I have always wondered why the subways in London, NYC, and Paris have no cell signal in the tunnels. Subways in many large Asian cities (Hong Kong, Shanghai, Seoul, Tokyo) have signal in most tunnels. From the article, it sounds like it's because London, NYC, and Paris had subways very early - and so didn't anticipate having to install telecom equipment in the tunnels:
> In addition to the smart city initiatives, Transit Wireless obviously is eyeing the tunnels as one of the most important infrastructure challenges going forward. Given the age of the tunnel construction, they are much narrower than the engineering standards used today for modern transit systems. In some cases, installed equipment has to fit within just a handful of inches of space lest a moving train rip the equipment right off the wall.
It reminds me of the Galápagos Syndrome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome), where Japan pioneers some technologies, but they're often incompatible with the rest of the world because Japan itself is isolated (ATMs, mobile phones, etc.).
Edit: wrong about Paris! Thanks for correcting me :)
I don't understand infatuation with NYC subway. Moscow subway, while being very old, very deep and in supposed third world country had count down clocks for 25 years, all major carriers LTE for years, very fast wifi on stations and in tunnels for forever, doesn't even require stupid login, just connects, imagine that. The only feeling I have for NYC subway is shame. That pride that some people have is apparently because they never visit anywhere. Oh, and trains are very fast, and come every 3 minutes
Despite how bad it is, the NYC subway is still the best public transit system in the US, so Americans are infatuated with it, especially those who never user other subway systems.
So New Yorkers are like "BART sucks, my subway is way better, itś amazing", while the rest of the world is like "oh, you have shitty dirty metal boxes that break down all the time and you call it public transit, how cute..."
And just shows the provincialism in a supposed "world capital" that is NYC. New York shouldn't be compared to San Francisco, it should be compared to London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, etc.
NYC subway is complete trash, it's one of the most depressing aspects of living in New York. Any impressiveness that comes from it is not from the system itself but rather the density of the surface above it. You feel like you just got from one side of the city to another quickly, but that was in spite of the crappy subway system; it was because so much is crammed within 2 miles above you!
Should a person not be impressed by being able to travel through two miles of incredible urban density in just a few minutes?
I think vehicular traffic is far and away the most depressing aspect of NYC. All of the noise, pollution, bad attitudes, and danger to pedestrians and cyclists and it's not even close to being a timely and efficient way to get around. The subway is a damn miracle compared to any other current form of surface transportation.
Biking is the best mode of transit here. If I take nearly any destination that I could reach via subway within an hour - which for me is pretty much anywhere I'd need to go - I can bike there in the same time as the subway ride or less. And that's assuming that there are no delays or other hiccups on the subway. With the increase in delays these days, I just see no point in taking the subway under most circumstances anymore.
> And just shows the provincialism in a supposed "world capital" that is NYC. New York shouldn't be compared to San Francisco, it should be compared to London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, etc.
New York is compared to London and Hong Kong. That's why they're called the Big Three.
I'll be the first one to talk at length about the many problems of the MTA and the effects on New York public transit, but to be honest, it still comes out ahead of London. It's absurdly expensive due to corruption, and there's no excuse for amount of money the MTA spends for the outcomes it delivers on, but the picture you're painting isn't accurate either.
I promise you that most New Yorkers are deeply unhappy with the subway.
The pride that we feel in the MTA is in carving out a non-automobile based way of life in a country where the ability to drive and own a a car is synonymous with independence and coming of age.
We're also a little proud of the fact that it never stops running even if the trains are only running every twenty minutes. I can not describe how freeing it is to not feel bound by a metro closing time (as I so often do when I visit London or Seoul or Hong Kong).
The fact that Moscow's subway outperforms NYC in every metric despite rampant corruption and embezzlement (buddy of mine used to be an engineer there) means one thing: MTA is inept beyond any measure and any repair. Some changes are in order to unshackle NYC Subway, so we all can be proud of it
> The fact that Moscow's subway outperforms NYC in every metric despite rampant corruption and embezzlement (buddy of mine used to be an engineer there)
Wait, are you talking about Moscow? Because the MTA/TWU in New York is rife with corruption and embezzlement. That's the whole problem.
I agree, though, with the ultimate point: the MTA is utterly inept (or more accurately: utterly corrupt) and needs massive reform.
> Moscow subway, while being very old, very deep and in supposed third world country
Moscow is not in a third-world country, in either sense of the word. It's not in a developing nation (colloquial contemporary use of the word), and it's not in a country that remained unallied with the US and Russia during the Cold War, which is the original meaning of the word.
