• NJ Transit seeks to add wi-fi to trains, stations · New Jersey Transit wants to bring wi-fi to its trains and stations. As The Record reported yesterday, the commuter rail has issued a request for proposals from providers of wireless broadband service to outfit its fleet and bring Internet access to the commuting masses. The agency is hosting a pre-proposal conference next week in Newark, and officials are excited about the potential to bring better amenities to its customers. New Jersey Transit said the price of wi-fi access — whether it would be free or come with a cost — would be determined by the RFPs. Wi-fi, said executive director James Weinstein would “[enable] those who wish to remain connected and productive during their commute to do so continuously.” He added, “We hope to receive responses from qualified wireless service providers to advance our plan to bring the Internet aboard NJ Transit trains in the near future.”

    With this announcement, New Jersey Transit joins the efforts of the region’s other commuter rail services to offer wi-fi on board trains and in stations. Metro-North and the LIRR are engaged in a similar process, and New York City Transit recently announced its intention to kickstart its underground wi-fi program. To compete in a global economy, these technological advances are badly needed indeed. · (2)

These often-dirty subway benches could be going the way of the dodo. (Photo by flickr user nicolasnova)

New York City Transit’s wooden benches are an iconic part of the subway experience. Found in most underground stations, these benches are designed with raised arm rests to discourage people from living on them, but the wood can grow disgusting as gum, food, beverages and various unknown substances are rubbed into the grain, leaving them sticky and grimy. Some have been reported to carry bed bugs.

According to a report in today’s amNew York, though, these wooden benches’ days might be numbered. Transit, says Heather Haddon, is again considering stainless steel benches. In a piece that explores the various competing architectural and visual styles of a subway system pieced together over 100 years and presented to riders with a 21st Century sensibility, Haddon drops in a note in the end about the future of the benchs:

NYC Transit officials are weighing whether to scrap the standard wood bench and opt for the system’s first stainless steel seats for the Second Avenue Subway and No. 7 extension stations. Designers are having a vigorous debate between the two models, with some viewing the steel as cold, while others blasting the wood as unhygienic, [Transit architect Judith ] Kunoff said.

In coming months, officials will install prototypes of the two competing benches at an undisclosed station to get the public’s feedback, she said. It’s not the first time that transit has wxperimented with seats — funky orange benches were installed at the Jamaica-Van Wyck station in Queens, and the system also experimented with plastic, metal and stone in the 1960s.

It’s certainly undeniable that stainless steel is cold and that wood is unhygienic, but in the debate between the two, I’d take cold ten times out of ten. As I noted earlier this year, benches are an integral part of the subway experience. While at peak hours, finding a platform seat is rare, at off-peak hours when waits are longest, benches can provide welcome relief for the weary who don’t want to stand impatiently at the platform’s edge.

New York’s wooden benches — bed bugs, gum stains, stickiness and all — are a rarity among the underground systems. While New York has experimented with non-wooden benches, around the world, materials differ. The Paris Metro has molded plastic; the DC Metro sports some unforgiving concrete; the London Underground has something metallic. The grime factor is significantly less elsewhere.

So Transit will tantalize us with a pilot at some undisclosed station so bench enthusiasts don’t skew their sample. If anyone spots this pilot in the next few months, you know how to reach me. In the meantime, keep raisin’ a skeptical eyebrow at those wooden seats. Who knows what lurks within?

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The MTA’s raised ventilation grates could be put to the test tomorrow.

As Hurricane Earl passes by the New York area to the east, it’s going to rain, it’s going to be windy, and the city’s public transit grid is going to be put to the test. A little over three years ago, our subway system suffered a devastating outage amidst a torrential storm. Twenty of the 22 subway lines were with abbreviated or no service, and water rushed in through ventilation grates as the MTA’s communications network failed. How the system holds up this weekend may very well help us see how prepared the city is were a big storm to strike.

If the worst of the storm for the city is rain and some ocean swells, the transit network should be fine, but the MTA is warning customers to be prepared. Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road can help serve as evacuation routes as long as the tracks remain clear, but the MTA is at Earl’s whim. As the authority said, “The potential for service disruptions caused by flooding during periods of sustained heavy rains does exist.”

As transit workers are currently clearing drains of loose debris, the new ventilation grates that are supposed to prevent excess run-off water from flooding the subway tunnels will be put to the test. The ones above on flood-prone Queens Boulevard have won architectural praise. Now, they’ll have to garner recognition for their practicality as well.

