View from Underground

Franklin Street on the 1 train on a particularly busy day. (Photo by flickr user NYCUrbanScape)

Dotted throughout the subway system are a series of shuttered subway stations that pop up now and then as ghosts. They are reminders of an era when subways were shorter and stations even more plentiful than they are today. Many people don’t know these stations exist, and as trains fly past 91st St. and Broadway or Park Ave. and 18th St., astute straphangers can espy glimpses of a past when the city closed subway stations.

Today, we are set in our ways with 468 subway stations, and in a few years, we’ll see that total creep up by four to 472. Closing a subway station, even temporarily or overnight, is pretty much a non-starter as community groups and politicians who otherwise look down on public transit or ignore its needs entirely throw a fuss whenever the MTA threatens service. Still, it’s probably possible to argue that, in some spots, we have too many subway stations.

Yesterday, in the comments to my post on the city’s ever-growing wishlist for transit maintenance prioritization and improvements, a few SAS regulars and I got to talking about station closures. The challenge: Identify 25 stations to close that would cause minimal disruption to those who rely on transit. Challenge accepted.

In essence, it’s a thought piece. With staffing levels on the decline, shuttering 25 stations wouldn’t make much of a dent where it counts in the MTA’s budget. Sure, the MTA wouldn’t have to rehab these stations every three or four decades or paint and clean them more regularly. But the jobs saved would add up to maybe a few million dollars while a lot of people would be both upset and angry at the MTA for failing to provide an adequate level of service.

Still, thought pieces can be fun, and as I toyed with the idea, a few obvious stations came to mind, many of them along the same few routes. First, Rector St. and Franklin St. on the 1 are ripe for closures. Neither provide transfers to other lines, and entrances to both are around 0.3 miles away from the next closet station. A five- or six-minute walk is hardly a major disruption. With fewer than 6000 riders per day, Franlkin is the 240th most popular stop in the system.

Other 1 train stops were prime culprits as well. Up in northern Manhattan, barely 2000 riders per day use 215th St., and 18th St., a relatively popular station, is not even a quarter of a mile away from 14th St. In Brooklyn, Cortelyou Road and Beverly Road are 0.2 miles away from each other, and in Queens, 21st St. on the G averages 1123 riders per weekday. While those folks would argue for their stations, it’s easy to see a rational argument against keeping these stops open. Subway rides would be faster, and expenditures on stations less.

Of course, we can’t just cut willy nilly. We can’t leave neighborhoods without subway stations, and we can’t discourage system-wide use. We need to maintain regular service while allowing for it to be fast, reliable and comprehensive at the same time. So here’s my own challenge should you choose to accept it: Help me develop those criteria for assessing stations. I’ve looked at exit coordinates, distance to the next nearest subway and ridership as potential indicators of a station’s value. What do you think? I’ll develop a full list with some explanations on the stations we pick for a post early next week.

Earlier this week, I featured a piece I wrote a few years ago about brining air conditioning to the subway. It was not easy, unsurprisingly, for New York City Transit to usher in something like air conditioning, and the subways were even worse in the summer 30 years ago than they were today. In fact, a 1983 study found that just 50 percent of buses and 33 percent of subway cars were air conditioned. Considering how we respond to un-air conditioned subways today, it’s hard to believe New Yorkers suffered through such brutal summers barely 30 years ago.

In the comments to that post, SAS regular Phantom said something I’ve often thought over the years. “The subways,” he said, “are off the charts better than they were in the past. We forget that sometimes.” As we fight for better transit planning, more political support and sounder financial investments, we certainly do forget that. We forget what it was like to ride around in graffiti-covered cars that were un-air conditioned, poorly lit and prone to breakdowns. We forget what it was like to avoid subway stations over concerns for personal security or only ride during certain hours. We forget how far we’ve come over the last three decades.

Now and the, while researching a post on subway history, I come across glimpses of the subway past. I wasn’t alive when things were really bad in the 1970s and my memory of the 1980s is sparse. By the time I was old enough to ride the subways alone, the system was on the upswing with better rolling stock, safer environments and stations undergoing renovations. I remember the days of rampant graffiti, and I remember all that graffiti vanishing. I pin I have from a late-1980s street fair proclaims a new “Wipe out graffit” campaign, and it was successful.

