View from Underground

Earlier this past fall, the MTA announced an experiment in counter-intuitive thinking. To combat trash, the authority announced a two-month, two-station removal of trash cans. A few months into the pilot, the MTA found less trash and no increase of litter at the targeted stations, but the authority isn’t yet to ready to draw concrete conclusions. Instead, as amNew York reported this morning, Transit will expand this program to include more stations and a better public outreach campaign.

According to Transit president Tom Prendergast, the isolated stations do not provide the MTA with enough information on how people are adjusting their trash-related habits. “Two doesn’t give you enough for a sample,” he said. “We’re going to expand it.”

Various stakeholders, though, clearly do not have particularly high hopes for New Yorkers’ abilities to keep things clean. Marc Beja had more:

MTA board member Andrew Albert said he hasn’t been briefed on the new plan, but thinks it might work in lesser-traveled stations. “If it’s really scant usage in the trash cans and apparently no litter around, then that may be a good candidate at the pilot,” Albert said, though he is doubtful straphangers will hold onto their garbage instead of tossing it on the floor.

“That means taking newspapers and used coffee cups and taking them out of the station and searching for another trash can,” Albert said. “I don’t see people doing that.”

An MTA spokesman wouldn’t discuss details of the plan last week, saying they haven’t been finalized…One tweak being made for the MTA program’s expansion — expected as early as this summer — is notifying riders. When the pilot started in October, the MTA quietly removed the bins without telling straphangers. “We need to explain to people what we’re doing and why we’re doing it,” Prendergast said.

Meanwhile, predictably enough, union officials called upon the MTA to spend more money on their employees who half-heartedly clean stations instead of combating the root of the letter problem. “We’re spending money to change people’s ways?” Derrick Echevarria, the head of the TWU’s Stations Division, said. “Let’s spend money to clean the stations.” Why not both? Or neither? I’ve yet to hear a compelling argument for why the MTA should be in the garbage-removal business as much as they currently are.

As amNY noted, the PATH system, Transit’s counterpart, has no garbage cans and barely any litter. The Port Authority removed trash receptacles under the guise of security, but an initial period of aggressively combating litter has led to a much cleaner system. If Transit is serious about combating litter, rats and the costs associated with keeping the system free from garbage, enforcement will at some point become a necessity.

Just like every subway in the world, New York has a core with branches.

In New York City, we like to think of our subway system as fairly unique. We have no true circle line, and our Outer Borough tendrils snake throughout the city. The amalgamation of old rights-of-ways and three independent builders, the current subway system arose through fate, fortune and good luck. Or so the story goes.

Two pieces making the rounds covering the same academic journal article beg to differ. As both Scientific American and Wired noted today, two scientists using two-dimensional spatial network analysis have determined general rules for any subway system. It’s interesting research, but it’s hardly groundbreaking to those who know urban planning.

Sarah Fecht of Scientific American summarized the “rules”:

First, subway networks can be divided into a core and branches, like a spider with many legs. The “core” typically sits beneath the city’s center, and its stations usually form a ring shape. The branches, which are more linear, extend outward from the core in many directions.

Second, the branches tend to be about twice as long as the width of the core. The wider the core, the longer the branches. And subway systems with more stations tend to have more branches. The number of branches corresponds roughly with the square root of the number of stations.

Last, an average of 20 percent of the stations in the core link two or more subway lines, allowing people to make transfers. [Physicist Marc] Barthelemy says his team does not know which factors are guiding subway networks to follow these general rules; perhaps the rules maximize efficiency. For example, too many branches or connections would be redundant and unnecessarily costly. In contrast, having too few branches would reduce the range of areas that the network services, and having too few connecting points would reduce travel efficiency.

Fecht notes, as an example, that New York City doesn’t have a clearly defined ring core, but even on that point, I beg to differ. It’s a four-train loop that isn’t particularly efficient, but the area constrained by the two IRT lines on the East and West Sides, the L along 14th St. and any of the 53rd, 59th or 42nd St. lines forms a loop around the city’s major work center. Lower Manhattan throws a wrench into this ring, but that’s what makes the city’s subway system works.

That’s neither here nor there though. New York’s subway system still fits under these rules as we have a clear core with branches feeding into that core. The branches are significantly longer than the core itself, and depending upon how you define the core, many of them offer multiple transfer points. Check, check, and check.

Of course, as interesting as this summary is, we’re not really learning anything new here. Subway systems exist to offer a cost-effective and relatively quick way to bring urban dwellers from mostly residential areas into and through the commercial centers. As the commercial centers generally form a core surrounded by other neighborhoods, a subway system will always follow this shape. That’s the whole point.

