Lauren Hough, an adviser to the "Subway Sleuths" program, said that when she asked how to get anywhere in the city, some of the participants could tell her not just which train to take, but the exact number of stair steps in each of the stations.
The potential exists for everything from crashing subway coordination programs or creating massive gridlock by shutting down traffic lights to knocking out a power grid or causing damage to nuclear reactor.
He was sitting in a corner of the train, and above his head was an advertisement for a subway homeless outreach program, which included a picture of a homeless man who looked a lot like him.
In regards to subway stations, a program will be launched to clean the neediest structures, fix elevators faster, and increase the frequency of heavy duty cleaning from every six weeks to every four.
The pitch for the online course sounds like a late-night television ad, or maybe a subway poster: "Learn programming in seven weeks starting Feb. 20.
The museum created a "Subway Sleuths" after-school program for 9- and 10-year-olds with autism that focuses on the history of New York City trains but seeks to make the children more at ease socially.
In the nineteen-eighties, engineers in Sendai, Japan, incorporated fuzzy logic into the design of the city's new subway, using it to program the system's famously smooth starts and stops.
Cynthia Atkins, a young poet employed by the Poetry Society of America to help select the works displayed on the subway, hopes that the program may "change the reality down there," and explains, "We want poetry to be part of daily life, something that has to be accepted and dealt with.
Maybe, but maybe we would grow ridership faster and make more Angelenos happy transit riders if we built a less fanciful system faster and for less money than the subway extension and other programs are estimated to cost.
Transit officials said they would evaluate the fans and air cooling units at summer's end with the potential of expanding the program to other subway stations.