Despite these imminent concerns of the havoc wind and rain may wreck on New York City on Friday, the issue of a big hurricane runs deeper, and a huge storm could take out the subways. New Yorkers don’t like to admit that New York City is a hurricane danger zone. Thousands of residents live close enough to the city’s shores to be in the path of potentially destructive storm surges, and while we tend to think that hurricanes happen somewhere else, a 1938 storm took out numerous houses on Long Island and resulted in the deaths of 600 New Yorkers. It very well could happen again.

Over the years, as the area’s weather patterns have changed, various analysts have commented on the city’s storm preparedness, and the general consensus is that we’re not prepared. Five years ago, Streetsblog founder Aaron Naparstek penned an extensive piece for the New York Press on the Big One. It is, he says, all too likely that a storm will hit New York, and as the city’s emergency personnel note, few New Yorkers will take the need to evacuate seriously. We are New Yorkers; we are impervious.

Naparstek’s piece concerns the impact hurricanes would have on the infrastructure above ground, but what of the subways? He offers a tantalizing glimpse of the way tunnels would fill with water:

For a taste of what will happen to the city’s infrastructure, we can look at the damage wrought by the great nor’easters of the early 1990s. During those storms, the L train had to be backed out as the 14th Street tunnel began filling with water, and the FDR highway was so badly inundated that 50 motorists had to be rescued by dive teams. In the event of a direct hit by a category-3 hurricane, surge maps show that the Holland and Battery Tunnels will be completely filled with sea water, with many subway and railroad tunnels severely flooded as well. The runways of LaGuardia and JFK airports will get flooded by 18.1 and 31.2 feet of water, respectively.

Erik Holm writing in The Wall Street Journal tackles the same subject and believes the subways would sustain lasting damage in the event of a storm surge or direct hurricane hit. If Lower Manhattan, a major subway hub, is flooded in a storm surge, the resultant damage could lead to a crippled subway system as the salt from the ocean water works its corrosive effects on switches and other electronic subway equipment.

Every now and then, huge storms have reminded us that water will spill over, into and around anything in its way. The subways are no exception, and although models show Earl veering away from New York on its trip up to Maine, we can’t always expect to be so lucky for much longer.

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  • A case study in privatized transit: the Hamptons Jitney · As the Taxi & Limousine Commission prepares to launch its dollar-van program along now-defunct bus routes, transit advocates are watching to see how and if these routes become profitable. The MTA says many of their eliminated routes were cost-prohibitive to run, but tossing these services to private operators allows for more flexibility. Private operators can run fewer buses and aren’t beholden to the demands of a public-benefit corporation as the MTA is. Whether these routes can be run at cost or with a profit remains to be seen.

    Today in the Wall Street Journal, Jen Weiczner profiles the Hampton Jitney, one of New York’s longest running and most successful private transportation companies. The Jitney, which offers luxury trips to the Hamptons over the summer and chartered rides in the winter, makes $20 million a year and, as Weiczner reports, has cornered the market on mass transit to the Hamptons. “For 36 years, the company has maintained a near monopoly on express transportation to the Hamptons,” she writes, “drawing passengers with newspapers, snacks and beverages – all handed out, airplane-style, by uniformed attendants. And every so often, passengers get goodie bags with products that advertisers pay the Jitney to distribute like Tory Burch gift cards and Vera Bradley accessories.”

    Of course, the Hamptons Jitney is in a bit of a unique situation. It caters to a very wealthy clientele that expects upper-class service, and it covers distances greater than any New York City bus route would. Still, the Jitney shows that public transportation can be, in limited ways, a profitable undertaking. I don’t expect the dollar vans to fair quite as well, but if run properly, they should be adequate replacements for the lost bus service. · (3)

As above-ground complaints about the Second Ave. Subway are making headlines, underneath the avenue, progress on the tunnel is continuing apace. When we last checked in on Adi, the TBM drilling out the subway tubes, it had reached only 90th St. and was drilling an average of just 14 feet a day. In August, however, the MTA was able to pick up the pace.

Late last week, DNA Info reported that the TBM had drilled through 1760 feet of rock in August and had nearly reached the 2000-foot mark. Today, the MTA confirmed that the machine has reached 1928 feet. Meanwhile, Ben Heckscher at The Launch Box notes that the TBM is moving faster than expected. Last week on one day, for instance, the TBM mined 92.74 feet, and yesterday, the machine dug out 74 feet, ell above estimates of 50-60 feet per day. Adi is now somewhere underneath 84th St., approximately a mile away from its ultimate goal of 65th St.