Photo by Benjamin Kabak

On the way home from Yankee Stadium on Friday night, I had the chance to enjoy one of those quintessential subway experiences, and the photo above was my surreptitious attempt to capture the moment in all of its glory. The woman who has decided to take up three subway seats was not sleeping when I snapped the photo. She was putzing around with her iPod while shouting across the car to her traveling companions.

From Yankee Stadium until I got off at Nevins St., this woman sat splayed across three seats. As other riders came and went, many in search of a seat on a relatively crowded train, she would not move. At various points, she had both feet up on the seats, and when someone would approach about the empty seat, she would glower at them and then laugh as they went off elsewhere in search of a sit.

I wondered how it came to this. Why do people think they can hog seats? Where are our manners underground? Where was the cop to give this woman a summons for her rude behavior? No one had the audacity to say anything. We, like the woman next to her in my photo, just stared and pursed our lips. It was an utter breach of underground etiquette.

Stanley Kubrick. Life and Love on the New York City Subway. Passengers reading in a subway car. 1946. Museum of the City of New York.

Once upon a time, Stanley Kubrick wasn’t always an award-winning director. He was just a staff photographer for LOOK Magazine, and in 1946, he was assigned to capture the essence of the New York City subway. In a posting earlier this week, the Museum of the City of New York showcased some of Kubrick’s shots, and it’s well worth the click-through.

Dapper New Yorkers dressed for the times and many reading newspapers — another relic of another age — recline on rattan-covered padded seats while heading home. Canal St. looks hauntingly familiar, and even in a supposedly more chivalrous age, men would not surrender their seats for women standing above them.

If you thought arming MTA workers with tasers was a bad idea, get a load of this video.

The video, originally posted on CrownHeights.info over a year ago, is making the rounds this week, and while it’s old news, it’s still stunningly stupid. Some teenagers hop into the tracks at Kingston Ave., wait to see the lights of the approaching train and then hop back onto the platform in the classic and life-threatening game of “Chicken.”

NBC New York picked up the story last night, and they have a priceless quote from someone at the station. “I guess it’s a commentary on what’s happening,” Barbara Gardner said. “Kids don’t have any purpose. Life means nothing, or they don’t understand why they’re on Earth. This is really sad.”

The MTA, meanwhile, has passed the video along to the police and urge straphangers not to do this at home. “The individuals depicted in this video should be taken into custody and then they should have their heads examined,” the authority said. Well then.

Earlier this year, we heard quite a bit about some half-baked plans to ban food in the subway. Perhaps it’s a good idea to limit what people can and should be eating in the trains. Perhaps it’ll combat litter and the rodent infestation. Or perhaps it’ll go underenforced with no real impact. Either way, without a food ban, we have Snackman.

Snackman is making the rounds these days. He’s hit the major papers after landing on the front page of Reddit, and he’s even earned some nice words in Jim Dwyer’s “On New York” column. The video that made it all happen is posted above (with some adult language).

The story is a simple one: Charles Sonder, a 24-year-old who’s lived in New York for just a few years, was riding an uptown 6 late at night last month while munching on some chips. A man boarded at Spring St., and apparently an incident ensued. A woman not happy with this man started yelling and kicking, and Sonder, to ease tensions, simply walked between the two of them, all the while eating his snacks. Sonder’s actions have earned him the nickname “Snackman” and the attention of New York’s single ladies.

Dwyer’s take though was the most illuminating. He talks about Sonder’s actions and the way it ended up on YouTube:

Mr. Sonder stepped toward the door, and the battle ebbed for an instant as the man and the woman parted, possibly to let him pass. But he stopped, directly between them. He didn’t say a word, just kept working his way through the Pringles. With Mr. Sonder forming an implacable barrier, the fight dwindled to generally unprintable sputterings, with the woman ordering the man: “Don’t follow me. Do not follow me.”

[Eitan] Noy, having been born and raised in the city, had seen plenty of subway outbursts before, including one on St. Patrick’s Day, when two men set upon a third, pulling open his bag and using some force. Just as Mr. Noy and his friend were discussing intervention, the two men displayed badges and were cuffing the third. “After that, I knew I had to have my phone camera ready,” he said. So on the No. 6 train, he whipped out his camera a few blows into the round, in time to catch some of the action; Mr. Sonder stepping in; and then another woman, with an authoritative voice, ordering the woman to sit down and the man to get off the train.

