View from Underground

Courtesy is contagious, but it doesn’t start with the guy on the right wearing his backpack on a packed train. (Photo via flickr user Runs With Scissors)

The first hour or so of the Tuesday after Memorial Day is never a fun one. Most folks heading into work or school are feeling the effects, literally or figuratively, of the first three-day weekend in a few months. Trains are crowded; tensions are high; patience is thin. It would be, in other words, a good day for a smooth ride.

Alas, for me, it was not quite to be. My ride into work was a quick one on the Q train, but as it frequently is, the Manhattan-bound trains leaving 7th Ave. in Brooklyn at 8:30 in the morning was packed to the gills. We had enough room in the car to board, and after Atlantic Ave., enough riders got out that we had room to breath as well. Everything was fine except for this one guy who kept bumping into us because he had on a backpack. Even with no room in the car and straphangers jostling for just enough space, this guy carried on, oblivious to the world around him.

An inability to figure out the right approach for a backpack seems to be an epidemic. On my ride home last night, on an much emptier B train, a guy sitting across from me had his backpack splayed across the two empty seats next to him. He might have been willing to move had anyone asked, but New Yorkers tend to avoid those types of subway confrontations like the plague.

I’ve always believed that the proper place for a backpack, especially on a crowded train, is down low. Hold it between your legs; keep at your feet. People take up significantly less space down in the lower extremity areas than they do at the midsection and shoulders. It’s harder to bump people if you’re standing over your backpack, and you allow other riders the space to navigate around you without any of the jockeying for position that takes place while dealing with a backpack to the head or neck. I think of it as common courtesy.

The packpack issue though is just one of many we face on our daily rides. The door-blockers, the panhandlers, the preachers, the breakdancers (who can get violent), the candyhawkers — we deal with it every day. Some are mere annoyances; others are a threat to our space and, potentially, our well-being. My short list doesn’t include the more sinister elements like the gropers and the flashers that women have to confront as well.

A few days ago, I posed this idea to Twitter and I want to present it here: What are the things that annoy you the most about a subway ride? I may put together a little bracket challenge. Do you find yourself getting irrationally angry at people eating on the train or those who insist on pole-hugging? What about those grooming and clipping their nails in a crowded subway car? Pick one; pick ’em all.

It’s the Friday before a long weekend. Let’s just have some fun.

Removable floodwall panels could be put in place to seal off subway tunnels in the event of another big storm.

As New York City works to recover from the lingering impact of Sandy, the headlining news from the MTA on Thursday was largely positive. A train service to the Rockaways will return on May 30, nearly a month ahead of schedule, and the subway system will again be complete. But it’s a superficial completeness as the damage from the storm and its surge will make its presence felt for months and years to come.

In conjunction with the good news about the A train, the MTA yesterday delivered a press briefing with the bad news. I didn’t have a chance to attend the briefing, but Matt Flegenheimer of The Times did. He shares the news:

Inside a crew room at the new South Ferry subway station, once flooded wall to wall with the waters of Hurricane Sandy, transit officials on Thursday offered a sobering progress report on a system that continues to feel the storm’s effects. Emergency repairs have proliferated. Exposure to saltwater accelerated the corrosion for many metallic parts, and reduced the useful life of equipment like cloth cable sheathings. Last month, a pump discharge line in the Canarsie tube, where the L train operates, ruptured under normal loads — residual evidence of the storm’s excessive stress on the system, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

And if a hurricane were to approach the city in the immediate term, the agency’s best option for fortifying stations would most likely be the same: sandbags, plywood, and the hope that water would not find a way through. “It’s sunny outside. it’s warm,” said Thomas F. Prendergast, the authority’s interim executive director and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s nominee to be chairman. “We’re about a month away from the start of another hurricane season.”

