Category: View from Underground

While you were enjoying a three-day weekend, a drunk 26-year-old from New Jersey decided to take a nap in the crevasse next to a set of active subway tracks early Sunday morning. He awoke when his leg splayed out and an E train drove over it. He survived but will live with one leg. On Monday morning, a man or maybe a woman leaped in front of an oncoming 2 train at Times Square. He or she was DOA in a suicide.

These are but the latest in what seems to many like an uptick in subway/passenger accidents. For the last few weeks, we’ve heard terrifying stories of two incidents involving someone pushing another straphanger into the path of an oncoming train. We heard of someone who fell into the tracks while defecating between subway cars (which, by the way, is something that doesn’t happen too often). We’ve heard of threats of an TWU-requested slowdown, and now we have Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer calling for an MTA Inspector General audit on subway safety. What exactly is going on here?

The answer, you may be surprised to hear, is nothing. At least that’s one rational take on it. As Dana Rubinstein expertly detailed in Capital New York yesterday, subway accidents aren’t on the rise. Rather, the only thing on the rise seems to be the attention we pay to them. Rubinstein writes:

In 2012, 141 people were struck by trains and 55 died. That fatality number was up from in 2011, when 146 people were struck by trains but 47 died. In 2010, 127 people were struck by trains and 51 died. In 2009, 136 people were hit by subway cars, of whom 49 died. The M.T.A.’s data on this only goes back to 2001, but in those years, the high mark for fatalities was set at 55 in 2007, and matched last year.

The number of people hit by trains is essentially holding steady, but the incidents seem to be getting more attention lately, after two particularly ghoulish homicides in December, both of which involved mentally unstable assailants allegedly pushing strangers in front of oncoming trains and to their deaths…

The M.T.A. says that reducing entry speeds would reduce the number of trains that could move through the system by up to 40 percent, which means there would be longer waits for trains, and more crowding on subway platforms, leading to even more collisions between straphangers and subway cars. The authority also suggests that what the union is actually advocating is a work slow-down in disguise.

Whether or not this spate of subway deaths is a problem depends upon one’s perspective. People who witness these accidents say they are horrific, and train operators, in particular, bear the psychological brunt of these collision. The City Council, never one to miss an opportunity to gain media attention, also seems to be in on the action. “Standing by without a plan of action as incident after incident occurs is not an option,” Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca said in a statement. “The MTA needs to bring all the stakeholders to the table and acknowledge that this is a serious problem that demands a coordination solution, and they must tell the public what their plan is.”

But how much should we spend on this problem? A subway slowdown isn’t the answer anywhere else, and it’s not the answer here. Until we start responding to automobile deaths in a similar fashion, it’s hard for a rationalist to see subway deaths as a major problem. But it seems as though the MTA will have to answer to someone, be it the public, the TWU or the City Council.

So we’re left with a problem that isn’t really solvable at a reasonable cost, a union playing politics with people’s lives over a tenuous contract situation and a government oversight body snatching at headlines. Call me cynical, but that seems to be a perfect storm heading toward a bad solution to something that we could consider an intractable problem.

Amidst a rigorous debate on platform edge doors and potentially illegal slowdowns, a pair of incidents forced the Lexington Ave. subway nearly entirely offline during rush hour yesterday evening. Matt Flegenheimer had the gruesome details, and they are gruesome indeed.

After initial reports that a man had been struck and killed by a train after a confrontation on a platform at East 125th Street in Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon, the police said that in fact the man had been killed and another was injured in separate episodes near the station.

The man who was killed had been on a train, defecating between two cars, when he fell on the tracks and was struck by the train, said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman.

In an unrelated episode, Mr. Browne said, a bloodied man with a broken pelvis emerged from the tracks at the 125th Street station just before the fatal accident. Mr. Browne said the man told investigators that he did not know what had happened to him. The Fire Department said the man was in serious but stable condition at Harlem Hospital Center.

No amount of platform edge doors will prevent some riders from defecating between subway cars, but maybe we should reconsider my point on subway restrooms? Or at least take a look at articulated trains?

