<story><title>Illustrations of Japan’s “unseen” workforce of trains that work at night (2019)</title><url>https://www.spoon-tamago.com/toei-project-unseen-maintenance-trains/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>deebosong</author><text>I gotta agree with this.&lt;p&gt;If I&amp;#x27;m waiting at 2am for a subway in NYC for 1 hr, versus waiting 6 hours for the first subway to kick back in if it&amp;#x27;s say, 12:01am in Japan or South Korea? Then IMHO it&amp;#x27;s better to just eat the cost, take a taxi, feel the burn of $100 to get home vs. say $2-4 for a 3am subway ride, and give the NYC MTA subway system time to work on repairs, renovations, additions, etc.&lt;p&gt;24 hour subway leaves no time at all to do any maintenance.&lt;p&gt;I really, really, really really really wish that NYC would just straight up plagiarize Japan or South Korea for their metro systems. Even their &amp;quot;next stop&amp;quot; displays are far superior than what NYC currently has.&lt;p&gt;One can dream...</text></item><item><author>decafninja</author><text>NYC is proud of its 24&amp;#x2F;7 subway service. Tell a NYer another city’s subways are better because of XYZ and they’ll shake their fist and say “but we have 24&amp;#x2F;7 service and they don’t!”&lt;p&gt;But I can’t feel part of the reason for the NYC subways many woes is because of the 24&amp;#x2F;7 service and the lack of maintenance and cleanup.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway2037</author><text>&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    24 hour subway leaves no time at all to do any maintenance.
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This is incorrect.  The NYC subway has a huge amount of extra tracks (side tracks and local&amp;#x2F;express tracks).  I would hazard a guess to say more than any other system in the world.  (How many other systems in the world have so many local &amp;amp; express tracks?  It is incredibly rare.)  This allows them to run maintenance at night, while there are much fewer regular trains running.  This is partly why you need to wait so long for a train between 2 AM and 6 AM.  A long time ago when I lived in NYC, during these &amp;quot;dead hours&amp;quot;, waiting at a station, I would frequently see maintenance trains passing through the station.&lt;p&gt;To me, the real purpose of 24 hour train service is make the city a &amp;quot;24 hour city&amp;quot; -- for economic purposes.  People working late shifts in office buildings (cleaners, maintenance) or factories (food, clothing, whatever) or restaurants&amp;#x2F;bars&amp;#x2F;nightlife can all use a very cheap, albeit slow, delayed, and low quality, metro 24 hours a day.  What is strange to me: Why not replace nice service with bus service?  It would be cheaper to run and they could spend more time maintaining the tracks below.&lt;p&gt;Last question: How many 24x7x365 metro systems exist in the world?  I struggle to think of five.</text></comment>
<story><title>Illustrations of Japan’s “unseen” workforce of trains that work at night (2019)</title><url>https://www.spoon-tamago.com/toei-project-unseen-maintenance-trains/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>deebosong</author><text>I gotta agree with this.&lt;p&gt;If I&amp;#x27;m waiting at 2am for a subway in NYC for 1 hr, versus waiting 6 hours for the first subway to kick back in if it&amp;#x27;s say, 12:01am in Japan or South Korea? Then IMHO it&amp;#x27;s better to just eat the cost, take a taxi, feel the burn of $100 to get home vs. say $2-4 for a 3am subway ride, and give the NYC MTA subway system time to work on repairs, renovations, additions, etc.&lt;p&gt;24 hour subway leaves no time at all to do any maintenance.&lt;p&gt;I really, really, really really really wish that NYC would just straight up plagiarize Japan or South Korea for their metro systems. Even their &amp;quot;next stop&amp;quot; displays are far superior than what NYC currently has.&lt;p&gt;One can dream...</text></item><item><author>decafninja</author><text>NYC is proud of its 24&amp;#x2F;7 subway service. Tell a NYer another city’s subways are better because of XYZ and they’ll shake their fist and say “but we have 24&amp;#x2F;7 service and they don’t!”&lt;p&gt;But I can’t feel part of the reason for the NYC subways many woes is because of the 24&amp;#x2F;7 service and the lack of maintenance and cleanup.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>asdff</author><text>NYC subway is basically a situation where the horse stable owners got their industry codified into the law. For example, there is a pension earning position on each train that is merely responsible for closing the doors, because this was needed with the technology of the time a century ago, but the transit workers union has ensured this good paying job will not be eliminated now that we have came up with ideas to solve the operator closing door issue (like a platform mirror). Now labor costs are twice as high for no good reason to run a train, since NYC subway needs to run them with two people while other transit agencies can run them with just one, or entirely autonomously even. Chances are there are a lot more positions like this, completely vestigial at this point, adding to overhead, but to be preserved seemingly until the end of time so that no one is told the bad news that their job no longer exists.</text></comment>