MTA Absurdity

During the morning panic as yesterday’s subway deluge set in, the tracks weren’t the only part of the MTA flooded. Its Website was overwhelmed with visitors — 44 million of them in a few hours, according to some sources — and the system just couldn’t handle the pressure.

With this outage, bloggers and reporters across New York are noting something I noticed in July when their site went down during the East Side power outage. Similarly, Todd has long railed against the oft-down MTA Website on his own site and in the comments section of mine.

Now, with another big rain storm on the horizon, the MTA is readying its system both online and off. This afternoon, MTA CEO Elliot “Lee” Sander spoke about the emergency plans in place for Friday.

“We will be strategically placing pumps throughout the system at potentially flood-prone locations, strategically placing management and customer personnel at key stations throughout the system to help our customers navigate in case of service disruptions,” he said. “We’ll be adding additional support personnel — such as signal ventilation and drainage maintainers — so that we can immediately address any situations that may arise.”

This all sounds great for those tracks such as the ones underneath Queens Boulevard that are prone to flooding, but what of the glorious Internets? In a post noting how hard it is to navigate the MTA’s Website (something I’ve long since chalked up to the ills of bureaucracy), Chan found some folks at the MTA willing to talk about the site:

On Wednesday, the authority’s Web site recorded 44 million hits…according to Wael Hibri, the authority’s chief information officer. But an untold number of riders were unable to reach the site because the authority was using an old firewall. Mr. Hibri said the authority had scheduled an upgrade of the firewall; the upgrade is to occur this weekend.

Mr. Hibri said the authority had more than enough server capacity to handle the demand. It was the old firewall, he said, that hindered many people from entering the site.

The M.T.A.’s Web site is one of the busiest in the country, [an MTA Executive Director Christopher P.] Boylan said…During the height of the transit chaos on Wednesday morning, Mr. Hibri said, the site got 3.8 million hits. By comparison, the authority got about 2 million hits an hour during a brief power failure in parts of Manhattan and the Bronx on June 27.

So while Sander has men in the tracks ready to pump out the subway, Hibri is relying on the old wing-and-a-prayer method. After all, the same firewall in place on Wednesday won’t be upgraded until this weekend at the earliest.

Friday is bound to be another taxing day for the MTA’s site. As soon as the first drops fall, people at their desks across the city will flock to MTA.info expecting the worst for the subway systems after Wednesday’s debacle. It sounds like that old firewall might once again stifle traffic.

We’ll find out later if millions of New Yorkers trying to will their way to an easy start to their weekends once again overwhelms the MTA. Good luck to them.

Meanwhile, if the MTA’s firewall blocks you out, I’ll have all of the service alerts, and I’ll be updating them as often as possible. So check back early and often when the rains fall. Or just chead on over to Chris’ site. He has all the MTA alerts you’ll ever need.

The Mayor uses this car to drive to the subway. Lazy. (Photo: Robert Stolarik for The New York Times)

Oh, The New York Times, what have you started?

This morning, splashed across the front page of The Times – but thankfully, below the fold – appeared this scandalous story. Apparently, Mayor Bloomberg, long known as the billionaire Mayor who rides the subway to work with the common folk, hasn’t been totally honest with us. Much like you and I do, he has his drivers chauffeur him to the nearest (sort of) uncrowded express stop.

Bloomberg boards one of his two woefully fuel-inefficient Chevrolet Suburban SUVs at his house on 79th St. between 5th and Madison Aves. The cars head east on 79th and turn right on Lexington, just seven blocks south of the nearest express stop, where they pass not one but two local stops en route to the 59th St. stop. Personally, I prefer to take my converted Chieftan battle tank limo to the subway each morning, but to each his own.

This story came about after The Times received a tip that Bloomberg’s commute isn’t what it seems. They stuck a summer intern outside of Bloomberg’s apartment and had him shadow the Mayor to City Hall for a month, according to the intrepid reporter’s post on Cityroom.

The reaction, as you can imagine, was typical Public Outrage. People commenting on both Streetsblog and Cityroom accused the Mayor of hypocrisy. Others defending Bloomberg, and I must say that it’s hard to overlook his commitment toward boosting public transportation in the city even if he can’t deign to ride the local at the overcrowded 77th St. stop like the rest of us. (The Gawker comments were typically Gawker-ish.)

Now, I was prepared to let this slide. Maybe the security measures around him demand that he take a police escort to the subway. And as I said, he has been the best mayor in terms of securing funds for public transportation and expanding the system’s reach that we’ve seen in decades. So he likes to take a little more comfortable ride. Deep down, we all would.