But while graffiti became a visible symbol of the system’s decay, the state of the subways went well beyond vandalism. Track fires, such as one from September of 1979 that shut down the West Side IRT for three hours, were common occurrences. This one led to the evacuation of thousands of passengers as subway service from Manhattan to the Bronx shut down, and it was hardly an isolated event. From the DeKalb Ave. bottleneck to the Bronx and Queens, the system suffered from minor delays all the time. It was just a fact of travel.

Meanwhile, the rolling stock was in a terrible state. We look back in wonder at a time without air conditioning, but the train sets from the late 1970s and early 1980s were old. Cars broke down regularly; doors wouldn’t open; lights weren’t on. Stainless steel with FIND displays these cars were not.

By the standards of 35 years ago, today’s subway system is downright luxurious. Stations are in much better state; the rolling stock is mostly newer; switches and signals have been upgraded; technology has made its way underground. Today, minor delays as treated as major inconveniences, and four decades ago, those delays would have been just another part of the daily ride. No matter how much better we want subway service to be, it’s hard to deny the progress the city has made since the state began investing more in transit.

So where do we go from here? One of the reasons why I’ve called for more investment is because we can’t relive that era. The subways and buses were losing 5-10 percent of their ridership annually due to the state of the system and the state of the city’s economy. Right now, though, the subways power New York City, and the powers that be must ensure that it can continue to do so for another 110 years. We have to remember the past or else we may be doomed to repeat it. No one wants to relive that subway experience again.

An appealingly empty staircase awaits a crush of commuters. (Photo by flickr user Thomas Hawk)

Whenever I visit Washington, D.C., or London, I’m always struck by behavior on those two cities’ subway systems. Due to the deep depths of the stations, Riders exiting Metro or the Tubes often do so on escalators, and Washingtonians and Londoners seem to grasp that the right is for standing while the left is for walking. Those unfortunate souls who do not pick up on this fact often find themselves chided by those who wish to pass.

On staircases in those cities, behavior is respectful as well. People manage to stay to the right on two-way stairwells, and everyone gets along fine. There are seemingly fewer incidents of stair rage as harried subway riders don’t have to push through the streaming crowd to get to their trains. In New York, though, staircases are anything but organized.

On a daily basis, I travel through the Times Square subway station, and it is, for lack of a better word, a mess. The stairs leading up from the IRT platforms have no order, and straphangers stop at the top to get their bearings. A recently-arrived Shuttle means wave after wave of people assaulting the staircase, and fighting through that crowd can be nigh impossible. To reach the street, some people walk up the right and others the left while those hoping to descend are left waiting, impatiently tapping their feet at the odd behavior.

Today, New York 1’s Tina Redwine tackle the staircase problem. “How many people have raced for the train and missed it because a wall of riders coming up the subway stairs blocks them from getting down?” she asks. “The answer is most.”

New Yorkers drive on the right, walk down the street on the right and the MTA encourages them to keep to the right when walking up or down subway stairs. And many riders seem to want to oblige. But the temptation of saving a few seconds can be too great. Someone dashes to the left and the crowds often follow. “It is like a stampede of animals going up and down the stairs. It is very dangerous, people are very rude. We just need some type of organization,” says a rider.

Some riders want the MTA to hire staff to enforce the common courtesy of staying to the right. “Have signs,” one says. “Just direct people the right way because it is frustrating.”

In fact, the MTA does have signs at Borough Hall and Court Street from a pilot project a few years back. But it didn’t work well enough for them to implement system-wide. So some riders hope for kindly conductors who wait, while other riders fight back and push. “My attitude is if they don’t get out of the way than sorry, I am not responsible. They’ve got to stay in their lane,” says a straphanger.

No one really knows why New Yorkers act like this. One person offered up this nugget to NY1: “It’s New York. Anything goes.”

There is no good solution to this. Some people shove their ways down stairs with well-placed shoulders. Others wait for the crowds to subside, missing their trains in the process. It won’t get better without a concerted effort from everyone, and that effort likely isn’t coming any time soon. The maddening crowd goes on.

