The innovation here is that this PR person works in the Rail Control Center, with the people who are actually running the subway. Not in some PR office. She's surrounded by the people who are telling the trains what to do, controlling signals and switches, and dealing with problems. She can see the track boards and listen to the comm loops.
Contrast this with big sites which have status pages showing everything is just great half an hour after it's hit the mainstream media that they're down.
It's very New York. When Maersk Shipping had a big hacking incident and was down for most of a week, the best no-bullshit info was coming from someone at the Port Authority who edits their feed for truckers. Maersk PR was saying "almost everything is fine". The Port Authority trucker feed was saying stuff like "Maersk can't take outbounds at APM, only one gate is open for inbounds, don't return empties at this time". That brutal honesty beats horsing a semi over there to find out you can't unload.
Seems like it's a new communications channel which is ripe to get PR'd into uselessness, just like the company's official channels.
Maybe it can't be, because there has to be some useful channel to tell people that, no, those ships aren't coming in today or that train isn't going to make it on time or so on, but if the company sees a value in presenting the happy face to everyone, it has an incentive to make whatever deals it needs to in order to ensure all public or not-private channels stay on-message. This works out to NDAs and encryption, usually.
I hate to say this, but the MTA/Subway in NYC has reached the level of service that you can expect from a third country system. The pain is even worse during the summer where all stations have a mix of scorching heat and humidity, and it feels almost like you are in a sauna.
The MTA doesn't just need more money, but a completely change in leadership as well, and putting new people that have higher expectations on the service, and that actually use it themselves.
Even simple thing like "scheduled maintenance" notices look like they were design for lawyers and not normal people.
The current management is totally dysfunctional, and yes Ny Gov. Cuomo is part of the problem. (and the boob wants to run for President). He is going to run down the country just as he is doing with the MTA.
Robots for all the things that a commuter doesn't directly interact with.
The humans belong in the human interface and can remain in the stations; MAYBE as actual patrols on the train looking to provide assistance and keep the peace (and also having access to get in to the control area in case an over-ride is required).
I checked out their Twitter feed a couple days ago (had to reroute due to a broken rail at Wall St. and wanted to see a picture or something of the broken rail). I was amazed how polite and helpful they are to the most irate customers. It really does seem that the social media team calms down a lot of angry people.
Meanwhile, I am surprised at how desynchronized their various data sources are. I check mta.info before I go on a subway trip, and did that this morning for my commute to work. Delays on the 4 and 5, but none on the 2 and 3. I go down to the 2/3 platform and there is an announcement playing saying that the 2 and 3 are delayed (for the same reason given on mta.info about the 4/5; signal problems at Borough Hall). The website apparently didn't get the message. At least I had cell service while waiting...
The worst part about mta.info is that it'll show scheduled work on lines, but it doesn't show closed stations - so the C looks like it skips 86th but not 72nd, when in actuality 72nd is closed for repairs and you ain't getting on or off a train there. If you need to plan a trip, you have to check at least two places.
For that broken rail incident, I'm pretty sure I could have gotten home. The announcement said Clark St. was closed, which is my station... but I am pretty sure, in retrospect, that they meant that there would be no Manhattan-bound trains at that station because they're being rerouted over the 4/5, but I think Brooklyn-bound trains were not being rerouted (as that rail wasn't broken). They were very unclear, and so I just took an alternate route. They could have been completely clear, but chose not to.
(I'll also point out that they provided walking directions from Clark St. to Borough Hall... but they provided directions to the actual Brooklyn Borough Hall, not the subway station with the same name. Oops.)
>It really does seem that the social media team calms down a lot of angry people.
Great, they've mastered spin. People are angry for good reason. Don't calm them down, fix the damn trains, now. This is just more of the MTA's endless bullshit.
I have noticed on my commutes that there are times that I simply can't arrive at work. If I'm commuting at an unpopular time, it takes 15 minutes. If I commute at a popular time, it takes 20 minutes. This makes me either 5 minutes early or 5 minutes late, depending on the time I expect to arrive.
The reason the trains take a different amount of time is because when the trains are crowded, it takes a long time for people to get on and off, so the train has to sit in the station longer. This delays the train behind, and so on. A new signal system or better tracks isn't going to fix this problem. It's the human factor of "I want to arrive exactly at 9am, 9:01am isn't acceptable" that's slowing everyone down.
