Underground Wish Lists: MTA Ponders Subway ‘Genius’ Ideas

NEW YORK — Imagine subway trains that arrive seamlessly one after another, never playing those dreaded words over the loudspeaker: “train traffic ahead.”

Imagine major subway repairs taking months, not years, tackled by crews of robots who work around the clock.

Imagine a subway train so roomy that there is little risk of becoming overly familiar with a complete stranger.

For beleaguered riders of New York City’s dismal subway, such scenarios might seem as far-fetched as a week of commutes without a single delay. But the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, eager to show that it is something more than a lumbering, unresponsive bureaucracy, believes otherwise. Those notions were some of the winning entries in the “genius challenge,” a competition the agency sponsored to spur ideas about what can be done relatively quickly to improve the system.

The MTA says it is committed to making the competition more than just a public-relations campaign.

“The substance that was brought to bear here is one that we will absolutely follow up on,” said Joseph J. Lhota, chairman of the MTA, adding that the agency received 438 submissions from 23 countries. “They are great ideas, all of which have the potential to make the subway system operate more effectively and efficiently.”

To underscore the agency’s resolve, each winning entry came with concrete next steps and a process by which it can be tested and implemented on its way to possibly becoming a reality.

On their own, none of the eight winning entries in three categories are a magic solution to a system weighed down by mismanagement and neglect, whose crumbling infrastructure has made it unreliable and infuriating for the more than than 5 million riders who use it every day. But taken together, the ideas represent a concerted effort to address fundamental problems by improving the subway’s communication systems, designing a better train car and figuring out high-tech replacements for an outdated signaling system, the backbone of the system and the root of many delays.

In the area of subway car innovation, there were three winners. Each proposed “radically new approaches” to addressing problems, such as loading large crushes of passengers or mechanical breakdowns, according to an MTA statement, while offering strategies that would result in new cars arriving faster and at a lower cost.

Among the winners sharing the $1 million prize were veteran transit companies like CSiT, which proposed software that could quickly diagnose and report train troubles, and CRRC, a giant train car manufacturer that pledged to invest $50 million to develop a new lightweight car.

One subway car idea came from an amateur transit enthusiast — Craig Avedisian, a lawyer from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, who proposed longer trains and a new passenger-loading procedure. Essentially, longer trains would mean not every car would open at every station, so passengers would have to be more attentive.

“It feels very gratifying to just be a part of the story of the subway,” Avedisian said Friday at a ceremony announcing the winners at MTA headquarters in lower Manhattan. “It’s got such a long, storied history, even if I am just a footnote in that. And hopefully it ends up more than that; hopefully this will actually get implemented.”

By his own accounting, Avedisian’s plan could cost more than $17 billion. The MTA said the goal of the contest was not to put exact plans into practice, but to take principles that could guide future developments.

In the signals category there were four winners dividing a $1 million pot. Two, Ansaldo STS and Thales Group, both separately submitted a proposal for a system that would use onboard sensors and cameras to position trains as a way to reduce delays. Two other winners, Metrom Rail and Robert James, a transportation engineer, each pitched a technology called ultra-wideband wireless that can precisely locate trains, allowing more to be sent down the tracks safely. The MTA has been conducting ultra-wideband testing to determine its feasibility.

Metrom’s idea calls for installing thousands of nodes along the tunnel walls that can detect the speed a train is going, and where it is to within a few millimeters. “Given the size and scope and age of the system, it becomes more difficult to implement innovation and change,” said Rick Carlson Jr., Metrom’s director of business development. The MTA has made overhauling its signals, some of which date back to before World War II, at the forefront of its agenda — a project that some estimates say could take five decades. “If anyone says 50 years, we can do it at the very least in 25, and probably within five to 10,” Carlson said.

Bechtel Innovation won the communications category for proposing a robotic system that can install control and communication infrastructure inside subway tunnels by itself. Bechtel plans to use its $500,000 to create a working group within the MTA to find ways to develop the robotic system.

Andy Byford, president of New York City Transit, said that when he first heard of the competition he was concerned it might be a waste of time. “I worried that we would have to evaluate a whole bunch of things that would never see the light of day,” he said. That changed once he saw the winning ideas, he said. Now Byford is convening eight teams within the agency to tackle each idea. Among Byford’s first moves was setting aside an area of train track for more ultra-wideband testing.

But even if the eight ideas are never implemented, they have already made an impact, Lhota said. “What the genius program did is light the competitive juices within everybody at the MTA to raise their game, to do better,” he said, “to come up with ideas they may have kept to themselves.”