View from Underground

Once a bathroom; now a newsstand. (Photo by flickr user theratrace)

A few weeks ago, I was heading back to Park Slope from Manhattan and found myself on a D train. To get home, I had to switch at Atlantic/Pacific to a train that makes local stops, and I thought I’d use the time I had to duck into the bathroom. It was during the middle of the afternoon rush, and I assumed that bathrooms on the mezzanine between the Fourth Ave. stop at Pacific St. and the IRT platforms at Altantic Ave. would be open. Luckily for my olfactory sense, the bathroom was locked even though the sign said it would be closed only from midnight to 5 a.m., and I simply waited until I arrived home a few minutes later.

Around the subway system, the MTA’s bathrooms pop up like hidden gems – or trash heaps – amidst an unfriendly system. New York isn’t known for its public restrooms, and the subways are no exception. The johns at Times Square near the 8th Ave. line are useable; the ones at W. 4th St. are generally locked; and I don’t know anyone who dares enter the restrooms on the F platform at Delancey St. You never know what you’re going to find.

For a few years, I’ve toyed on and off with a subway bathroom feature. I’d take my camera and document the toilets underground. Somehow, though, I haven’t been able to stomach the idea. Do we really want to see what’s inside the subway’s myriad unloved bathrooms? Today, Heather Haddon did just that sans a camera. She explored all 129 restrooms in 77 subway stations and found what you would expect. Most are dirty; most reek of human waste; and nearly half of them were closed when they should have been open. “They’re pretty disgusting. People are always cleaning themselves in there and doing other stuff,” Kelvin Pau said at 168th St.

Haddon continues:

Of the open bathrooms, a third were frightening caverns of garbage, urine, standing water or unseemly smells. Odors from the Astoria-Ditmars Blvd. station on the N nearly caused an amNewYork reporter to feel faint during a recent visit…

Don’t expect to find toilet paper or soap, as few of the bathrooms had either. And while graffiti has largely been eliminated from subway stations, it lives on in the bathrooms, as many of the walls and stalls were covered in tags.

Keeping the bathrooms tidy and open is a challenge because they are constantly being vandalized or attract “criminal activity,” Seaton said. “They may be locked at any given time due to vandalism and ongoing repairs,” he said.

Haddon and her co-reporter Nicholas Klopsis close with a list of the best and worst bathrooms in the system. Stay away from Hunts Point where the men’s room stalls have no walls or 57th St. and Broadway with its “potpourri of not-so-pleasing smells.” And if you really have to go, just head above ground and find the nearest coffee house. It can’t be worse than the restrooms that mar the subways.

This past Sunday night, I found myself on a reasonably crowded 2 train heading from the Upper West Side to Park Slope. As the train went local and slowly snaked its way down the West Side, I had ample opportunity to surreptitiously survey the scene. What struck my fancy was something quite disgusting.

Sitting across the car from me where a family traveling together. The young parents had their daughter — maybe five or six years old — in tow, and she was trying to chow down on some fast food chicken fingers and fries. At one point, the girl spilled half of the box of food on the floor, and as her dad leaned over to inspect the damage, I was sure he would sweep it up into the plastic bag he had with him. Instead, he pushed the fries and chicken under the seat, and as the train continued onward, every few minutes, he would kick more of the food under the seat, grinding it into mush in the process. I was disgusted.

Eventually, the three exited the train, and I turned to my girlfriend, who also witnessed this display with similar disgust. “Do you think,” I asked, “they do that at home when they drop something on their kitchen floor?” I often find it easier just to kick food under the table than it is to own up and clean it up. Don’t you?

This behavior isn’t rare in the subways. People think they can just abdicate responsibility for their actions because, hey, someone else will have to clean it up. Rampant rudeness on trains is a known problem, and websites such as Train Pigs document those who eat and litter underground. Yet, it shouldn’t be like that.

New York City Transit’s trains are a shared space in the city. No matter our upbringing, our class, our socioeconomic position in the city, we ride the trains to get from Point A to Point B in a cheap, fast and environmentally friendly way. The trains, then, are only as clean as we make them. We can blame the MTA for its lack of garbage cans — a problem at stations with one entrance — and we can question the decision to skimp on station cleaners amidst an economic crisis.

