If OP's subway carried 80k people per day (and I guess this could be conservative), and they are all delayed 15 minutes, the overall wasted time equals 1 lifetime per month.

I'm all for improving the technology, but in the meantime the math should absolutely be done, at least to ensure the temporary fix isn't worse than the problem.

There are feedback mechanisms here which shift where people live and work in response to changes in transportation times. Which means you can’t simply extrapolate like that over time.

Is it necessarily wasted, though? If the subway is tedious and unpleasant, then sure. But if I get a seat and I get 15 more minutes reading or staring out the window, then I’m probably not calling that a complete waste.

If you told New Yorkers they had the option to live 15 minutes longer, but that is added time on the NYC subway, I think most would turn it down.

Getting a seat on the NYC subway? Lol.

Quite doable these days; I'd say 90% of my recent rides (Q, B, A, C lines).

Was a total piece of cake in 2020, of course %)

Jokes aside time spend on the subway isn’t actually equivalent to time spend dead, we shouldn’t trade them one-for-one.

Also the “one extra death per century” measure seems to be derived via the method of rectal extrication, we don’t know how many deaths a schedule change might cause or prevent at all, and I bet the people working on the subway have, if anything, some idea with massive error bars.

I dunno the math seems basically impossible to do, I mean it would have to include things like “how to people, possibly irrationally, respond to deaths on the subway.”

You need to adjust for the QALY level of riding a train compared to the rest of people's lives. Train riding isn't much fun, but it's much better than being dead.

Your point probably still holds though.

When the train is often late, it simply pushes people to drive more, and depending on the specifics driving on the highway could very well be less safe. Ergo, it results in a net loss of lives. This is pointed out near the end of the article.

Many lifetimes of time are being wasted every day to save < 10 lives every century.

Lifetimes aren't composed of tiny time slices of many people.

Ethics discussions often involve this sort of idea, although it's usually in terms of life-years.

Life can't be reduced to (productive) time like this. At least I find this take very sad.

The time they spend on the metro isn't necessarily productive time. Many people would be enjoying leisure with that time.

Why do you find it sad? Everything has a cost. There are plenty of things that harm people every single day that we tolerate readily. For example, 91 lumberjacks died last year. There are way fewer employed lumberjacks than there are subway riders.

You don't necessarily need to make that comparison: If you make the trains too slow many people will drive instead which is radically more likely to kill them than the train.

So you can still find that there is a speed risk tradeoff the minimizes death which is not the same as minimizing the train risk.

Worse for NY's problems is that in that decision people are probably using something like the 95-percentile trip time as the criteria: It doesn't help them if the train is fast on average since they need to schedule for the worst-likely case. The fact that the crews are playing roulette with an kafkaesque speed limiter system and risking disciplinary action should they anger it essentially guarantees that the times will be both slow and highly inconsistent.

Indeed fully receptive to this argument.

> Life can't be reduced to (productive) time like this

Yes it can, and it's essential that we do it, because the alternative is a ruinous level of risk aversion.

You’re right, it’s even worse than that. When public transit is constantly decelerating, crawling, and hesitating it (correctly) communicates to the riders society’s judgment that they and their destinations don’t matter. That if your trip mattered you would have your own car. It sets a waiting room atmosphere. Public transit is a purgatory for those with nowhere else to be to while away the hours. And pretty soon that’s who your ridership is and what they’re doing there.

What death risk are you talking about? Seems like an interesting anecdote.

> I do not like this math

Many policy difficulties arise from unwillingness to trade-offs between "sacred" and non-"sacred" values. It's easy to say that just one life is worth an arbitrary amount of non-fatal inconvenience to an arbitrary number of people. It's the cheap, easy platitude anyone can summon in a meeting. It feels good to say. Simple. Strong. Righteous.

But the world doesn't work this way. Mere life does not, in fact, have infinite, overriding value. Infrastructure engineering is not a morality play. It's a complex set of trade-offs, some involving safety. In a big system like public transit, as crass as it might be to say explicitly, the optimal number of deaths is seldom zero. Safety and utility are not, as the moralists might insist, incommensurable. They in fact exist on the same plane, and to build things that are effective and efficient, we need to trade them off against each other. Failure to do so leads to cowardly paralysis.

In other words: yes, we absolutely should accept some statistical nonzero risk of injury to save time or money in the overwhelmingly common case, because these things matter.

Practically what happens is many people switch to driving and waste more lives

> the accident may not be once per century. And it is good for the bureaucracy to be risk adverse if it comes to my life

People stop taking the subway when it takes too long. That not only increases traffic, it also saps the system of funding.

> "Sure you save some lives but how many will be late!" I do not like this math. For example the accident may not be once per century. And it is good for the bureaucracy to be risk adverse if it comes to my life.

I hope you’re campaigning for a nationwide speed limit for automobiles of 20mph. It is good for the bureaucracy to be risk averse with loves after all.

> "Sure you save some lives but how many will be late!"

You make this trade off every day without admitting it in such stark terms.

Every time you drive, bike, or fly to a destination you’re choosing speed at an increased risk of injury or death.

Note that flying is safer than walking.

> And it is good for the bureaucracy to be risk adverse if it comes to my life.

Only moderately risk adverse.

Unless you'd approve of all roads having a 15-20mph speed limit? Because that's the natural conclusion of prioritizing accidents much higher than speed. And I'm not being hyperbolic or using a slippery slope argument. I'm saying that you have to admit a tradeoff to get any kind of sensible result.

How much delay is acceptable for a 0.001% point yearly mortality reduction on a busy rail line? Certainly not an hour. So there is some tradeof.

Notably the lives OP was talking about included his own. I think that matters quite a bit. Risking your own life for better speed is a different ballgame than deciding the risk other people run is fine.

Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan had a system designed for a 1 in 100 year accident. It happened after 8 years. https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/3016087/ PS, this is a great video about the typhoon that caused the disaster.

Disasters are Black Swan Events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory in Talebsbook he explains (ok it's a theory) that rare events happen commonly.

See also Terry Pratchet "one in a million chances happen nine times out of ten"

But hold on - do you really want to be significantly slower on your way to the hospital or doctor, for symptoms that you didn't think merited an ambulance; but actually do? This isn't an uncommon kind of trip, it's a pretty common one. Adding minutes to millions of trips adds deaths that are much harder to count up, but are no less real. Now add in kids left alone for an extra few minutes times millions, etc, etc. There are tradeoffs here; risk doesn't lie on just one side of the equation.