Grand Central sat empty on Friday night as Hurricane Irene approached. (Photo courtesy of MTA, Aaron Donovan)

I had some errands to run on Friday evening before Hurricane Irene arrived, and as walked down Broadway in Soho, business owners were hard at work boarding up their windows. After a dinner in Chinatown, I hopped on the 4 train for what would be my last subway ride until Monday afternoon. When I went to check on the trains on Saturday at around 2 p.m., stations were already boarded up, and the city has come to a standstill.

When Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the MTA announced the system-wide closure, I didn’t know what to make of it. For my entire life, New Yorkers have scoffed at weather-related warnings. Until recently, blizzard watches never developed; big snowstorms failed to dump much on the city; and even previous hurricanes had petered out before arriving in the northeast. Maybe it’s the unique geography of New York City and the landmass of Long Island, but something seems to slow down big storms before they dump much on us.

This time, though, the state wasn’t going to take any chances. After stranding passengers in the December blizzard, the MTA had to act, and the new governor wasn’t going to sit idly by. Cuomo ordered a system shutdown, and some of the starker images from the New York area emerged from our quiet transit system. Grand Central was entirely perfectly empty by Saturday afternoon. The bustling hub for transit and commerce had nary a soul inside. It was as though Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky had come to pass.

Over the next 42 hours, we sat and waited for life to resume. The storm came and went with parts north bearing the brunt of it, and the city could not spring to life. At first, I thought the roads would be more choked with cars as New Yorkers tried to drive into Manhattan and throughout the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island to go on with their lives. Yet, as the MTA shut down, so too did most businesses. Employees couldn’t get to work without their trains, and it made no sense to open if the city was at a transportation standstill.

With the MTA’s network out, though, we had an opportunity to see just how dependent the city is on the subways, buses and railroads the service us. In Park Slope, the businesses that were open on Sunday were staffed by locals. These folks live in the neighborhood or close enough to hoof it when the trains aren’t running, but many others were shuttered. People couldn’t get to work, and so work didn’t happen.

By and large, New Yorkers regard the transit system as a necessary evil. We think nothing of taking a 20-minute train ride, as I did last night, from the West Village to Brownstone Brooklyn. It just happens. Sometimes, it’s slow; sometimes, it’s crowded; sometimes, we wait out for service interruptions. Usually, thought it just is.

So I’m left with a question: Why can’t politicians see the importance of the system? Without the subways and the buses, New York becomes a city of neighborhoods, and no one can go anywhere. With the transit system, we have a vibrant economy that powers the nation and sometimes the world. The subways are the prime people-movers in that economy. Without political support, the system will slowly wither and die. Every day cannot be as quite as it was with Irene looming, but unless attitudes toward transit change, that’s where we’re heading. It’s not a pleasant future to contemplate.

Metro North's Port Jervis line will be closed indefinitely as the MTA addresses what it called catastrophic damage. (Photo by Metropolitan Transportation Authority)

By the time I ventured out of Brooklyn on Monday afternoon for the first time since arriving home on Friday night, Irene’s impact within the five boroughs of New York City had largely dissipated. A few neighborhoods are dealing with flood waters and downed trees while others are still waiting for power to be restored. But as dramatic images of flooding in upstate New York and Vermont pour in, New York City remained unscathed.

Of course, since the city emerged from the storm with only a death or two and little long-term damage, many pundits have begun to question our preparedness. Did we have to shutdown the city so completely on Saturday? Was it an overreaction to cut off subway service and shut down mass transit? Why couldn’t meteorologists better predict the weather? It’s typical Monday-morning quarterbacking but this for a natural disaster.

Outside of the city, the storm has been devastating. So far, 40 people have died from it, and that total is expected to rise. The property loss is estimated to be well over $10 billion, and even locally, the MTA announced last night that Port Jervis line will not enjoy Metro-North service for months due to “catastrophic damage” to track beds, bridges and signal system. The railroad will run shuttle buses for now, but they do not anticipate service any time soon. More details are available in a press release, and the photos are breathtaking in their starkness.

Now, even before we knew the full extent of the damage to Metro-North’s westernmost reaches, straphangers were wondering if the MTA overreacted. Why didn’t they run less frequent shorter trains during the storm? Why didn’t they wait to shut down the system until later in the day on Saturday? Why wasn’t it back up and running before yesterday morning? Eventually, these are questions that someone — the MTA, the governor’s office — will likely answer with a report in a few months, but for now, the answer is a simple one.

As the storm bore down on New York City, meteorologists simply couldn’t know that it was going to largely skip over New York City. They couldn’t know that the worst would hit to the north of us. They couldn’t know that the bands of rain would spin out for a bit at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning and that the winds would be worst to the east of us. Even as it appeared as though New York would largely be spared the worst of it, forecasters continue to warn of uncertainty, and as people from the south who are in the regular paths of hurricanes know, it’s better to prepare for the worst than be left unprepared for a big storm.

For the safety of New Yorkers, for the safety of MTA employees and for the safety and security of the subway equipment, shutting down the system was the right decision. Less than a day after the storm passed, the system was up and running with few hiccups, and we could breath easy. We dodged a bullet this time, but it won’t be the last one we face.

The Mayor greets riders on the 6 train this morning. (via)

When Mayor Michael Bloomberg and various city and state officials gathered yesterday afternoon to speak about the transit situation, hizzoner warned the assembled crowd about Monday in, well, less than sympathetic terms. “Tough commute tomorrow,” the Mayor said, “but we have tough commutes all the time.”

For those of us in the five boroughs, though, it wasn’t a particularly tough commute. The Mayor’s 6 train from 77th Street wasn’t too crowded, and although the MTA warned that trains wouldn’t run as frequently, many offices in Manhattan remained closed today as employees from New Jersey and Westchester were left without transit options. Thus, trains were empty, and few people were in a rush to get anywhere.

As the recovery continues, subway service will increase throughout the day, but the commuter rail situation looks a little bit dicier. I’ve heard that Metro-North has a “tentative plan” to restart service tomorrow at 2 p.m., but trains would run on a modified Sunday schedule. Many parts of the system remain submerged under flood waters, covered by downed trees or buried under mudslides. Normalcy may take a few more days.