Over the past few years, I’ve written extensively about the MTA’s focus on or lack of customer service. From the frustration we experience over connections that aren’t made because Transit won’t hold local trains as an express pulls in to refund polices that just don’t go that extra mile, the MTA seems to have a love-hate relationship with its customers. It obviously needs them, but it struggles with appreciating them.

Lately, MTA officials have tried to be more customer-friendly. An open-data policy has led to a robust community of app developers; countdown clocks make waiting more bearable; and Joe Lhota spoke extensively about delivering service improvements for the benefit of the MTA’s customers when he announced the so-called “service investments” last week. Still, little things that are easy to correct often make me raise an eyebrow in dismay.

One of those things involve the uptown N, R and Q trains at 34th St. Because of either Transit stubbornness or a need to run too many trains to 49th St., the uptown Q switches from the express tracks to the local south of 42nd St., and the Q will often wait at 34th St. as an uptown local arrives. Sometimes, the conductor will announce which train will be first to leave, but often, riders are left guessing. Some will dash across the platform once they figure out which train is departing; others will wait the 2-3 extra minutes in the serenity of a calmer commute.

It’s an odd little dance, and in a piece on City Room, Matt Flegenheimer profiled the dash between trains. “It’s a gamble that you take,” Michelle Price said to The Times reporter. “Sometimes you win; sometimes you don’t.”

He writes:

Many riders tussle daily with the timeless question: local or express? But for the denizens of the N, R or Q trains, traveling uptown through Midtown, the calculus is a bit more complicated. Every morning, during peak commuting periods, two trains often arrive at about the same time. Sometimes the express leaves first. Sometimes it is the local. Sometimes at least two local trains will depart before a single express does. Sometimes they move together. And virtually every time there is a decision to be made, riders scamper across the platform, groping for a competitive travel advantage even as they are unsure why they have made their choice…

According to the transportation authority, the confusion is caused by a dispatching quirk on the Q train’s route on weekday mornings. Some Q express trains become locals after leaving 34th Street — crossing over and eventually going to Queens — but some do not. If an express is not changing course, it can leave at the same time as a local at 34th Street. If it is, a dispatcher must decide which train leaves first, said Charles Seaton, a spokesman for the authority.

Announcers occasionally inform passengers which train will leave first, though this often happens after the doors of the departing train have begun to close. For a rider, a wrong choice, to say nothing of two or three, can lead to several minutes in initial delays. The amount of time lost can accelerate for passengers with transfers to make at the next stop, Times Square, who may miss their connections. (Since all N, Q and R trains stop at both 34th Street and Times Square, most of the switching at 34th Street is most likely done only because a rider thinks a train will leave first.)

The question, of course, isn’t about a local vs. an express. If the two trains were on separate tracks leaving at the same time, the express would always be the right answer. Rather, it’s about what happens when the express becomes a local and other trains are competing for the same track space. Reaction to The Times’ amusing and overwrought story has ranged from applaus to derision with many folks channeling a popular Twitter feed. Take a gander:

It’s just the subway, guys. RT @NYTMetro: City Room: In Commuters’ Daily Gamble, Dashing to Victory, or Despair nyti.ms/LLlUxj

— katie honan (@katie_honan) July 24, 2012

WARNING: this article contains possibly the most overwrought theatrical metaphor in history of journalism nyti.ms/Qz1qhE

— Stuart Millar (@stuartmillar159) July 24, 2012

OMG this is so true! But can’t believe someone actually wrote a story about the NRQ trains being totally illogical. nyti.ms/MEyVx0

— Lauren Tara LaCapra (@LaurenLaCapra) July 24, 2012

This NY Times piece about picking the right New York City Subway train just screams First World Problems: nyti.ms/NQNcXr

— Danny Sussman (@TheSuss) July 24, 2012

Sometimes people try to change trains but they’re too slow and the New York Times is ON IT: cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/in-…

— Laura Hadden (@alauraborealis) July 24, 2012

Maybe it’s about all of that, and maybe it’s just about a quirk of life underground. But I also think it’s about customer service. If the drivers know which train is going to leave first, the customers should too. It might lead to a few sprints across the platform, but it will also lead to better informed customers who aren’t left waiting for their train to leave. The stranded straphangers will grow less impatient and may appreciate the added bit of information and that’s extra minutes saved during their commute.

