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.
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- pageflight@piefed.socialEnglish1 day
How horrifying.
In many other cities (photo of London from Philly Mag), doors separate the platform from the tracks:
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.
- vorpuni@tarte.nuage-libre.frFrançais6 hours
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.
- 17 hours
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.
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- 18 hours
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.
- MunkyNutts@lemmy.worldEnglish1 day
new fear, right up there with getting sliced in half by an elevator
- 21 hours
an elevator
Nah, elevators are pretty safe; let me introduce you to the paternoster:
- ElectricWaterfall@lemmy.zipEnglish1 day
I always try to cross the threshold as quickly as possible in an elevator
- thesohoriots@lemmy.worldEnglish21 hours
You obviously haven’t seen those LiveLeak videos of people getting sucked into escalators
- 24 hours
I wonder if this was caused in part by assholes pushing onto the train before people could get off.
- corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish22 hours
I found in the 2000s that shouting MAKE A HOLE or STEP BACK in the face of some rusher sometimes helped…my stress level.
20 hoursIs this story confirmed? There seems to be many variations of it.
