The MTA's Oldest Controls Kept Going During Today's Outage

It works! Photo: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Lines, delays, and cancellations piled up at La Guardia, Newark, and JFK. New York 1 struggled to get Pat Kiernan’s morning show on the air. The criminal courthouse in Manhattan couldn’t process arraignments. The DMV couldn’t do the one thing it’s supposed to do: push paperwork. Amid the biggest technological debacle in recent memory, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority came through. Its fleet of thousands of subway cars, commuter trains, and buses kept rolling — getting roughly 5 million New Yorkers to their jobs and appointments.

The sprawling transportation behemoth, often criticized for being too slow to adapt to the times, was the one thing that basically worked Friday morning. On the website formerly known as Twitter, users (okay, me) jokingly posted, “MTA this AM: Can’t crash computers you don’t have!” along with a picture of the Battlestar Galactica, the interplanetary aircraft carrier that survived a rebellion led by sentient robots because it was the one vessel that, lacking a computer network, couldn’t be hacked.

The only portions of the MTA’s massive infrastructure that were apparently affected were its data feeds allowing the public to see in real time the location of buses, commuter trains, and subways on the lettered lines. The displays for the numbered lines kept on trucking. Housing-policy expert Alex Armlovich joked that “the MTA’s deeply fragmented IT systems are so mutually incompatible that at least only half the system crashes at one time.”

It’s an astute observation that gets to a core truth about the MTA and how it works: The agency has been very slow to push itself into the future, and it’s gun-shy partly because no one wants to break the railroad. (The MTA has four railroads, really, depending on how you count.)

The system that allows locations to be displayed on the No. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 trains — the one that didn’t break — dates to the late 1990s and early aughts. It took 11 years and an estimated $230 million to develop and install. It’s a sophisticated and powerful network that linked the MTA’s ancient stop-light-style signals with the switches that control train movements and allow dispatchers in the central Rail Control Center to see where those trains are in real time and redirect them as needed. Known as ATS-A, it feeds the green-and-red countdown clocks above the platforms and cues up the automated train announcements on the PA. Officials repeatedly promised the system would eventually come to the lettered lines, but that never happened for a variety of reasons.

The countdown clocks that did break are much newer, and here we run into the iron fist of Andrew Cuomo. During his governorship, Cuomo demanded that the MTA get countdown clocks on the lettered lines after years of rider complaints about their absence. In a race to get it done, the MTA knocked together a system that was comparatively half-baked. It is not wired into the mechanical signals, nor does it control the switches or link up to the PA. Instead, each train running on the lettered lines was equipped with a Bluetooth beacon (yes, the same technology that powers your wireless mouse) that trips a receiver as the subway nears a station, which then triggers the LCD screen over the platform to update. The system uses the Bluetooth network to guesstimate where a train is on the route and the amount of time it will take it to arrive at its next stop.

Perhaps the biggest bright spot for the MTA during today’s meltdown was the performance of a third system. Computer-based train control, as it’s called, is the newest and most sophisticated way of running subway lines, with all the features described above that the numbered lines have as well as two additional and powerful ones: It knows the exact location of the trains in the system, removing the need for the old physical signals that break down, and it allows dispatchers to run trains on remote control. That combination means trains can move more quickly and closer together. But it requires extensive rewiring of the tunnels and replacement of switches, which is costly and labor-intensive. The L and the No. 7 have been entirely flipped over to the new system, and it’s no coincidence that both have on-time ratings of more than 90 percent and can run trains every two minutes during the rush hour. The underway summer G-train shutdown will add CBTC to another entire line. Officials are also in the midst of converting the Eighth Avenue subway, which carries the A and C. Kathy Hochul’s “indefinite pause” of congestion pricing has left plans to install it on the delay-prone Fulton Street line (A/C) and the Sixth Avenue line (B/D/F/M) in limbo.

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