As a long term NYC resident, I have read countless articles on ideas tweaking subway services, but always found them hard to follow without visual aid. So over the long weekend I decided to build one. It has all the basic features: trains would spawn at their origin, stop at stations, and slow down if it gets too close to another. You can also design custom routes by piecing tracks together.
Have fun, and let me know what you think!
On high capacity systems, train dwell time becomes the limiting factor on passenger capacity. 30 seconds is generally the minimum possible dwell time a system can manage, 20 seconds might be possible during much lower demand periods. But you’re unlikely to ever achieve better than that.
The London Victoria Line, which runs with 90 second headways at peak, achieves at best 24 second dwell times in central section, but 30-40 seconds is more realistic for most stations.
Don’t forget, dwell time includes more than just passengers getting off and on. It has to include time to open the doors, close the doors (including a 2-3 second visual and audible warning!), perform needed safety checks, and eventually pull away. Those operational components the sandwich the core “people getting on and off” bit of station stops add up to a non-trivial number of seconds.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Dwell-Time-and-Passenger...
As a minor note, the NYC subway uses a system of fix automatic blocks, not a moving block system, which is what your simulation appears to use. Moving block systems are dramatically more efficient than fixed block systems. But I have no idea how you would get hold of accurate block locations for the NYC subway.
Lines with CBTC use moving blocks. That’s the L, 7, and parts of the E, F, M, and R.
You don’t need a warning for opening the doors. The warning for closing the doors will overlap with people boarding.
That being said 10s is too low as a default but it can easily be changed to a more reasonable 30s or more.
Seems like the Swiss railway didn't get your message because there is acoustic warning on open nd on close.
I'm 100% showing this to them today just for fun. They'll get a kick out of it.
Is any of your/their work published?
For example: Selected: Black fill Normal operation: Color fill with 100% opacity Slowing down: 70% opacity Stopped: striped fill, 50% opacity At station: pulsing opacity
Sometimes when I Edit Routes and click an "<- Add" button I get the console error "Uncaught Error: coordinates must be an array of two or more positions" and the page blanks out.
-->-->-- --<--<--
I'll add some logic to prevent such options from showing up.
All input data and scripts are in src/data. Run the two Overpass queries, replacing New York with a city of your choice, and you will get JSON data on the infrastructure, as well as services. Replace the two existing JSON files, run the two transformation scripts, and you are done.
A slider to do a bit of time-travelling if possible would be also a nice to have
Edit: Actually Clifton is in NY, and playing with Google maps there's ZERO public transport from Staten Island to NJ, except by going through Manhattan!
So my idea wouldn't help anyway, unless they extended that subway all the way over the Goethals Bridge.
> ZERO public transport from Staten Island to NJ
Forest Ave/Goethals Rd North to Bayway Ave at Mckinley St.
Edit: This could be a fun game - find the two spots with the greatest ratio of driving vs public transport. I think those two are pretty good candidates.
Distance: 2.5 mile.
Drive 9AM: 5-9 minutes, 11PM: 4-6 minutes.
Public transport 9AM: 1:52, 11PM: 3:34.
Ratio (using the average drive time) 9AM: 16, 11PM: 42.8.
According to Google Maps it's not in this case - I'm getting a walking time of 14:37 (!), where the "walk" includes a ferry from Weehawken to Manhattan and the Staten Island Ferry. However Google Maps doesn't seem to know you can walk across the Goethals bridge.