In other Second Ave. Subway TBM news, Wired magazine went underground this week with a slideshow feature on the tortured 75-year history of the new subway line and the technology behind the tunnel boring machine. Since the photographer took his shots when the media took a trip in the launch box, the photos are similar to the ones I presented in May, but with one amusing difference: I accidentally appear in one of Wired’s photos.

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Building a new subway line in age with stringent requirements about station and tunnel security and accessibility is a trying affair. No matter how involved the affected community is with the project, someone is bound to find something they don’t like. For the MTA along Second Ave., they’ve faced their fair share of complaints as Upper East Siders have bemoaned entrances at 96th St. and 72nd St. as well as ventilation structures up and down the avenue. Yet again, the auxiliary structures are coming under fire.

While some residents have sued the MTA over updated designs to these structures, others believe the MTA has missed an opportunity to beautify and develop the above-ground area on top of the Second Ave. Subway. Had the Authority better designed the auxiliary structure, the Upper East Side could have seen more affordable housing and nicer buildings, says Richard Bass, a lawyer representing one Second Ave. co-op in discussions with the MTA.

In the Real Estate section in today’s Times, Terry Pristin goes in depth on this issue. Did the MTA, she asks, adequately integrate these buildings into the neighborhood? Few seem to think so, and many, she writes, view these buildings as “a missed opportunity or an unwelcome industrial intrusion into a residential neighborhood, or both.” Bass suggested that the MTA could have taken advantage of New York’s air rights laws to build above their auxiliar structures, but the Authority has instead chosen an austere look.

The agency, reticent to speak because of the pending lawsuits, answered some questions about the above-ground decisions. Pristin reports:

Kevin Ortiz, an M.T.A. spokesman, said by e-mail that the agency had worked with developers on both the 97th Street site, where the Century Lumber Corporation once stood, and on 72nd Street, the longtime home of Falk Drug and Surgical Supplies. Plans for 72nd Street, where the site measures 75 feet by 75 feet, were scuttled because “in order for a development to work, additional property would have had to be acquired, which we couldn’t justify as a transportation use,” he said.

On 97th Street, “M.T.A. Real Estate worked very long and hard to make it work, but in the end the developer lost interest,” he said.

In a subsequent e-mail, Aaron Donovan, another M.T.A. spokesman, said the developers that the agency had consulted owned the sites. Mr. Donovan said the agency had not issued requests for proposals from developers “because we didn’t own the properties,” which were acquired through eminent domain. According to the M.T.A., only the 97th Street site, which measures 100 feet by 125 feet, is large enough to accommodate a residential development. The M.T.A. also would not say why it did not consult a second developer for that site.

In addition to the visual elements and seemingly missed opportunities to allow for residential development, other urban land-use experts have questioned whether the MTA is maximizing its opportunities while minimizing costs. The Authority hasn’t successfully worked with real estate developers on plans that would help defray costs as new subway construction raises land values and rents. The same can be said of the lack of a station stop at 41st St. and 10th Ave. along the 7 extension. “The MTA does not think of its real estate as either an investment opportunity or a development opportunity,” Julia Vitullo-Martin of the RAP said to The Times. While a bit hyperbolic, the MTA’s real estate planning has often worked against and not with the neighborhoods serviced by new subway routes.

Not all is lost however along Second Ave. The auxiliary structures may be monolithic, and they might not appear to fit the character of the neighborhood, as the MTA claimed they would in the SAS Environmental Impact Statements. Civitas, the Upper East Side civic group, has long questioned the aesthetic impact these buildings will have, and the MTA defends that on grounds of lower maintenance costs. But Civitas was succcessful in convincing the MTA to include 360 square feet of real estate at 69th St. and 240 at 72nd St., says Pristin. At least the avenue won’t face too many windowless ventilation walls as some side streets in Midtown do.

It’s no easy task to build subways through neighborhoods that are replete with 80- and 90-year-old buildings, and the MTA seems to be learning this the hard way. One day, in a decade, we’ll view these structures with the same disregard with give every MTA substation, but those who live next to them might see them as lost opportunities to better a neighborhood soon to enjoy the benefits of a subway line running through it.

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Amidst concerns over a porous subway system, the MTA is planning to equip the upcoming R179 order of new rolling stock with security cameras, Tom Namako of The New York Post reported today. While the system’s preexisting rolling stock will not be retrofitted with cameras, each of the 340 new cars that make up the R179 fleet will have the necessary technology built in so that the MTA can simply put the cameras, shown at right, into the new cars.

