View from Underground

The original Penn Station lives on only in photographs.

Amongst the transit literati and New York architect community, nothing triggers more nostalgia than old Penn Station. The McKim, Mead and White original met its demise 49 years ago, and its destruction along with the threatened demolition of Grand Central led to today’s wave of overly enthusiastic preservation. Yet, thanks to the dingy, cramped and ugly underground replacement, someone always wants to find a way to bring Penn Station back.

This time around, the argument belongs to Michael Kimmelman, architect critic for The New York Times. In a piece set to appear in Sunday’s paper but already available on the web, Kimmelman argues for a grand restoration of dignity for Penn Station commuters. His overall idea is an intriguing one. When the Javits Center is torn down as part of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s convention center scheme, we will move Madison Square Garden to 34th St. and 11th Ave. and rebuild a grand train station where the Garden is now. Sounds great, right? Stay tuned.

In the piece Kimmelman is very dismissive of the Moynihan Station plan. Why? Read on:

Because the open secret about the Moynihan plan is that Amtrak alone would move across Eighth Avenue. Long Island Rail Road, New Jersey Transit and the subways wouldn’t budge. And only 30,000 of those 600,000 people who use Penn Station each day take Amtrak, never mind all the subway riders passing through.

That’s right: 95 percent of commuters will still have to contend with Penn even when the Moynihan plan is realized.

It’s true that the Moynihan plan will eventually improve a few access routes to subways and commuter trains. But it will add no new tracks and have limited effect on the congestion and misery of Penn Station. New tracks aside, the challenge is at the bare minimum to bring light and air into this underground purgatory and, beyond that, to create for millions of people a new space worthy of New York, a civic hub in the spirit of the great demolished one, more attuned to the city’s aspirations and democratic ideals.

This, of course, is no secret for many of us. We’ve bemoaned the dollars to be sunk into Moynihan with little to no upgrade to train capacity. It’s a similar story at Fulton Street where the headhouse represents a large chunk of an expensive project and sits a block away from a $4 billion PATH hub that also won’t increase capacity. In fact, as he proposes this new Penn Station, Kimmelman draws a comparison with the PATH hub.

“We depend on developers to improve neighborhoods,” he writes, “and at the same time we waste unconscionable amounts of public money on architectural follies like the much-delayed World Trade Center PATH station, which is projected, even after ground zero is fully developed, to serve only perhaps 60,000 riders and whose exploding cost is already approaching $4 billion, a scandal still waiting to dawn on New Yorkers.”

So the solution here appears to be…spending billions to build something that will create a “light-filled Penn Station” without increasing train capacity? Kimmelman manages to skirt the real issue: We can build the most glorious Penn Station possible and spend lavishly on it, but without an added tunnel underneath the Hudson River, without an expansion of track capacity underneath Penn Station and an increase in the number of trains that can cross into and out of New York City, we will just be repeating the same spending mistakes transplanted a few miles north from the World Trade Center site.

Maybe one day we’ll have a glorious train station on the West Side. Maybe we’ll have something to match the splendor of Grand Central (and hopefully, it will be a little less bland than the LIRR’s Atlantic Terminal). But we shouldn’t ask to spend billions at 34th Street just for the sake of aesthetics. A pretty building might look good, but it won’t allow for more trains and more rail commuters.

During a recent weekend, West Side IRT headways were a bit tighter than they should have been. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)

Last night, I enjoyed one of those typical nights where the MTA communications network broke down. I was coming back home from the West 4th area to Park Slope and had hoped to take a B train. According to the MTA’s schedule, I had two B trains left to catch before the route shut down for the night, and all things being up to snuff, I would have had no problem.

Of course, things weren’t up to snuff. I wanted a few minutes past the scheduled B train arrival time, and the D showed up. Luckily, to coincide with the D train, an announcement noted that B service had stopped for the evening. The PA voice offered no reason for the shutdown, two trains and ten minutes earlier than it should have been, and it wasn’t until the D was crossing the Manhattan Bridge that I had a chance to learn of a “rail condition” impacting B and Q service.

