View from Underground

This little fella isn't getting electrocuted anytime soon. (Photo by flickr user Ludovic Burtron)

In my idle moments while waiting for a subway, I’ll often scan the tracks looking for some four-legged friends. I’ll watch as rats, ubiquitous everywhere underground in New York, scurry along the subway tracks looking for food. They dart over tracks and duck under the third rail, sometimes hopping atop it, sometimes scampering beneath. Even as the vibrations from approaching trains cause them to dart away, they avoid electrocution. It is a marvel of the subway ecosystem, but how do they do it?

Well, in this week’s FYI column in The Times, Michael Pollak has your answer:

They don’t form a grounding connection between the third rail and the track bed, transit officials said. “In order to be electrocuted you need to complete a circuit, which means you need to touch the third rail and the ground,” said John Campbell Jr., assistant chief electrical officer for New York City Transit. “It’s the same reason birds can sit on live uninsulated electric lines and not get electrocuted: there is no path for the current to flow.”

If a rat, bored with jumping, were unwise enough to reach up and touch the live part of the 600-volt third rail while keeping its other paws on the ground, it would be toast. But rats don’t do that. In most cases, either their bodies are not long enough to form a grounding connection, or their travels do not give them any reason to climb that way.

Pollak also spoke with a mammalogy expert at the American Museum of Natural History who doubts rodents’ needs to jump up on the third rail in the first place. After all, they are nimble enough to just go under. So while electrocution won’t solve the subway rat problem, perhaps, then, the MTA should just pick up the trash instead.

The Wafels and Dinges truck, my personal favorite, parks outside of Key Food in Park Slope on Saturdays. (Photo by flickr user Adam Kuban)

I am an unabashed fan of New York’s burgeoning food truck scene. From the Wafels & Dinges stalwart to the cookies from the Treats Truck to Mexicue’s sliders and beyond, I find the food trucks to be a breath of fresh air amidst New York’s stagnant lunch scene, and I eye Los Angeles, Portland and the Bay Area enviously for their vibrant food truck and food cart offerings.

Unfortunately, though, while many New Yorkers agree with me, those with power — the restaurant and food services industry — don’t feel the same way. To them, the food trucks represent a threat. While no longer a novelty, they have remained popular by offering good, cheap food, and from Midtown to Park Slope, bricks-and-mortar stores feel threatened. They don’t want to lose their customers to better options and think that food trucks, which do pay taxes and do adhere to DOH standards, are leeching off of their businesses. Competition, of course, is good for everyone, but try telling that to someone with an insane rent on a mediocre deli on 48th Street.

To that end, restaurants and delis have often tried to get food trucks to move. They’ve complained to the cops and to City Council members; they try to get parking regulations changed or old laws enforced. It is, as The Times noted earlier this week, working:

In the last 10 days, the Treats Truck, which has sold cookies and brownies for four years during lunchtime at West 45th Street near Avenue of the Americas, has been told by police officers that it is no longer welcome there, nor at its late-afternoon 38th Street and Fifth Avenue location. The Rickshaw Dumpling truck, a presence for three years at West 45th Street near the Treats Truck, has been shooed away as well.

The police “have told us they no longer want food trucks in Midtown,” said Kim Ima, the owner of the Treats Truck, a pioneer of the city’s new-wave food-truck movement, who began cultivating customers on West 45th Street in 2007.

Also ejected from their customary Midtown locations recently were the Comme Ci, Comme Ça Truck at 38th Street and Broadway; the Desi Truck at West 50th Street between Seventh Avenue and Avenue of the Americas; the Eddie’s Pizza Truck, the Kimchi Taco Truck and the Wafels & Dinges Truck, all at West 52nd Street and the Avenue of the Americas; the Crisp on Wheels truck at West 51st Street and Seventh Avenue. Members of the ragtag fleet of generic soft ice cream trucks in the area have been cast out, too.

Few if any of these trucks have been ticketed, and few towed. Nevertheless, some vendors who tried to return have been shooed away again. Many, including the Treats Truck, consider themselves permanently displaced and are trying to find other locations. In some cases, they have been turned out of their new neighborhoods, too.

According to The Times, this drive to push food carts out of midtown stems from a recent New York State Supreme Court case that turned to an old law “believed to date from the 1950s.” The law bars any “vendor, hawker or huckster shall park a vehicle at a metered parking space” from offering “merchandise for sale from the vehicle.” In May, Judge Geoffrey Wright decided this law applied to food trucks, and cops in certain Midtown precincts where delis feel most threatened have ramped up the pressure to get food trucks to move.