The authority said it was devising plans to protect itself against storms as powerful as a Category 2 hurricane, adding that officials would study whether it was possible to protect against Category 3 or Category 4 storms…Mr. Prendergast suggested that aboveground floodwall panels, to be placed over station stairwells or sidewalk vents, were seen as a leading option to protect the system. But he cautioned that these additions were unlikely to arrive for the start of the next hurricane season, leaving the authority with little choice but to rely on sandbags and plywood. “By and large, it worked very effectively,” he said of the low-tech remedies. “But we can do better.”

Even as Prendergast tries to put a positive spin on things, the fact remains that key points in the system — underwater tunnels between the boroughs — remain vulnerable to flooding and seriously damaged. The pump in the Canarsie Tube burst last month, and I’ve heard rumors of long-term saltwater damage in both the Montague St. Tunnel and the Greenpoint Tube that could require extensive repairs and service outages down the road.

In the materials accompanying the briefing, the MTA announced a variety of efforts. In addition to the new Sandy Recovery and Resiliency Division I discussed yesterday, plans include tunnel repair work, pump room and pump capacity augmentation; and flood mitigation and prevention efforts focused around vulnerable stations in Lower Manhattan and car yards in low-lying areas. Still, the challenges are extreme, and the MTA has to prepare for the worst. As the materials detail, for instance, the Montague St. Tunnel would fill with water in 30 minutes if flood levels reached just over five feet, and a Category 2 hurricane could lead to a storm surge of up to 16 feet.

Over the next six months, as hurricane season unfolds, the city’s transit network will remain vulnerable. It’s still recovering from last year’s storm and can ill afford another direct hit. Until these measures are in place, we’ll be relying on sandbags, plywood and some dumb luck while we hold our breaths and hope for the best.

Massimo Vignelli’s signage decision tree highlights how signs should be placed only at decision points and no sooner or later.

New York City Transit’s Graphics Standards Manual, designed by Massimo Vignelli and his team at Unimark International in 1970, stands the test of time as the paragon of sign design in the city’s subways. Over the years, the rout-indicator bullet colors have been unified, and the double letters and confusing QJ and QB designations have been simplified. But absent a switch in letter coloring from black-on-white to white-on-black, Vignelli’s signs have withstood the test of time as the key wayfinding elements underground.

The system doesn’t always work properly. I’ve been critical of the information presented on signs discussing divergent routes. It takes some base level of knowledge, for instance, to understand the way the B and D run after crossing the Manhattan Bridge and what service patterns are like once the B stops running but the D doesn’t stop at DeKalb Ave. Additionally, some of the MTA’s later additions not included in Vignelli’s manual are flat-out ungainly. The signs that shorten platform to “plat” are among the worst around.

Still, Vigenlli’s philosophy survives the test of time because of its simplicity. Whereas his subway map oversimplified New York City and the subway schematic, his signs present information riders need when they need it, not before and not after. To understand how this works, point your favorite web browser over to TheStandardManual.com. A few enterprising designers — all associated with Pentagram Designs — have published high-res photos of each page of The Standards Manual, and it gives the design-obsessed among us a chance to delve into the history of signage. Before Vignelli, it was a mess; after, it’s a unified system of generally clear signage.

My favorite page, almost obvious in its simplicity, concerns the placement of signs within a station. It’s something we take for granted now, but Vignelli’s instructions set the tone. “This diagram,” reads Page 2 of the manual, “explains the sequence of information to the rider. It is a branching system that will lead him to his destination as directly as possible. The basic concept of this branching system is that the subway rider should be given only information at the point of decision. Never before. Never after.”

This sign peeking out from behind a light fixture was not a particularly useful one. It has since been moved. (Photo via Second Ave. Sagas on Instagram)

With that in mind, take a look around your favorite station complex. The sign philosophy is best illustrated by a stroll around Times Square, and I’ve noticed that some signs are superfluous or beyond the decision point. That’s likely a result of years of modifications to the stations and signs that wind up in awkward or useless locations. (A sign hung behind a light at Atlantic Ave. comes to mind. It has been re-hung since I snapped a photo of it eight months ago.)

