you can't get them in the tunnels. Subway trains are all also 3rd or 4th rail powered, so I can see how lots of (effectively) standing water makes people nervous.

The mitigation I suppose would be to get them underground in advance, and when/if the snow hits you just run with what you've got.

[jrockway]

In NYC we actually have a bunch of yard capacity that is completely underground, and then a bunch of other yards that are covered (like condos built on top). Typically the snow service plans involves stacking as many trainsets as possible on the express tracks, while service runs on the local tracks. There are a ton of extra express tracks on the network (because the IND had what appears to be unlimited money when building their system), so capacity doesn't suffer a ton.

Honestly, in the 12 years I've lived in NYC, there have really only been 2 or 3 nasty snowstorms. Generally things ran OK except the one time Cuomo freaked out. (Hurricane Sandy was pretty nasty, of course. Rain and storm surge are much worse than snow here.)

[groby_b]

I mean, yes, of course, weather is weather. Nobody expects perfection in the face of force majeure. US railways, however, seem to specialize in delivering the minimum possible experience that doesn't result in open riots.

[makestuff]

Japanese public transportation made me never want to take the Amtrak/Subway/US Airlines again. It was astonishing how well it works there.