MTA Absurdity

Following these signs will get a subway rider nowhere. (Photo by flickr user Hello Turkey Toe)

New York City Transit has a sign problem. Every week, countless signs proclaiming various service changes are plastered throughout the system, and they have begun to multiple to such an extent that no one reads them. Worse still are the ones people read but can’t understand. No wonder few can track what’s really happening over the weekend.

Now, generally, the plethora of signs lead to many headaches but few real problems. Maybe we don’t really know which train is going to take us to our destination on Saturday, but with some patience, we’ll get there nonetheless. The problem pops up, though, when the signs simply do not tell us what to do.

Earlier this week, I examined just that problem. Every subway car has an emergency brake, and yet, Transit’s message has been one of caution. In case of emergency, don’t pull the emergency brake. In that piece, I discussed a sign each car has up with instructions about emergencies. The sign — click the image to enlarge — hangs beneath the brake and supposedly tells straphangers what to do in an emergency.

This sign is highly problematic. It purports to be “Emergency Instructions,” but then has some rather odd directives. If there is a fire, do not pull the emergency brake. If there is a medial emergency, do not pull the emergency brake. If the police are needed, do not pull the emergency brake. Three do-not’s and no do’s. Anyone reading this sign could be forgiven for not having a clue what to do. When exactly should someone in trouble pull the emergency brake?

The message from Transit is to pull the brake only when someone is in danger of getting injured by a moving train. If a rider is stuck in the doors as the train begins to pull away or if some passengers spot someone on the track in danger of getting struck by the train, it is perfectly reasonable to pull that emergency break. You wouldn’t know it from the sign.

On an institutional level, the lack of emergency brake preparedness gets to another problem MTA CEO and Chair Jay Walder identified in his 100 Days report on the state of the authority. The MTA has an information problem. As the booklet he produced says, “Information on planned service changes can be overwhelming and extremely difficult to understand.” The same holds true for these emergency instructions.

For the MTA, better communication with customers is vital toward gaining more acceptance as a player in the New York political scene. People do not trust what they cannot understand, and that effort at explanation can start with something as simple as emergency brake instructions or as complicated as a convoluted service change poster. Iin the aftermath of this fall’s D Train murder in which the emergency brake was pulled and riders in one car were trapped with a killer, Transit is currently looking into ways to better present its emergency brake rules. After all, in the event of some emergencies, pull the brake. Good luck for now figuring out which ones.

To pull the emergency brake in a new subway car today requires some thought and some action. While the picture at right shows the pullcord simply dangling at the end of a subway car, today’s emergency brakes are incased in a box so that people don’t accidentally latch onto them as the subway car lurches forward.

But that’s not the only notable part of the emergency brake, that oh-so-tempting way to stop a train car. Rather, as Michael Grynbaum noted yesterday, in case of emergency, subway riders are not supposed to pull the emergency brake. As Grynbaum notes, the cards — often ignored by most riders — that discuss the emergency brake include Rule No. 1: Do not pull the emergency brake. Reminiscent of Fight Club, this makes little sense.

Grynbaum continues:

So what emergency, exactly, does this emergency brake refer to? The explanation, transit officials say, is simple. If someone gets caught between the train’s closing doors, or between subway cars, and is about to be dragged to an unenviable fate, pull the cord. The train will stop, possibly saving a life.

But in case of fire, crime or a sick passenger — in fact, any other situation that could fairly be described as an emergency — the cord should be left alone. Stopping the train between stations will make it harder for help to arrive. The explanation is on the agency’s Web site, albeit accessible only after several clicks.

“We think that it is clear,” said Charles Seaton, a spokesman for New York City Transit.

The Times transit writer goes on to speak to a few straphangers who have no idea when to use the emergency brake, and he highlights last fall’s Murder on the D Train as a prime example. Sensing an emergency, riders in the car where the murder occurred pulled the brake. Some people say that action helped catch the suspected killer while others say it delayed police response to the scene of the crime and trapped innocent bystanders in a car with a killer. Either way, it made sense even if Transit officials urged riders to eschew pulling the cord.