Other train systems manage exactly that. In Japan being even a minute late isn’t acceptable. This isn’t some impossible fantasy thwarted by human nature.
Your comment is exactly what I’m talking about. The MTA has managed to train us to accept this awful state as unavoidable and natural. Don’t buy their bullshit.
Seconds matter in Japan's rail system [0]. Leaving early is (usually) a bigger problem than leaving late - but I doubt anyone was clamoring to get on the train in those last 20 seconds. But in the event a train runs late - get a 遅延証明書 from a station clerk.
I have friends who
have and currently live in NYC and I know the MTA gets a lot of flak from them and sometimes for very good reason.
I have to say though all things considered this is a shining example (to me) of something that is typically very opaque - government agency public relations- and giving it some honest try polish and actually trying to meet people where they are (e.g Twitter)
Does this paper over all the problems of th MTA? I’m sure it does not! I do think they’re at least trying though and that’s a lot more than can be said of other gov agencies I have dealt with.
The German train system uses TTS in all stations to announce (among other things) delays and cancellations. Cancellations are usually followed by the phrase "we apologize". This has always been for me the most infuriating part: that the fakest of apologies was attached to it.
In contrast, getting actual information about the delay works for me, precisely because it feels more honest.
The most infuriating part for me with the local transport agency in Cologne (KVB) is the verbosity. They use a 90s style unbearably slow ticker display. So if you catch a glimpse at the wrong moment you're stuck reading all the unimportant garbage while trying to figure out whether the message is even relevant to you.
This is especially bad with cancellations because it lists every major stop (with station name and time) for the canceled tram. So instead of getting the important information instantly you are stuck waiting for the message to end and then repeat to the point that's actually important. I realise this is a technical limitation because apparently all affected stations get the same message but this seems fairly archaic while at the same time also being an obvious cost-cutting move over having actual announcements.
In general however the infuriating part about the apologies is that instead of "we apologize for the inconvenience" a more literal translation of the one you see most often -- "Danke für Ihr Verständnis" -- is "thank you for your understanding", which comes off as super passive-aggressive compared to the more apologetic but much less frequent "Wir bitten um Verständnis" ("we ask for your understanding"). Sure, they're both hollow phrases but thanking you seems extremely condescending.
The best display technology IMHO is the old electro-mechanical split-flap. They update pretty fast, and they make one hell of a racket when they do so everybody in the train station knows when something updated (this is a feature). They're sufficiently versatile to display information a train station needs to. They also have a certain aesthetic that simply cannot be touched by modern LCD/LED displays.
You must be one of those hipsters who lugs around a typewriter to cafes.
- They are very slow compared to digital.
- They aren't versatile, they can't display arbitrary information. Each message has to be crafted individually and fit in among the rest. Which makes it nice for station lines since there are a small number that never change. Anything else? Not so much.
- The noise is not intentional, it's more of a bug than a feature for sure. In a busy train station they change every minute or more so as an alerting mechanism it's near useless.
We're talking about train station displays, not arbitrary displays. Nobody has ever done word processing on a split-flap display so obviously I'm talking about a restricted domain. They don't need to display arbitrary information and the range of information they need to display rarely changes since that typically involves construction. The noise, an unintentional consequence of the mechanism, provides utility to train travelers and is therefore a feature.
In a busy train station the duration of the split-flap change provides an auditory clue to what's going on. If you hear one or two rows update then nothing out of the ordinary is happening. If you hear several rows update that might be a good indication that your train is now on the board, or it could signal mass delays. For many years I went through 30th Street Station in Philadelphia with a split-flap board in the middle and I loved that board. When I'm at airports with LCD boards, I always miss it. LCD boards are trash, you don't notice them changing unless you're staring at them, almost always have text too small to read unless you're standing directly in front of it, and are completely soulless.
I learned to type on a Selectric years before my family bought our first computer. I haven't touched one since.
Adding qualifications? The context of this discussion was plainly train stations; in fact I explicitly mentioned train stations twice in my original comment. Display technology seems to be something you take very personally, but that's no reason to throw around insults.
> They use a 90s style unbearably slow ticker display. So if you catch a glimpse at the wrong moment you're stuck reading all the unimportant garbage while trying to figure out whether the message is even relevant to you.
BART in the SF Bay Area is the same. The tickers slooowly scroll through repeated public service announcements and ads before eventually showing the train ETAs and current time for five seconds. They should show that important information all the time.