Now, the problem here isn’t just one of a limited culinary palate. It’s one of street prioritization. Food trucks inherently encourage pedestrians to use the sidewalk space they have, and they turn road space otherwise taken up by either idle and empty parked cars or moving traffic into an economically beneficial activity. Food trucks should be encouraged, and laws leftover from the 1950s when no one had even heard of the Rickshaw Dumpling Truck should be discarded. Of course, that would require a City Council willing to face down the food services lobby, and that won’t happen. Somehow, food services are louder and more vocal than pedestrians.

One day, the city will better allocate street space based on use. Then, we’ll be able to enjoy our waffles, our cookies and our overpriced lobster rolls in peace. For now, the food trucks will be marginalized to neighborhoods that actually want them.

An example of NYCDOT's proposed neighborhood map. (NYC Department of Transportation)

Few New Yorkers would ever admit it, but now and then, a map comes in handy. Sure, most neighborhoods throughout large stretches of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and, of course, Manhattan are laid out on a grid, but maps can be useful. Perhaps one is bound for a new neighborhood; perhaps one doesn’t know where they are at the top of an unfamiliar subway staircase; perhaps one finds oneself in Chinatown and just can’t figure out where Pell St. is anyway.

And then of course, there are the tourists who get lost trying to figure out which way’s 8th Ave. and which way is 6th Ave. when they’re standing on 7th Ave. Forget trying to guide them through neighborhoods where the streets have no numbers. That’s hopeless.

Other cities have solved this problem through an innovation called a map. In Philadelphia, for instance, the city has taken the initiative to encourage walking by posting signs directing pedestrians to nearby attractions (PDF) while hanging up neighborhood maps that guide the way. These maps show an entire neighborhood with distance-based circles showing how far away the walker may be from his or her destination. Talk about convenience.

Now, New York wants to get in on the game. On Monday, NYC’s Department of Transportation has issued an Request for Proposals for surface-based maps. The initial contract for five years would cover four neighborhoods with an additional option on the deal for another five years and another five neighborhoods. It seems like a slow process for something that could help with city life, but that’s New York’s bureaucracy for you.

“New Yorkers seem to know it all, except how to get around town sometimes,” Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said. “We’ve got great signage for cars, but we don’t have great directional signage for pedestrians.”

For now, DOT would like to test out signs in the following neighborhoods: Long Island City, Queens; Prospect Heights/Crown Heights, Brooklyn; and Chinatown and parts of Midtown in Manhattan. The Times reports that this initiative will cost $1.5 million with federal and business dollars accounting for $1.2 million of that total. The Wall Street Journal noted that the city is willing to spend up to $9.5 million on the project.

The impetus for the project, NYC DOT says, came from a recent intercept survey conducted citywide. Five hundred pedestrians were stopped and peppered with questions, and the findings were not too comforting. Nine percent of city residents and 27 percent of visitors said they had been lost within the past seven days while 13 percent of New Yorkers were unfamiliar with the area they were in. A whopping 27 percent of visitors couldn’t even name the borough in which they were surveyed, and 33 percent of city residents couldn’t point north. It’s seemingly a wonder anyone gets around.

As The Journal noted, this effort is part of a larger initiative to better unify city neighborhoods and help New Yorkers navigate. For instance, the area between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges in Manhattan has suffered through an identity crisis. “In different spaces, according to the Department of Transportation,” The Journal said, “that space has been labeled as Chinatown, Two Bridges, Knickerbocker Village and the Seaport Historic District.” And of course, there’s Queens with its various Roads, Streets, Drives and Avenues all with the same numbers.

It might, as The Times says, be a badge of pride to know the way around, but getting lost too seems to be a hallmark of a New Yorker. Why not solve that problem too?

Just last week, I highlighted the tale of a Bronx woman who assaulted a bus driver when her dog was refused entry to the Bx9. Today, another video of rider rage directed toward a bus driver is making the rounds. This one originated on FiPS and features some graphic language. Be forewarned.

According to FiPS, the bus driver had asked the lady to turn down her music after she started playing it through her phone’s speaker. We’ve all been subjected to loud music on trains, and this is why few people ever ask rude and inconsiderate passengers to turn down the volume. Take a look:

The bus driver probably shouldn’t engage in an insult match with passengers, but there is absolutely no excusing this lady’s behavior.

Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Omura

Earlier this year in February, Jeffrey Omura, SAS reader, sent me the above photo of the 157th St. platform with a note explaining how the trash would stick around for a few weeks. MTA workers would bag the garbage, but no one would ever come to collect it. Rats would move in and a stench would invade the rear of the platform.

