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  • Essay / The Development of the New York Subway Communication System

    The New York Subway, one of the busiest subways in the world, has always faced serious obstacles when it came to communicating information between underground and aerial police personnel. Transportation Police officers stationed on the surface were unable to communicate regularly with those working on the subway. Additionally, the transport police were unable to communicate with other services, organizations and sometimes each other in an emergency. Incompatibility between communication systems was the main reason for this recurring problem which left the illegal transport police stranded in terms of exchanging information with the outside world. Say no to plagiarism. Get a Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay An initial plan conceived by the New York Police Department in the 1990s that came into action when two companies were jointly assigned the task of developing a new communication system. for the judicial authority which was operational both above and below ground, almost a decade later. The project was to be completed by 2004 with a budget of $115 million. Part of the problem could have been solved by sharing the same frequencies, since overhead and underground personnel used the frequency range to communicate. The bulk of the problem still lay in transmitting signals underground that required antennas, most of which were faulty or unusable. Radio signals transmitted below ground level had to pass through a series of mazes and grates, so most of the signal deteriorated with distance. The entrepreneurs believed that amplifying the signals would allow them to easily overcome these obstacles, but these actions raised several questions from the experts at the very beginning. After 7 years, $140 million and several attempts later, law enforcement was left with a system full of interference. The New York Police Department has made it clear that it will not use a system saturated with interference in its area of ​​operation. The implementation of the new system was suspended due to these problems and the elimination of these problems required an inflated budget of $210 million. Certain reasons contributed to the failure of the project. The contractors did not take into account the expert's opinion on the interference problem. The reason behind this substantial failure was the way the project managers moved forward even after the experts highlighted the flaws in the project. Rather than solving the problem and developing a new plan, they jumped into the project with little knowledge. Engineers at the Metropolitan Transport Authority (MTA) were skeptical about using analog technology when the much more reliable digital technology was at hand. The brute force of the amplifiers could not remove all the obstacles inside the subway. This is one of the reasons why interference still prevailed within the system. Moreover, after the incidents of September 11, the authorities were preoccupied and could not avoid such a serious lapse in the department. Political pressure pushed project managers and contractors toward project completion. However, as things got worse and the project began to drag on, police officers began using cell phones as a mode of communication. As Mark Bienstock, manager of New York City's transit program, said, "What's in place today is functional." After all these.