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.

Sitting on my coffee table in my living room is a book from the U.K. by two designs experts. The book is called Signs: Lettering in the Environment, and it is, as you might guess, all about what are known as wayfinding signs.

These signs are a ubiquitous part of everyday life in New York City. We have one-way signs, alternate-side-of-the-street parking signs, street signs, landmark signs, directional signs and, of course, an entire network of signs courtesy of the MTA. The underground signs tell us which way our train is going, what trains we can expect to arrive on which tracks at what time and whether or not the staircase on the left or right will put us on the proper corner.

In Phil Baines and Catherine Dixon’s book, the two write about the theory behind wayfinding signs. These should be welcoming and clear, uniform and informative. As the MTA learned in the 1950s and 1960s, it isn’t always easy to design signs that fit those specifics, and although Massimo Vignelli’s Helvetica signs succeed in certain aspects, in many ways, they live those unfamiliar with subway shorthand confused about the way.

Take, for instance, the sign up above. That sign — a direction with some letters missing — would make no sense to many people, and yet, it marks stations with mid-platf (sic) entrances throughout the system. Apparently, the MTA, short on cash, couldn’t afford the “-form.”

These signs all stem from a 1970 manual by Vignelli and his associates called the New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual. The user Triborough has a full set of photos from the manual, and the images provide a tantalizing glimpse into the world of MTA signage. We can see the theory behind directional signs, the rational behind the placement of signs in complex station mazes and the modular font system designed to make the signs very readable.

But does it work? In general, the MTA’s signage makes sense. Riders know where they are and can figure out, to a reasonable degree, where the trains are going. But sometimes, signs such as the one above creep up. The B train stops at W 4th St., except when it doesn’t, and then you can take the D and transfer to the Q at De Kalb Ave. Usually, the D train runs express and skips DeKalb, except during late nights when it runs local and stops at DeKalb. Good luck, too, determining when that “late night” period is or figuring out what to do for those 90 minutes after the B stops running and before the D makes its stop at De Kalb. Even the MTA’s website is helpless on that front. In the end, the signs make perfect sense to those who use the B and the D and the Q on a regular basis and no sense to those who have never had to interpret Vignelli Subway-ese.

For the next few weeks, Slate is tackling this subject of signs. Julia Turner offered up a primer on signs to introduce the series and yesterday explored how London, a city decidedly not on a grid, is trying to help people get around. (Fun London fact: It’s often faster to walk than it is to take the Tube, but few out-of-towners and even some native Londoners know that because the street map is just that confusing.)

The New York-centric essay in her series involved Turner’s effort at finding her way around Penn Station. Why, she asked, are the signs so confusing? Turner charts her effort, in photos, to get from Lower Manhattan to Amtrak’s half of Penn Station and finds the connection from New York City Transit to Amtrak very complicated. The reason for the confusion, she says, is because three different agencies — the MTA, New Jersey Transit and Amtrak — share the space and have never coordinated on signage. Such are the travails of transit bureaucracy.

We tend to take signs for granted until we don’t know where we’re going. The next time I ride, I’m going to take a look at that plat and see if I can find some gems amidst the MTA signage. Sometimes, you never know on which track that train will arrive even with the signs.

As the city’s newspapers cover the latest in MTA political theater, a few have taken the bold step of interviewing New Yorkers to get their views on transit issues. Instead of grandstanding politicians and crusading advocates, Metro commissioned a poll to find out what 280 New Yorkers felt about service hikes, fare cuts and the state of the transit system. The results are presented in full in this infographic, but I wanted to break it down a bit.

For the poll, Metro led with my favorite question: Fare hikes vs. service cuts. A majority of those polled preferred a 7.5 percent fare hike to service cuts while 44 percent said the fares are already too high. Those people would prefer less service for their too high fares, an odd compromise indeed. Considering that the fares are lower today than they were 15 years ago, New Yorkers either hate paying or don’t understand how much they pay for a subway ride.

