I’m on vacation for the next week, but since New York’s subways never shut down, neither will Second Ave. Sagas. I’ve enlisted the help of a few bloggers to help keep things fresh around here. Today’s guest post comes to us from Gerrit, better known as The Altar of Entropy at 2Log.
Hear it go clink, ya pansies… the gauntlet’s officially down!
Let’s recap.
2log, wherein I do my blogging, hosts a weekly competition among talented bloggers to determine who’s best of the best. Many fortnights ago, Ben threw his hat into the ring. And he bloodied us all bad. What can I say… he fights dirty. he came armed with… with… with mouth-watering pictures of nachos. Who could resist?!?!
Although I could use my short stint as a guest-blogger for Second Avenue Sagas to write one of my many flippant posts about the subway, I thought I’d use it to bring the fight back to Mr. Kabak’s home turf.
Way back in the day, I pitched Kabak a series of questions about the subway, but he only answered two of them correctly. For my post here at Second Avenue Sagas, I respin the underlying theme of my third question into a larger, more philosophical question:
WHY DOESN’T THE MTA THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX INSTEAD OF RAISE SUBWAY FARES?
I know what you’re thinking… it’s because they’re a pack of dorked up, Diet Coke downing, middle-manager rejects with curiously large nose hairs whose idea of creativity is putting a U2 album on shuffle. Whoa there, Mr. Negative… let’s not go all John McCain this early. Here’s some crazier ideas they could try as a possible source of additional revenue. Some are so crazy they just might work.
Stick Some Junk in That Trunk
This was my original idea… late at night, when the subway cars aren’t in use, use the MTA to transport freight about town. Gas prices are ridiculously expensive, right? Seemingly 20% or more of the city’s traffic is trucks hauling shipments. Why not use a few cars on the late-night trains, which are pretty much deserted anyway, to offer merchants cheaper rates on shipping. The upside for passengers is that, if the program becomes super-popular, then late night passengers will see more trains roll by and their wait time will plummet, especially along trains that touch a port (like the airports or any hub to dirty Jersey).
Kabak countered that it has something to do with the gauges, but I say that’s nonsense. A single subway car easily holds 50 people. At about 150 lbs a person, that’s at least 7,500 lbs of cargo per train without any modifications. So what you have to say ’bout that?!?
First Class Trains
Where do airplanes make their money? It’s not on coach, it’s on the rich idiots who are willing to pay extra to be separated from the commoners. So here’s what you do. Take the first car on every train, and call it a first class car. Tear up the orange plastic seating and install plush La-Z-Boy chairs. Offer a copy of the Wall Street Journal and a latte, and charge $50+ a ticket. There’s enough wealthy hedge fund bankers in the city who would take the deal, and the rest of us would be happy to not have to ride with them.
Chinatown Subway
Pretty much the opposite of the previous example. Some wizard figured out how to operate a bus at only $10 to Philadelphia that runs faster than the trains and outside traffic combined. Why not find this genius and offer him or her the key to the tunnels. For only a quarter, they’d build a high-risk train that could take you from Flushing to Canal Street in 13 minutes. BOOM BLAP! I don’t care if it’s hauling heroin, I just want to get to my danged discotheque.
Gauntlet’s down, MTA!
4 comments
Running freight requires a huge up-front investment in new cars, loading and unloading areas, and connections to the national rail network. You seem to be imagining this subway freight as being about people entering a station and putting cargo on a train, and other people entering another station and pulling the cargo out. That’s not how freight handling works anymore – we have containers now, and stub tracks for a train to park while it’s being loaded or unloaded. I think it’s worth investigating, but it’s for when there’s a surplus, not a deficit.
Nobody’s going to ride first class trains, especially not for $50. The average Wall Street executive has little problem riding the 4 to work every day; why would he care about sitting down for 20 minutes enough to fork over so much more money? Airliners don’t have first class travel on short-haul flights, either.
The Chinatown bus is cheap because it’s no-frills and undermaintained and because the employees get Chinatown wages rather than union wages. A system that has to occasionally repair rolling stock and track, and needs professional train operators, can’t do any of that. Indeed, the local Chinatown buses, which take people from Flushing to Canal Street to Sunset Park, aren’t better than the MTA buses.
Also, what’s “faster than the train and outside traffic combined”?
How the hell long do you plan to hold a train in a station until its unloaded with freight?
Do you even understand how freight railroads work?
No one ‘unloads’ the freight train, the cars are put in a siding and LEFT AT THE LOCATION until the company offloads them when they are ready.
Both of my suggestions have to do with the airport, because that is where travelers will sacrifice the most money for convenience. And airlines may also be interested in sponsorship.
First class would make sense on LIRR trains that will travel to the new transit hub downtown, whenever that gets built. Direct express trains that take passengers off the AirTrain would definitely benefit from such a service.
Tokyo, London, Paris, and probably other major cities, have train luggage delivery services. At least one of the three cities allows one to check in for their flight at the central train station (and leave luggage there) and then go to the airport with just the carry-ons. If Penn Station offered such a service (with the A train and a JFK truck shuttling luggage to and from JFK) it would be fairly popular, I think. The MTA would order a few more of their special-purpose windowless cars and strip the insides. Since they don’t need access to the intermediate stations, they can simply be the 11th and 12th cars, for example.
@tceez: the freight trains could be unloaded by an army of dragons. how will we feed the dragons, you ask? dragons don’t eat! they snort LIGHTNING!