I, and many others I'm sure, would appreciate it if you would actually put some effort into your half-hearted America slams. All the subways I've been in, EU and US, have plenty of both ads and maps.
How about the English one, copied from [1] with an example train included:
"May I have your attention please on platform 1. We are sorry to announce that the nineteen-fourteen South West Trains service to Windsor and Eton Riverside has been cancelled. This is due to a failed train at Richmond. South West Trains apologises for the inconvenience caused."
At least some parts of that one are useful. I found hearing things like "This is a safety announcement. Due to today's inclement weather, please take extra care whilst on the station. Surfaces may be slippery." and "Security personnel tour this station 24 hours a day." very annoying.
(And I said "English" intentionally. You can at least double the length of these, Welsh first, in Wales.)
I wonder if that's a limitation of the (likely ancient) systems they pull the data from, or just a terrible convention. Even a vertical refresh, one complete line at a time, would let you show a lot more updates to the passengers than a horizontal scroll.
Using the DB app is really helpful to me. All delays are near real-time. It makes using public transport so much easier. Now the German ticketing machine, please fix that so it includes the stops instead of just end points.
Isn’t this “fake” politeness part of the German culture? I see it in everything related to business communication, from banks, insurances, public services, etc. Even from retail stores. That has been explained to me as being part of the etiquette for proper communication, which seems to be quite important in Germany, even if everybody I asked agreed that it was empty and meaningless.
It indeed is, in a way German culture is very similar to something like Japanese culture, where the social form is way more important than actual intent/content.
For the same reason, the German language has very complex honorifics [0].
Some Germans take real offense if you don't address them with the proper honorific or forget to list one of their, oh so important, honorific titles on some text communication.
Because of this, there exists quite a lively market to sell honorific titles, specifically aimed at German-speaking users [1], in that regard there still exists a very real "class distinction" in Germany.
Stuff like that always makes me wonder how much influence population density has on the evolution of such strict social dynamics.
When living in Germany, I found that the Germans were quite blunt in comparison to the United States and discarded a lot of the word fluff and fake friendliness that I often see people using in the United States. They prefer to be direct and get to the point. There was no need to beat around the bush and hint politely at something. So the attitude of getting rid of the meaningless words and stick directly to the information seems like a very German attitude to me.
However, I also found (particularly in written contexts) that the Germans were really big on formality. If you don't use their proper titles, they'll get very upset. If the paperwork doesn't have an official stamp on it, it's meaningless waste paper. If it does have an official stamp on it, then it's holy and undisputed, no matter what nonsense is written on it. I'm surprised that there isn't a flourishing fake official stamp black market because of the importance people place on those things.
I find that all the fluff in German written documents revolves around formality, rather than fake politeness. I always got the feeling that all those extra, meaningless words and phrases were more about doing it the proper, formal way (no matter how meaningless that was), whereas in the United States, the people are much more informal, but use a lot of fluff words to convey fake friendliness.
German academic writing is ridiculous. There's so much formality and academic vocabulary involved that they'll write long, complex sentences with fancy vocabulary to convey a simple concept. It's about as formal as you can possibly imagine, so it's wordiness and complexity has to compensate.
>“I think people think it’s a lot worse than it is, this catastrophic mess all the time,” she said. “I’ve had to put a moratorium on talking about the trains with my boyfriend. We had to say no talking about the trains. He’s part of the public. They just see the bad parts. They don’t see the strides we’re making and how this information that we put out makes a difference. They’re caught up in the negative part.”
The "negative part" is the trains being late or stopping in the tunnels almost daily. The "negative part" is our lives being constantly disrupted by the MTA's unbelievably poor service. She's damn right we're "caught up in the negative part".
This is a bullshit spin operation. Fix the damn trains, don't hire some PR operative to tell us we're somehow delusional and we're not really having these problems.
Agreed! Though there are clearly problems, I really appreciate the folks working actively on transparency (of operations, at least). I've been pleasantly surprised at the breadth and depth of my own city's API for real time information, and understand this level of thoughtfulness isn't unusual for major US public transit systems in general.
This is an improvement over how things worked before, but the end state for this has to be an API definition for service changes so that services like Google Maps and Citymapper can update my routes or estimated travel times.
I don't want to plan a route in Citymapper and then have to check myMTA for service status.
I live in NYC, and I follow transit news very rigorously.