Ironically, the first notification of a problem came via a tweet from OEM. The city’s Office of Emergency Management claimed that “normal B train service” had been restored following an “earlier rail condition.” That seemed to be at odds with Transit’s in-system announcement that B service had stopped for the evening, and I wasn’t about to wait around for 15 minutes trying to assess which agency was telling the truth. Something had happened, and passengers weren’t informed of the fact.

When I arrived at Pacific St., I just missed an IRT local train that could have taken me to Grand Army Plaza, and the countdown clocks told the story of a wait. The second train out was, properly, 12 minutes away, but the next train was still nine minutes away, approximately three minutes behind schedule. By the MTA’s own internal metrics that give trains five minutes of leeway, that next train was on time. By my own metrics, I was on the verge of waiting nine minutes for a train at 10:45 p.m. with another train just three minutes behind it. That is not good service.

Were this an isolated incident, I would be more willing to overlook it. Rail conditions happen. That’s the price we pay for a 24/7 underfunded system that features significant outdoor mileage. Yet, this is also a matter of information. I had to wait at West 4th St. for too long before any announcement concerning downtown express service filtered into the station, and even then, it conflicted with the most recent information I could access. Transit still hasn’t figured out a way to transmit real-time status alerts to customers who are in their system and have no access to cell service. That’s been a gripe of mine for years.

The headway problem is another issue entirely, and it’s one I see with increasing frequency along the IRT routes. At rush hour, there is often a six-minute gap between East Side express trains before two arrive nearly on top of each other. Late at night, when the downtown 3 makes only two stops before merging with the 2 line, these uneven headways are even less explicable, and yet, they happen all the time. The photo atop this post is an extreme example I observed two weekends ago.

Tiny operational efficiencies — better communication, regular headways, shorter waits — can lead to less agitated customers and a more pleasant commute. It’s often tough to realize that in a complex system, but later, it seems as though these small improvements are just flat-out missing.

On my home this evening as my Q train crossed the Manhattan Bridge, we straphangers were bombarded with the endless stream of prerecording messages Transit has seen fit to install in its newest rolling stock. An important message from the NYPD that loses its importance after the 4000th listen played on, and then the courtesy announcement filled the car. Give up your seat for the elderly, handicapped or pregnant, it says. “Courtesy is contagious, and it starts with you.”

As I’m wont to do with this train announcements, I sort of rolled my eyes at it and then went back to chatting with my travel companion. Because of the repetitive nature of the announcements and the way they rarely change over the years, it’s become easy to just tune them out. They won’t be important; those announcements still come from the person driving the train. And they just add to the background noise of taking the subway.

Tonight, though, something about the courtesy announcement made me perk up. On the one hand, it’s a lecture aimed at recalcitrant New Yorkers. We have to be scolded into giving up our seats for straphangers who actually need them. We have to be reminded that it’s the right thing to do. But on the other hand, perhaps it’s a lesson we all could use.

Lately, since 2012 dawned, I’ve noticed a general attitude among straphangers that’s worse than your typical New York brusqueness. Yeah, we’re all trying to get somewhere quickly. Yeah, we want our trains to go faster and come more frequently. Yeah, we want our space and our seats. But why you gotta be so pushy about it?

The behavior I’ve seen has been nothing and everything. It has ranged from folks spreading out over multiple seats and getting upset when you say excuse me to a new breed of door-blockers who will not move no matter the circumstances to people who have never learned to walk on the right side of the staircase and get angry at anyone coming their way. It includes the people who sit down on top of you with nary an excuse me and those pretending to sleep so they don’t have to give ground. I’ve seen seated riders stick their feet out into the aisle so standees have no room, and I’ve seen the typical breed of pole-huggers.

