Also, countdown clocks on all the lines would be very beneficial for me for reasons beyond calming my impatience. I often times use the Myrtle-Wyckoff stop in Bushwick that has platforms for the L and the M. Whenever I’m headed to Lower Manhattan, I can take the M directly or the L with a transfer. Knowing which train will come first via countdown clocks would make my commute much more efficient.

LOL.

However, if the clocks were before you enter the system/turnstyle by the booth or at the entrance it would be quite useful.

But I do wonder about installing them at E143 — it’s the lowest ridership station on the IRT (or at least it was last time I checked the data). Is it that they’re doing this by line and that it does not make sense to skip stations?

“What a gigantic waste of money. What happened to looking at the tracks and seeing by the light on them that a train is coming? And if you don’t see any light, your train’s not coming yet. (Kinda like the old Indian Weather Rock) I mean, what does it matter!? You’ve already paid your fare. If the train’s late, it’s late. It comes when it comes. I just don’t see the point to this. Explain please! GRRRR!!!!!!!”

So having countdown clocks are bad because, well, they are just bad. Real New Yorkers don’t want to know when the next train is coming.

I really think this attitude is some form of mental illness.

I happen to agree that the countdown clocks should have been very low priority compared to the other things the MTA has to do, and that I’m not sure the MTA has sufficient control over scheduling the train to make them work. But they will be really nice in stations where you have the alternative of switching to a local train or another train theat gets to the same destination by a less direct route. And on principal, things are just bad when Americans can’t do even simple organizational things that people manage to do elsewhere.

Perhaps you only have one way to get where you’re going, but a lot of people have choices (local or express?), and PA/CIS will remove a lot of the guesswork. Have you ever let a local go by to wait for the express, only to have to wait 15 minutes for the express? You would have gotten where you were going sooner on the local, and if by some miracle you manage to fit onto the express, it’s certainly not going to be a comfortable or quick ride. Wouldn’t it have been nice if you had known from the start that the express was 15 minutes away? Not only would you have had a better ride, but the delayed express wouldn’t have been so overcrowded. And if you do find yourself confronted by an overcrowded train – wouldn’t it be helpful to know if there’s another train right behind it or if there’s going to be a long wait for the next one?

That sounds a lot more useful to me, as a rider, than gratuitous new cars. (New cars are only purchased to replace life-expired cars or to increase service.)

When I ride the L, the signs are usually pretty accurate – and when they’re not, they’re usually obviously wrong (next train in 92 minutes?). But the technology behind PA/CIS on the L is different. ATS on the L is based on CBTC. The L still isn’t running in full-CBTC mode; I don’t know how well PA/CIS takes non-CBTC trains into account. That may explain some of the problems you’ve heard about on the L.

The bus countdown clocks are not based on bus schedules. I’m not sure why you think they are. They’re based on actual bus locations. (Maybe the signs switch into a schedule-based fallback mode if the GPS goes down?)

And countdown clocks are way better than countup clocks, such as the ones they have in Moscow. I don’t want to know how much time has elapsed since the last train came through – I need to know how much time remains until the next train arrives.