This article underplays the extent of the problem, which is that the information they give is just not actually correct.
First of all, the MTA made a big deal about rolling out the subway countdown clocks across (almost) all the stations. Except, for the old BMT lines[0], the clocks are just... not actually accurate! They're literally just publishing the scheduled times, and almost never actually update it to correspond to a delay[1][2]. Delays are dramatically worse across every single subway line than they were ten years ago[3], so by this point, those scheduled times are almost completely useless. Thankfully, the BMT countdown clocks are a different style from the IRT ones, so as a rule of thumb: if it's black text on white background, then it's completely useless, and if it's green LEDs on black background, then it's probably-somewhat-useful, but still not necessarily up-to-date.
Even for planned service changes, they publish information in unbelievably obtuse ways[4]. Yes, they're technically correct. But the point is to communicate things clearly, not to publish statements that are defensibly not-wrong in a court of law.
Just last month, they decided to stop service for the express trains midtown (or run it in two segments - I never figured out which). They didn't tell anyone, so an entire train full of passengers went two stops downtown and two stops back uptown. Because they also held the train before one of the stations, we literally took half an hour to end up right back where we started[5].
[0] For the most part, any line with a letter instead of a number, like the A/C/E instead of the 1/2/3
I totally agree. I was stuck at the Broadway Junction station this weekend waiting for the L. Every 5 min or so, both the screen and the announcer would claim it is now arriving. We were there for 35 min. I was supposed to meet some friends and initially I was updating them that it's about to get there. Eventually, they were almost pissed because they thought I was lying. Had to send pics.
I really really get frustrated by the inaccuracies. I'd rather they just let me know straight up that it's 30 min away and I make alternative arrangements.
> Except, for the old BMT lines[0], the clocks are just... not actually accurate!
I can't say I agree. I've been a daily commuter on the ACE, 1, and NQR/BD trains since the introduction of the clocks and found them all to be wonderfully accurate.
Yeah, it's almost surely a case of remembering the handful of times when the clocks were inaccurate because they caused you trouble, while forgetting the hundreds of times when they worked correctly. They do work correctly most of the time, and the A division works even better than the B division, as you'd expect. (the opposite of what OP claimed.)
> Yeah, it's almost surely a case of remembering the handful of times when the clocks were inaccurate because they caused you trouble, while forgetting the hundreds of times when they worked correctly.
It absolutely is not availability bias, as demonstrated by the concrete data included in one of those links.
But even if it were - the whole point of having those signs is to alert you about the actual state of the subway, factoring in delays or service changes. Otherwise I could just download the PDF of the scheduled train times from the MTA's website and look at that. (Yes, those exist. There's almost no reason any person would ever need to look at them).
> They do work correctly most of the time, and the A division works even better than the B division, as you'd expect. (the opposite of what OP claimed.)
No, that's not the opposite of what I said. The A division is the IRT lines. Those are the ones that use the ATS system (which was outdated even at the time it was rolled out), and that's why the IRT lines (the ones with the LEDs on black background) are at least somewhat useful. Even if the train is delayed from its normal schedule, the times posted there are supposed to be somewhat accurate because it's using the ATS signal data.
For the B division (the BMT lines), you might as well be using the static PDFs that post the idealized train schedules[0]. I am not exaggerating; that's literally the data they are displaying. Once in a blue moon, for very serious delays such as a train accident, it will tell you that a train is "delayed" instead of telling you the updated ETA, but that doesn't help, because you want to know how long the train will take, rather than just the fact that it's "delayed"[1]. Most of the time, though, it won't actually update the time at all, and it'll keep displaying the wrong estimate until the train is literally about to pull into the station (at which point it'll skip straight to "0 minutes away").
The reason they don't tell you more information is because that information doesn't exist. They don't know where the trains are, beacuse the BMT lines use outdated signaling technology that's decades old, and the MTA has stonewalled all efforts to upgrade them[3].
So, in short, the BMT countdown clocks are useless because:
* They only publish the scheduled times, not the actual estimated arrival times
* Only about 50-60% of BMT trains arrive according to the times posted on those schedules
* For the remainder, it usually displays the wrong information, because it doesn't have any way of knowing that the information is out-of-date
[1] Saying a train is "delayed" doesn't give me any useful information, because I already know that about half the trains are delayed. And since it doesn't tell you what the scheduled ETA was, telling me that it's "delayed" from the scheduled ETA is also pretty useless[2].