After that, the remaining combatant noticed Mr. Noy’s cellphone camera and asked if she could see it. “I didn’t know what she was going to do with it,” Mr. Noy said. “She could smash me on the head. I told her, ‘I didn’t really get anything.’ ” She persisted, he deflected, and then he got off at Grand Central Station. Mr. Sonder disappeared into the night and pretty much forgot the whole thing. He went back to his work of building three-dimensional models at an architectural firm.

This is a tale that has everything we love and hate about the subways. There’s a random fight that devolves into violence — something veteran subway riders happen upon far too regularly. There’s a mention of some previously spotted undercover police action (and usually that’s very easy to spot in trains). It has a silent defender doing his duty to break up the fight. And it has food on the subway. Maybe that eating ban isn’t such a great idea after all. I wonder what Snackman would say.

With Irene heading toward the city, the MTA had to shutter the subway system. Could it be worse the next time? (Photo by flickr user ccho)

Earlier this week, when the MTA finally secured state approvals for the rest of its three-year capital plan, we viewed it as a victory for the transit authority, but in reality, it should be a warning sign. Since New York City has largely washed its hands of its own subway system, we are dependent upon the state to deliver money, and the state has been a reluctant funding partner for a while now.

To gain approval for MTA funding from Albany Republicans, as Dana Rubinstein wrote yesterday on Capital New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo had to usher in significant road expenditures and further infrastructure commitments for upstate New York. I scratch your back, and you scratch mine even harder. That seems to be the way of things in Albany.

For the MTA and for New York City, though, securing capital money and the ability to raise the debt limit is just the beginning. On Wednesday night at the Transit Museum, Andrea Bernstein led a panel on the subways that I unfortunately could not attend. The topic focused around transit and sustainability in light of rising sea levels. A recent article by Katharine Jose covered similar ground, and experts pain a rather dire picture of the MTA’s future.

The threat from Irene last August was just the beginning. A direct hit from a major storm or a surge from rising sea levels could make things much, much worse. Jose wrote:

Imagine a scenario in which a 100-year-storm flooded all of the parts of the system that are most susceptible—the tunnels that carry trains under the East River to and from Manhattan, and the major connection points in Lower Manhattan. Then Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island would essentially be cut off from the mainland for the millions of commuters who pass through those links every day. And not for a short time. “Essentially the subway system will be shut down and the restoring time will be at least a month,” [Professor Klaus] Jacob said. “And probably many months.”

In the same way that many people, during Irene, didn’t understand why it took so long to shut the system down and so long to start it back up, if there is that kind of flooding, they will have to pump all the water out of the tunnels, take out the signal systems, wash them off (because they will have been in touch with brackish water), dry them, put them back together, test them, and reinstall them. And since much of the subway system is as old as 100 years, new parts cannot exactly be ordered up immediately; new ones would probably require starting from scratch…

[The M.T.A.] is an agency that does not get its money from New York City; it’s the state legislature that decides how much public money will go to the authority. This, historically, has been a problem for transportation networks that don’t stretch beyond the limits of the city, and it still is. For massive capital projects, the political will could be hard to assemble for significant projects. And in the meantime, the M.T.A. has been in financial trouble, funding much of its ongoing operation and “state-of-good-repair” work with bond issues, which is not feasible in the long term and doesn’t leave much room for large capital projects that would normally depend on such financing.

So far the M.T.A. has been taking smaller, less expensive measures to prepare for flooding and sea-level rise. They are raising sidewalk grates that vent stations and tunnels and putting bicycle racks on top of them, anad building concrete platforms a few inches high in front of the entrances to stations.

Jose’s piece is a sweeping examination of the way the city is responding to the threat of climate change, and it sounds as though the MTA is relying more on hope than concrete investments. The agency can perform mitigation efforts along with support from the New York City DOT. The raised grates can alleviate flooding from routine storms, and a more efficient pumping system can better assist the MTA in readying service after a storm.

The authority however has no protection against flooding in the tunnels, and many of its rail yards are in low-lying areas around the city’s edges. The Coney Island Yards is particularly susceptible to a storm surge, and the East River tunnels could be vulnerable to a rising tide. Without a firm commitment from the state, then, the authority is left where it often has been. It can’t invest in any sort of storm shutter system or true mitigation efforts.

So in the meantime, we too must hope. We’ll have to hope that our system, started in 1904, can withstand the challenges of 2012, and we have to hope that one day Albany will realize the uniquely vulnerable position we’re in. I’m not holding my breath on either issue.