Still, the fact remains that we the riders should be the ones who clean up after ourselves. We shouldn’t ignore food that spills, and maybe we shouldn’t let others off the hook either. I didn’t say anything to the family that spilled dinner on the floor and then tried to kick away. I let them off the train with just a glare, and others did the same. No one wanted to pick a fight, and we all faced the typical collective action problem. It was, we though, someone else’s problem.

Maybe, though, had one person said something, we could have shamed that family into doing the right thing. We could have let them know that we saw what they did and how they tried to cover it up. We could have told them that we knew they were taking a shared city resource, something upon which we all depend and something we all want to see clean, and sullying it through rude behavior. But we didn’t.

The MTA urges people to take their trash with them, and yet, many do not. Perhaps, we should urge people to treat train floors as they would their kitchen. When I spill something in the kitchen, I don’t kick it under the counter and hope no one notices. I clean it up because it’s what we are supposed to do at home and what we should also do on the trains.

Where: Inside thenew headhouse at 96th St. and Broadway.

When: 11:44 a.m. on April 5, 2010

What: While poking around the new stationhouse at 96th St. on the IRT yesterday morning, I discovered that people on the entry level can, in a way, spy on those waiting for the trains. Because the staircases and station are more open to let light down to the platform, there’s a gap between the edge of the stairs and the station walls. Although utility and power lines block the direct view of people waiting for the train, when someone makes the age-old subway move of stepping forward to peer into the tunnel to search expectantly for the light sof the train, they’re clearly visible from above.

As I was standing there taking pictures, straphangers impatient for a downtown express to pull in kept leaning over. It was a quintessential New York moment, and I caught one woman in the act. One day soon, countdown clocks will come to 96th St., but for now, we’re left with the firm New York belief that, by looking into the dark tunnel, the train will arrive sooner. Eventually, the 3 came, and everyone boarded, heading south to destinations unknown.

The Lower East Side’s 2nd Ave. stop along the IND Sixth Ave. line is among my least favorite stations. (Photo by flickr user CabonNYC)

As we ride around the subways every day, we learn the various ins and outs of the stations we frequent. For instance, I know to look for a faint red light in the southbound B/D tunnel outside of 47th-50th Sts. that will disappear when a train is approaching. I’ve come to love Grand Army Plaza for its wide platforms and ample seating. The Sol LeWitt installation at the renovated 59th St./Columbus Circle stop adds a bright bit of color to the otherwise drab subway system.

On the flip side though are the stations we hate. These are the stations that exude, well, something. Perhaps it is an odor upon which we don’t want to dwell. Perhaps it is the cramped concourses, low ceilings or general sketchiness. Perhaps it’s the interminable wait on a cold winter night that makes us forever hate a station in Astoria, a station along the elevated tracks deep in the heart of Brooklyn or the Howard Beach station outside of JFK Airport.

Over the weekend, SubChat debated that very question. Which station, asked LuchAAA, is your least favorite? His was Lexington Ave. and 59th St. on the N/R/W. That station is always crowded, very dusty and smells pretty bad.

As the thread unfolded, many SubChatters highlighted the same qualifications for that least favorite station. Take, for instance, Osmosis Jones’ view on Chambers St. on the BMT: “It’s ugly and adequately named as it smells like a chamber pot.” Smells were a leading cause of station hatred with many of the BMT stations along the J/M/Z and the R stops in Downtown Brooklyn leading the charge.

But beyond offensive odors were those stations that seem neglected. The 53rd St./7th Ave. station earned numerous votes because of the long walk up from the depths of the lower levels, the smell and the foreboding nature of its nooks and crannies. SubChatters heaped scoren upon the Bowery station along the Nassau St. line. That station just seems forgotten with peeling paint, closed platforms, entrances lost to time and little care.

Then there are the recent monstrosities. The Archer Ave. extension, built in the 1980s, isn’t remembered for its architecture or presentation. Sutphin Boulevard, an entryway to the city from the JFK Airtrain, is dimly lit with ugly floors and dirty ceilings. The rest of those stations hardly inspire pride or confidence in the subways.