What I haven’t seen though are manners. Try to carve out a space for yourself and you might get your head bitten out. Things seem far more tense under ground lately. Maybe it’s the chill of winter as we all take up more space with our bulky jackets. Maybe it’s general impatience with the MTA. Maybe it’s this fear that the Mayans were right and our world will soon end. Whatever it is, though, it’s out there, this quasi-menacing, full-on passive aggressiveness.

I don’t believe we New Yorkers are inherently rude despite what recent national surveys have said. Throughout my life, I’ve seen New Yorkers be courtesy with their knowledge and time. We don’t tolerate others who don’t play by the rules of the city though. We don’t like tourists who walk four across on the sidewalk or folks who are too buried in their phones to pay attention to the world around them. Maybe that frustration is coming out underground as straphangers try to find a way to protect their space and dignity.

Ultimately then, maybe we need to be reminded more often that courtesy is the right way to go. I’ve heard it’s contagious and that it starts with you.

Sprucing up decrepit stations could improve public perception of the MTA. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)

Now that Joe Lhota has been confirmed as the new Chairman and CEO, he’s been unleashed on the media. I’ll have my chance to sit down with him next week, but so far, as he’s spoken with the various New York press outlets, Lhota’s immediate concerns are focused on around improving the image of the MTA. While some may call this a frivolous pursuit, it plays an important part in drumming up some level of public support for the beleaguered authority and the city’s transit system.

For Lhota, the public face of the system concerns its decrepit infrastructure. We see stations with tiles literally falling off the walls as I saw tonight at 7th Ave. along the Culver Line. We see broken staircases, blown light bulbs and paint peeling off of every surface. It’s dirty; it’s dingy; it isn’t a nice sight.

The new chairman sees the need to focus on cosmetics as an extension of the broken windows theory. “The thought was if a window is broken, someone is going to break another window or someone is going to break into the house,” he said. “Fix it. Fix it up front. When paint starts peeling, either peel it off or repaint it.”

Shoddy paint jobs are a particular concern of his. “It’s one of the things that bothers me, and I’d like to fix it as much as we can,” he said. Lhota has been riding the train to work, just like you and I do, for years, and he sees how riders relate to the system.

In addition to paint, Lhota wants to tackle the rat problem as well. During his confirmation hearings while pressed on the issue, Lhota expressed some disgust at the amount of food in the subway. He didn’t advocate for an outright ban on eating underground; that would have been too controversial. But he suggested that riders and their dirty habits are to blame for the influx of rodents. “If you’re going to eat down there,” he said, “take it with you,”

The TWU seems to agree. The MTA’s largest union is hosting a rodent contest to see which members can snap the best photos of the largest rats in the system. They’re using this as a backdrop to argue for more attention to working conditions underground. “Who the hell wants to work around hundreds of freaking rats?” Jim Gannon of TWU Local 100 said earlier this week.

Of course, if the TWU were willing to allow station agents to clean their stations, rats may find fewer morsels underground. That involves a discussion of work rules, and it’s one of the MTA is trying to have with the TWU as the two sides continue their contract negotiations.

Rats and paint are two issues that strike at the fundamentals of the environment. They have nothing to do with systemic failures from Albany concerning transit funding or the need to cut down on ever-climbing capital construction costs. Eliminating rats and sprucing up stations as the FastTrack program is trying to do are cosmetic improvements to the subways that go a long way.

Lhota seems to understand that if he leads an effort to make the subway environment a more friendly, welcoming and clean space, New Yorkers will not view the subways with such disdain. They may never come to love their commutes, with packed subway cars and pushy riders, but if the surroundings are clean, perhaps they won’t come to dread them either. With small environmental improvements, the MTA could see a big rise in public support, and when it comes to those big-ticket topics, more public support could help push politicians to do the right thing. All it might take is a fresh coat of paint.

A true New York City subway connoisseur is not one who knows the fastest way from Point A to Point B. Rather, a true connoisseur is one who knows which set of doors will deposit him or her at the proper staircase to avoid the maddening crowd.