Missed connections are an annoying fact of life underground. That 2 train pulling out as the 4 arrives at Nevins or that 3 speeding away as the 1 gets to 96th Street or that Q sitting there at 34th while the N arrives and then departs…we’ve all been there. But it doesn’t have to be that way. A quirk of a commute could disappear with a little extra communication.

Missing tiles is not an endearing part of the NYC subway experience. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)

It’s no big stretch to claim that the New York City subway’s station infrastructure is not in particularly good shape. As the authority has invested billions in track, signal, switch and rolling stock maintenance and upgrades over the past three decades, stations have enjoyed renovations and modernization at a far slower pace. To some degree or another then, the bulk of subway stations look closer to the photo I snapped a few years ago of 7th Ave. on the IND Culver line than they do of somewhere clean and presentable.

Yet, whenever I bring up the fact that Transit’s stations are in various states of disrepair, someone will always appeal to some sense of New York City grittiness and character. In my post yesterday on driverless trains, I referred to the “passable-to-decrepit appearance of the subway system,” and someone took issue with it. Here’s what SAS commenter “normative” had to say:

Why do you always say that? The NYC train system is an experience not merely just a ride from A to B. Every time I travel out of the country, I always get asked about the subway in NYC. WHY? Because its dirty, loud, a motley mix of the marginalized, alternative, the rich, and the normal. There are performers, political diatribes, street artists, angry old women, and people who sing out loud to themselves. I take the DC train, and it is pharmaceutically sterile, boring, and just about getting to work and getting home. I start so many stories with, “on the train the other day…” This is NYC. The subway-as-experience makes it what it is, and why people write books on it, make films about it, and why there are train buffs who can tell you everything about it. If you woke up tomorrow and the train looked like DC, do you really think this would be NYC anymore?

When it comes to stations, I don’t think we should be so accepting of the “subway experience.” At one station near my apartment in a relatively affluent section of Brooklyn, my regular “experience” includes a shuttered staircase that is literally eroding due to a 20-year stream of human urine. This station often plays host to more than one homeless person, and I’ve seen human excrement on the platform more times than I care to remember. Fifteen blocks away, the tiles are falling off the walls. That’s my “experience.”

Now, I don’t think Washington, D.C.’s vault-like subway stations are the way to go. I was down in D.C. in mid-June, and I found the Metro to be oppressively dark and dreary. The train service, with constant mechanical problems and infrequent service, is even worse. There is a happy medium though.

Subway stations don’t need to look as though they have been neglected for decades with constant water damage and a general state of disarray. Rather, subway stations should look like something we can tolerate for 10-15 minutes at a time. They should be well-lit with clean places to sit, staircases that aren’t falling apart and walls that can stay in place. The experience — with its melting pot of New Yorkers and varying design elements — won’t disappear. It will just look good. Is that too much to ask?

I’ve wavered on the issue of station cleanliness and presentation over the years. At a certain level, the MTA has to prioritize investments in tracks and rolling stock because that’s what makes the system run regularly and reliably. On the other hand, though, by putting forward a cleaner public face, the MTA can create a more pleasant environment and possibly fewer disgruntled commuters. It’s a Broken Windows theory of station maintenance: If straphangers experience something pleasant in the stations, they are less likely to despise, nitpick and bemoan the system. Complaints about subway service start because station environments aren’t conducive to waiting.

Ultimately, this whole thing boils down to money. The money isn’t there for the necessary station rehabs that involve massive lead and, in some cases, asbestos abatement projects. It’s timely and inconvenient to shutter stations, and the outcomes have been far from perfect. Still, stations have to be a part of the discussion. Putting lipstick on this pig might produce more than just a prettied-up swine.

A new PSA from the MTA urges common sense platform safety measures.

