Second Ave. Sagas

Category: Asides

  • Lhota dashes dreams of a 7 train to Secaucus

    The Mayor Bloomberg-inspired plan to extend the 7 train underneath the Hudson River to Secaucus has captured transit dreamers’ imaginations over the past few years, but the odds have long been stacked against it. The subway expansion would require interstate cooperation and billions of dollars that aren’t readily available. Useful? Yes. Practical amidst the current political and economic climates? Probably not.

    Today, while speaking at a meeting of the New York Building Congress, MTA Chairman Joe Lhota threw an ice cold bucket of water on those dreaming of such a subway plan, as Transportation Nation reported this morning. The extension, he said, not going to happen in our lifetime. It’s not going to happen in anybody’s lifetime…The expense is beyond anything we’re doing.”

    From the cost of construction to the need to build railyards and shops in New Jersey to the more pressing needs within the city, Lhota was unequivocal in his stance. “I’ve told the mayor this, I can’t see that happening in our lifetime,” he said. The Mayor, in his response, seemed to accept the MTA head’s assessment. Calling Lhota a “realist,” Bloomberg said later that he hopes it “happens within someone’s lifetime. Those people may not have been born yet whose lifetime it would be.” Ain’t that aiming for the stars?

  • Amidst renovations, subway platforms narrow

    Over the past few weeks, as accidents involving straphangers who jump or fall into trackbeds have gained headlines, some transit watchers have renewed calls for platform doors. The benefits, as I’ve discussed are numerous, but the costs could be astronomical. While platform doors could better protect the MTA’s passengers, another issue surrounding passenger safety concerns platform space.

    As New York 1’s Tina Redwine noted last week, station renovations often leave platforms with very little space. Her article focused mainly on the impact of ongoing construction, but the final products leave space at a premium too. As Redwine notes, on the IND platform at Broadway/Lafayette, areas currently under construction leave just 51 inches of space for people to wait for trains and walk down the platform. It isn’t nearly enough.

    The problem, though, doesn’t end with the construction. As the MTA renovates stations for ADA compliance and grafts bulky elevators into 70- or 100-year-old stations, straphangers lose platform space. As staircases appear, waiting areas disappear. Grand Central on the IRT, for instance, wouldn’t feel so cramped if the platform areas for people waiting for trains weren’t so miniscule. There is, of course, no easy answer here as these upgrades are both necessary and required, but as the MTA searches for ways to make platforms safer, examining the amount of space we have while waiting should be a no-brainer.

  • Another year, another push for platform doors

    Every year at around this time, the MTA releases its year-end figures concerning passenger safety, and this time around, The Daily News did not fail to get too excited. As the paper notes, a whopping 147 people — or a percentage of all riders too miniscule to calculate — were struck by trains. That amounts to one accident every 2.5 days or approximately 1 accident per 12.5 million riders.

    Without minimizing the loss of life — 33 percent of those hit by trains died — this isn’t exactly a problem screaming out for a solution. Still, earlier this week, New York City Transit President Tom Prendergast once again spoke out in favor of platform doors. “The primary reason is safety, ” he said. “The second is environmental control and the third is to have a better means of getting the train into the station, doing the loading and unloading, and getting the train out of the station.”

    We’ve been down this road before. In fact, it was just last February when Prendergast first proposed platform doors (as long as they didn’t have to pay much), and everyone and their uncles grossly overreacted. Now with, in the words of The Daily News, “terrifying” accidents taking a “sharp leap” upward, the doors are back.

    I’ll say what I said last year: If the MTA can implement platform doors while keeping expenditures low, great. They’ll keep people and trash out of the tracks while allowing for more temperate platforms. But the cost of implementing such a plan, let alone the practicalities at a time when door spacing on various rolling stock models has yet to be fully standardized, could be astronomical. And at that point, the costs far, far outweigh the benefits.

  • Subway grand larceny figures up nearly 40 percent

    The NYPD has released subway crime figures for the first two months of the year, and yet again, grand larceny numbers are up markedly. In February, the police received 126 grand larceny reports — up by 35 over February 2011 — and the year-to-date numbers show a similar increase. Grand larcenies are up 39 percent, and robberies are up 47 percent.

    The numbers, of course, are alarming, but we know what’s fueling these increases: device thefts. Unsuspecting straphangers are too busy playing Angry Birds to notice their vulnerability. Thus, grab-and-go larcenies become more common. According to officers I’ve spoken with, iPads have quickly become the most popular devices since they’re worth the most, and iPhones are a constant target as well. Even as the subways are significantly safer now than they’ve been in years, we should still remain aware of our surroundings, as one of those endlessly annoying subway announcements makes perfectly clear.

  • Link: ‘The Tao of the C Train’

    McSweeney’s has a fun piece for a Friday afternoon: Kendra Eash presents The Tao of the C Train. It is her ode to the subway replete with this gem: “There is no person who is not clean who has not sat in your seat. No matter which seat you choose, it is unclean. When everyone is unclean, cleanliness ceases to exist.” It ends with an existential question: “Who can continue to calmly ride, when train traffic is ahead?” [McSweeney’s]

  • Samuelsen: Add platform staffers to dangerous stations

    During yesterday’s discussion on subway stations we love to hate, a few readers mentioned narrow platforms as a major concern. At rush hour, some stations simply cannot handle the crowds, and lately, the MTA has dealt with a spate of accidents, some fatal, at 72nd St. and Broadway, an express stop home of a very narrow platform. John Samuelsen has a solution.