To wit, every morning as I journey from one Grand to another — Army Plaza to Central Terminal — I take a 2 or 3 to Nevins St. and switch to a 4 or 5. I know which doors on the East Side IRT deposit me in front of which staircase at Grand Central, and I know where I need to stand at Nevins on the way back home to make sure I’m primed to beat the crowds streaming to their homes in Brownstone Brooklyn. Sometimes I get a seat; sometimes I don’t. Either way, I’m out of the station quickly, and that’s the way I like it.

The Internet and the advent of mobile apps has rendered the challenge of identifying the set of doors closest to the exit moot. Exit Strategy NYC allows New Yorkers to unlock the secrets of subway exits across the city for a mere $4.99. But that’s cheating. Learn the exit strategy yourself, I say.

But what of the weary who don’t mind trudging slowly up to street level? What of the straphangers who don’t want to hang but just want to sit? For them, my answer is thus: Do not ride at rush hour. Easier said than done, of course.

When the MTA conducted its studies of crowding on the L and F trains this past fall, their documents included a look at the way people board the trains. Due to a variety of circumstances ranging from station layout to personal safety, the authority found that, generally, the back cars are emptier than the front cars. It’s not quite a shocking finding to anyone who rides the subways during off-peak hours, and those who ride during peak hours aren’t likely to notice much of a difference. The Daily News wrote up the findings this week anyway.

As The News notes, trains at isolated parts of the system displayed these crowding tendencies. “The MTA found that at the Bedford Ave., Brooklyn, station on the L line, dozens more riders squeezed into the first car of Manhattan-bound trains that started at the end of the line in Canarsie than packed into the final car. There were approximately 191 riders in the first car of those trains — 46 more than the maximum capacity guideline. Meanwhile, the last car held about 143 riders,” Pete Donohue wrote. “The same front-heavy pattern was found on Manhattan-bound F trains surveyed in 2009 at the Roosevelt Island station and at the Bergen St., Brooklyn, station.”

I’m more fascinated by the “why” of it, and in that why, we see a challenge facing transit planners. The front of the Manhattan-bound train is more crowded at Bedford Ave. because the bulk of the riders want to exit at that end of the station. Similarly, Brooklyn-bound L trains are often packed to the gills in the rear because the station entrances at 1st and 3rd Aves. are at the west end of the stations and because exits at Bedford and Lorimer Sts. are at the back of the train as well. In other words, people gravitate toward those cars closest to their exits. We are all expert riders.

As new transit routes are planned, then, those in charge must watch the ebb and flow of passengers. Some stations should have entrances in the middle of the train and others in the rear or front. Such designs better disperse passengers along the entire length of the train. The new Second Ave. Stations all have front and back entrances, and while platform access points from mezzanines should encourage some movement, by the time the Q from Second Ave. pulls into Times Square, it will have made a series of stops with entrances at only the front and back of the train. If there’s space, riders will learn to move toward the middle. And that’s the great exit dance of the subway rider.

With countdown clocks, it's easy to see how train bunching can impact wait times. (Photo by Kim Last)

I have been a big proponent of Transit’s PA/CIS initiative. In addition to vital behind-the-scenes communications upgrades, the new displays finally deliver countdown clocks to New York’s waiting masses. We now when our next train will arrive and how many minutes we must wish away while sitting in subway station on our way home.

With these new clocks, though, come some hidden glimpses into an infuriating part of the subway system: inconsistent scheduling. Take, for instance, the photo above my girlfriend snapped on the way home last night. She was waiting for a 1 train on the West Side to go down to Chambers St., and at 8:54 p.m., she had a nine-minute wait. To make matters worse, the train after hers was only two minutes further behind. That, of course, averages to a headway of around 5-6 minutes per train, but something clearly went wrong somewhere.

I too had a similar experience last night. I caught a movie at Court St. in Downtown Brooklyn last night, and while making my way over to the IRT local, I had to walk along the Manhattan-bound 4 platform at Borough Hall. The next 4 train at 9:45 p.m. was 14 minutes away, but the subsequent train was just six minutes behind that one.