When it comes to transportation planning, signage is both vital to the way we get around and often simply taken for granted. We are willing to accept sub-par signage, but we’re also willing to argue over what information should be presented on signs and how. While the Vignelli-designed underground signs do a reasonably good enough job informing straphangers of their directions, New York’s parking signs have often led to questions of interpretation that stump even the most veteran of the city’s drivers.

Yesterday, though, New York City officials unveiled a new sign that has been designed to solve that problem. Created by Pentagram Design, the new signs feature a font change and streamlined information. “You shouldn’t need a Ph.D in parking signage to understand where you are allowed to leave your car in New York,” City Council Member Dan Garodnick, a self-professed supporter of syntactic clarity, said. “The days of puzzled parkers trying to make sense of our midtown signs are over. I was pleased to work directly with DOT, removing unnecessary words in these signs, cleaning up their appearance, and the result is a simple, clear product that people will understand.”

According to DOT, Garodnick has been pushing the agency to simplify parking regulation signs for nearly two years, and the new effort features standardized colors, typefaces and font sizes. For the typographically inclined among us, the font Interface takes center stage here. As far as spacing goes, the new signs seem ideal for the Twitter era as DOT has reduced the number of characters used to explain parking regs from 250 to around 140. The signs are also a foot shorter with the day of the regulation preceding the hours. There are no more abbreviations either.

The new signs are going up throughout Manhattan’s paid parking areas in Midtown, and the initial build-out includes 3300 commercial parking signs and 3000 other signs for nighttime and weekend parking, hotel and taxi stands, street cleaning and the always-confusing “no standing” areas. “New York City’s parking signs can sometimes be a five-foot-high totem pole of confusing information,” DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. “Parking signs play an important role in setting the rules at the curbside and these changes will make regulations easier to read and take the stress out of figuring out where and when you can legally park.”

When Superstorm Sandy swept through the New York City area, it left a wide swath of transit destruction in its path. New York City Transit’s subway tunnels connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens were flooded out while some parts of the system suffered further destruction. New Jersey Transit rather foolishly left its rolling stock in vulnerable areas. The Port Authority’s PATH trains still aren’t operating 24-7. It was the closest to a transit armageddon the region had seen in over a decade.

In the aftermath of the storm, Gov. Andrew Cuomo commissioned a few panels to ascertain the region’s next steps, and one of them — NYS2100 — released its preliminary report this week. We can’t wait until 2100 to implement these suggestions, and they’re worth assessing now. None of the panel’s transportation suggestions are all that groundbreaking, but with a state-commissioned body putting forward these ideas, hopefully acting and, more importantly, funding can come sooner rather than later.

NYS2100 featured some transit luminaries, including current RPA head Robert Yaro and former MTA chief Joe Lhota, and their suggestions seem to reflect such influence. At a high level, the panel has recommended a rapid CBTC implementation, action on the Gateway Tunnel and Metro-North Access plans and a faster and broader bus rapid transit network for the city. On a more philosophical level, the panel has urged the city to reconsider its transportation priorities.

“Even now,” the report says, “the state’s transportation network is being stressed to the limits of its capacity. For this reason, the recommendations in this chapter — building redundancies that enhance the overall transportation network — focus strongly on ways that enhance the resilience of the New York of tomorrow. The infrastructure we invest in today will serve generations of New Yorkers.”

First up is the subway system’s signaling. The panel suggests a rapid CBTC implementation because of the flexibility and increased capacity such a system provides. How this ties into a response from a major storm is a good guess. As far as I can see, CBTC would allow any non-flooded routes to run more trains. Otherwise, it’s an upgrade that shouldn’t require a massive weather event to see the light of day.

Next up comes the recommendation making headlines: The NYS2100 panel urges a crazy bus rapid transit network. “A world class BRT network would enhance the resilience and redundancy of the overall transit system by expanding and supplementing surface transit options,” the draft report says. SBS, says the panel, could be a foundation for a true bus rapid transit network, but all I see is the potential for four or five years of endless public studies with no actual progress made. Let’s reform the process before things get out of hand.