The rest of the Graphics Standards Manual is worth a perusal as well. Vignelli and Unimark discuss the modular design, the proper amount of information to put on a sign, and the process for deviating from standards. Over the decades, many elements of Transit’s public presentation have changed: The subway map looks radically different today than it did in 1972; we use Metrocards and not tokens; subway cars all feature LED route bullets without the distinctive colors on the front. And yet the signs remain. Idiosyncrasies and all, they must be doing something right.

An air quality monitor tests the conditions at Union Square. (Photo via flickr user wwward0)

It’s not secret that the subway system is not the cleanest spot in New York City. The dirt, grime and garbage is evident on platforms and trackbeds and fills tunnels and even train cars as well. Some people brave the mess to grab a quick bite to eat, but we’re all better off not dwelling too much on the cleanliness, or lack thereof, underground. But what of the air quality?

The odor of the subway is often distinctive and, depending upon location, unique. The 2nd Ave. station smells like the 2nd Ave. station, and a few other underground stations are signature smells. Generally, though, the subways smell like some combination of the unwashed masses mingled with various bodily odors, the scent of food or garbage and often, if we’re lucky, nothing. But that doesn’t mean we’re not breathing in various microbes, metal dust and other assorted things.

It’s hard to believe, but in all of the years of subway operations, scientists haven’t taken a close look at the air down there. A group of scientists out of Colorado have taken it upon themselves to do just that, and they’ve released their findings [pdf]. “The goal of this study,” they said, “was to determine the composition and diversity of microorganisms associated with bioaerosols in a heavily trafficked metropolitan subway environment.”

With that in mind, the paranoid among us may cast a wary eye upon its findings, but the study should assuage those fears. “We encountered no organisms of public health concern,” the researchers noted. But what did they find? In a nutshell: “The microbiology was more or less similar throughout the system and with time, and most similar to outdoor air, consistent with highly efficient air mixing in the system. Identifiable bacterial sequences indicated that the subway aerosol assemblage was composed of a mix of genera and species characteristic of soil, environmental water, and human skin commensal bacteria.” Essentially, we’re breathing in the same things underground as we do above ground.

The study went into more detail:

The subway environment, underground and away from light, might seem remote from our usual environment and potentially occupied by distinct or novel kinds of microorganisms. Rather than unusual however, our survey finds that the microbiota encountered in the NYC subway is fairly mundane, essentially a mix of outdoor air with an overlay of human-associated microorganisms typical of the skin. No significant evidence of pathogens or other organisms of concern was obtained, beyond what might be encountered in any human-occupied indoor setting. Thus, this survey provides the pre-event information necessary for surveillance activities for pathogens that might occur or be introduced into the system. The results also provide pre-event information necessary for interpretation of the microbiological consequences of the recent flooding of the NYC subway system during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

Although subways might be considered confined environments, the similarity of subway air microbiota to that of outside air suggests that the subway air significantly equilibrates with outside air on relatively short timescales. There is little or no local air conditioning in the NYC subway. Instead, air movement in the system is driven by passive train-pumping, with air taken in and exhausted through street-level ports, the NYC sidewalk grillwork. The general uniformity of microbial assemblages throughout the system indicates good air mixing, a testimony to the efficiency of the train-pumping process.

Ultimately, the study provides a baseline for air sampling for security detection. By setting levels now, officials can more easily detect living things in the air that shouldn’t be there and that may pose a risk to humans. To that end, NYPD officials plan to release a colorless, odorless, harmless gas into the subway system later this summer to determine how air flow would spread something dangerous in the event of a terrorist attack. “The subways play a major role in how air moves through Manhattan and the five boroughs,” Paul Kalb, an engineer at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, said. “If you’re in the subways and there’s something released on the surface, you could be vulnerable.”

As that express train rushes by you next time you’re waiting for a local, note the wind, and dwell on what may be in that gust of air. It may not always be such a comforting thought.

Hating on the G train has become something of a New York pastime over the past few years. Even people who have no reason to ride the IND Crosstown deride it as an unreliable train. “The G sucks” is a common refrain, if only because it’s what we’re supposed to say.