“Future cars will be camera-ready,” Paul Fleuranges, a Transit spokesman, said to The Post. “The hardest part of retrofitting old cars to run the lines is that it involved taking the car apart.”

The MTA is currently running one train on the E line that’s equipped with an in-car camera surveillance system, but that car is just a part of a 12-month pilot program. As Namako notes, by ordering the R179s with the ability to install cameras, the MTA may be leaning toward approving this pilot program on a wider scale. The cameras, said Fleuranges, “will be part of the infrastructure, in case we want to go that route.”

As part of the pilot program, four cars along the E are each equipped with a set of four cameras, and the cars with cameras are identified with a decal, seen here at left. The camera sets are linked into one DVR system, and the four cameras are tied into a network controller unit that transmits the signals between cars. The cameras are placed to “effectively cover the passenger area,” according to Transit, and while the agency stressed that the cameras are for recording purposes and not live monitoring, it’s unclear how Transit plans to make use of the footage. The police have yet to request the video feeds.

As with many MTA pilots, the camera program was in development for years. The MTA first announced plans to create what many call a ring of steel in March 2007, reiterated a commitment to the pilot in April 2008 and again in August 2009 before installing the surveillance equipment this February. Various other cities, including Washington, DC, and London, have long outfitted their subway cars with such technology, and it has been used as both a criminal deterrent and a tool for identifying perps and terrorists.

Categories : Subway Security
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Although the Hall signal tower has since been repaired and LIRR service is operating normally after last Monday’s fire, I spotted this video late this weekend and wanted to pass it along. In it, the MTA goes inside the signal tower and explains what happened to the burned out equipment and how crews had to test each of 200 wires to ensure that the switch is working properly. Getting service up and running with seven days was apparently quite an undertaking.

Categories : LIRR
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Schematics of a 1912 plan to connect Staten Island with the BMT via a subway tunnel under the Narrows. Click to enlarge.

Staten Island is often called the forgotten borough by New York’s transit literati. With only some express bus routes and the Staten Island Railway as its transit routes, the borough plays host to a high car ownership rate and is relatively disconnected from New York City Transit’s extensive four-borough subway network. For nearly 100 years, Staten Islanders have clamored for a subway connection to nearby Brooklyn or Lower Manhattan, and at every turn, the project has been shunted aside over costs or worse.

A 1912 article in The New York Times introduces us to a plan to build a subway to Staten Island under the Narrows. The piece focuses on how real estate values in Tompkinsville and Rosebank were on the rise amidst rumors of a direct subway connection to Manhattan’s Broadway line via a tunnel from Brooklyn that would parallel 67th St. in Kings County, and developers were excited about the future of Staten Island real estate. “In the first place, all Staten Island will not be greatly benefited because there is a large portion of the Borough of Richmond where there are no trolley lines connecting to with the future subway,” William E. Harmon said.

Harmon also mentioned the proposed terminus of this underwater subway route. “The end of the Staten Island subway is, according to present plans, to be at Arrietta Street, about five minutes’ walk from St. George’s Ferry,” he said. Today, Arrietta St. is better known as St. Marks Place, and the subway would spurred both south and north to make a connection with the Staten Island Railway.

Even though the Board of Estimates approved this subway connection to Staten Island on July 11, 1912 and the Mayor William Jay Gaynor followed suit on July 16, the subway was slow to materialize. A 1915 letter to the editor of The Times from Robert T. Cone highlights how borough activists were dying for a subway. Cone noted how travel took three times as long as it should have on the ferry and how Staten Island, if developed properly, could house 3 million taxpayers. He advocated for a two-track subway connection as well as a two-track freight connection from Staten Island to Manhattan. It was an ambitious plan indeed.

A 1919 proposal for a subway from Staten Island to Manhattan. Click to enlarge.

Four years later, the issue of a Staten Island subway connection again reared its head. Proponents of any subway plan had decided that a connection to Brooklyn via the 67th St. tunnel would be too indirect and the trip too long, and so they proposed a direct Manhattan-to-Staten Island tunnel. The Staten Island Subway Committee called for one of two routes: either a direct route to Battery Park via Ellis and Bedlow Islands under “the shallows of the bay of Robbins Reef and thence under Kill Van Kull” or by subway via Ellis Island to “within the bulkhead line below Communipaw [in Jersey City]; thence on an elevated structure just within the bulkhead line to a point near Robbins Reef; thence by subway under the Kill Van Kull.” The committee declined to include any cost estimates but assumed the net increase in tax assessments would eventually cover the price of this lengthy subway expansion.