The Moscow subway is astonishing for the architecture. Some stations look more like the interior of the Hermitage than a subway. Marble, art, chandeliers!
In that respect I think it's truly unique.
If you don't know of this try an image search for moscow subway
I lived in Moscow for a while as a kid and the Metro system was such a joy in retrospect that it's really soured me on some other cities' transit systems. Living in Seattle right now while we struggle to achieve a single-route light rail system is especially saddening.
Crazy that Moscow's system is almost 100 years old, dating from 1935. (I just checked and London's Underground has it beat by a margin though - 1863)
HN is a US-cetric forum. Americans are bad about being oblivious to the existence of anything outside the US. New York is, by far, the largest US city and one of the oldest. It is hugely influential here and has essentially legendary status in the minds of many Americans. To most Americans, New York is kind of The big city and symbolizes anything and everything urban. I am not sure if we even have subways elsewhere (which just may be my own ignorance showing). If we do, they wouldn't be as extensive.
> I am not sure if we even have subways elsewhere (which just may be my own ignorance showing). If we do, they wouldn't be as extensive.
There are subways in other US cities, but nowhere near as extensive. One-third of all subway stations in the entire country are within New York City itself.
New York City has more subway stations than any other subway system in the world, and that's not counting the non-subway transit (commuter rail, PATH, etc.)
The people I know in Boston/Somerville/Cambridge avoid having a car due to how irritating it is. I had one while living in the city (family reasons), but if I had the option I would've happily ditched it.
> The people I know in Boston/Somerville/Cambridge avoid having a car due to how irritating it is.
Anecdotal stories notwithstanding, New York is the only city in the country in which the outright majority of people don't own cars. (D.C. is a very distant second).
I've lived in California all my life and was somehow ignorant of this fact. Apparently it does exist, although the bulk of the Urban Rail system is light rail, not grade separated. Daily ridership is somewhere around 360K (not bad honestly!) vs. SF Muni at 660K and NYC at 5.7MM.
The light rail isn't that bad as far as traffic goes: it isn't grade separated, but its not in the street either (e.g. to Santa Monica). The two subway lines I'm referring to (red and purple) are actually subway lines though (vs. the Expo line which is basically light rail). Living in LA, I actually never had a chance to ride any of these routes.
Without trying to stir up a debate about the merits of various political systems, could this be due to the strong state control in the Soviet era?
I'd imagine it would be a lot easier in Soviet Russia to just say "we're upgrading this, the line will be down for a week, deal with it". It was an authoritarian state, you're not running for reelection, it didn't matter if people got a bit miffed at delays due to an upgrade.
Well, nothing you said is wrong, but the reason is wrong. Both St Petersburg and Moscow have a very well distributed and supported above ground public transit system as well, going back to the early years of the Soviet Union. Trams, trolleys, buses, and the pay vans (Marshrutki) are extremely prevalent and help people get around fast and relatively cheaply. I live in spb right now and am riding a tram where the placard lists the commissioned date as 1958. The wagon of the metro train I moved to while writing this post says 1972; point is this infrastructure has been around a long time.
So yeah, people had no say if a district shut your metro station down for 4 months for repairs (which still happens today), but you had and have many alternatives to get where you want to, so at best it's a minor inconvenience.
Compare this to where I grew up in the Midwest, if the buses there broke that was it. Hope you knew someone with a car who was home or liked walkjng (and I've done a few 7 mile walks home when buses broke down, since my choice was wait an hour in the cold for the next bus or just walk)
Deal with it now in russia and in the ussr basically meant "pick one of these other services".
But the democratically elected state senators do routinely cut the MTA's funding so that they can give their overrepresented rural constituents a tax cut.
> But the democratically elected state senators do routinely cut the MTA's funding so that they can give their overrepresented rural constituents a tax cut.
1. New York is not a democracy in anything but name. Voters have basically no control over the state government; the party establishment has fully captured that role.
Because urban New Yorkers are paying for rural areas' transportation infrastructure. In fact, state taxation and spending policies represent a large net transfer from urban areas to rural areas.
An old lament. Why should rural (anywhere) fund the city folks' needs? E.g. Here in rural Iowa, we pay state taxes for schools like everybody else, and have a tiny underfunded school vs the nearby city's grand edifice with two theatres, enormous football facility, AP classes and full staff.
In most cases it's the city folks subsidizing the rural folks. It turns out that it costs a lot more money to build the roads, power lines, schools, etc than the small number of rural residents that benefit from them will ever pay in taxes [0]. And in the specific case of New York's MTA, revenue from subway fares has repeatedly been diverted to pay for things other than the subway [1].