Omura’s story isn’t an isolated one in the days of the MTA’s austerity budgets. A few years ago, then-Transit president Howard Roberts told me that cleaning budgets were going to be cut, and we’re still feeling — and smelling — the effects of those cuts. Today in his Daily News column, Pete Donohue explores the trash problem. No one is picking up the garbage, he writes:

Subway riders are being forced to wait on platforms that have plastic bags stuffed with foul-smelling dreck because the MTA regularly fails to meet its own garbage collection schedule, the Daily News has learned. On an average night, MTA trash trains and garbage trucks don’t make it to more than 100 stations that are scheduled for a pickup, Metropolitan Transportation Authority data show.

When the temporary storage space in a station fills up, the trash is left on a platform. It remains there – sometimes for days – before being carted away. It could be a bag tucked in the corner or more than a dozen bags near an entrance…The News found between one and 10 bags at a string of other nearby G train stations such as Bedford-Nostrand – and 30 piled on a platform at the elevated Astoria-Ditmars Blvd. station in Queens.

The MTA has eight garbage-hauling trains with flatbed cars. From Tuesday, June 14, through Tuesday, June 21, those trains missed 962 of their scheduled stops, NYC Transit division records show. (They made about 200 unscheduled stops.) The authority has nine garbage trucks assigned to the subways. They missed 260 scheduled stops over the same eight days, the records show, even as they made about 60 unscheduled stops. Some stations are supposed to get garbage collection once a day. At the other end of the spectrum, the least-busy stations are supposed to get it twice a week. The pickup rate is about 60% or 70%, depending on how you crunch the numbers.

According to Donohue, the MTA has put forward a handful of reasons why garbage collection suffers. He says that crews have to work around passenger train schedules as well as capital repair-related shut downs. He also notes that the nine garbage trucks are old and are out of service for around 118 days per year.

While he doesn’t mention previous years’ budget cuts, I have been told in the past that those cuts have also led to more trash on the platforms, but now the MTA plans to add more garbage collectors. “We’re certainly conceding trash in all instances is not being picked up in a timely fashion,” MTA spokesman Charles Seaton said to The News. “We have taken steps to improve the situation, and we will take further steps.”

The New York City Subways are not a quiet place. Noise filters into our rides from nearly every source. People lost in their music forget how loud their cheap headphones are; kids coming home from school laugh and joke with their friends; subway car brakes squeal; metal-on-metal sparks fly.

While the outside noise is impossible to contain, the MTA’s own announcements aren’t helping. The new countdown clocks make waiting for trains far less stressful but also far more bothersome. Every two minutes the loud pre-recorded announcements let us know that the next Brooklyn-bound 2 train is two minutes away while the next Bronx-bound train is 4 minutes away and over and over and over again.

The on-board announcements are even worse. We are bombarded with messages from the New York City Police Department that haven’t changed in nearly 10 years. We are told not to ride on the outside of the train. We are urged not to litter. But the worst, says Juliet Lapidos in this weekend’s Daily News, are those exhorting us to be patient when unavoidable delays arise. In fact, she absolutely hates it.

Nearly every day, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority asks me, quite insistently, to “please be patient.” On the F line, which I use to commute to work from Brooklyn, I’m often held up at Jay Street-MetroTech. There, a pre-recorded message explains that it’s necessary to wait for a connecting train: “please be patient.” At West Fourth Street, I’m told there’s been a signal malfunction in midtown: “please be patient.” Stalled at Second Avenue due to trouble with the closing doors: “please be patient.”

..Well, to those who run the sprawling MTA bureaucracy, I’ll say this: Thanks but no thanks. New York’s subway system is vast, constantly in operation and perennially underfunded. It serves some five million people every weekday. Delays are unavoidable. But just skip the “please be patient,” or the PBP. It’s presumptuous and condescending – and, most of all, counterproductive.

Anyone with a basic understanding of psychology knows that when you request patience, you draw attention to the passage of time. It’s comparable to that tired trick your uncle trots out at barbecues: “Don’t think of an elephant.” “Please be patient, you say? Come to think of it, I’m feeling pretty impatient. How long have I been on this train, anyway?” The more they ask, the worse it gets.

According to Lapidos, the MTA says the messages were “introduced to soften messages that contain useful yet unwelcome information.” They were not tested on a focus group though who could have noticed how annoying they are. The messages, Lapidos writes, “irritate and inflame. She says, “The worst is when a computerized message delivers the message – which is becoming increasingly common as the system automates many of its operations. The computerized voice is annoyingly unflappable; it most assuredly does not feel my pain.”

Of all of the complaints about customer relations underground, I find Lapidos’ gripe to be spot-on. These prerecorded messages do nothing to inform straphangers of the cause of the delay or the amount of time the train will be waiting. On the B train every morning, the conductor asks us to be patient before we cross the Manhattan Bridge, and the delay is inevitable five or ten seconds longer than the announcement. In that case, the announcement simply draws attention to a delay that isn’t.