The next question is the one with the most comforting result. Only 13 percent of respondents believe the MTA should be paying for student transit, and 87 percent of New Yorkers think the city, state or parents should foot the bill. Someone should tell that to our politicians who won’t pay for student travel and continue to slam the MTA for threatening subsidies it should be expected to cover.

Here’s where things start getting interested, and I’d love to see how these questions further break down. Even though 44 percent of respondents were willing to take service cuts over fare hikes, the biggest complaint people have about the system are the crowds. It will only get worse as service is decreased. The 21 percent who say cleanliness is a problem should think about starting a movement to convince others to use the proper garbage bins, and 24-hour service remains a hallmark of the MTA. That only eight percent appreciate how cheap the subways strikes me as too few, but perhaps that total would rise if people could pick a second choice.

After presenting the info on people’s views of the system overall, the poll switches gears to discuss straphangers’ opinions on those who work in the subway. The TWU does not currently have public sentiment on its side in its battle to convince New Yorkers that its guaranteed raises are good for the city and its transit system. Still, with the law on their side instead, the TWU doesn’t need much public sympathy.

I’m intrigued to see people’s views on station agents. Clearly, as I’ve mentioned before, they serve a psychological purpose even if they can’t actually observe platform before and aren’t legally required to stop crimes in progress or assist victims. Their mere presence at station entrances is enough to convince New Yorkers that they are safe. The truth is that in a deserted station, passengers can be waiting the equivalent of two city blocks away from station agents and on another level of the station. The agents are only as useful as they can be as a deterrent factor and as a calming influence on nervous riders. Considering that the city has lost numerous station agents since 2008 and crime has not risen in the subways, it remains to be seen if those 60 percent of riders who predict a decrease in safety will see their fears come true.

What the station agents are not, however, is all that useful. Less than a quarter of all riders think the station agents are instrumental in keeping the system most. Most want these employees to both friendlier and more knowledgeable. That too is an unsurprising finding. We want station agents as a safety blanket, but when we need something out of them, they become less helpful.

So as the MTA conducts its final New York City-based hearings tonight, these views are something to consider. The authority should begin to consider a fare hike as an alternate solution for its budget crisis, but opinions are decidedly mixed on most MTA issues.

Via Infrastructurist and Martha Kang McGill comes this snapshot of urban life in America. McGill took census data to illustrate how people in various cities across the country commute to work, and while Houston’s red is reflected in tales of traffic jams and pollution, New York’s blue is a soothing reminder of our need for a vibrant subway system. No other city in the country approaches New York City’s reliance on public transit just as a means of commuting to work, and the state and city should remember that as they prepare to let the MTA’s coffers run dry. (Click the image to enlarge. It’ll open in a new window.)

A rollsign from years gone by recently on display on the B train. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)

I took the picture atop this post on Dec. 8, 2009. It was shortly after 2:15 when one of the last remaining R32s to make the B run pulled into Broadway/Lafayette, and the car I boarded was just flat-out wrong. As is evident from the picture, the B, normally running down the Sixth Ave. line and then the Brighton line out to Brighton Beach, was confused. It seemed to think it was running the BMT Broadway/West End Line, and while most passengers hesitated to board the train, most seemed content to ignore this anomalous rollsign.

For the B train, errant rollsigns are not an occurrence all that rare. Due to the Manhattan Bridge construction that spanned three decades and lasted nearly twenty years, the B train has been rerouted more frequently than any train, and for significant chunks of the 1990s, two different B trains — one orange and one yellow — ran various routes in Manhattan and Brooklyn. In fact, a few months before boarding the confused B, I saw another slightly less lost B train:

So why the divergent history? The tale lies in the MTA’s need to adequately serve Brooklyn and in the need to shore up support for the Manhattan Bridge. Because the subways lines are on the outside lanes of the bridge, the joints on the bridge were severely stressed for decades, and by the mid-1980s, trains could only crawl across the bridge for fear of structural damage. Facing a disaster, the city and MTA finally began work on a decades-long project to steady the bridge. It would prove quite disruptive to subway travel and did not wrap until 2004.