Over the past few years, as often-fatal incidents involving passengers hit by subway trains have grabbed headlines, New York politicians have urged the MTA to focus on platform safety. While the MTA doesn’t have billions on hand to spend on platform doors, the authority has launched a new PSA urging straphangers to stay alert.

For many New Yorkers, standing away from the platform edge runs against our ethos. We like to stand impatiently waiting for a train as close as possible to that platform edge as we can get. Yet, it’s dangerous With a 4.5-foot drop off the platform, the track bed is lower than it appears. Additionally, trains can nick those standing too close to the edge. Last year, in fact, 47 of the 146 people struck by subway trains were killed after falling on the tracks.

“Venturing onto the subway tracks is the most dangerous thing a customer can do, so this is an issue that we take extremely seriously. We have created and are posting visible reminders of the hazards of either standing too close to the platform edge, or descending to the tracks to retrieve a dropped item,” Cheryl Kennedy, Vice President of System Safety for NYC Transit said.

The twist here though is that his PSA isn’t just a lecture. It also asks others to be mindful of those around them. If someone else looks like they may be at risk or may venture down to the tracks, the MTA asks everyone to stop it. After all, a delayed train can have a severe impact throughout the system.

Walk Score has started a petition drive to protest the exclusion of transit directions in iOS 6.

When Apple unveiled the latest upgrades to its mobile operating system earlier this week, the Internet was all a-buzz with praise for its new Maps app. Instead of continuing to rely on its competitor Google for maps and directions, Apple decided to build an in-house mapping solution. Along the way, though, it dropped transit directions, and urban advocates are not at all happy with the change.

For tech watchers, Apple’s Map app is supposedly the “gem of iOS 6,” as David Pogue of The Times said. It will be visually stunning with complete driving directions. Transit, though, is out, and as a recent Gizmodo posts notes, it appears as though even station location markers have been dropped. “When building Maps, we looked around and realized the best transit apps for metros, for hiking, for biking, are coming from our developers,” Apple’s Scott Forstall said. “And so instead of trying to develop those ourselves, we are going to integrate and feature and promote your apps for transit right within the Maps app in iOS 6.”

It’s unclear right now exactly what Apple plans to do, but unless the company will allow app makers to craft plug-ins for its Map app, the solution won’t be as elegant as Google’s. Currently, iOS users can switch among transit, walking and driving directions with the tap of an icon, but under Apple’s future, iPhone and iPad users — and there are a ton of those, especially in urban areas — will have to add yet another transit application to their mix. Convenience suffers.

“This is a big step backwards for pedestrians and transit users, because it forces those people to first know they have to acquire a third party application, then find and install the best one, and finally perhaps pay for this support,” David Herron wote this week. “By contrast today’s iOS users have excellent pedestrian and public transit support in the Google Maps application.”

Transportation Nation too had a take on this issue:

That move seems out of step with the Apple ethos. Long ago when the company was rebuilding its brand as the hip cool computer for the next generation it heavily courted teens and college students, banking on winning over lifetime customers while they were young and still forming consumption habits. Considering how young people are driving less and taking transit more, launching the new Maps without this feature is a rare moment when Apple’s magic touch is slipping from the pulse of the cool kids. Some millennials even cited a preference for transit over driving so that they have more time to use smartphones.

To me, though, this decision transcends what the “cool kids” are doing. It’s about sacrificing something that encourages mass transit use and places it on equal footing with driving. I currently own a Droid phone and iPad. I appreciate how Google Maps features transit directions that do not require me to open a few different apps to find the best route. Apple will have to convince us that their new Maps can properly integrate a transit component or else this is step backwards for one of the nation’s largest smartphone developers.

Every now and then, when it’s late and I’m bored, if I’m a rare three-track station, I’ll look across the tracks and eye the other platform. The distance always seems short enough to jump, but who would do that? Apparently, a few foolish folks at the 9th Avenue station would. Observe:

The gap, which measures around 10-11 feet, is apparently small enough for a good long jump, but this stunt, as many have pointed out, is beyond dumb. In fact, everyone has banded together to decry this video, amNew York reported today. Wrote Ivan Pereira:

Gene Russianoff, of the Straphangers Campaign, said he has seen hundreds of stories of people playing around in subway stations, but this one was by far the worst. Although both men jumped when there were no trains approaching, there still were big risks, including a 600-volt shock from the tracks, Russianoff said…

Transport Workers Union spokesman Jim Gannon, who called the YouTube jumpers “jackasses,” agreed. “It’s also a terrible thing for train crews to live with if one of the teens falls under the wheels and gets cut to pieces,” he said. The NYPD said it is not investigating the jumpers, but warned that jumping platforms can lead to a citation and, if done repeatedly, a misdemeanor charge.