Lately, with the Riders Alliance (full disclosure: I’m a board member) pushing for necessary and important G train improvements — a full line review, out-of-system transfers — that could boost ridership, G train derision has made a comeback, and the claims are perfectly outlandish. Apparently, on top of being allegedly unreliable, the G train also breaks up relationship. DNA Info’s Meredith Hoffman has this dispatch from some borough-crossed lovers:

Former Park Slope resident Christie Walsh remembers in detail the night she made a trip to Greenpoint and ended up going home with a guy she’d met at a bar. He became her boyfriend — but after a couple of early treks to his place she learned never to venture there during their six-month relationship.

“I always refused to go there,” said Walsh, 26, who now lives in Sunset Park. “After a couple of punishing rides on the G train I decided I wouldn’t do it… Eventually he moved to California. The funny thing is, I’d date someone in California, because I’d like to go to California. I’d never like to ride the G train.”

Walsh and some other Brooklynites say the G train’s slow and unpredictable service has sabotaged relationships — and some have even sworn off G-train dating altogether. “I had to make a rule that was, literally, if you live off the G you’re not for me,” said Bedford-Stuyvesant resident Mutale Nkonde, 26, who lives off the A and C trains, and said getting anywhere off the G involved a nightmarish array of transfers and usually getting lost. “To get to the G is such a monumental hike, it’s two buses plus a long walk.”

The story is replete with other tales of woe. A couple who splits their time between Clinton Hill and Greenpoint claim the G keeps the pair apart more often than they’d prefer. “He lives 3 miles away and it takes 45 minutes, at a minimum, to get there,” one half of the pair said. “So that takes nearly two hours just to see each other. I’m glad it’s there but it’s still a huge pain.”

Others still bemoan the state of the G line’s infrastructure and the problem with short trains. “The thing about the G is it comes middle of platform so if you’re dressed in high heels you have to run what feels like 7 miles to catch the train,” one woman said. “When you get there it looks ‘Law and Order’-ish.”

I have to wonder though if the G train is to blame or if the city’s Manhattan-centric transit options are the real culprits. The G train isn’t that bad. As long as it’s not short-running to Bedford/Nostrand or suffering some other GO service change, it runs regularly and on schedule. I find it to be one of the more reliable lines in that if I miss a train, I know the next one will come after the allotted headway has elapsed and no sooner. The trains are short, and rush hour rides are crowded. But these complaints focus around night time, off-peak service.

As far as cross-borough (or even cross-neighborhood) coupling goes, I’d rather be stuck with the G train than, say, the R or the C. I find waits for those lines to be interminable and less reliable than the Crosstown local train. Plus, once the G arrives, the trip from one end to the other is reasonably speedy whereas the R and C tend to crawl.

But as silly as these relationship complaints are — a strong relationship with two committed partners should withstand no matter the subway line — the story highlights the problem of intra-borough travel. Some areas of the city just aren’t well connected via subway, and the north Brooklyn-to-south Brooklyn transit options are limited. Cross-Bronx travel and many intra-Queens trips suffer the same fate.

Fixing this problem isn’t easy. We’re not going to see new subway lines provide these connections, and buses carry their own sets of reliability issues. The upcoming CitiBike program will solve a lot of problems, notably those Clinton Hill/Greenpoint rides that would take 20 minutes of pedaling. But otherwise, we’re left with the subway system we have until someone is willing to spend the time, money and political capital on expanding it. As long as the city can provide those last-mile modes of transit though, even the shakiest of relationships shouldn’t have to suffer at the hands of the G train.

The RPA’s Third Regional Plan featured a call for the Triboro RX line that the MTA presented in 2008.

In 1996, the RPA published its Third Regional Plan, and it became the report that launched a thousand fantasy maps. In that massive tome arguing for more transportation investment for the city and region, the RPA set forth the Triboro RX plan. Embraced by then-MTA Executive Director Lee Sander in his 2008 State of the MTA address, this circumferential subway line would utilize preexisting track and right-of-way to connect through outer portions of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. It hasn’t, obviously, come to pass.

