View from Underground

The true sign of an expert subway rider is the knowledge concerning door choice. I know which set of doors will leave my right at the staircase for my morning commute, and I know which set of doors will open so I can be the first out of the station on the way home at night. Not everyone though pays as much attention to their commutes as I do, and sometimes, we find ourselves en route to an unfamiliar station. At that point, the door choice becomes a guessing game. Well, to borrow a phrase, there’s now an app for that.

As City Room’s Jennifer 8. Lee reported this morning, a mobile start-up called Exit Strategy New York has released an application available for iPhone, Blackberry, the Android and the Kindle that higlights the exits as stations around the city. A brother-and-sister team put in the legwork and spent countless hours charting the system over the last few months to bring this info to the masses. “It’s incredible, you can be off by an entire avenue,” Jonathan Wegener, one of the company founders, said. “You are three or four minutes off from where you thought you were going to be.”

Per the company’s official backstory, Wegener and his sister Ashley simply camped out in train stations. They write, “At each subway station, they waited for the train to come so they could mark which door of the train aligned with the exits. At stations with multiple stairwells, they figured out which were the most efficient ones. They did this, again and again and again, in hundreds of subway stations.” That’s fairly ingenious.

In the end, they compiled information on car door locations, exit placement and even the hours of operation for those stations with part-time exits. Not everything was as easy as counting doors though. Amusingly enough, according to the programmers, they ran into some problems with the varying car lengths. When the F trains switched from sets of eight 75-foot-long R46 cars to 10 60-foot-long R160 cars, the app had to be updated in development.

The app went on sale today, and it is available for $2.99 for Blackberry and $1.99 for the other platforms. It features exit information every stop in Manhattan and much of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx and should eventually include every station. It also works offline. I’ll download this one soon and give it a spin on my Blackberry. Expect a review in a few days.

Every few months, Lenore Skenazy’s tale of allowing her nine-year-old son to ride the subways alone rears it head. In fact, few stories about New York City parenting generate as much discussion as this one did.

A few weeks after the story first broke, I defended Skenazy. I grew up in New York City when the subways weren’t as safe as they are now, and I first started riding alone during the Giuliani years. As long as children are taught safety tricks and tips of the trains, there should be no problems.

Today, Beliefet’s Hillary Fields, author of the subway ethics posts we’ve discussed lately, chimed in on the topic. In theory, she says, she supports Skenazy and believes that children — especially those growing up in urban environments — need to foster their independence. In practice, though, her answer is different:

However. I also live in NYC. And I take the subway. As you’ll have seen from my prior posts on the subject, my commute is not exactly my favorite part of my day. And my faith in my fellow man is at a lowwww ebb whenever I head underground. I tend to see everyone around me as a perv, a stalker, and a loony. As a teen riding on the train to school, I can’t tell you the number of times I had my bum grabbed or saw some guy flashing his privates (or worse). Maybe I’m being a wuss, but I really could have done without those ‘learning experiences.’ So, stats or no stats, I don’t think I’d have done what this mum did.

Now, Hillary was a teen in the subways during a different era in New York City history. Today’s teens don’t suffer the same fears or insecurities underground that those of us who grew up in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s did. The subways are more crowded and better patrolled than they used to be. Still, groping is a very big problem.

Maybe the answer to this underground ethical quandary is a sexist one. Maybe younger boys can ride the subways alone before young girls can. Maybe girls need to be taught a different set of subway safety and self-defense skills than boys do. I’m not a parent; I don’t know.

In the end, I still haven’t changed my mind since last April. The subway is an integral part of life in New York, and parents should teach their children how to ride the rails alone as soon as the parents feel their children can handle it. I was probably around 11 or 12 when I first rode the subway alone. It turned out to be empowering and ultimately safe.

