Asides

As New York City digs itself out from yet another monster snow storm, the city’s public transit system held up admirably well. Although a few bus routes are delayed, trains are running, and service ceased above ground only for a few routes. That doesn’t mean there weren’t a handful of problems though. So let’s run down a pair of them.

Approximately 100 passengers commandeered an N train at 2 a.m. and remained on it at Stillwell Ave. for four hours until the N moved again. Apparently, the train operators didn’t do a very good job communicating the snow changes to customers on the train, and as the service patterns altered with the snow drifts, the MTA eventually decided to take the train out of service. “Of course, there was a strong probability that the train would not make the run easily and what we did not want to do is strand these customers on a stalled train between stations,” MTA spokesman Charles Seaton said. Eventually, the passengers convinced MTA employees and police officers to let them stay in the heated train, and they had shelter for the night.

The MTA’s website suffered a snow outage as well. For a few hours after dawn on Thursday morning, the site was sluggish or inaccessible as over 500,000 people tried to log on. That number is a testament to the way the MTA has redeveloped its website, and it’s more than double the authority’s usual traffic during weather emergencies. The MTA, though, acknowledged a need to keep the site running during such times and said it has plans to increase bandwidth capacity. “The website has come under extreme usage,” Jay Wadler said to The Observer. “We have been progressively reducing the amount of graphic content on there to keep it up. But to put this in some context, the early indications are that the website received twice as many hits as it did during the blizzard. It really is a question of expanding the pipe and that’s what we have to figure out how to do.”