In the end, the problem, as a psychologist explains, is one of messaging. The MTA expects its passengers to read signs that explain the emergency brake when most people just assume that an emergency brake should be used in case of any emergency. In reality, people should pull the brake only when someone is in danger of getting struck or injured by a moving train car, but that changes the concept of the emergency brake to one with which we the straphanging public are not familiar.

And so we’re left right back where we started: In case of most emergencies, please do not pull the emergency brake.

Above: Emergency Break photo courtesy of flickr user adotmanda.

Ah, January. It’s a brisk time of year for New York. The temperatures are hovering in the low 20s, and people ride the trains bundled up in layers of coats and sweaters. Yet, for one group of fun-loving New Yorkers, January is also the time for the No Pants Subway Ride.

For the last eight years, the instant-comedy group Improv Everywhere has hosted the No Pants Subway Ride in New York City, and this afternoon, unsuspecting straphangers will witness the ninth No Pants Ride. Last year, 1200 people dropped trou on the trains, and even more are expected later today.

So here are the details for this year’s event. For the first time in the history of this voyeuristic event, Improv Everywhere will tackle the outer boroughs. Those who wish to participate should meet at the following locations at 3 p.m.:

Astoria: Meet at Hoyt Playground
Downtown Brooklyn: Meet at Prospect Park
Downtown Manhattan: Meet at Foley Square
Queens: Meet at the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Park
strong>Uptown Manhattan: Meet at the Great Hill in Central Park
Williamsburg / Bushwick: Meet at Bushwick Park (AKA Maria Hernandez Park)

The event will culminate in a pants-less gather at Union Square shortly after. At around 4 p.m., the Union Square area should be teeming with too many people wearing only underwear and exiting the subway.

I won’t be participating this year. Two years ago, I joined my one and only No Pants Subway Ride at a time when around 900 other people joined me. At that point, enough New Yorkers didn’t know what was happening for the ride to be a gimmicky and funny and novel. Now, though, at least 1500 people will arrive, and nearly everyone is expecting someone to take his or her pants off this afternoon.

If you’re riding the rails and see it happening, enjoy the absurdity. If you’re participating, good luck. For the rest of us who may just be trying to get from Poitnt A to Point B, well, good luck with that too.

The cops who patrol the subways have been busy these days — or should I say these nights? They haven’t been busy stopping quality-of-life crimes that happen during the crowded rush hour commutes. Rather, they have been busy ticketing passengers late at night for not actually violating MTA regulations and subway rules.

The Post’s Tom Namako and Kirsten Fleming have highlighted the NYPD’s recent late-night ticketing blitz focusing on straphangers who take up more than one seat. It’s an outrageous tale, but it doesn’t fully connect the dots. The cops are giving out tickets for offenses that just aren’t offensive.

The two reporters tracked down two recent victims of the NYPD’s ticketing efforts. Josh Stevens, a student at FIT who was ticketed on back-to-back nights in November, says on the first night, he was stretched out on two seats and on the second, took up two seats when he crossed his legs. The NYPD officer who issued the summons said the increased enforcement was due to a quota.

“After the second time, I asked the officer, ‘Really, what’s going on? Why is this happening?’ ” Stevens said to Namako and Fleming. “And he told me, ‘Recently we’ve been told to write tickets instead of give warnings for this type of thing.’ He said they need to hit quotas.”

Andres Azamora was summonsed for having his legs splayed out in front of him — at 2:30 a.m. on an empty train. “There was no one else in the subway with me,” he said. “They just want to make money.”

Writes Namako and Felming, “MTA rules — which are enforced by the NYPD’s Transit division — say a passenger may not ‘occupy more than one seat’ or ‘place his or her foot on a seat.'” That’s not all these rules say. In fact, while this story makes the NYPD look petty, the real problem though is how the NYPD is blatantly flouting the MTA’s own Rules and Regulations.