I don’t have the hard evidence to back this up, but I’ve noticed this quite frequently. Downtown express trains on the 2 and 3 will arrive in bunches — an inexplicable happening considering the 3 makes only one stop after the Lenox Ave. terminal before meeting up with the 2 train at 135th St. After the bunches comes a very long wait, sometimes upwards of 10 minutes.

If anything, the countdown clocks allow us an anecdotal glimpse at the way trains are scheduled to arrive, and in my experiences, off-peak coordination is severely lacking. If trains are set to run every 6-8 minutes, a 3 train shouldn’t be two minutes behind a 2 train. Without better wait-assessment metrics and a more granular understanding of headways, all the promises in the world can’t make the actual schedules more reliable, and riders end up paying for the intricacies in variable and infuriating wait times.

Every year as December draws to a close and we near another New Years Eve, I take some time to look back on the year that was. So here is my annual list of the top ten most popular posts on Second Ave. Sagas. They run the gamut from musings to news and provide a glimpse into some hot topics. With a new contract for the TWU on tap and another tough economic year ahead, we can only wonder what 2012 will bring.

1. Graphic of the Day: Pregnant on the Subway
My top post this year was a hot-button topic. Elizabeth Carey Smith of The Letter Office presented a graphic about being pregnant on the subway. She tracked those who would and would not give her a seat while she was pregnant, and her findings sparked a long debate over the proper subway etiquette when confronted with a woman who may or may not be with child.

2. Building a Better Subway Bench
Veyko, a Philadelphia-based design shop, unveiled a new bench for the City of Brotherly Love’s SEPTA subway stations, and I wondered if the modern and sleek design to could replace the frumpy wooden benches that mark New York City Transit’s system. The Philadelphia prototype is too expensive to mass market, but the agency is working on a different solution.

3. Photo of the Day: The 7 Line Extension Moves Onward
Patrick Cashin, the MTA’s photographer, released a series of images from inside the 34th St. station cavern as the 7 line moves forward. The new subway extension will be open within 24 months, but the station planned for 41st St. and 10th Ave. remains a lost opportunity.

4. Breaking: Second Ave. Subway Slashed to One Track
April Fools! Gotcha.

5. The View from Inside the Second Ave. Subway
In April, I took a tour of the Second Ave. Subway construction site and shared my photos from the trip. That subway extension won’t open for another five years, but construction is massive nonetheless.

6. A September Nostalgia Train with a Sponsored Twist
HBO sponsored the September Nostalgia Train to mark the start of the new season of Boardwalk Empire. The train ran along the West Side IRT route for a few weeks.

7. A Tale of a Viaduct, a Sign and the Need to Pay Attention
Despite years of planning and numerous community meetings, folks in Brownstone Brooklyn were still surprised and outraged when the MTA announced station closures along the IND Culver Line. I took residents to task for ignoring the news that impacts their commute. New Yorkers take subway service for granted and rarely pay attention to goings-on until it threatens their rides.

8. Photo of the Day: At 50th St., a Passageway Reopens
The MTA reopened a long-shuttered walkway between 7th and 8th Aves. at 50th St. earlier this year. The passageway had been closed in the early 1990s due to safety concerns, but with crime at near-record lows, the MTA has been able to reopen this out-of-system walkway.

9. End of the Designline for New Buses
After extensive testing, the MTA determined that Designline buses weren’t cut out for New York City streets.

10. Jay Walder to resign as MTA CEO and Chair
Without support from the governor and facing a tough round of negotiations with the TWU, Jay Walder resigned abruptly in late July. He left New York to take a high-paying job in Hong Kong, and the MTA is still waiting around for Albany to confirm his replacement, Joe Lhota. His departure was symbolic of an MTA brain drain that has seen many qualified managers and executives leave in the face of a multi-year pay freeze and no support from the government.