The Triboro RX’s existence as a fantasy subway line rather than reality isn’t for lack of trying. The MTA knows the plans are out there, as do transit advocates, amateur cartographers and research institutions. But there’s no political champion, and without a political champion, nothing will happen. The 7 line extension will see the light of day because Mayor Bloomberg lined up financing, and the Second Ave. Subway is well on its way to some sort of completion due to a bond vote and guaranteed money from Chuck Schumer and the feds. No such effort materialized in the aftermath of the Third Regional Plan.

Stil, thinking big and thinking long term are two key elements of sustaining and encouraging growth in New York City. Although the next MTA five-year capital plan is likely to be short on expansion efforts and long on systems maintenance and modernization, New York must keep looking long. Sander hoped to see the Triboro RX realized within 40 years, and it could still happen.

Meanwhile, the RPA announced on Friday a fourth regional plan. With a focus on both the overall economy and climate change and the impact shifting weather patterns and ocean levels will have on the region, the RPA will study “growth and sustainability” in New York. Here’s how the Regional Plan Associate describes this effort:

The Fourth Regional Plan for the greater New York region will examine our most pressing challenges, including climate change, fiscal uncertainty and declining economic opportunity for too many residents of the region. The plan will propose policies and investments to ensure our prosperity and quality of life for the coming decades…

RPA believes that the metropolitan region has reached another critical juncture. On the one hand, we have made tremendous advances in the last 20 years. Instead of fleeing our urban areas, residents and businesses are flocking to city centers. Crime has dropped dramatically throughout the region, and we are making key investments in infrastructure after decades of neglect. Abandoned industrial waterfronts have been turned into thriving parks, and threatened open spaces have been preserved.

Yet there is much that threatens our progress. Despite our efforts to curb pollution, we haven’t done nearly enough to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and address the risk posed by climate change. A growing number of the region’s residents can’t find housing they can afford, and many are struggling under growing financial pressure. Much of our infrastructure is deteriorating, and increasingly we lag behind our global peers in implementing new ideas and technology. Our public institutions, plagued by high levels of debt and outdated structures, often fail to address our most pressing long-term needs.

In praising the effort, Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy hit the nail on the head. “A strong economic future requires us to make smart decisions now – to connect transportation, commerce, and housing with an eye on affordability, sustainability and livability,” he said. Those three factors needs to be more closely integrated in major planning efforts in New York City and in the surrounding region.

We don’t yet know plans and proposals will emerge from the Fourth Regional Plan, but it should be grand. The MTA, by virtue of its budgetary constraints, won’t be thinking grand, and politicians can’t see past their own reelection campaigns these days. Maybe something inspiring will come out of the RPA’s efforts. The challenge after that, though, is realizing this dream. After all, Triboro RX is no closer to reality today than it was 17 years ago.

One of these three diagrams may represent the ideal subway car. Read on to find out which one it is.

Debates and discussions over how New Yorkers choose to ride the subway could fill endless hours of debate and countless volumes of psychological journals. Where do we sit? Why do we decide to sit next to someone, if we do? Why do we choose to stand when seats may be available? And what’s the best way to configure seating in a subway car? Recently, a group of officials at Metro-North and New York City Transit have tried to study the issue with some obvious results and some surprising findings.

As we all know, New York City subway cars feature a wide array of seating choices. The bucket seats on the R68s and the R62s always seem far too narrow for comfort, and the eight-bucket benches on the R62s rarely fill up with eight people. Meanwhile, on the R68s, the forward-facing seats clash with the center-facing seats, leaving little leg room for those sitting in the window seats. On newer rolling stock, the bucket seats have given way to flat benches, but those often do not fill up efficiently either. Meanwhile, the various cars all have poles — or stanchions — in a variety of locations, sometimes in front of the door, sometimes not. There is no uniformity and no right way to go about it.