Everybody benefits from farm access to markets. Rural roads are there for everybody. To say 'its more money per capita for rural folks' just means you're using a heatmap of population and putting it over infrastructure - shazam, it doesn't match!. But it says nothing about who's getting the utility out of the infrastructure.
24/7 "service". Sometimes I feel like I'm stuck in the middle of a tunnel just so some middle manager can claim that the line is still running. I would prefer they closed the thing at night and put some serious effort into improvements.
The stations in Moscow seem amazing, but they have half as many as in NYC. Plus I don't believe they run 24/7 do they?
I believe Moscow has traditionally had way more support from the overall country as opposed to just being funded from Moscow proper. Has there ever been something similar as "Ford to City: Drop Dead" with Moscow/the metro system?
In the 1990s you could carry on a conversation on the "analog" cell phones (AMPS vs CDMA/TDMA) in the cut & cover lines in NYC (lines which are 12-20 feet below street surface). The signal would fade but wouldn't drop.
The cutover to digital signals circa 2001-2002 meant calls would drop as soon as the signal faded.
Yeah…I don't know if it's the depth or type of construction but I can get enough signal to check mail and occasionally twitter on the R and 1/2/3/4/5 but not the A/C/E.
Yes, Paris mobile network in subway is now pretty good. My second job was to install BTS for FTM (now Orange) in Paris including the subway in... 2000 ;-)
And we had to do it cooperatively with competitive carriers because of the lack of space in the tubes.
My experience (with the carrier “Free”) is quite different. If there’s data at all, it’s mostly Edge and will cut out when the train gets to the next station. In some deeper lines I won’t even get a phone signal.
Transport for London are currently trialling in-tunnel 4G service on the Waterloo & City line, with a full rollout across the whole London Underground network planned for 2019.
The tunnel gauge isn't a major problem. The standard technology for providing wireless coverage inside tunnels is a leaky feeder or radiating cable - a length of coax cable with a perforated shield. The leaky feeder acts like an antenna with a very elongated radiation pattern. As long as the distance between stations isn't too great, then you don't actually need to put any equipment inside the tunnel other than a length of cable.
Here in Warsaw you get cell reception and even LTE on both lines. From what I understand, the transit authority installed antennas along the tunnels and then the big four wireless operators maintain their BTS at each station directly, without any specialized underground operator.
It used to only work reliably on and near the platforms but nowadays you can watch full HD YouTube videos all along the line with minimal issues.
In Chicago, every underground station AND the tunnels connecting them have had LTE service since December 2015. Amazingly, it works annoyingly well (quite a few people will do video Facetime chats, without headphones, for tens of minutes while we're going through the underground portions of the network).
In Tokyo, a sustained conversation even at barely audible levels would be discouraged by social comparison - others don't so I shouldn't. As a result I can follow a typical conversation between seemingly oblivious native English speakers from half-way down a carriage.
Disappointed with the content of the article; it does not cite an examples of the engineering that was involved, just the challenges and the end result. Missing the whole point, IMHO.
Same feeling for me. I clicked it thinking 'oh damn, I wonder if they'll use leaky coax[1] like the Hudson River car tunnels did' but was sorely disappointed.
In 5 years when the market share has changed are the carriers okay with subsidizing someone else's access while they haven't recouped their sunk costs? If I start a new cell company in Oslo do I automatically get access for free since I have 0 market share?
For NYC, in theory it would have been better if the infrastructure was provided by the MTA and access to it was rented out to each carrier based on usage.
Most cities around the United States require that the contract be renewed after a certain period of time ( usually 2 to 5 years) to prevent things like massive contracts like this from occurring because of gigantic break up clauses that will eventually cost the city and to also promote competition so that the city knows that they're getting the best price.
Vienna has LTE in all tunnels and stations for all carriers. How? The train just runs next to hundreds of kilometers of antenna cables and picks up the signal that way. Perfect reception throughout and much more stable than the old antennas they had between stations.
Isn’t this title a bit misleading? It sounds like there is only service in one ‘tunnel’ on the Grand Central Shuttle. Everywhere else it’s just on the station platform.
The original title is "Engineering against all odds, or how NYC’s subway will get wireless in the tunnels". There's wifi + LTE coverage in stations today. I don't know if it's part of this program or something else but there's LTE coverage from Verizon on the E from midtown down to about Penn Station.
New York Transit Wireless has a free, open wifi that is open in many stations, which I use frequently. It is a little bit of a throwback using it on the subway though, as it does not work in the tunnel, so you have to wait to stop at a station, get the wifi signal back, send out your web page request and receive it, then the train goes into the tunnel again and your connection goes dead again. It is better than nothing though.