Six days ago, I helped break the story of the MTA’s first naming rights contract. To recap: As part of the Atlantic Yards deal with Bruce Ratner, the MTA will receive $4 million over 20 years to add Barclays Center to the Atlantic Ave./Pacific St. subway stop. While the new name would identify an above-ground attraction, the agency did not want to give free advertising space to Barclays.

Today, The Times editors chimes in with their take on the deal. Based on the short editorial, it’s tough to tell what they really think of the day. They waver on the pluses and harp on the minuses:

We know [$200,000 a year] is a goodly sum and times are very tough for the M.T.A. But there’s reason to be skeptical about all of this, which probably explains why it took so long to sell even this one.

When you get off the train at a subway station, you want to know where you are, not who your sponsor is. Names aren’t as easily changed as all that, especially when they correspond — as the names of subway stations do — to the actual geography of the city.

The names of subway stations are beautifully utilitarian just as they are, shifting only as rapidly as the streets above them shift. The names of their sponsors are likely to shift with the economic climate, and somehow adding a name like Barclays to what is, after all, a public transit station — in Brooklyn — feels even more dissonant. So when it comes to selling naming rights, we’d like to urge the M.T.A. to take another approach: sell the naming rights to individual subway cars. Some Metro-North commuters already know the pleasure of stepping aboard the Thelonius Monk or the John Cheever or the Sojourner Truth. But in these times, it would have to be cash on the barrel from the M.T.A.’s honoree. Perhaps the Donald Trump?

Of course, this ignores the reality that plenty of spots around the city already bear corporate names. Rockefeller Center isn’t a public trust; it’s a private, corporate area. The Yankee Stadium stops, while signifying that a major attraction is nearby, existed at 161st St. and River Ave. long before the original stadium opened in 1923. Ditto for the Mets at Willets Point. If anything, this line of reasoning makes the case against naming rights.

In the end, the MTA isn’t going to stray from identifying the stations. The complex at 42nd St.-Times Square will always carry that name even if it becomes “42nd St.-Times Square brought to you by the Walt Disney Corporation.” If the agency can get some money out of the naming of a station with sacrificing the integrity of the name, then by all means, do it.

I’ll get to the nitty-gritty of the MTA’s sweetheart deal for the Atlantic Yards rights later today. If you want to read about this embarrassment of riches for Bruce Ratner and the MTA’s dereliction of duty ahead of time, check out Mike Grynbaum’s coverage on City Room.

Right now, I want to instead turn my attention to an intriguing bit of news that came out of the MTA Board’s Finance Committee meeting on Monday. For the first time, the MTA will be taking in money in exchange for the naming rights to a subway station. The Observer’s Elliot Brown summarizes this development:

Monday’s announcement, made at a meeting of the M.T.A.’s finance committee, did include one new, if small, income stream: The agency agreed to lease the naming rights for the Atlantic Avenue station, where the project is based. With payments of $200,000 a year for 20 years, the new name: “Barclays Center,” which an agency official said will appear alongside the existing name for the station.

So in a few years — whenever this hideous arena opens up — the Atlantic Ave./Pacific St. subway station will become the Atlantic Ave./Pacific St./Barclays Center station. Talk about a mouthful.

For the MTA, securing a naming rights deal has been a long-term project. A few years, some subway conductors starting referring to 47th-50th Sts./Rockefeller Center as “Top of the Rock” for the then-newly opened attraction at the top of 40 Rockefeller Center. The transit agency, however, drew in no money for the deal.

A few months ago, the authority tried again. When the city and the Mets dismantled Shea Stadium and opened the corporately-named Citi Field, the MTA tried to get some money to rename the Willets Point-Shea Stadium stop after Citi Field. The two sides could not reach an agreement, and the station is now awkwardly called Mets-Willets Point. It is one of the few stations in the subway system at which the attraction’s name — in this case, the Mets — precedes the geographical identifier — here, Willets Point.