The MTA, which also criticized the daredevils, said trains have struck 29 people so far this year. The agency said it cannot determine how many of those injuries were related to people playing around on the track. Kevin Ortiz, the agency’s spokesman, said the MTA has been pushing an advertising campaign warning people to be wary of the dangers of subway station. “However, the campaign does not address this type of idiocy,” he said.

The two jumpers actually started on the side with the third rail and jumped away from it, but that’s besides the point. Any number of things could have gone horribly wrong. If these three thrill-seeakers wanted to do something equally off limits but far less dangerous at the 9th Avenue station, they should have just snuck down to the abandoned lower level. Don’t try that at home either.

As a society, we seem to love grading things. How many Yelp stars does the hot new restaurant have? What’s its Department of Health rating? Everything from movies to shops and everything in between gets subjected to rankings, and now, the subways are in the crosshairs too.

In a way, some groups already rank the subways. The Straphangers assign various scores to the train lines each year based upon cleanliness, timeliness and availability of seating, but controversially, they don’t think any subway lines are worth a full fare. Such ratings aren’t the height of usefulness.

A few weeks ago, though, the City Council started making noises about grading subway stations. Exerting what little influence they have over the MTA and New York City Transit, the Council members decided that riders deserve to know just how dirty and decrepit their stations are. Never mind that no one knew who would fund this effort or as most riders have little choice as to their station, what purpose it would serve. It was a grade, and we love grades.

At the time of the City Council hearing, I was less than impressed with the idea. It seemed like pointless bluster from a body that excels at pointless bluster, and it did nothing to solve the underlying problems with funding and station maintenance. At the time, the MTA said they already conducted internal evaluations of studies but did not release the grades to the public. Now, the Daily News offers us a glimpse at this internal grading initiatve.

Pete Donohue has the story:

But the Daily News obtained three different NYC Transit division reports in which stations periodically are rated on a scale of 1 to 4 for the condition of their walls, ceilings and floors. Separate reports grade stations on cleanliness and litter. Cleanliness essentially is a matter of how much grime, goo and trampled gum there is in a station. Litter is coffee cups, junk-food wrappers, freebie newspapers and other trash.

The reports don’t combine all the various scores given to each station. They don’t provide an overall letter grade for each stop. Someone who paid much more attention in math class than I did would have to do some number crunching to get there.

But the reports are pretty damn close to what the Council members — James Vacca of the Bronx, Domenic Recchia of Brooklyn, and Peter Koo of Queens — advocated for at the hearing. It also appears that NYC Transit didn’t fully inform MTA brass about how much data already is collected when the letter grades idea was raised.

Unfortunately, Donohue doesn’t provide too many more details in this column than what the MTA itself told the City Council. Some stations get failing grades; others do not. That’s hardly the news. What is the news, though, is that, according to MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota, the numbers are used internally in order to assign resources to each station. That’s a public use waiting to happen.

I’ve written extensively over the years about the MTA’s willingness to open its data. Here’s another prime opportunity to do so. Recently, NYC DOT put a whole bunch of street and parking data online in a map. By choosing the right paramters, users can see how recently a street was repaved and how NYC DOT grades those streets. For instance, the potholed-marked street near my office hasn’t been resurfaced since 1999 but DOT somehow rated it “good.” Perfect, the system is not, but it exists.

So the MTA could put that data online, and we would know how they view our station. Isn’t that really what this is all about too? We already know what we think of our subway stations, but what does the MTA think? Do they know how dirty they are? Do they know which ones suffer from perennial leaks even during days without rain and which ones are rat-infested? If they do, so should we.