View from Underground

WeMakeCoolSh.it “L Train Notwork” Behind the Scenes from Matthew McGregor-Mento on Vimeo.

As the MTA works to bring cell service underground, a group of artists in — where else? — Williamsburg have decided to bring a wireless intranet network to the L train every day. The group, called WeMakeCoolSh.it, has been experimenting with their project from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. every day this week in the last two cars of the L train between Morgan Ave. and 8th Ave.

Here’s how this works: Using a few battery-powered web servers, the group creates mobile hotspots on the train. Those riding the L with their WiFi-enabled devices — which is just about everyone — can sign onto the network to chat with fellow straphangers, read curated news and creative content and surf the limited intranet. “We like to encourage strangers to talk to each other, and this seemed like a great way to do it,” the founders said in a press release. “When people ride the trains during rush hour, they are forced to be so close to each other, but they rarely interact with each other. We wanted to give people something to talk about.”

According to the group, they’re not doing anything intrusive that violates any MTA rules or regulations. Their equipment fits into regular shopping bags, and they say they “aren’t doing anything you couldn’t do on the average laptop or mobile device.”

Earlier this week, the group released the video above which shows how they set up their mobile train network. Tomorrow morning is their final run. While I’m sure some people will find this art both kitschy and ridiculous, it’s a clever way to connect people on a train in the morning.

What this man is doing is never an acceptable thing to do on the subways. (Photo by flickr user Dan Dickinson)

By and large, most New Yorkers believe there are certain things that just shouldn’t be done on public transit. We can take or leave coffee in a train while most people wouldn’t choose to chow down while riding to work. We don’t engage in lewd behavior; we don’t relieve ourselves in the subway system; and we don’t tend to personal grooming in the subway. Or at least, we shouldn’t attend to personal grooming.

On Wednesday morning, however, I was greeted with one of those situations that just screams out as being grossly awkward. As I commute from Park Slope to Midtown East, I switch from the IRT local to the express at Nevins Street, and rarely am I lucky enough to get a seat right away. So I found myself standing above a lady who had her pocketbook half open on her lap. It was then I heard the familiar sound.

The noise a pair of nail clippers make is an unmistakable one. It’s a brief sound as the metal blades snip through the fingernail, but it’s also one with which we are familiar. Clipping nails is just a thing that we all have to do every few weeks, and we grow accustomed to huddling over a toilet, a garbage can, the sink in an effort to control those runaway nails that tend to go flying.

So there I stood on a 5 train early in the morning with that noise echoing in my ears. As I looked around for the source, I found the woman sitting on the seat near me, and it was a strange sight indeed. This straphanger was clearly someone who knew that what she was doing was not exactly hygienic. She was well-dressed and on her way to work, but she kept her hands in the bag as she furtively attempted to trim her nails. She saw me watching disapprovingly and glanced away. She did have the decency to bury her fingers fully in her handbag, but that must meant that her pocketbook would be filled with clippings. Better her bag than the floor of the subway car.

This culprit absconded from the scene of her moral crime at Union Square, and our fleeting six-stop encounter was over. I gave her the eye; she kept trimming her nails. As I rode onward to Grand Central, I couldn’t get the experience out of my mind. What inspires someone to do something as personal and as unappealing as clipping her nails in a crowded subway car at rush hour? Did she forget to do it at home? Does she have no easy access to the privacy of a bathroom at her office? Does she simply not care what other people think and what the rest of us would consider acceptable social behavior for a subway ride?

A few years ago, I wondered about those who insist on performing bathroom rituals on the train. I’ve seen people floss their teeth, pluck their eyebrows and clip their nails all in some misguided sense of efficiency. It’s not appropriate train behavior, and it shouldn’t be something anyone has to say. Read a book; listen to music; stare off into space. But for the sake of everyone else, just leave the nail clippers at home.

An October derailment have many fearing the bad old days. (Photo via @NYCTSubwayScoop)

Remember the bad old days? Remember when the subways weren’t safe, when track fires and derailments ran rampant, when trains weren’t air conditioned but were covered in graffiti and Bernard Goetz came to stand for a generation of New Yorkers too scared to use transit after dark? Remember cars that lost power, doors that wouldn’t open and public address systems that wouldn’t address? Anyone old enough who’s lived in New York City long enough certainly does.

While I came off age in the city toward the tail end of those dark days for the city and its transit network, I’ve heard the horror stories and read the news clippings often enough to know that no one wants to relive those days. The transit network, which has rebounded from the 1970s and 1980s to carry over 5 million passengers per day, has become too vital to slip back into that morass of decay and neglect.