Section 1050.7 of the MTA’s Rules of Conduct concern disorderly conduct, and section j involves passengers and the seats to which they are entitled. A passenger shall not “(1) occupy more than one seat on a station, platform or conveyance when to do so would interfere or tend to interfere with the operation of the Authority’s transit system or the comfort of other passengers;” and may not “(2) place his or her foot on a seat on a station, platform or conveyance.”

As the rule makes clear, a foot on a seat is an automatic offense, but passengers may occupy more than one seat if they are not interfering with the comfort of other passengers and the operations of the subway. If Alzamora and Stevens are telling the truth, the cops are ignoring the rules. They’re writing tickets for actions that aren’t violations.

So far this year, police have issued 784 summonses, and that number far surpasses 2008’s 760. Even though the NYPD’s Transit division isn’t run by the MTA, the authority will look guilty by association and will have to deal with another blow to its beleaguered public image. It’s time to reign in this irresponsible behavior. Cops should know the rules, and anyone who receives a ticket for stretching on an empty train at 2:30 a.m. should fight that ticket as hard as they can.

Why are NYPD officers targeting late-night victimless offenses when mid-day harassment and groping incidents go ignored if not to meet a quota? Plenty of people interfere with passenger comfort and space by spreading out when the trains are full. Late-night enforcement though catches people who aren’t violating the MTA’s regulations. If only the police were this vigilant during the day, the ride would be nicer for all.

During the buildup to the near-enactment of the Doomsday budget and the subsequent Albany bailout, supporters for Access-A-Ride were among the most vocal. The MTA had planned to save a significant chunk of change by jacking up fares and cutting some services, but the activists, citing ADA compliance, dominating many of the public fare hike hearings. In the end, Access-A-Ride was left unscathed. Although the service costs the MTA well over $60 per ride, users are charged just the regular subway fare for it, and determinations of eligibility are left up to Transit employees.

With that in mind, is it any wonder that Fox 5 has found some rather shady practices within this paratransit structure? According to an undercover investigation conducted by John Deutzman, abuse of this service is rampant. Deutzman tells the story of an auxiliary police officer who used Access-A-Ride to travel so he could march in a parade. The officer denied the accusation. At another point, they found an Access-A-Ride van idling but empty in Lower Manhattan as the driver took a nap. Supposedly, a scheduling snafu was to blame.

In the end, this story isn’t so shocking as it is an example of the problems with bureaucracy. There is no effective oversight over Access-A-Ride, and powerful lobbying forces work to keep the service as it is. It will cost around $451 million to run paratransit this year. For that much, we should demand more accountability.

On and off for the last few months, I’ve explored the way labor costs are dragging down the MTA’s overall financial outlooked. I’ve examined how rising pension costs will saddle the MTA with more debt and have explored the recent arbitration decision, currently under appeal, that would grant TWU workers an 11 percent raise over the next three years.

Generally, my tone has come across as anti-labor simply because of the costs. While organized labor is generally a net positive, the unions have not been too sympathetic to the MTA’s financially reality. While union leaders will always look out for the rank-and-file, bad economic times for the transit authority will eventually impact its workers as well. Oftentimes, unions lose sight of that reality.

Today, I have another tale of union support contributing to the MTA’s economic woes. As Pete Donohue first reported, the MTA has been ordered to use — and pay — overtime workers to dispatch shuttle buses even though other dispatchers on regular time are available to do this work. This ruling could cost the MTA up to $1 million in increased and unnecessary labor costs. The Daily News transit writer reports:

The arbitrator of a labor-management dispute in Queens recently ruled the [bus] dispatchers’ contract is silent on how weekend bus shuttles can be staffed. So the agency must stick to what it has done for more than 20 years: Fill shuttle posts with workers who volunteer to work more than 40 hours per week for higher pay rates, contract arbitrator George Nicolau said.

