A man was dragged to death by a New York City subway train when a bag he was carrying got stuck in the door during the Monday evening rush hour commute, according to police.
Yaw Boahene, 57, had been exiting the train at a Brooklyn subway station around 6 p.m. when his bag, which police described as a shopping bag, snagged in the closing train doors. The Brooklyn resident was pulled onto the tracks and run over by the train as it left the station, police said in a statement.
How horrifying.
In many other cities (photo of London from Philly Mag), doors separate the platform from the tracks:
That’s only on a very few locations. Most of the tube doesn’t have them.
Yeah I’ve always wondered why New York doesn’t do that
It doesn’t need something like this to prevent these kinds of accidents, light gates on the train doors (which are standard in most subways nowadays) would have prevented this from happening. But even without, let’s not forget, this is a freak accident.
As to those platform doors, they’re actually not that common, and for good reason:
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It’s an additional cost, making public transit that much more expensive.
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It adds another layer of complexity and mechanics that can stop working and cause a disruption, meaning more delays.
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It requires very precise stopping, making (very fine grained) automated train operation a necessity and adding another layer of problems when the automated systems fail.
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It seriously reduces flexibility, since future railcars either have to have the exact same door configuration, or the doors have to be rebuilt. If the door configuration changes, everything has to be done in a “big bang”, since you can’t have multiple door layouts on the system at the same time, which has a whole series of knock-on effects.
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In emergencies it makes evacuations more difficult.
…and I’ve probably missed a few points, as well.
Platform doors in Paris also exist with manually drivable trains. None of your points are actually good reasons against platform doors in busy stations: people falling on the tracks cost a lot of money and the doors almost completely eliminate the problem.
The vast majority of the network has at least GoA 2, which is what’s needed for platform doors to work in any serious way.
Yes, line 13 being the least advanced has odometers accurate within 20 mm or so, and balises for precise positioning in stations. I wouldn’t call it automation: the train can still be manually controlled and stopped within a few cm of the exact spot where doors are perfectly aligned.
Excellent points, thank you for explaining
They’re not excellent points, they overstate tradeoffs into a reason not to use platform doors.
they’re actually not that common, and for good reason:
That’s just straight up misleading. Most metro infrastructure was built decades before platform doors became practical. Looking at modern systems, it’s a completely different story. The other comment that just says “Singapore” is a great example, they retrofitted platform doors on all their stations.
Now the excellent points:
It’s an additional cost, making public transit that much more expensive.
Sure, it’s an added cost. It also reduces other costs, like the cost of injuries and fatalities, debris related shutdown, cleaning, and there’s also energy benefits when you’re huge stations are air conditioned. But even if they didn’t actually save more than they cost, even if they saved nothing, relative to the whole system cost they wouldn’t make transit “much more expensive”.
All the other points are similarly overstated or incorrect, look into them if you care. Especially the safety one, these barriers are designed with safety standards and they can be pushed from train side with small force, in an emergency even if the train doesn’t align with the gate, you can push the whole barrier down with ease.
Our modern rail system doesn’t shut down when some jackass throws something on the tracks, because they can’t. If a gate malfunctions they rope it off and it takes an extra minute on a busy day to unload/load from one less gate. We have a clean station/tracks, AC in the station, and it’s certainly cheaper than NY subway.
Most metro infrastructure was built decades before platform doors became practical.
The first platform doors appeared in the 80s, that’s almost half a century ago. Also, there are enough examples where platform doors were retrofitted to existing subway lines. Maybe don’t accuse me of being misleading when you’re writing stuff like that.
Oh, and I never said it makes public transport much more expensive, I wrote it makes it that much more expensive. Two very different statements. Funny you mix them up after accusing me of misleading people. But accusations that are actually admissions, I guess. Never mind that you’re simply looking at the costs of the does themselves, and not the costs of the inflexibility you being into your system by installing these, among others.
Especially the safety one, these barriers are designed with safety standards and they can be pushed from train side with small force
It’s still a barrier, which is exactly the opposite of what you want in an emergency. And it can’t be that easy to push in since if it were, the air pressure from any train going through the station would pop them right off. But even assuming it is that easy to push off, it’s still an extra obstacle in the way, which not only risks slowing things down but also causing a panic.
Our modern rail system doesn’t shut down when some jackass throws something on the tracks
Someone throwing something on the tracks isn’t all too big of an issue though. It’s something that doesn’t happen all too often and is solved fairly quickly. A fairly common cause for delays? Problems with doors. Adding platform doors is roughly doubling the possibility of door problems at every stop.
And interesting you mention the commenter that commented Singapore. Because that person linked to a list of incidents there. And I don’t know if the list is filtered or anything, but it is pretty interesting that over half the incidents listed were either exacerbated or caused by platform doors, including a case where someone got stuck between the train doors and the platform doors and miraculously didn’t get killed when the train left the station.
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Less for accidents, more for suicide/pushing.
Okay…
I mean that’s factually incorrect, but what’s your point?
You enjoy reading stories and watching videos of people being pushed onto the NY subway? It prevents both, and modern countries use them. The US should be investing in modernization instead of genocides.
new fear, right up there with getting sliced in half by an elevator
an elevator
Nah, elevators are pretty safe; let me introduce you to the paternoster:
I always try to cross the threshold as quickly as possible in an elevator
Threshold! Take us to the threshold!
You obviously haven’t seen those LiveLeak videos of people getting sucked into escalators
I wonder if this was caused in part by assholes pushing onto the train before people could get off.
I found in the 2000s that shouting MAKE A HOLE or STEP BACK in the face of some rusher sometimes helped…my stress level.
Is this story confirmed? There seems to be many variations of it.