So what’s the solution? Lapidos offers a great one: “The MTA would do well to give its riders more and more useful data. Tell us about how long we should expect to wait…Announcing that the connecting train should arrive within two minutes, or that the signal trouble should be cleared up within three, will go much further than a PBP in encouraging docile acceptance.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

An emergency exit stands alone amidst construction in 2007. (Photo by flickr user rlboston)

Usually, when we talk about the great emergency exit debate, we do so in the context of exiting a station. Should those who think they are in more of a hurry than others risk the ear-piercing sounds of the alarm to power through the emergency exit? Should others follow once the exits are opened by someone else? The moralists and pragmatists have squared off before, and today, the alarms are largely ineffective.

But what of people who use the emergency exits to sneak into the subway system without paying? Those are the folks we never mention because it’s clear they are violating the law. By skirting the turnstiles and the need for a swipe, they can enter without a fare. In this week’s column, though, Pete Donohue highlights the hazy ethics surrounding some recent police stings. Is it entrapment or ethics, he asks:

Carlos, a hair stylist from Long Island, says he’s never been in real trouble. Never arrested. Never even got a speeding ticket. But there he was, surrounded by four uniformed police officers in a midtown station one morning last week. He stole a sheepish glance at the cops and the commuters rushing by, then settled his gaze on the tiled floor.,,

Minutes before, as he hurriedly approached a bank of turnstiles below 33rd St. and Seventh Ave., Carlos saw that the emergency exit gate was wide open. He made an instant decision not to break stride. He ducked through the opening. ..Little did he know that a police officer was peeking around a nearby pillar like a schoolboy playing spy, eying the emergency exit gate that exiting riders constantly swing wide open. Carlos didn’t get more than 15 feet past the gate when the young officer stepped out from his hiding spot…Carlos was issued a fare-beating ticket. The fine is $100.

The hairdresser was caught in a cynical trap that is wrong on far more levels than it is right. It’s a cheap version of the “broken windows” theory of policing that was born in the urban lawlessness of the 1980s and embraced by former Police Commissioner William Bratton in the early 1990s. Police have partly credited the sharp decline in subway felonies to their cracking down on relatively minor offenses like turnstile jumping. In the process, they wound up nabbing plenty of bad guys who had weapons or were wanted for serious crimes.

Turnstile jumping is one thing. But the swing-gate sting pushes the bounds of fairness. It’s entrapment, inducing people who wouldn’t dare jump a turnstile to enter without swiping a MetroCard – including some who have valid cards in their wallet. It’s trickery that engenders bad feelings toward cops whose supervisors don’t allow them to use a modicum of judgment.

Donohue’s article ends with the story of another person who entered through an open emergency exit and right into the arms of the cops even though she had an unlimited ride card. “I didn’t even think about it,” she said. “I assumed the turnstile was broken. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

To me, this is a pretty cut-and-dry issue. If you enter the system without swiping — unlimited ride card or not — you are violating the law, and the affirmative defense of entrapment doesn’t apply here. Cops aren’t actively encouraging or inducing anyone to break the law, and per New York State law, “conduct merely affording a person an opportunity to commit an offense does not constitute entrapment.” If the cops are leaving emergency exits open to test straphangers’ ethics, it might be a waste of time or resources, but it’s certainly not entrapment.

It is likely a better use of resources for cops to keep shadier elements out of the system. The man and woman in Donohue’s article made mistakes, brok the law and had to pay. It is a fate they could have avoided by doing what everyone else does and swiping in.

We know all about the folks along the L train who put on a movable feast nearly two weeks ago. The Times reported on the culinary ride underground and spoke to those who participated. As with any good media stunt, though, the organizers brought along their own videographers, and today, we have the video of the fine dining.

In the 5:45 clip, we see Michael Cirino, the event’s organizer, put on his meal. The chefs feed both suspecting and unsuspecting straphangers their meal, and of course, the crowd reactions are great. Who expects such fine dining on a Rockaway-bound L train anyway?

The folks in charge of this experience go by the name a razor, shiny knife, and they call themselves an educational, social and theatrical culinary experience. They put on themed events all over the place and have established a small website with a bunch of acknowledgments.

The MTA wasn’t originally too amused by the dinner party. “A dinner party on the L train?” Transit spokesman Charles Seaton said to The Times a few weeks ago. “No. Subway trains are for riding, not for holding parties.” I, however, find the idea amusing. I could see why someone might not want the interruptions or the hassle, but a dinner party would brighten up my usually mundane commute on the B train. Live and let live.