[2] If the train is scheduled to come in 20 minutes, but it's been delayed by five, that's different from if it's scheduled to come in 3 minutes, but has been delayed by 10. Those two situations are displayed identically on the BMT countdown clocks, with no way to distinguish between them.
[3] The official MTA party line is that they want to wait and do the really expensive, comprehensive, state-of-the-art overhaul. In reality, that means that they've been saying this for nearly thirty years, and have actively fought all attempts to provide quicker and cheaper ways of achieving the same end results.
> * They only publish the scheduled times, not the actual estimated arrival times
Do you have a source for this? I'm positively certain it's not true. I time my commute every morning with the online subway clock that matches exactly with the one in the station -- I leave my apartment when the Q is ~8m away and it always arrives shortly after I get to the platform. I've only encountered one situation where the clock was unacceptably wrong: a downtown A train at 59th that was 1m away for over 5m. That happened over a year ago and I still remember it.
Similarly, when delays happen the clock does get updated accordingly. Today was a good example -- 24m for the next N train during commuting hours :/
I think you may be confusing the countdown clocks with the kiosks. Once upon a time they did display the scheduled time. I'm not sure if they still do but the above head displays are without a doubt more accurate. Anecdotally speaking, the margin of error seems to be roughly +/- one minute. I'm aware that's anecdotal evidence but I simply don't believe that somebody could take the subway on a daily basis and think the countdown clocks are that inaccurate.
> I think you may be confusing the countdown clocks with the kiosks
No, I'm not. I know the difference between the kiosks and the overhead clocks.
> I simply don't believe that somebody could take the subway on a daily basis and think the countdown clocks are that inaccurate.
Benjamin Kabak, whom I linked above, has been covering the MTA and transit in New York for over a decade, in addition to being a daily subway rider. Offhand, I can't think of a single independent journalist who has more comprehensive knowledge of the minutiae of the NYC transit systems than he does, let alone a more established track record of documenting not only the visible problems, but the factors that create those problems. If that, combined with the other data provided, isn't convincing, I don't know what else could be.
You haven't really provided any data. A few random tweets about incidents, only one about the countdown clocks where the next response offers a probable explanation.
You're trying to sell me on a different version of reality, here. You're telling me a system I rely on every single day is completely unreliable.
Do you live in NYC? Do you take the trains? Go put your theory to the test. Go sit at at a busy train station for 20m and watch the countdown clocks tick down until the train comes. I promise you'll be pleasantly surprised. The countdown clocks are just about the only part of the MTA system that works.
> You're trying to sell me on a different version of reality, here.... Give the MTA their single, well-deserved victory. Put your theory for the test. Go sit at at a busy train station for 20m and watch the countdown clocks tick down until the train comes. I promise you'll be pleasantly surprised.
I'm not trying to sell you on anything. In fact, I'm not even interested in continuing this discussion. I've provided you with a reference to the most well-respected journalist covering the technical details of the MTA and NYC transit. If you're really interested in learning more, it's not hard to do some basic Googling and find their extensive coverage and analysis of this problem.
> Do you live in NYC? Do you take the trains? I'm so confused -- are you astroturfing for some reason?
Just because someone presents information that contradicts your anecdotal experience, that doesn't mean they're astroturfing. Though at this point, if you're going to start slinging bad-faith accusations with no basis, it's pretty clear this conversation is going nowhere.
> it's pretty clear this conversation is going nowhere.
Yes, obviously, because you keep saying "look at the data" while providing none of relevance. Nobody's arguing that the MTA is rife with delays and poor planning, we're talking about the countdown clocks specifically.
The countdown clocks do not show the scheduled time. They use Bluetooth receivers to physically track the trains [1]. Your fundamental premise is wrong.
I'm honestly curious -- do you Uber everywhere? How often do you take the train?
Contrast this with big sites which have status pages showing everything is just great half an hour after it's hit the mainstream media that they're down.
It's very New York. When Maersk Shipping had a big hacking incident and was down for most of a week, the best no-bullshit info was coming from someone at the Port Authority who edits their feed for truckers. Maersk PR was saying "almost everything is fine". The Port Authority trucker feed was saying stuff like "Maersk can't take outbounds at APM, only one gate is open for inbounds, don't return empties at this time". That brutal honesty beats horsing a semi over there to find out you can't unload.