MTA workers dig down to the track, ballast & the third rail at Cortelyou Road yesterday. (Photo via New York City Transit)
According to a note on the MTA’s website, subway service this morning has been “restored to near normal levels on most lines.” The authority is still not running the Franklin Ave. shuttle, but B and Q service along the Brighton line has returned “with residual delays.” There is still no N service from Whitehall St. to Coney Island. Bus service across the city remains limited, and Transit is urging its passengers to allow extra time for travel.
4 comments
City grows more Third World every day. We can’t even clean up after a lousy snowstorm anymore. Last NYer left, please turn out the lights when leaving.
Hmm, a one-and-a-half hour trip from Astoria to the Financial District is nowhere near normal.
As someone who recently moved to New York from the third world – trust me, New York is nowhere near as bad as you think. If this happened in the third world you would have to pay a substantial bribe to get your street plowed at all.
But this is substantially better even than other parts of the US. Years ago I lived in Seattle, and we had about a foot of snow one time that shut down everything for a week. It doesn’t usually snow much there, and they have no plows, so their strategy is literally to wait until it melts. Unfortunately this time it stayed below freezing for a week. About 3 million people lost power when trees fell over from the weight of the snow and knocked out the lines. Since electricity there is mostly hydro, it’s pretty cheap and everyone has electric heat, so there were 3 million people without heat for that week. In my house I relied on a well with an electric water pump, so I didn’t have running water either.
And there’s your fare hike, service cut and MTA deficit in miniature.
It’s 2010, not 1810. A simple machine, which could be built out of snow blower heads and spare parts in MTA yards (if the MTA maintenance people actually did their jobs) could sweep through this in a moment.
And shoveling down to the ballast? Either that is an excuse to keep more people on OT or there is a design defect in the subway car specs. Most likely both. I could drive my car over snow several inches higher than the car’s belly, and that was a dirt common passenger car (using chains to provide traction). An 85,000 pound subway car running on rails should be able to do rather better than that.
If you drill down to the details you’ll find that everything the MTA does is designed to drive up costs and slow or degrade service. Top level reforms can’t easily reach through a culture doing the least work with the most people.