But learning how New Yorkers opt to sit and stand can help transit planners develop a better subway car. Should subway cars feature more seats and less room to stand — as is in the case with Washington’s Metro — or should the cars have fewer seats and more standing room as is seemingly the case in New York? I prefer the latter as it makes peak-hour rides more tolerable and exiting and entering a crowded car smoother. Still, New Yorkers have their preferences, and those preferences often involve standing in the way of everyone else.

According to the study, available here as a PDF, straphangers strongly prefer not to sit next to anyone, and they’d rather stand than squeeze into a space that may not seem wide enough. Seats next to the doors, with the buffer of a railing on one side and empty space on the other, fill up first, and similarly, on cars with forward-facing seats, the window seats fill up quicker than the aisle seats. That could be attributable to etiquette or the desire to avoid getting bumped by people standing in the empty space between seating benches.

(As a brief aside, my favorite note in the report concerns strategic seat choice: “Customers do change seats as seats become available due to passengers disembarking, but seat change maneuvers incur utility costs (movement effort, and risk of desired seat becoming occupied mid-maneuver); to find desirable seats often requires customers to relinquish their current less-desirable seats in advance of busy stops, and position themselves strategically close to where seat-turnover seem likely.” Strategic seat positioning is my, uh, favorite subway pastime during crowded morning commutes.)

Meanwhile, subway riders are happy to stand if as few as 70 percent of a car’s seats are taken. In fact, seating capacity doesn’t reach 90 percent until the total car load is at 120 percent of its capacity. In other words, some seats will remain empty even as standing room grows scarce. But why?

The answer lies somewhere between habit and design cues. Sometimes, we stand because of space concerns. It’s uncomfortable for three people if I choose to shimmy into a space not quite wide enough for me, but it’s only inconvenient for me if I choose to stand. Perhaps we stand because of the physical stigma attached to too much sitting these days. I often eschew a seat on short-haul subway rides due to the myriad studies alleging the long-term ills of constant sitting. Whatever the case, standing room begins to fill up long before all of the seating space is taken.

Design, though, plays a role as well in the choice between sitting and standing. According to the study, subway riders like to stand exactly where they shouldn’t. That is, straphangers don’t like to hang on those straps; rather, they prefer the so-called “doorway zone.” Why? The report’s authors explain: “Besides having multiple poles, “doorway zone” has other desirable features that attract standees: ease of ingress and egress, partitions to lean against, and avoidance of sometimes-uncomfortable feeling of accidentally making eye contact with seated passengers.” As they write, though, standing in the doorways increases subway dwell times and causes issues with standees blocking passengers who wish to enter or exit the train.

As for the design element, symmetrical subway cars — those with the same door alignment on both sides — encourage more standing in the doorway zone. “Visually, asymmetrical arrangements make car interiors look a little more open, and perhaps more inviting—hence luring passengers away from doors with potential dwell time, loading, and capacity utilization benefits,” the study notes. Which, of course, leads us to the ultimate question: What’s the best design for a subway car?

The recommendations do not unleash the perfect subway car. Such a design is based on a variety of constraints, but the research offer up some guidelines:

1. Avoid symmetrical door layouts.
2. Install stanchions between seating areas, rather than between doors.
3. Where safe to do so, avoid installing poles or partitions in seats adjacent to doors; instead, install them in the middle of bench seats.

Other observations, involving some data from outside of the city, encourage a variety of best practices. These include eschewing center-facing seats as to avoid the aisle/window seat dichotomy; ditch the concept of a middle seat, especially on commuter rail lines; and use a combination of vertical and branching poles to encourage standees to move throughout a car. Anything to avoid subtle cues that lead to standees taking up shop in the doorway would be a welcome development.

Finally, the report concludes with the idea for a perfect subway car. Off-set doors and stanchions toward the middle would better distribute passengers while forward-facing seats at the ends of the car could be used for long-distance riders while bench seats would serve as sitting spots for short-haul trips. As a visual, take a look at choice C in the image atop this post. I don’t think we’ll see that layout come to New York City’s subway cars any time soon, but it’s certainly interesting to delve into the various factors that determine how we board and fill up a subway car.