New Red and Orange Line Cars

[DominusNovus]

I think it is fair for people to be skeptical of the Chinese government. I think it is also fair for legislators to not be experts on such technical matters - if they were experts, they’d be wasted as legislators.

 

[CSTH]

True story - I has a girlfriend once who had a traumatic brain injury and every now and then would start to spin off into a hypo-schizophrenic fugue and claim loudly and incessantly that the CIA was listening to her thoughts and using secret tape recorders to record all of our conversations.

It was a long time ago, she has gotten great help from a lot of great people and she's doing better now.

The moral of the story is, the CIA was not actually listening to her thoughts and tape recording all of our conversations.

 

[boston85]

if they did bug a car and somehow managed to successfully transmit data out of it what would they get, a bunch of screeching and a mixture of gossip from everyday americans?

I would be less concerned with hiding transmitters and listening to conversations than inserting to code that messes with sensors and stops the cars from running. I do not know the level of extent of supply chain risk mngt the MBTA uses nor if its a worthwhile exploit, but I would say its a non zero risk with a potentially high impact.

 

[fattony]

I would be less concerned with hiding transmitters and listening to conversations than inserting to code that messes with sensors and stops the cars from running. I do not know the level of extent of supply chain risk mngt the MBTA uses nor if its a worthwhile exploit, but I would say its a non zero risk with a potentially high impact.

To what end? What geopolitical advantage is there to gain by disrupting the morning commute in Boston?

That was a rhetorical question, please please please don't try to answer it.

 

[JeffDowntown]

To what end? What geopolitical advantage is there to gain by disrupting the morning commute in Boston?

That was a rhetorical question, please please please don't try to answer it.

We hardly need the Chinese to disrupt the morning commute in Boston.

We have the MBTA!

 

[CSTH]

We hardly need the Chinese to disrupt the morning commute in Boston.

 

[KentXie]

I mean if the trains are bugged, the smart thing to do is to feed it misinformation. They need to start looking at the positives.

 

[boston85]

To what end? What geopolitical advantage is there to gain by disrupting the morning commute in Boston?

That was a rhetorical question, please please please don't try to answer it.

While rhetorical, your pompousness deserves a reply. I did not say it was likely, but if the Chinese were to do something, it would be the possibility to remotely shutoff components of your enemy's transportation network in time of war would have some value.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

While rhetorical, your pompousness deserves a reply. I did not say it was likely, but if the Chinese were to do something, it would be the possibility to remotely shutoff components of your enemy's transportation network in time of war would have some value.

Which...again, is stupidly easier and more lucrative to do with the commodity Lenovo server rack in the central ops building that handles dispatching and the commodity routers powering the walkie-talkie band for employees than it is trying to rig the embedded system on the train that has schematics documented to the nines and umpteen layers of fault tolerance. You could probably create a mildly chaos-inducing power outage like last week's by going for the commodities on a high-value backoffice target. But how many individual train cars could you realistically hope to knock offline at one time given the odds that a killswitch command could ever be received on every single train at the same time? Probably not much more than the average number of dead Red Line trains actively fucking up this current 4:00pm hour of today's rush.


This James Bond stuff was never an accurate picture of espionage...not even in the Cold War. *Soft* targets and ease of infiltration are the name of the game, not niches for proof-of-concept sake. The Soviets liked hacking the phone network. Putin's Russia likes to test the margins of website security. If we've got a reason to worry about the Chinese, it's that cell phone in your pocket and a whole lot of other cheap commodity electronics...not premium design-build engineering product.

 

[Jahvon09]

That's not fair. Ease up. He's trying.

Thanks. They are such morons & dumb idiots, & don't care who they hurt or try to embarrass!!

They want to get mad at anyone, then they need to visit the link & speak to the people there!!! I'm only the messenger!!!

 

[HelloBostonHi]

Just saw a few new pictures of the trains testing and I could be crazy but it looks like they have significantly shrunk the roll signs... Or maybe I'm losing it? Old Roll sign design: https://cdn10.bostonmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/05/orangeline5fb.jpg

New:

Also the interior LCD displays look way larger than I recall them being in the mockup

vs the ones I remember

Looking closer it looks like they switched the OL LCD to match the RL mockup LCD...

 

[sm89]

Not a fan of the cyan and yellow dots and the red arrow.

It does look like the shrunk them down horizontally, but imo vertically was the issue. The housing doesn't need to be 3x the size of the text, does it? The displays on buses seem to work fine (though they're less heavy duty I imagine).

 

[cadetcarl]

That UI looks totally unprofessional.

 

[Arenacale]

It's going to drive me nuts that the typeface isn't actually Helvetica like the T's physical signage. I'm the 1/10th of 1% that cares, but it would look better if it was consistent with the rest of the system.

 

[HelloBostonHi]

It's going to drive me nuts that the typeface isn't actually Helvetica like the T's physical signage. I'm the 1/10th of 1% that cares, but it would look better if it was consistent with the rest of the system.

I'm still hopeful to see a completely different UI on the final ones, those pics of the screens were from the mockups and I'm hoping that CRCC just shipped a generic UI with Boston station names to look acceptable for the display. What do the Type 9 Green Line displays look like? I would be disappointed if they didn't try to match the UIs across them for a more consistent user experience

 

[Equilibria]

That UI looks totally unprofessional.

Fortunately, it can be changed with minimal effort.

 

[Lrfox]

Fortunately, it can be changed with minimal effort.

Agreed. And are we certain that what was in the mockup was the final product? I'd imagine the UI/Typeface is pretty far down the list of things that get finalized on a project like this.

 

[djimpact1]

Thank you for the picture HelloBostonHi. Aside from the destination sign shrinking horizontally (which I'm not sure how I feel about), I'm glad they at least got the correct "T" logo on the car you spotted (and didn't keep that obscenely incorrect version the mock-up & test car has been showing.

 

[jass]

I still dont understand why the line with one destination needs roll signs

 

[HelloBostonHi]

I still dont understand why the line with one destination needs roll signs

Two main reasons:

1. No harm in preparing for the future. By the time these Orange line cars are retired history says it's entirely possible we will have different terminal stations or branches. The orange line our current cars were designed for looks nothing like the OL of today.

2. More information is better, always. Those of use who care and use the system daily it won't necessarily benefit but if an unfamiliar user or tourist comes down to an island platform say at Mass Ave and sees two trains sitting there, rollsigns are a really quick and easy way to reassure yourself that you're getting on the right train. Way way way too often I still see people get on trains in the wrong direction in this town.

It's also useful for noting diversions, like this weekend I noticed Red Line trains were signposted to Harvard not Alewife. Now that will confuse the hell out of some people who are expecting the terminal station from the map but shows people that the train terminates at Harvard currently. See: all the tweets from idiots who sat on the trains as they terminated and started back up to Oak Grove from back bay during the OL SW corridor bus weekends last year.

Lastly if the T ever decides to use the express track up north for the OL then rollsigns can indicate that.

tldr; more information is better, always assume customers are pretty stupid and not looking where they are going and sign as many things as clearly as possible, it makes for a much better customer experience.