Furthermore, the panel urges New York to push forward on both Amtrak’s Gateway Tunnel and the Penn Station Access project. The former requires a significant federal contribution and the latter the completion of the East Side Access project. Neither are expected to be ready before 2019 at the earliest. Looking to the future, the report also calls upon the state to “encourage alternate modes of transportation.” It is truly compelling language.

In terms of proactive protection, the NYS2100 panel put forward some recommendations that don’t need nearly as much snark as their forward-looking affirmations of projects currently in progress. The report urges the MTA to retrofit subway stations with waterproof roll-down doors; install below-grade vent closures to seal ventilation shafts; and to use inflatable plugs to seal tunnels. Of those three recommendations, the third is most controversial. It’s likely easier to recover from a tunnel flood than it is, as South Ferry has shown, from a station flood, and we should figure out a way to deliver more floodwater into the tunnels while better draining that piece of the infrastructure puzzle. I can’t argue with the doors and vent closures though as keeping water out in the first place should become a priority.

So what do we make of this panel and its suggestions? As my tone may indicate, I’m not too impressed. Most of these projects are in progress, and they hardly solve major problems. They don’t represent a major expansion of the rail network — with a corresponding decrease in car travel — and they seem to respond to problems we witnessed two months ago. They don’t address potential future problems different storms or steadily rising sea levels may pose to the city and its transportation network, and they don’t address funding sources. None of these ideas, obviously, are cheap.

In the end, we’re left at the beginning: With ideas that have long been discussed and no way to pay for the necessary upgrades. This is but a draft report. Hopefully, the final version can deliver on specifics, but I’m not too optimistic. Without the dollars and a funding source, the waters will rise, and the floods will come.

A few years ago, I had the admittedly terrible idea of documenting the New York City subway system’s public restrooms. I thought I would maybe make a day of checking out the bathrooms, snapping some photographs and writing up a witty overview of what I would find. Eventually, amNew York beat me to it, and I’m glad they did. I’ve used a subway restroom only once in my life (8th Ave./42nd St.), and it wasn’t a terrible experience. It was just one I’d rather not repeat.

Now and then, though, my curiosity still gets the best of me, and if I’m walking past a subway bathroom, I’m often tempted to duck in. Usually, though, I can’t. Despite signs promising open hours of 5 a.m. to midnight, I’ve found subway restrooms locked more often than not. Those on the mezzanine at West 4th St. are never open, and only once or twice have I seen straphangers duck into the bathrooms off the passageway between the Atlantic Ave. and Pacific St. sides of that complex. I can’t imagine what the ones on the F platform at Delancey St. look like, but those too are often locked.

This past week, Eric Jaffe at The Atlantic Cities tackled a different element of the Great Subway Bathroom Conundrum. Why, he asked, are America’s public transit systems generally without restrooms? By and large, cost seems to be the dominant factor as transit agencies that have restrooms have shut them because no one wants to pay to keep them clean. New York seems to be the exception. Jaffe writes:

Back in 1940, with Fiorello LaGuardia running the city, there were 1,676 functioning toilets in subway stations throughout the system — and all of them received weekly inspections. That figure has since dwindled significantly. Most reports now believe that 77 stations citywide have working public bathrooms (28 in Manhattan), mostly at major transfers or at the end of the line. A survey of the Manhattan facilities conducted by New York magazine in 2006 found most of them either impossible to locate or closed for “construction.” (The rest were just gross.) A citywide survey, done by AM New York in 2010, found that 60 of the 129 total restrooms were locked or being used for another purpose, such as storage. (The rest were still pretty gross.) The MTA cited “criminal activity” as the main reason for the closures.

So there you have it: We don’t have restrooms underground because of the unscrupulous activities they seem to foster. That doesn’t stop many people from simply using the subway system itself as a restroom, and therein lies the problem.