Looking for savings, NYC Transit last year began assigning shuttle posts to underutilized workers not assigned regular routes, a move challenged by a dispatchers union.

The “very unfavorable” decision means NYC Transit “literally can have a dispatcher…with no work to do but we cannot assign that dispatcher to shuttle work,” NYC Transit President Howard Roberts recently wrote to MTA board members. “Instead we have to leave that dispatcher idle and bring in another dispatcher on overtime to supervise the shuttle work,” he wrote in the letter obtained by The News.

In the grand scheme of the MTA, the $1 million per year this ruling could cost the agency is small beans. When budget deficits reach into the billions, a meager $1 million hardly makes a dent. But this ruling flies in the face of common sense. If idle workers are available to do this job and if the MTA can avoid paying overtime wages at the same time, why can’t the transit agency make use of those workers?

I don’t want to dislike the unions, and I want to believe they are sympathetic to the needs of the MTA. This story makes for bad press though. Maybe some of the pro-labor union members who read this blog can explain the rationale behind this ruling and the union’s position. For now, I just don’t get it.

The 7th Ave. station on the IND Culver Line would probably pass the MTA’s Eyeball Test. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)

Generally, I try to give those running the MTA and its subdivision the benefit of the doubt. It’s not easy to oversee a 24/7 transit network that includes three different rail divisions, a whole slew of buses, thousands of track miles and hundreds of stations spread out over 12 counties and parts of two states.

Sometimes, though, news comes along that makes me wonder just what is going on inside the upper reaches of 2 Broadway. Take, for instance, the welcome news that Transit is going to ramp up station inspections in the aftermath of the ceiling collapse at 181st St. I’ve been pushing this angle of the story for the last two weeks, and as a daily rider of the subways, I’m comforted to know that Transit will be making a concerted effort to ensure our collective safety.

That’s not the crazy part. The crazy part is how they used to it. Before Aug. 16, Transit inspectors would employ the “Eyeball Test.” To paraphrase a friend of mine, that’s how I generally assess the security of subway ceilings as well. Anyway, Heather Haddon has both the good and absurd of it:

The MTA will conduct tougher station inspections in the wake of last month’s ceiling collapse at the 181st Street stop on the No. 1 train, transit officials said Tuesday. Engineers are beefing up NYC Transit’s protocol for station inspections to include new technology that can “spot potentially serious latent defects,” transit spokesman Charles Seaton said. Officials yesterday did not further elaborate.

Currently, inspectors primarily eyeball a station to determine its soundness. After the ceiling collapse on Aug. 16, relying on visual inspections is “obviously inadequate,” NYC Transit President Howard Roberts stated in internal communication Friday…

Transit advocates are hoping the MTA will start using devices that can detect water damage through sound waves. Water seepage is believed to have played some role in the ceiling collapse, which knocked out service for two weeks.

So just to recap: The MTA has been assessing the structural integrity of its 105-year-old tunnels by eyeballing a station to “determine its soundness.” Stunningly, it took a chunk of ceiling to fall on the tracks for Howard Roberts to realize just how “obviously inadequate” that method is.

Over the last few years, with some solid leaders in place, Transit and the MTA have made strides to improve their public image. The agency’s finances are far more transparent than they used to be, and Roberts has led an era of improved customer relations for Transit. Still, vestiges of the old ways — of secrecy, of lean times, of barely getting by — still seep through the progress. This is one of those times.

As Transit inspectors fan out to look for those “serious latent defects,” I wouldn’t be surprised if the news about structural problems in the subway system picked up over the next few months. It may be enough to attract more money for transit investment, but somehow, the MTA will have to counteract this new story. After all, if the best test those running our trains have involves just looking at ceiling, I have to wonder how any station passed that test and what the MTA is going to find with its more in-depth examinations.