As SubChatters continue to discuss their personal subway dislikes, I got the sense that people dislike stations for a few key reasons. Some stations are just too crowded. The Canal St. complex where the BMT and IRT intersect is teeming with people, and the narrow platforms, especially on the N/Q level leading to and from the Manhattan Bridge, make waiting seem treacherous. Other stations smell bad. Still others are just left to rot away by the MTA.

In the end, though, it’s all about waiting. If we don’t feel comfortable waiting at a station — if we feel unsafe, if we feel as though the train won’t arrive because no one has cleaned the stop since the Reagan Administration — we will not have a positive association with that station. Maybe, then, as the MTA addresses concerns of subway security amidst cameras that don’t work and station agents aren’t there, the authority should ask people what they need to feel comfortable waiting at a station. Sometimes, new lighting, a fresh coat of paint, and no bad smells are a deterrent enough. As long as it looks as though someone cares about how the subways look, we all might just be safer.

A glimpse of some very familiar-looking wooden subway benches. (Photo by flickr user nicolasnova)

When I ride from Brooklyn to W. 4th St. to go to class in the mornings, I often encounter a very familiar subway conundrum. Do I sit on the bench to wait for my train or do I walk down the platform so that I’m closer to the exit? If I do the former, I can rest comfortably for a few minutes; if I do the latter, there are no benches for the Manhattan-bound platform has just three benches, all clustered near the staircase.

For New Yorkers, it is a familiar problem. Although our subway stations span three blocks underground, places to sit are few and far between. At those stations with the most foot traffic — Grand Central on the Lexington Ave. IRT comes to mind — only one bench, tucked out of the way, greets weary commuters. Seats are scarce and generally nowhere convenient.

As welcome a sight as these benches often are, there’s something about them that leave them very unappealing at times too. Mostly, the disgust stems from the fact that they are made of wood. It may be treated wood, but it’s also very abused wood. Benches are battered with coffee spills and food stains, with gum and other assorted items left behind and even, at one point, with bedbugs. Used by the homeless for sleeping, the six-seaters — some with backs, some without — are often looked upon with a wary eye.

What if the benches were more alluring and what if, I’ve always wondered, there were more of them? Stainless steel would be more expensive to procure, but it wouldn’t have the same problems as wood. Some stations in New York, such as 2nd Ave., have built-in benches. Around the world, the seats vary. The Paris Metro has molded plastic; the DC Metro sports some unforgiving concrete; the London Underground has something metallic. Or try this one on for size:

Recently, Ikea took underground comfort to a new level when they started outfitting some Paris Metro stations with actual Ikea furniture as part of a system-wide ad campaign. In the City of Lights, you can wait for the train in comfort. Just don’t think too hard about who else sat there before you.

As the MTA Board gears up to approve a series of service cuts later this morning, seats will become both rarer and more precious. Part of the cuts include fewer off-peak trains, and another part increases the load guidelines so that trains are not considered to be 100 percent unless every seat is taken and a quarter of the passengers are standing. In the past, trains were considered full with every seat taken and no one standing.

These cuts will give us more time to sit at our nearest stations, more time to admire or inspect or raise an eyebrow at the MTA’s wooden benches. Sometimes while standing at one end of the platform, I think about how the seats are there only when I don’t want them, and now I think we should enjoy those seats while we can though because once we’re on board those trains, seats will be scarce indeed.

For New Yorkers, nothing is seemingly as important as time. We rush from place to place in the anonymous masses of people that fill our city to the brim. We run up stairs and down stairs. We dash to reach train doors before they close, and we tap our feet impatiently if we are left waiting too long for an elevator, a doctor’s appointment, a restaurant reservation. If only things were on time. If only we had more time.

In the vast underground world beneath the city streets, time takes on a different meaning. We might wait impatiently for a train, but our time is not our own. We are the whims of the time of the Q train, the 2 train. We wait for the searching glow of headlights to pierce the darkness of the tunnel, and only then do we know that it’s time for our train to arrive.

