There once were some placards with rhyme
To destroy them would be quite a crime.
But the MTA
They did say
Poetry in Motion simply ran out of time.
After 15 years of verse in our heart,
SubTalk will now turn to history and art.
E.B. White and Galileo
Don’t flow quite like Longfellow.
But now we’ll know more about Descartes.
Train of Thought this […]

Lucky Chicago. They aren’t afraid of change and progress, and now the Windy City is getting what should be ours if it hadn’t been for Sheldon Silver and his crony of cowardly representatives.
When New York decided not to adopt congestion pricing, the City forfeited around $354 million that would have gone toward anti-congestion […]

Live from the subways, it’s The Remaking of Pelham 1-2-3. New York’s seminal subway movie from the 1970s, The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 stands a classic view of both the subways and the city frozen in a moment of time. Today, Tony Scott is remaking the film with Denzel Washington, John Travolta and James Gandolfini. […]

Get ready to smile for your MTA overlords. Over a year after the MTA first started grumbling about putting security cameras in subway cars, the security plan may get off the ground sometime this year. Or maybe next year. No one really knows yet.
What we do know is that the MTA will begin one […]

While this morning I praised COMMUTE’s Bus Rapid Transit plan for the way it connects the city’s boroughs, not everyone believes this to be the best plan. Regular SAS commenter and fellow blogger Cap’n Transit offered up his issues with the COMMUTE plan. In short, he doesn’t feel that the COMMUTE plan brings low-income residents […]

COMMUTE’s BRT system would unite boroughs in ways the subway system cannot. (Source: COMMUTE’s proposed BRT route map PDF)
One of the great casualties of the congestion pricing failure was the $112 million earmarked for bus rapid transit implementation. While the city missed out on this significant federal contribution, NYC’s Department of Transportation has not allowed […]

Current MTA CEO and Executive Director Elliot Sander was one of former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s more prominent appointees. Sander, a celebrated transit expert, replaced a real estate maven and has brought more accountability and responsibility to the MTA.
When Spitzer stepped down, speculation ran rampant through Albany that Gov. David Patterson would […]

I introduced you in February to the plans to bring armed security personnel into the subway. Yesterday, SUBWAYblogger saw a few of the first armed teams dispatched as part of Operation Torch, and today, the Daily News writes about rider reaction the underground submachine guns. Makeda Mays-Green summed it up: “I just got off the […]

Thousands of people walk past this subway entrance at 52nd and 8th, unaware of its history. (Photo by RJ Mickelson for amNew York)
We started the week with a tale about a doomed abandoned platform at 42nd and 8th Ave. Let’s end the week ten blocks north standing outside a gated subway entrance at 52nd St. […]

As some of you may have noticed, the look and functionality of the comments here on Second Ave. Sagas changed early this week, and I wanted to take a second to formally introduce those changes. SAS now features threaded comments with live comment preview. The preview function means that, as you type your comment, you’ll […]