As word of ZipCar’s impending $500 million merger with the Avis Budget Group spread throughout the Internet on Wednesday morning, few knew what to make of the deal. Mike Lydon, Principal of The Street Plans Collaborative, wondered why more urbanists weren’t discussing the deal, and I spent a lot of the day wondering why so many Zipcar users were upset by the pending merger. If anything, the deal should help ZipCar, and for city-dwellers living their lives without owning cars, that’s a positive.

I’ve been a Zipcar member for two and a half years now. It is, as my girlfriend called it yesterday, a necessary evil. We don’t own a car for various reasons: We have access to my parents’ car for long trips; it’s expensive to own, register, insure, maintain and park in Brooklyn; and we just flat-out do not need one regularly. We go months without a car with no problems, and when we do need our own vehicle, we can use ZipCar. Among our cohorts, this model is becoming standard, and car ownership rates are dropping precipitously, especially in cities.

Yet, despite the need and convenience of Zipcar my 30 months as a member have brought nearly as many problems as smooth rentals. I’ve had cars with expired registrations, cars with physical damage, cars with dirty interiors, cars with no gas and cars with broken headlights. The kicker came when the battery in the ZipCar we had rented for my grandmother’s funeral earlier this fall died during the ceremony, stranding us in the rain in Yonkers for 90 minutes and then fighting with us on the phone over refunding the ride for another 20 minutes the next day.

So when Avis and Zipcar announced the deal, I figured it would be a win-win. Zipcar gets some financial backing and access to more car stock and a better distribution network while Avis gets streamlined rental technology and a rising brand. As Ronald Nelson, Avis’ CEO, said in a statement, “We see car sharing as highly complementary to traditional car rental, with rapid growth potential and representing a scalable opportunity for us as a combined company. We expect to apply Avis Budget’s experience and efficiencies of fleet management with Zipcar’s proven, customer-friendly technology to accelerate the growth of the Zipcar brand and to provide more options for Zipsters in more places. We also expect to leverage Zipcar’s technology to expand mobility solutions under the Avis and Budget brands.”

In other words, procurement, operations, maintenance and, most importantly, weekend availability will improve. Yet, so many Zipcar riders expressed concern, and when I asked my Twitter followers why they felt that way, I received a diverse range of answers. Some people have had bad experiences with Avis while others have pointed out that Zipcar’s marketing has been very effective in creating brand loyalty. As one long-time SAS reader said, the response seems to be a “reflexive dislike of a very corporate-feeling entity taking over a ‘fun,’ quirky-feeling one” which can “feel like losing a friend.” As Felix Salmon wrote, “People actually like Zipcar, which is more than can be said for any of the big rental companies.”

On a more practical level, Zipcar is easy. It’s a website with a very graphical interface that makes renting a car as simple as a few mouse clicks. On the other hand, while I’ve had good experiences with Budget, an Avis subsidiary, renting from them is never easy. Drivers never really know exactly what kind of car will be handed to them in the lot; website prices never reflect the actual total; and car rental agents try to upsell everyone. It’s not a particularly clean business, and it’s one that leads to a lot of user frustration and distrust. For those of us who would prefer to see cities with fewer car owners and more car sharing, the prospects of a rental car company taking over Zipcar should be worrying, if not alarming.

Yet, I find myself seeing the good in this deal. Maybe it stems from my overall annoyance at Zipcar and my slate of negative experiences. Maybe it stems from the hope that the car rental company will integrate Zipcar’s back-end platform and offer up its technical expertise, as they claim they will. Either way, this deal could be a game-changer for car-sharing or it could be the beginning of the end for Zipcar. Here’s to hoping for the former.

As 2013 dawns, the MTA is once again engaged in a search for a new chief executive. Joe Lhota left his post after the day ended on Tuesday to explore a run for mayor, and with Thomas Prendergast taking the reins as interim Executive Director, Gov. Andrew Cuomo will have another opportunity to appoint an MTA CEO and Chairman. Whomever he finds will be the seventh such person to hold the job since 2006.

