Bring me a train as fast as you can

[muckefuck]

On the radio this morning, I heard that among the CTA's proposals for increasing revenue was the possibility of selling naming rights to the el lines--like I'd take the "Motorola Line" to Howard and transfer there to the "Northwestern Memorial Hospital Line" or something. (Well, not me specifically; I'm the kind of stick-in-the-mud who will still say "Dan Ryan" for the South Side Red Line, but you get the idea.)

On the platform this morning, I waited for twenty minutes before I saw any sign of a northbound train. It was running express. The train behind it was also running express. I got on the train behind that, and we got stuck at Granville waiting for the "expresses" to get out of our way. That's when a novel idea for increasing CTA revenue occurred to me: Why don't you morons GET THE FUCKING TRAINS TO RUN ON TIME, huh?

Pablo at work suggested the delay might've been terror-related and recounted the two times this week he'd been hustled off the train--the second time out of the station entirely--while some security situation was going down. Great: Now every time some dipshit forgets a backpack on a car, all progress will be brought to a halt? They've had four years to adjust to new circumstances, they have got to get more efficient at security procedures than this if they expect to retain any riders five years from now.

But God never locks a door except that he breaks in a window (or something), right? Turns out the delay was just enough for me to arrive at the b-school at the start of break time for the constructin workers. I suddenly had a pressing need to cut past the crowd smoking out front and through the atrium where the others were relaxing. Two new additions to the bearem--one U. martimus and one U. americanus. But my favourite imagine from the trip in was seeing a man teaching a young boy to play patty-cake on an el platform. When the boy got confused, the man turned to the woman with him and they began demonstrating the proper moves while the boy watched attentively. Lovely!

Comments

[febrile.livejournal.com]

But my favourite imagine from the trip in was seeing a man teaching a young boy to play patty-cake on an el platform. When the boy got confused, the man turned to the woman with him and they began demonstrating the proper moves while the boy watched attentively. Lovely!

It's moments like these that make me absolutely love city living, despite its occasional troubles. I still carry a Mental Snapshot from fou years ago, watching a man feeding birds on the sidewalk on a cloudy day, just as one shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds and illuminated him like a spotlight.

(Okay, maybe it was just Mayor Daley's "Pigeon-Feeder" spotlight catching the man in the act, but it was still one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.)

[bunj.livejournal.com]

To be fair, it's not the CTA's fault that idiots have been calling in bomb threats.

[gopower.livejournal.com]

But maybe the CTA can be faulted for failing to adapt to the nature of the current threat. As a general rule, Islamacist terrorists do not seem to give warnings of their attacks (unlike more gentlemanly terrorists like the IRA who gave a little notice before blowing up women and children, except when they forgot).

It raises an interesting game theory question. Presuming that any bomber who sends a warning wants attention for whatever reason but not to kill people, then wouldn't a strict policy of never responding to bomb threats curtail actual attacks as well as phony stunts?

In practice, I doubt the CTA or any other body would have the political will to risk ignoring a threat that turns out to be real. And such a rule would not cover the 911 call from an alleged innocent bystander: "My God, I just overheard two Arab-looking guys laughing about the bomb they put on the Green Line."

Still, it would be good to have some system that didn't put us at the mercy of yahoos.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

Presuming that any bomber who sends a warning wants attention for whatever reason but not to kill people, then wouldn't a strict policy of never responding to bomb threats curtail actual attacks as well as phony stunts?

I think that there's a subset of real bombers whose basic attitude is "We warned them-- if anyone's hurt, it's their fault, not ours."

Though given the dearth of pay phones these days, I wonder how many yahoos could be tracked down via Caller ID. (Yahoos not being notable for their clever strategizing.) A few high profile prosecutions and prison time might discourager les autres.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I'm with gopower on this. NEW FLASH TO CTA: Yahoos will be calling in false bomb threats. What's your plan to keep them from screwing up everyone's commute while still covering your asses?

It's not like there aren't little adjustments they could make that would just be smart. Like if you're going to have two trains run express in a row, why not have them stop at alternating stations so no one has more than one train roar past them? Sure, some people eat more of a delay, but as many or more eat less.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

I don't know if that would work. I would think you'd get something like the bus-bunching effect, so that instead of two express trains you'd get two trains going barely faster than they would otherwise, with the others (less laden, after the front two have picked up a lot of the waiting crowds) pressing up behind them. Running some trains express is presumably supposed to spread the trains back out, but that probably means letting them go a lot faster uninterrupted than the ones behind them.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

It worked fine back in the days of A trains and B trains.

[gopower.livejournal.com]

Now that's dating yourself!

In fact, I would have thought it was before your time unless you visited Chicago as a child.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Just how young do you think I am? When I came up here to start college in 1988, there were still A and B trains. I remember reading about their abolition in the Reader. Someone (probably Kruesi) was pointing out that the change cut the amount of time people had to wait for a train almost by half. Whawt he didn't say, of course, is that it increased overall travel time between distant stations by probably a third or more.

[gopower.livejournal.com]

I remember them from my undergrad days in the 80s, but I thought the A/Bs were gone when I came back to Chicago a few years later.

It's an axiom of customer service that perception matters more than reality. Waiting for a train is perceived as more annoying than multiple stops even if the trip takes the same time (or even longer) solely because you're moving. Given Chicago's unheated and sometimes unsavory platforms, its all the more important to get on a train, ever a slower one, ASAP.

This is the same though behind the Downtown Wendy's restaurants which have people who go down the queue writing your orders on a slip of paper and giving it to you for you to hand to the cashier. The actual time savings is negligible, but the customer feels like he's accomplished something while waiting. Of course, McDonald's bypasses all that by being much faster.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

And, at the end of the day, who sells more hamburgers?

[gopower.livejournal.com]

Well, if the CTA wanted to radically cut its quality and put more trains on the tracks, that analogy might be more apt.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

I don't know how well it worked. (They stopped doing it, after all, though I don't know the details as to why.) But even if it worked under normal circumstances, that doesn't necessarily mean it's helpful for spreading out trains that have gotten concentrated in one place. Maybe it is. But the top speed of an alternating stops train is going to be less than that of an express. Wore, the entire line is limited to the speed of the train in front-- the one that, presumably after a long delay, is picking up the largest crowd and is having the hardest time getting its doors closed while urging people to wait for the next train.

(None of which means I don't feel the frustration of seeing one train or several pass me by when I've already been waiting too long. I just don't know if there's necessarily a good alternative.)