To accomplish its task, the MTA had to close various sides of the bridge for long stretches of time. Today, the B and D trains run along the northern tracks on the bridge to Grand St. and up the Sixth Ave. IND line. The Q and N take the southern crossing and enter Manhattan at Canal St. before heading north along the BMT Broadway line. But that is a creation of the last six years. How then did service used to look and why are these rollsigns as they are?

Well, when the northern tracks were closed, the B train ran in two segments. One trip took riders from 168th St. in Manhattan — now a C train stop — to 34th St./Herald Square along the IND routes under Central Park West and Sixth Ave. That was the orange-and-white section. The other part of the trip started at either 21st St./Queensbridge in Queens or 57th St. and Broadway in Manhattan and carried the B over the southern Manhattan Bridge tracks. The train would travel along the West End line and terminate in Coney Island as the D does today.

When the southern tracks were closed, the B would invariable run via the 6th Ave. line, across the bridge and to Coney Island. At times, the B was truncated and saved as a Brooklyn shuttle between Atlantic Ave./Pacific St. and Coney Island. Sometimes, it would run weekedays-only, and sometimes, just in Manhattan. The fact that the B has had a stable route for the last six years and counting is a modern creation.

When the Bridge reopened for good in 2004, Transit had to address changing conditions underground and changing travel patterns. In 1986, when the Bridge closed, people were generally not too keen on riding the subway, and no one wanted to go to Union Square or Times Square, major destinations of the BMT Broadway line. So when faced with the chance to run trains that could spur to either route, the MTA polled riders and found a preference for the Broadway route that hadn’t existed 18 years earlier. As The Times detailed then, the routes were adjusted and for a few weeks, confused reigned.

Today, we know the B as the Brighton Express. It’s an orange-and-white bulleted train that runs only during weekdays and not at all during the overnights. It’s a speedy ride into Manhattan, and it’s the train I take more than any other these days. Today, it’s a very stable ride, but now and then, when someone sets an improper rollsign, the B can still remind of construction from years past.

Taking pictures in the subway isn’t illegal, but good luck convincing NYPD’s transit officers of that fact. In what has become a series of similar cases, the City of New York had to pay out $30,000 to a man who was unlawfully detained for snapping some subway shots.

Fox 5’s John Deutzman reports that Robert Palmer was at the Freeman Station in the Bronx last year when cops ordered him to stop shooting photos of the subway. When Palmer respectfully declined to erase his pictures and showed the cops his copy of the subway rules that say, “Photography, filming or video recording in any facility or conveyance is permitted,” he was handcuffed.

The cops then booked Palmer for not one but three violations. He was charged with, according to Fox, “taking photos,” “disobeying lawful order/impeding traffic,” and “unreasonable noise.” Palmer says he wasn’t being confrontational or rude, and the three charges were eventually dropped. The NYPD admitted that Palmer shouldn’t have been charged, and Palmer sued the city for his unlawful detainment. The actions of police ignorant on the law cost taxpayers that $30,000.

To make matters worse, as Fox 5 news crews were filming this story, Deutzman had his own run in with a transit authority worker. He reports, “Some guy who claimed to be a transit supervisor actually put his hand over the camera’s lens to try to stop the Fox 5 camera guy from recording video. When the so-called supervisor figured out the crew was with Fox 5, he backed off saying he didn’t realize we were ‘working press.’

As the report notes, the NYPD has sent a memo to its service members reminding them that photography is legal. Transit has done the same. Yet, still the cops and employees haven’t gotten the message. How many more taxpayer dollars will it cost the city before the rules become the rules?

In a few years, the stations along the Culver Viaduct will be fully renovated.