In 1921, optimism was on the rise as the city promised residents of Richmond a subway expansion. For $25 million, the city would build a tunnel under the Narrows and connect Staten Island with the BMT routes in Bay Ridge. In present-day values, that $25 million would be approximately $297 million — or the equivalent of a few blocks of the Second Ave. Subway. At the time, the Board of Estimates had yet to determine if the subway to Staten Island would go under 67th St. or continue from the BMT’s terminal at 86th St.

In 1925, with the BMT in dire fiscal straits, the city’s engineers seemingly torpedoed the subway. That optimistic $25 million was far too low, they said. According to a survey, the real cost in 1925 would have been at least $40 million, and city engineers said they could build a bridge spanning the Narrows for $90 million. “But where a tunnel, if built, could be used only for rapid transit,” The Times said, “a bridge could carry not only vehicular traffic, on which tolls could be charged, but might be so constructed as to afford an outlet for freight cars.”

And thus died the subway to Staten Island. The plan for a bridge meanwhile laid dormant for decades. In the mid-1950s, Robert Moses revived the plan to span the Narrows, but much to the chagrin of The Times, writing in 1955, Moses declined to provide space for rail service on what would become the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. When the bridge opened in 1965, the paper called it “more of an esthetic and engineering marvel than a way to get to Staten Island.” Without rail, it would become dominated by cars, and Staten Islanders were left waiting for that rail connection to the rest of the city. It’s 2010 now, and they’re still waiting.

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While calls to toll the East River crossings have stalled in New York State, the MTA may have hit upon a partial solution to some forms of congestion in its latest fare hike proposal. As WNYC’s Matthew Schuerman noted late last week, the authority has issued two plans for its bridges and tunnels: One would see rates increase evenly across the board while another would penalize non-E-ZPass users more than it would those with the electronic payment tags.

The options — as the MTA presents them here — are simple. If rates are raised evenly across the board, tolls will increase from anywhere from 25¢ to 50¢ with the one-way toll across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge going up by $1. The E-ZPass rates would increase by approximately 10 percent across the board.

Another plan, though, earning less play on the MTA’s website is summarized thusly: “If tolls were raised only for Cash and non-NYS E-ZPass customers, this would result in a $7.00 toll at Major Crossings ($14 at the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge), $4.50 at the Henry Hudson Bridge and $4.00 at Minor Crossings.”

Scheruman spoke with MTA officials about the rationale behind this plan. He reports:

The new idea, according to MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz, is meant to encourage people to use E-ZPass, cutting down on congestion at toll plazas and the pollution that comes with it. The proposal means that E-ZPass users from elsewhere on the Atlantic seaboard who occasionally pass through New York would end up paying 53 percent more. They currently qualify for the $4.57 E-ZPass rate.

AAA New Jersey opposes any sort of variable tolling, according to spokesman Stephen Rajczyk. “It shouldn’t matter if you are an out-of-state driver or an E-Z Pass driver,” he said. “You could say the people who use it all the time maybe should be paying more for it because they are using it all the time.”

The MTA says that you don’t have to be a resident of New York State to get a New York State E-ZPass—you simply have to apply for a tag from the New York State E-ZPass Service Center. And in fact, drivers who use tags from the Port Authority would qualify for the discount, according to MTA Bridges and Tunnels spokeswoman Joyce Mulvaney. About 75 percent of drivers who use MTA’s bridges and tunnels use E-ZPass; 70 percent use New York State tags.

This variable-rate plan is a sure sign of economic protectionism by the MTA. First, they would be foisting off more of the costs on out-of-state users who don’t pay taxes to New York State (and thus, aren’t contributing to the MTA’s coffers through the state treasury). With this variable-rate plan, drivers would either have to pay to purchase a New York State E-ZPass tag with a $25 prepayment charge or be willing to fork over more dollars for tolls.

Second, this plan serves as a de facto congestion-reducing proposal. By raising the rates at tolled roads, the MTA will discourage some — but not all — drivers. Unfortunately, however, the MTA doesn’t have a monopoly on tolled river crossings. They can raise rates at the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, but the Queensboro Bridge and Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges will remain untolled. Thus, any toll increase could have the unwanted result of foisting more traffic onto local roads that lead into the free crossings and contributing to the negative side effects of increased congestion.

The MTA’s various hearings on these toll proposals and their slate of fare increases are set to begin in two weeks from tonight. For a full list of hearing times and locations, visit this site.

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