For the past few years, though, fears of a regression have crept into news coverage of the subways. It’s certainly true that deferred maintenance brought about by an underfunded capital plan will risk sending the subways into a lull, but over the past 25 years, the MTA has invested heavily in its state of good repair. Although stations and their components aren’t up to par, the tracks, switches and signals that truly count are in far better shape than the naked eye can see. If the station walls are crumbling, riders are willing to overlook cosmetic blemishes as long as the trains run regularly and quickly.

When accidents happen though — such as the derailment on the 6 train the other week — the fears creep up a notch. At Transportation Nation yesterday, Jim O’Grady spoke to some riders who worry about the bad old days. The October 24 incident was the third derailment in six months, but no one was injured as the train jumped the tracks early in the morning. Still, New Yorkers like to fret, and fret they shall. “If they keep cutting the budget and keep raising the fare, less people will be able to ride it and it won’t be as reliable,” Straphanger Amber Morgan said.

O’Grady, who isn’t waxing nostalgic, notes how the system isn’t bad when we use its nadir as a comparison, but he notes that not everything is wine and roses these days. He writes:

Budget cuts have made some things worse. Recent NY MTA data show a 20 percent increase in trains arriving more than five minutes late at the end of their runs. But New York City Transit President Tom Prendergast said major service disruptions — like those caused by derailments — are not worsening because of belt-tightening

“We do not think it’s in any way related to budget issues or financial issues,” he said. “We treat every derailment very seriously. I mean, I was here at a point in time twenty years ago, when we had 27 derailments a year.”

Surprisingly, Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign agrees with Prendergast. He said the NY MTA’s average of less than two derailments per year over the last five years is not bad. But Russianoff added delays and overcrowding are other matters. “You know, it’s not the bad old days yet,” he said. “But you have to worry about going down the slippery slope.”

As much as I believe that Albany has failed the MTA and that the MTA’s debt bomb could have tremendous consequences for the operating budget and fares down the road, the system simply isn’t re-entering the bad old days. We’re not going to see 27 derailments per year as the MTA once averaged; we’re not going to see track fires and broken-down trains. The MTA’s current fleet of rolling stock and its obsessive attention to track beds and in-tunnel infrastructure has insured our system against such an immediate future. A one-off derailment happens.

The real worries though are about the long-term future. If the MTA doesn’t get the infusion of capital it needs and if it can’t continue to invest over the next 10, 15 or 20 years, then we can begin to worry. The system broke down in the 1970s and 1980s because rolling stock that had long outlived its shelf life was still being pressed into service each day while track beds and signal systems that were 40-70 years old weren’t being maintained and upgraded.

It’s very tough for those of us living in the here and now to see beyond our immediate needs. I want my train to arrive quickly in the morning when I come to work, and I don’t want to wait out a sick passenger or pushy straphangers. The fears and concerns about the bad old days though lurk in the distant background. They won’t crop up tomorrow, next week or next month. But do we have the foresight today to avoid a disaster in 2025 or 2035? With the MTA’s debt levels rising, I don’t think we do.

Today is an anniversary of sorts for our beleaguered subway city for 107 years ago on October 27, 1904, the Interborough Rapid Transit company launched the city’s first subway line. To celebrate, the MTA, one of its licensing partners and Macy’s unveiled a boutique in the Macy’s Cellar that will be hawking subway-themed merchandise through the end of the year.

The collection, created for Macy’s by Gouda, Inc., will be entitled NYC Underground, and the shop includes apparel, accessories and a variety of other products adorned with subway maps and route bullets. The store itself will be decorated with subway maps, station signs and benches and old metal straps from the now-reefed redbirds.

For the MTA, the store offers a chance to earn more on licensing. The authority is paying no rent to Macy’s and will enjoy prominent placement throughout the holiday shopping season. “As we look to make every dollar count across everything the MTA does, we’re working to enhance the value of the MTA brand and trademarks,” Paul Fleuranges, the authority’s Senior Director of Corporate and Internal Communications, said. “We are delighted to be able to do that with a prominent presence in such an iconic and world-renowned space.”

In exchange for the space, Macy’s will be slapping its logo on a variety of products for sale — including apparel with the subway map and Macy’s store. The MTA, which makes $500,000 a year in licensing fees and royalties, says this is its first foray into direct, co-branding collaborations. And to think, it took only 107 years.

Last week, we saw what happens to low-tech MTA signs that are designed to help people find their ways about the subway system: Eventually, they fall victim to irate vandals. But what about the MTA’s high-tech countdown clocks? Here’s the view that awaited me in Grand Army Plaza early Saturday afternoon.

A shattered sign at Grand Army Plaza mars the MTA's new technological efforts. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)

It’s tough to say what exactly happened here, but it’s easy to see the impact. Someone tried to smash the countdown clock. Perhaps he or she grew annoyed by a late-night 20-minute wait. Perhaps a aggressively drunk straphanger took out some MTA-inspired frustration on the sign. Perhaps someone with a warped sense of right and wrong decided to break stuff. The nearest victim was a sign hanging eight or nine feet above the platform.