During the work week, the nj transit trains leaving hoboken have a “quiet car” where phone calls and talking in general are discouraged and it’s wonderful.
It's pretty loud down there. Cell phones work on the elevated portion of the 7 and you don't hear too many people talking on the phone. The LIRR, on the other hand, has an epidemic of loud cell phone talkers.
My carrier in the UK supports WiFi calling (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT203032). We have WiFi on subway platforms in London and I've been able to make phone calls.
Unless you want filtering, people are going to make calls anyway, and they don't need to be particularly tech savvy to do so.
On the contrary, VOIP is good enough that I use it to make both international and domestic calls all the time, with Viber, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger, using both 3G/4G and WiFi.
For international calling, VOIP actually tends to be better than POTS. It's 50/50 for domestic, I usually just ring but my friends use VOIP.
I used to commute on above ground trains, where you do get cell signal, and although there were business types talking on their phone, they usually weren't that loud.
On their commute most people are wearing earphones which will drown out external noise so they don't shout in their phones.
Just fyi, "gangsta" is such a dated, anachronistic slang term that it's use is now almost exclusively associated with resentful white Fox News types ineptly attempting to dog-whistle "black teens who don't give me the deference I think I deserve" (and occasionally "black athletes or entertainers I disapprove of for nebulously defined reasons"). I'd recommend the next time you need such a euphemistic term you go with the more timeless "urban youth".
You are of course right. I was offering (sarcastic) advice on how to convey the racist intent of the sentence in a manner that was slightly less crudely obvious.
Do you approve of black teens - or teens of any colour - listening to loud music in a public place without earbuds? Is it something the rest of the world should approve of, in your opinion?
The parent comment is clearly calling out the racial overtones on the GP comment and asking for more inclusive language. They're not talking about the obnoxious behaviour of teens (of any color).
As far as I can tell, they only stereotyped "white Fox News types" by describing them as "resentful," which is quite a bit different. To begin with, it's unclear who exactly the commenter is referring to.
I care much, much more about people who latch onto extremely minor public nuisances in order to stoke their own racial resentments. The parent commentator was clearly focused exclusively on black kids.
Maybe I missed it in the article, but where exactly do they make money? If they're paying MTA, do they get their revenue from the cell providers? I.e., does Verizon, AT&T, etc. pay them to provide access to their customers?
Yeah I assume since it's not at all taxpayer funded, it looks something like:
1. They build a network on their own dime in the tunnels
2. They pay MTA "rent" for the privilege
3. They have an exclusive contract so other carriers pay them to use their infrastructure. AT&T, Verizon, etc. essentially operate as MVNOs in the tunnels.
The NYC subway has not “got wireless in the tunnels”.
FTA:
> Transit Wireless obviously is eyeing the tunnels as one of the most important infrastructure challenges going forward... Currently, the company is offering a pilot demonstration of tunnel service on the shuttle between Times Square and Grand Central Station, which launched in December.
Worth mentioning, that for a long time Moscow subway already has free wi-fi (with paid plans too).
Moreover, in Moscow you can see Moscow_WiFi_Free in almost every place of city center. Even every bus has a wi-fi hotspot.
However, you need to receive a text message to use the free Wi-Fi, rendering the service less useful for tourists. So it's for some valley where you have a cell plan including SMS, but not decent data.
The built in navigation system in my car seems to work in tunnels, presumably because it has data from the car itself to use for dead reckoning, but I haven’t found that to be the case with navigation apps or standalone GPS units.
It would require reading data out of the OBD2 - greatly useful, but a Bluetooth dongle needs to be installed in the engine, first. Hence, quite rare: https://github.com/osmandapp/Osmand/issues/3204
An alternative to using leaky feeder in underground railways is to use Distributed Antenna System (DAS). A DAS system was deployed in some New York City Subway stations by Transit Wireless to provide WiFi and mobile phone and data coverage for customers.
I wonder what the pros and cons are for each solution.
> In addition to the smart city initiatives, Transit Wireless obviously is eyeing the tunnels as one of the most important infrastructure challenges going forward. Given the age of the tunnel construction, they are much narrower than the engineering standards used today for modern transit systems. In some cases, installed equipment has to fit within just a handful of inches of space lest a moving train rip the equipment right off the wall.
It reminds me of the Galápagos Syndrome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome), where Japan pioneers some technologies, but they're often incompatible with the rest of the world because Japan itself is isolated (ATMs, mobile phones, etc.).
Edit: wrong about Paris! Thanks for correcting me :)