This MTA employee is hard at work preparing to aid would-be straphangers navigate the system.
It’s clearly Beat Up On The MTA Week around here so far. We learned yesterday that technology is not the MTA’s strong point and that NYCT express bus drivers were inexplicably not given the order to alter their routes during last week’s system-wide failure. Today, let’s tackle those ever-so-unhelpful MTA workers.
First a story from my sister. She heads to work from the 96th St. stop on the West Side IRT to the 125th St. stop. This wonderful adventure happened last week:
A passenger got injured … at 125th Street, so there were two indecipherable announcements on my train about skipping a stop, which I heard both times as 135th but was apparently 125th. At 135th, I asked the woman in the booth if downtown trains were skipping 125th also. She didn’t know. My co-intern had to get out at 110th because her train simply wasn’t going to continue yet … She asked the person in the booth what bus goes up Lenox Avenue. The person didn’t know. I thought the lack of knowledge of these two MTA employees was ridiculous and unjustifiable — how can they have people working for them who can’t answer these basic and obvious questions?
Victoria, you ask questions that have plagued New Yorkers since the dawn of time. What good indeed are those red-vested employees that roam the stations now that token sellers are defunct? What good are MTA workers who are supposedly in place to help riders negotiate their ways through the subway system if they don’t know which buses are available for transfer just 20 feet above their heads?
Meanwhile, my sister — and 7.2 million other straphangers — isn’t the only person in New York noticing this problem. WNYC, New York’s excellent public radio station, ran a short audio snippet featuring two MTA employees bemoaning their lack of knowledge. The clip, which you can hear at the link, features Beth Fertig’s talking to these workers.
“We’re the last to know,” a female employee says. “Sometimes we hear information from the scanners and sometimes that information is not right. And the audio system: sometimes that is not right.”
Fertig later asks if the MTA employees are equipped with cell phones or Blackberries in case of an emergency. The female says their only emergency training is in case of a terrorist attack. The employees are instructed to put on their masks. And that’s it.
When asked about computers, the male employee could only laugh. “Where do you see a computer?” he asks Fertig pointing to a station booth.
So there you have it. The first responders to a subway emergency have no access to any accurate information and no way of coordinating with central command. Houston, we have a communications problem.
8 comments
wotthehell – everybody makes mistakes, sometimes even blatantly obvious ones. Like your headline today, f’r’instance
Yes, I fixed it. 🙂
In terms of mistakes, I’ve seen this trend all over the place. Employees don’t know if trains are running local or express. They don’t know which alternate routes exist or which ones are best. It’s, as I said, communication.
How ridiculous is this?? Station agents don’t do anything anymore, and they’ll do even less once the new PA system starts working (MTA: pretty please turn it on soon?) They might as well be replaced with undercover & uniformed police, maintenance crews and MTA ambassadors at key (busy and touristy) stations.
Well done with the Hed typo.
If the system is fully wired for PA, my guess is that the announcements will be nothing but repetitive nonsense, a la “We are being held by the train’s dispatcher” or “This is an important announcement from the NY Police Department…”
Meaningless, useless, and not worth the time or money spent making it possible to make them.
Here is the bottom line:
Other than lack of training of employees when it comes to relating to customers, for whatever reason, token booth clerks (or whatever they are called now) do not have the maps that they can read (or should be able to read) to tell you how to get where you are going.
Each boro has a bus map… while there is NO WAY ON EARTH that anyone can know each and every bus line in any boro, you should know the ones right above/below you and other area info.
As for communication… LMAO. I have no idea why the MTA has almost no real communication with its workers when it comes to system “flare ups”. If something happens on the Q line and I’m a conductor on the R, guess what? I’ll never know about it LOL. Less than half of the radio communications come through even when your on the same line or a connecting line.
I hope something is done about this. As passengers, we should feel safe knowing that somehow he people who work for the system can communicate with each other. While I’m positive in an emergency situation things will work, its the everyday system issues that go down any given day that needs to be addressed.
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