The Culver Viaduct — a pesky strip of the IND Culver Line that crosses the Gowanus Canal 90 feet above ground — is in very bad shape. The bridge is structurally unsound, and the stations are decrepit with paint peeling from leaky ceilings and windows boarded up. By 2013, the Culver Viaduct will be fully renovated, and with the completion of that project will come renovated stations and the potential for F express service. In the meantime, service changes and weekend cancellations make for uncertain travel via the F and G trains.

For this mile-long strip of above-ground track, the work is badly needed. Waterproofing has given way to waterlogged and stressed concrete, and this overhaul is the first major rehab since 1933 when the viaduct first opened. It is an old structure and surrounded by buildings, and the MTA knew it would not be an easy overhaul. Yet, many have embraced it. Residents in the area have long recognized how dangerous the viaduct had become and were happy to see the MTA begin work on it.

Happy, that is, until service changes came to rule the weekends. As The Post explained yesterday, the work on the viaduct will result in total weekend shutdowns with shuttle bus service in between Jay St. and Church Ave. for weekends in February, May and November. Brooklyn residents are not happy about this development. “People are going to totally freak out,” Laura Stryjewski said. “Taking the shuttle is a royal pain. This is terrible news.”

Others were even more critical. “They already put us through this six months ago,” Isabel Milenski said to The Post. “It’s like they’re not fixing the issue. The shuttle rides are grotesque. It’s going to be chaotic.”

Milenski’s comment and Stryjewski’s to a lesser extent are both patently absurd. Of course the MTA is fixing the issue; that is, after all, why the Viaduct, a 77-year-old structure, has to be closed for a few weekends during the course of construction. To claim otherwise is simply ignorant.

These comments, featured in a major daily newspaper, are designed to stir up some sort of populist outrage at the MTA. Look at those transit folks, canceling our service and making us take shuttle buses, suggests the tone of the article. I’ve harped on this point before, but it’s worth repeating: This is simply irresponsible journalism. Who cares with some man- or woman-on-the-street thinks about something about which they are largely ignorant? If The Post wants to make the MTA look bad, this hit-and-run journalism is exactly the way to do it. If the paper cared about informing its riders of the MTA’s efforts at restoring this stretch of its track, it could do so in a more newsworthy way.

In the end, though, these attitudes transcend the yellow journalism of The Post and get at a deeper problem with the way people treat transit in New York City. The people who complain about how dirty, dingy and unsafe the Viaduct is are the same folks who complain about shuttle buses and station closures when the MTA gets around to fixing things. These riders want everything, and they want it now. Simply put, they can’t have it. The Viaduct has to be closed because the MTA needs to do major structural repairs to it otherwise the station will remain a part of the city’s crumbling transportation infrastructure. Ever the demanding bunch, New Yorkers cannot have it both ways for once.

For more on the Culver Viaduct project, check out my old posts here, here and here. After the jump, a video from the MTA about the rehabilitation work. Read More→

Danny Lyon, IRT 2, South Bronx, New York City, 1979. (Courtesy of Fans in a Flashbulb)

A few years ago, when the NYPD and the MTA briefly concerned banning photography in the subway system, New Yorkers were, as a quick Google search shows, up in arms about the move. Shooting photos in the subway has become an iconic part of New York life and culture, and by mid-2005, the two agencies had dropped the camera ban.

Today, over at Fans in a Flashbulb, the International Center of Photography offers up a tantalizing glimpse at some subway photos from New York’s past. They highlight just five photos, and the shots, ranging from a 1943 Weegee shot of a crowded subway station serving as an air shelter to a 1995 Steven Siegel photo of the Culver Viaduct looking as rundown as it does today, leave you wanting more.

My favorite is the 1979 glimpse inside a graffiti-covered 2 train in the South Bronx. The subways were once so dingy, and everyone was so complacent about the state of affairs underground. In a way, that attitude exists today as New Yorkers still don’t view the subway system as something in which we should be investing instead of as an inconvenient means of transportation. Anyway, as these shots show, great photography underground can truly capture the essence and flow of the subways. Enjoy ‘em.