One of the reasons we don’t know how time operates in the subway is because the MTA’s approach to countdown clocks has been painfully slow and misguided over the years. Another reason is because the clocks are wrong. As I noticed two and a half years ago, clocks at W. 4th St. were an hour and 14 minutes slow. Today, they’re still an hour and 14 minutes slow. Late has a different meaning when the clocks are set to run in a different time zone.

This week, two stories reminded me about how time is ethereal as we travel the subways. The first came to me in the form of a press release from New York City Transit. The good folks in charge of the clocks in the subway wanted to tell us that the manual clocks — approximately 250 of them — are in the process of being sprung ahead a good four or five days ahead of the rest of the country. These clocks are found in nooks and crannies throughout the system and date to another age when cigarette ads used to share space. Today, the MTA says the advertising revenue from these clocks draw in $500,000 annually.

Beginning yesterday, Transit contractors had to start the manual switch in order to finish by 2 a.m. on Saturday night when the city springs ahead. For now, some clocks will say it’s actually an hour later than it really is, and Transit in a statement said that they “apologize in advance for any confusion this process may cause.” Unless the clock just says “late,” “early” or “on time,” the purported time doesn’t matter. Those clocks are accurate for only so long.

And another piece focuses on more modern clocks. Michael Grynbaum of The Times profiled the new countdown clocks Transit is installing in various subway and bus routes across the city. As regular readers of Second Ave. Sagas know, those countdown clocks range from the high-tech along the IRT lines to the budget version on trial in Washington Heights to countdown clocks for buses along 34th St. No longer will riders peer into dark tunnels awaiting the train to arrive on its own time. Now, we have the time blessed by signals.

While Transit hopes to remove the mystery and angst from our commutes, New Yorkers are stubborn in their ways. “This is New York City, nothing runs on time,” Leonora Berisaj said to Grynbaum. “It’s not about the clock. It’s about the bus.” We operate on transit’s time, no matter how many minutes away the next train supposedly will be.

Photo of the old ad clocks via New York City Transit.

Sitting on my coffee table in my living room is a book from the U.K. by two designs experts. The book is called Signs: Lettering in the Environment, and it is, as you might guess, all about what are known as wayfinding signs.

These signs are a ubiquitous part of everyday life in New York City. We have one-way signs, alternate-side-of-the-street parking signs, street signs, landmark signs, directional signs and, of course, an entire network of signs courtesy of the MTA. The underground signs tell us which way our train is going, what trains we can expect to arrive on which tracks at what time and whether or not the staircase on the left or right will put us on the proper corner.

In Phil Baines and Catherine Dixon’s book, the two write about the theory behind wayfinding signs. These should be welcoming and clear, uniform and informative. As the MTA learned in the 1950s and 1960s, it isn’t always easy to design signs that fit those specifics, and although Massimo Vignelli’s Helvetica signs succeed in certain aspects, in many ways, they live those unfamiliar with subway shorthand confused about the way.

Take, for instance, the sign up above. That sign — a direction with some letters missing — would make no sense to many people, and yet, it marks stations with mid-platf (sic) entrances throughout the system. Apparently, the MTA, short on cash, couldn’t afford the “-form.”

These signs all stem from a 1970 manual by Vignelli and his associates called the New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual. The user Triborough has a full set of photos from the manual, and the images provide a tantalizing glimpse into the world of MTA signage. We can see the theory behind directional signs, the rational behind the placement of signs in complex station mazes and the modular font system designed to make the signs very readable.

But does it work? In general, the MTA’s signage makes sense. Riders know where they are and can figure out, to a reasonable degree, where the trains are going. But sometimes, signs such as the one above creep up. The B train stops at W 4th St., except when it doesn’t, and then you can take the D and transfer to the Q at De Kalb Ave. Usually, the D train runs express and skips DeKalb, except during late nights when it runs local and stops at DeKalb. Good luck, too, determining when that “late night” period is or figuring out what to do for those 90 minutes after the B stops running and before the D makes its stop at De Kalb. Even the MTA’s website is helpless on that front. In the end, the signs make perfect sense to those who use the B and the D and the Q on a regular basis and no sense to those who have never had to interpret Vignelli Subway-ese.