    The TWU boss, in an letter to Joe Lhota which The Daily News obtained, calls upon the MTA to bring more employees to oversee platforms at crowded or dangerous stations. The authority has reduced these so-called station conductors from 100 to 40 over the past five years, and they could restore some order. “The platform is so narrow that if a person slips or trips there is a good chance they will be hit by an approaching train or fall onto the tracks,” he wrote.

    Samuelsen might be onto something, but I wonder if he would accept my proposal: Bring aboard more station conductors by changing the job responsibilities of station agents to include platform duty during peak hours. This way, the MTA wouldn’t have to spend money it doesn’t have on staffing levels while at the same time, the authority would be developing a more productive work force. It would be a win for the MTA, a win for passengers and a win for the union as well.

  • Business owners, residents bemoan Smith-9th Sts. delay

    As I mentioned briefly on Friday, the MTA does not anticipate reopening the Smith/9th Sts. station stop until the fall. Originally slated to open this month, the 78-year-old station has been the host of “especially challenging conditions,” according to a Transit spokesman, and its reopening will have to wait. Business owners and residents who are effectively cut out of from their subway stop are not happy, The Daily News reported today, and I don’t blame them.

    “I really might have to close my whole business down because of this,” Abdul Zaokari, the owner of the deli that sits beneath the viaduct, said. “I’ve asked MTA to give me a break since I pay them for my rent, but they don’t listen. And even worse, they don’t realize how many customers used to come here in the morning, for lunch and even for a quick dinner. I’ve lost 80 percent of those customers. I really don’t know how my business can survive until November when they say the subway will be finished.”

    Other shop owners say the crowds that used to accompany the F and G trains at the closet station to parts of Carroll Gardens and Red Hook are completely gone and won’t return for six to eight months. Now, I want the Viaduct to last another 75 years, but at a certain point, it’s understandable when people get upset. It is routine practice for the MTA to say a rehabilitation project will cost a certain amount and go on for a fixed period of time. In the end, the project usually costs more and takes longer than the MTA first promises, and people dependent upon the subway for travel and its crowds for a livelihood are the losers.

    Had Zaokari known the full extent of the outage last year, he could have better prepared for it. Instead he has to weather another six unanticipated months of this storm while Red Hook residents will have to hike to the nearest open stop or continue to rely on one of Brooklyn’s least reliable bus routes. The wait continues.

  • Metro-North set to expand Quiet Calmmute program

    Quiet Calmmute, Metro-North’s punny quiet commute program, is coming soon to a peak-hour train near you. Beginning April 2, all inbound AM and outbound PM peak trains on the Hudson, Harlem & New Haven Lines will feature one quiet car. For AM rains inbound to Grand Central, the last car will be a designated quiet car, and for PM trains outbound from Manhattan, the first car will be the serene one. For those violating the rules, conductors will pass out polite “reminder” cars.

    According to Metro-North’s own surveys, a whopping 83 percent of passengers said they support the quiet cars. “Quiet cars are a hit,” Metro-North President Howard Permut said to LoHud.com. “With very few exceptions, people have quickly adapted to the new etiquette.”

    While the quiet car is a concept that won’t see the light of day in the subway, I am particularly enamored with one aspect of the program. Among the things commuters in the quiet cars must do are: (1) disabling the sound features on electronic devices; and (2) using headphones at a volume that cannot be heard by fellow passengers. These are basic concepts in mass transit etiquette that are, more frequently than not, forgotten by the straphanging public in the subways.

  • Second Ave. Dust Sagas: OSHA finds silica

    The Upper East Side is all aflutter this week on the heels of a report released by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration concerning carcinogen levels underneath Second Ave. As The Post first reported yesterday, OSHA found found higher-than-acceptable levels of silica in the Second Ave. Subway work area, 70 feet beneath street level, and fined three contracts a total of $8500 for “serious” health violations. The full report is available here.

    Of course, with this news, Upper East Siders already complaining of Subway Cough and skeptical of the construction efforts, launched a new round of complaints. “My office is two doors down, and I don’t really trust the people who give out the information in terms of the safety of people who live here,” said Robert Allen said to NBC New York’s Andrew Siff. News cutaways during primetime shows on TV last night highlighted residents expressing similar sentiments.

    The MTA, meanwhile, defended its claims that the air above ground is safe and noted that silica couldn’t be reaching the avenue anyway. “The levels of silica underground noted in these preliminary findings under no circumstance impacts air quality at street level,” Kevin Ortiz, agency spokesman, told The Post. “Silica does not float in the air but rather drops to the ground, so it is essentially impossible for it to impact the air quality at the street level 100 feet above.”

  • Former MTA bus head named DesignLine interim CEO

    So here’s a little bit of intriguing industry news: Joseph Smith, the former Senior Vice President of Buses with Transit, has been named interim CEO of the DesignLine company. Smith stepped down from his MTA post in late 2010 and had been consulting with Cyan Partners, the arranger of DesignLine’s recent debt and equity capital raises. Now, he’ll have the opportunity to right the DesignLine ship on an interim basis.

    To me, this is an intriguing bit because of DesignLine’s tortured history with its delivery of buses and its lack of recent success. DesignLine ran a 2007 pilot in New York City, and although customers gave high marks to the vehicles, Transit eventually determined that the vehicles were not robust enough for New York City. At around the same time, the city of Baltimore issued a similar announcement concerning DesignLine buses, and many in the transit production industry questioned the long-term viability of the company.

    So now Smith will take the reins. He served as the head of MTA Bus, the president of MTA Long Island Bus and most recently as the SVP with Transit overseeing buses. He was well-respected at the MTA and can take his insider perspective to a company that needs the help. A shift like Smith’s from buyer to vendor is not a rare one within the transit industry. It’s a tight-knit community that often can’t shake its “inside baseball” reputation. We’ll see now what future awaits these DesignLine buses.