Amidst austerity budgeting, internal cuts and turnover at the top, stability has long been lacking at the MTA. It’s led to a significant amount of brain drain at HQ as non-union workers haven’t seen a salary increase in nearly four years while budgets have been slashed significantly. It also leads to no long-term focus as no signal MTA head has stayed or been kept around long enough to implement a new plan. Technology projects — such as the MetroCard replacement effort — tend to founder and only a concerted push by other institutional officials have kept capital projects on track.

With a renewed focus on platform screen doors following a second subway shoving death in December, that instability has taken center stage in the debate. The Daily News had a bit on the on-again/off-again effort to move forward with platform screens, and one easy conclusion to draw from the reporting is that the MTA needs stability. Pete Donohue and Stephen Rex Brown have the details:

The head of the company that wanted to install safety doors on subway platforms in 2007 blasted the transit authority this week for not making the system a priority. “It’s ridiculous,” Michael Santora, the president of Crown Infrastructure, said, citing the shove murder of Sunando Sen in Queens. “The plan went nowhere — really just dead ends.”

Crown Infrastructure offered the MTA a seeming win-win: The company would build the sliding doors on platforms, providing a new level of safety for riders, plus a reduction in track fires and noise. In exchange, Crown would keep all the revenue from advertising on the high-tech portals. But the idea never left the station, derailed by a perfect storm of big agency hassles, Santora said.

The MTA was in the midst of intense turnover. Since 2007, there have been four chairmen. In addition, the project’s main champion, MTA Capital Construction President Mysore Nagaraja, left in 2008. “He was passionate about it. He was the only one there in a position of authority that was really excited about it,” said Santora.

According to Santora, a litany of other problems stood in the way: MTA officials were worried that non-automated doors would give the union leverage as train conductors would have to press a second button to activate them. Additionally, the agency hesitated to fork over ad revenue even though Crown would have installed the doors for free.

MTA officials, past and present, defended the agency’s decision to avoid moving forward with the plan. Prendergast said Transit wasn’t satisfied with Crown’s initial plan to run a pilot in random stations, and one-time agency said Lawrence Reuter said platform doors were discarded on new capital projects over cost and maintenance concerns. It’s a veritable he said/he said of excuses that winds up in the news every time there’s a fatal track accident.

Meanwhile, the city’s politicians aren’t helping. Some of them have been responsible for the instability, as in the case of Lee Sander’s dismissal from the MTA, and others use these accidents for grandstanding that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Take, for instance, this response from State Senator Jose Peralta and City Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer. Peralta has called upon the MTA to instituted “common-sense measures to improve rider safety and security.”

Whenever someone from Albany mentions a “common-sense solution,” you know it’s going to be a good one, and this one does not disappoint. They want, according to Fox 5, “a swift evaluation and accelerated implementation of the Help Point Intercom system” and “security cameras at more stations.” I see where Peralta and Van Bramer are coming from, but their solutions show a fundamental lack of understanding. Setting aside how the Help Point system is a complete boondoggle, when someone is in the tracks with a train bearing down on them, there’s no time to use a Help Point Intercom, and security cameras would help only after the fact. Prevention would start with screen doors, and the two representatives could help on that front by ensuring MTA financing and stability.

Over the years, we’ve seen politicians who control purse strings attempt to urge the MTA to turn backflips without offering up the funding for it. This is no different. If we’re going to be serious about platform safety — although whether it’s actually a serious problem is an unanswered question itself — the MTA needs stable leadership to see a project through and a realistic assessment of funding needs. Until then, no amount of public posturing will help.

Check out this video released by the Transit Museum a few weeks ago. It’s a compilation of TV commercials the MTA ran in 1989 promoting its progress. At the time, the MTA was just six years into its capital program with a focus on “State of Good Repair,” and the authority wanted to tout its progress.

What’s fascinating to me is how similar the complaints are. The system has come a very long way over the last 23 years. We have new rolling stock and better technology, but when the lady in the first 30 seconds says things could be cleaner and communication could be better, especially when something isn’t working, I found myself nodding along in agreement. Anyway, it’s a neat little trip back in time, if only for the fashion, hair styles and clips of late 1980s subway cars.