For the next few weeks, Slate is tackling this subject of signs. Julia Turner offered up a primer on signs to introduce the series and yesterday explored how London, a city decidedly not on a grid, is trying to help people get around. (Fun London fact: It’s often faster to walk than it is to take the Tube, but few out-of-towners and even some native Londoners know that because the street map is just that confusing.)

The New York-centric essay in her series involved Turner’s effort at finding her way around Penn Station. Why, she asked, are the signs so confusing? Turner charts her effort, in photos, to get from Lower Manhattan to Amtrak’s half of Penn Station and finds the connection from New York City Transit to Amtrak very complicated. The reason for the confusion, she says, is because three different agencies — the MTA, New Jersey Transit and Amtrak — share the space and have never coordinated on signage. Such are the travails of transit bureaucracy.

We tend to take signs for granted until we don’t know where we’re going. The next time I ride, I’m going to take a look at that plat and see if I can find some gems amidst the MTA signage. Sometimes, you never know on which track that train will arrive even with the signs.

As the city’s newspapers cover the latest in MTA political theater, a few have taken the bold step of interviewing New Yorkers to get their views on transit issues. Instead of grandstanding politicians and crusading advocates, Metro commissioned a poll to find out what 280 New Yorkers felt about service hikes, fare cuts and the state of the transit system. The results are presented in full in this infographic, but I wanted to break it down a bit.

For the poll, Metro led with my favorite question: Fare hikes vs. service cuts. A majority of those polled preferred a 7.5 percent fare hike to service cuts while 44 percent said the fares are already too high. Those people would prefer less service for their too high fares, an odd compromise indeed. Considering that the fares are lower today than they were 15 years ago, New Yorkers either hate paying or don’t understand how much they pay for a subway ride.

The next question is the one with the most comforting result. Only 13 percent of respondents believe the MTA should be paying for student transit, and 87 percent of New Yorkers think the city, state or parents should foot the bill. Someone should tell that to our politicians who won’t pay for student travel and continue to slam the MTA for threatening subsidies it should be expected to cover.

Here’s where things start getting interested, and I’d love to see how these questions further break down. Even though 44 percent of respondents were willing to take service cuts over fare hikes, the biggest complaint people have about the system are the crowds. It will only get worse as service is decreased. The 21 percent who say cleanliness is a problem should think about starting a movement to convince others to use the proper garbage bins, and 24-hour service remains a hallmark of the MTA. That only eight percent appreciate how cheap the subways strikes me as too few, but perhaps that total would rise if people could pick a second choice.

After presenting the info on people’s views of the system overall, the poll switches gears to discuss straphangers’ opinions on those who work in the subway. The TWU does not currently have public sentiment on its side in its battle to convince New Yorkers that its guaranteed raises are good for the city and its transit system. Still, with the law on their side instead, the TWU doesn’t need much public sympathy.

I’m intrigued to see people’s views on station agents. Clearly, as I’ve mentioned before, they serve a psychological purpose even if they can’t actually observe platform before and aren’t legally required to stop crimes in progress or assist victims. Their mere presence at station entrances is enough to convince New Yorkers that they are safe. The truth is that in a deserted station, passengers can be waiting the equivalent of two city blocks away from station agents and on another level of the station. The agents are only as useful as they can be as a deterrent factor and as a calming influence on nervous riders. Considering that the city has lost numerous station agents since 2008 and crime has not risen in the subways, it remains to be seen if those 60 percent of riders who predict a decrease in safety will see their fears come true.

What the station agents are not, however, is all that useful. Less than a quarter of all riders think the station agents are instrumental in keeping the system most. Most want these employees to both friendlier and more knowledgeable. That too is an unsurprising finding. We want station agents as a safety blanket, but when we need something out of them, they become less helpful.

So as the MTA conducts its final New York City-based hearings tonight, these views are something to consider. The authority should begin to consider a fare hike as an alternate solution for its budget crisis, but opinions are decidedly mixed on most MTA issues.