But then his chief spokesman Stu Loeser (pronounced, as far as I’m concerned, as “loser”) opened his big mouth. Take it away, Cityroom:

Speaking to Mr. Loeser afterward, one reporter asked whether the mayor was taking the subway “for show.”

“No, he takes the subway virtually every day,” Mr. Loeser said, “because it’s the fastest way to get from Point A to Point B. He says this every day.”

Mr. Loeser added: “Almost every day, he says, um, you know, do you like taking the subway? Nobody likes taking the subway. If you like taking the subway you should see a psychiatrist, get your head examined, go to see a shrink. The mayor takes the subway from various places and various times because it’s the fastest way to get around.”

This means war. War on Mr. Loeser. War on our fake commuter mayor. Many of us take the subways, and we are perfectly sane. Sure, we may complain about them. Sure, they may be crowded during rush hour or slow during the weekends. But we love our subways.

We love our subways because they are New York. Non-stop, twenty-four service keeps this city alive. We’re the City That Never Sleeps because the subways take us where we want to go whenever we want to go there.

The subways are also New York’s greatest melting pot. The Mayor, a man worth around $5 billion, rides the train with people who live in the far reaches of the Bronx who could never dream of affording a car to deliver them to their low-paying civil service jobs at 1 Centre St.

Ride the subways through Brooklyn, and you can go from Coney Island to Little Russia to Chinatown. You can see Hasidic Jews reading the Torah in Hebrew and Polish immigrants reading foreign-language papers.

Maybe you, Mr. Loeser, need to see a shrink. Maybe you’re the one who needs to learn how to love and appreciate the subway. It might be good for you to travel with the rest of us.

So while Norman Seabrook’s plan to Disney-fy the subways took the headlines this morning, another story made the rounds. As numerous news outlets noted, a recent survey revealed that two-thirds of subway riders claim to be victims of sexual harassment while riding the rails.

The Daily News summarizes:

Two-thirds of people responding to an online survey say they have been sexually harassed on the subway, but only 4% reported the incident to authorities.

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who conducted the study over the past month, said yesterday more has to be done to reduce the rate of sex harassment.

“There’s this credo in New York that what happens underground, stays underground,” Stringer said. “You should not have to take a staircase out of a subway after having been harassed or assaulted, and feel that no one was there to help you underground.”

Now, that sounds pretty bad, right? 1800 people surveyed; 1200 harassed. Those are hardly good numbers. Meanwhile, Sewell Chan at CityRoom has more on the survey. He writes: “One-tenth said they had been sexually assaulted and more than two-thirds percent said they had ‘felt the threat of sexual assault or harassment’ in the subways. More than 9 in 10 of the respondents who reported they had been harassed or witnessed harassment said they never told the M.T.A. or the police.”

But, without lessening the impact of these incidents, something funny happens when you look beyond the numbers. This survey, conducted by the Manhattan borough president, was e-mailed to over 20,000 people. Those who responded were the men and women who wanted their voices heard on this issue. They were the ones who were the victims of harassment; they were the ones who want to see something happened.

My initial reaction to this survey was “no way.” No way are two-thirds of all subway riders victims even if that’s how the articles in the papers portray this very unscientific story.

That’s not to say sexual crimes in the subway doesn’t exist. They do, and it’s important to remain vigilant on trains. But 66 percent of riders? No way. This is a fine example of the media overplaying a high number from a poor survey to report a story that isn’t really as important as we are lead to believe.

Hands reach up the poles in a crowded subway car. (Photo by flickr user eszter)

Did you know that the subways are crowded? Because that’s what the MTA announced yesterday.

According to the MTA, ridership in the New York City subway system is at a 54-year high. In May, 138 million straphangers paid for the privilege of riding the subways. That’s an average of 4.45 million riders per day. WNYC has more:

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority says weekday subway ridership is up 4.5% from the same time last year and the number of people taking the subway on the weekends has jumped up over 6%.

So there you have it; conclusive proof that the subways are more crowded today than they have been since the Dodgers and Giants both played in New York. Now, you and I know that because we ride the trains each day and go through the joys of finding space, never mind a seat, just to make our 20-minute commute.

Now that the MTA knows that, will they do something about it? How about more frequent service on crowded lines? How about express service on unused express tracks in Brooklyn? How about a few new subway lines? Ridership is only going to go up from here as the city grows. Hopefully, our subway service will grow to meet (and dare I say surpass?) this demand.

On my way to JFK Airport via the IND lines this morning, I spotted the sign above at Nostrand Ave. on the A platform. The JFK AirTrain has been up and running since December of 2003. Anyone wanna bet that the signs at the much more heavily-trafficked Columbus Circle stop were changed well before three and a half years of no shuttle bus service had elapsed?