For New Yorkers, nothing is seemingly as important as time. We rush from place to place in the anonymous masses of people that fill our city to the brim. We run up stairs and down stairs. We dash to reach train doors before they close, and we tap our feet impatiently if we are left waiting too long for an elevator, a doctor’s appointment, a restaurant reservation. If only things were on time. If only we had more time.
In the vast underground world beneath the city streets, time takes on a different meaning. We might wait impatiently for a train, but our time is not our own. We are the whims of the time of the Q train, the 2 train. We wait for the searching glow of headlights to pierce the darkness of the tunnel, and only then do we know that it’s time for our train to arrive.
One of the reasons we don’t know how time operates in the subway is because the MTA’s approach to countdown clocks has been painfully slow and misguided over the years. Another reason is because the clocks are wrong. As I noticed two and a half years ago, clocks at W. 4th St. were an hour and 14 minutes slow. Today, they’re still an hour and 14 minutes slow. Late has a different meaning when the clocks are set to run in a different time zone.
This week, two stories reminded me about how time is ethereal as we travel the subways. The first came to me in the form of a press release from New York City Transit. The good folks in charge of the clocks in the subway wanted to tell us that the manual clocks — approximately 250 of them — are in the process of being sprung ahead a good four or five days ahead of the rest of the country. These clocks are found in nooks and crannies throughout the system and date to another age when cigarette ads used to share space. Today, the MTA says the advertising revenue from these clocks draw in $500,000 annually.
Beginning yesterday, Transit contractors had to start the manual switch in order to finish by 2 a.m. on Saturday night when the city springs ahead. For now, some clocks will say it’s actually an hour later than it really is, and Transit in a statement said that they “apologize in advance for any confusion this process may cause.” Unless the clock just says “late,” “early” or “on time,” the purported time doesn’t matter. Those clocks are accurate for only so long.
And another piece focuses on more modern clocks. Michael Grynbaum of The Times profiled the new countdown clocks Transit is installing in various subway and bus routes across the city. As regular readers of Second Ave. Sagas know, those countdown clocks range from the high-tech along the IRT lines to the budget version on trial in Washington Heights to countdown clocks for buses along 34th St. No longer will riders peer into dark tunnels awaiting the train to arrive on its own time. Now, we have the time blessed by signals.
While Transit hopes to remove the mystery and angst from our commutes, New Yorkers are stubborn in their ways. “This is New York City, nothing runs on time,” Leonora Berisaj said to Grynbaum. “It’s not about the clock. It’s about the bus.” We operate on transit’s time, no matter how many minutes away the next train supposedly will be.
Photo of the old ad clocks via New York City Transit.
9 comments
The zen of public transportation strikes again! You are not in control of your environment. Your earthly, human ways of pretending to be masters of your lives are no match for the higher power of transit! (I kid, but I really do believe the best approach is just to remember you don’t control the universe. No one is more angst ridden about time than DC and yet they have clocks everywhere on Metro, no one ever learned to just sit back and let someone else control things. This is what makes NYers so much easier to deal with, we accept a certain level of powerlessness.)
“Today, the MTA says the advertising revenue from these clocks draw in $500,000 annually.”
Is that gross or net?
I think the contractor does everything associated with the clock, so except for power, it ought to be pretty much net. I didn’t realize so many of these old-timers were left.
Countdown clocks sometimes make it feel worse. Years ago I got to a BART station (sunday afternoon) and the arrival clock said next train was 20 minutes. I said Hmmph and noted the time on my watch hoping the clock would be wrong. It wasn’t. Ignorance sometimes is bliss.
But if you had another way of reaching your destination, you would have probably availed yourself of the option. (That probably doesn’t apply often on BART, but it applies quite frequently in New York.)
And if next-train times are ever available online, even better. It’s a six-minute walk from your home to the subway? Wait in the comfort of your home until a train is seven minutes away and head off then.
Now it is.
Why are you leaving comments on three-year-old posts?
The are a few different ways to look at this. 1. The clocks, as you mentioned, are historical pieces and thus should be preserved. 2. The clocks cost money to change (even if the form is reduced revenue by the cost of labor) and should be discontinued, particularly when the countdown clocks come on-line. The L clocks have the time, too. 3. The advertising rates are way too cheap and should be at least doubled. I was just reading about ad spots on ABC related to the Cablevision dispute, and it seems that based on the ‘views’, MTA can charge much higher rates.
Does anybody really care?
Sorry, I couldn’t help myself, I just love that song!
No on cares!