In its annual customer information survey released today — more on those results later — the MTA trumpeted a system-wide embrace of technology. Riders who regularly use stations with countdown clocks are far more pleased with service than those stuck on B Division lines with only the lights at the end of an empty tunnel to forecast train arrival times. People find it less stressful and easier to travel if they have a sense of when the train is coming. So why the destructive tendencies?

As I mentioned on Friday, Transit is less likely to spend precious dollars on customer improvement measures if those efforts are going to waste. As most of us learned in nursery school, it takes only one person to ruin it for everyone else. Is that what we’re seeing here as New Yorkers take out their subway-inspired frustrations on the nearest inanimate object?

Remember the pilot program featuring in-station strip maps that was designed to improve wayfinding underground? Well, take a look at what happened to one of the maps in Grand Central barely four months after they were first unveiled. It ain’t pretty.

As seen at Grand Central on Wednesday evening. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)

Of course, it’s not a big surprise that a free-standing sign at a busy subway station was vandalized. Basically anything the MTA installs — from signs to benches to garbage cans — is at risk of suffering the same fate. But on the other hand, this outcome raises a question: Why should the MTA bother to invest in simple things that improve the system if this is how riders respond?

One of the endlessly annoying messages the TA broadcasts into the new rolling stock concludes with an exhortation: “Courtesy is contagious and it starts with you.” As cheesy as it sounds, it’s true, and the same can be said for the way we treat our system. If we’re respectful, if we don’t destroy signs, litter or use the subway was a public toilet, everyone would enjoy a more pleasant commute.

This Brighton Line pay phone at 7th Avenue has seen better days.

Pay phones in New York City are a dying breed. Aboveground, nearly everyone has a cell phone, and pay phones, with their quaint request for a quarter, have fallen into disrepair. Most are extremely dirty, and many do not work. Underground, where cell signals do not yet permeate, the story is much the same. In fact, a Straphangers survey earlier this year found that a third of all pay phones in the subway’s 40 busiest stations simply do not work.

Now, as Verizon looks to exit the pay phone business, the future for these underground communications lifelines may be short-lived. An article published last week by the Dow Jones Newswire didn’t gain much attention, but it features a key bit of information on the city’s subway system. Verizon is going to sell its NYC pay phone network to a California-based company called Pacific Telemanagement Services, and the buyers would like to disconnect all of the phones in the subway system. “At MTA, there’re many, many more phones in place than are justified,” Thomas Keane, the head of PTS, said.

While I saw an earlier version of the story that claimed PTS may shutter the subway pay phones, the company says it remains committed to keeping the city’s most popular phones up and running. Greg Bensinger had more on the impact this sale may have on underground pay phones:

Among Verizon’s more frequented pay phones are those on New York’s underground subway platforms, where wireless signals mostly don’t reach, Keane said. Under PTS management, some of those pay phones would be closed or turned into kiosks with commuter information, he said, noting the firm will have to negotiate those terms with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority…

Still other perils lie ahead for pay phones. In New York, the MTA has already rigged six subway stations with wireless service and plans to similarly retrofit all 277 stations by 2016. And Washington’s Metro this year said it would remove nearly all of the pay phones in its system, about 1,000, after failing to reach terms on a new contract with Verizon.

“People tend to forget about pay phones, until their cellphone doesn’t get a signal, until there’s a natural disaster or other emergency,” Keane said. “We want to make sure there’s a future with pay phones where Americans need them.”

Because the MTA has a service contract with Verizon that will, in all likelihood, be assigned to Pacific Telemanagement Services upon completion of the sale, the MTA won’t be losing its pay phones any time soon. Removals will, as the article said, have to be negotiated. Yet, it’s easy to see how forces are aligning against the pay phone. Cell service is available at a handful of underground stations, and that number should swell to around 36 within the next 12 months. Furthermore, the MTA is ready to move forward with its Help Point Intercom pilot to provide better emergency response underground. Only those looking to reach a person aboveground to talk business or pleasure will need a pay phone.

For now, I can’t get too worked up over the eventual death of the subway pay phone, if that truly comes to pass. Verizon has removed pay phones in the system for years, and stations as popular as 42nd St.-Bryant Park and West 4th St. have seem their phones removed for good. Meanwhile, it’s tough for me to imagine a scenario that would cause me to place a subway pay phone in contact with my ear or mouth.

Yet, the pragmatist in me hears faint stirrings of worry over emergency situations in which contact with the outside world is impossible. Do we live in a city ready to give up its underground pay phones? Perhaps not.