This deal with Forest City Ratner for the naming rights should lead us to reconsider how subway stations are named, and it’s bound to engender a debate between the traditionalists and those who feel the MTA should milk funds out of the system. For the most part, stations are called by their closest streets. There are a few stops at 96th St., some at the city’s various 7th Avenues and others along Canal St. Other stops take on the nearest big landmark: 34th St.-Penn Station, Howard Beach/JFK Airport and Coney Island/Stillwell Avenue come to mind. Others — 42nd St./Times Square, Flushing-Main St., Forest Hills/71st Ave. — are geographical signals.

Until this Barclays agreement was finalized, MTA stations were named for convenience’s sake. Stations with similar names were modified to signify where along a street the station lay, and major neighborhoods were identified as well. Now, though, stations are open to the highest bidder. What is stopping Disney from buying the naming rights to Times Square? Who wants to get off at 42nd St./Times Square/Disney? What about 59th St./Bloomingdales?

Maybe the MTA shouldn’t be charging for these corporate names. Maybe it’s part of its public duty to identify the major attractions that around the station in question. Or maybe the MTA shouldn’t offer up anything more than those in-station gray signs if corporate naming-rights sponsors won’t pay. After all, the MTA doesn’t need to accept free advertising for a brand.

The Train of Many Colors rides its way east past the Citibank building in Long Island City. (Photo by Ron Yee/New York Transit Museum)

The Transit Museum is breaking out their old cars this weekend, and they have asked me to help promote the trip. This Saturday, June 20th, the museum will run its Train of Many Colors for a day trip up to the Bronx. The train will depart from Shuttle Track 1 at Grand Central at 10 a.m. on Saturday morning. It will then travel south to the Brooklyn Bridge and then north to East Tremont in the Bronx. At the West Farms – East Tremont stop, railfans can either ride the Low-V train for a ride between East 180th and 239th Sts. or they can visit the Bronx Zoo at a discount.

The cost for this ride back in time is $30. Transit Museum members enjoy a discounted fare of $25, and children ages 5-17 get in for $10. As long as I can get up early enough on Saturday morning, I’ll be there. These rides are great fun. For more info on this and other transit-related events, check out the Transit Museum’s events page.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve talked a bit about the ethics involved in riding the subway. We looked at the age-old debate concerning the emergency exits and then went in-depth on some of the more selfish people in the subways.

This week, the MTA unveiled a new ad campaign focusing around subway ethics and the law. As part of a drive to remind straphangers to give up their seats for a disabled rider, new SubTalk ads debuted on Monday. Transit also plans to print reminders on the backs of MetroCards beginning in September.

“We take our commitment to the disabled community very seriously,” NYC Transit President Howard Roberts said in a press release. “With this campaign, we want to remind our customers that not all disabilities are visible. We’re asking riders to look around and be aware of others who may need that priority seat.”

The Times went more in depth on the new awareness campaign:

“It’s the first time we’ve really stressed this,” said Paul J. Fleuranges, vice president for corporate communications at New York City Transit, the largest arm of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Those who decline to give up a seat on request face up to a $50 fine, he said. (The new campaign also warns that “not all disabilities are visible.”) …

Mr. Fleuranges said it would be hard to gauge the effectiveness of the campaign. “We don’t have the staff to monitor that,” he said in an e-mail message. “Where we hope this campaign has an impact is in the area of customer education — in that our riders understand why these seats are made available and hope, if asked, they provide the seat to a fellow customer who requests it.”

In a way, it’s a sad commentary on the state of New Yorkers and their attitudes toward others that this campaign even exists in the first place. Do subway riders not know they should give up seats to those who need? Are we too involved in our iPhones and Blackberries to bother with other people?

Don’t get me wrong; after a long day, I like my seat as much as the next guy. Yet, someone who obviously cannot stand can have my spot any day of the week. The more sensitive aspects of this new campaign involve those with disabilities that are not visible. Maybe, then, this latest effort will target those. Either way, stand up if you see someone who needs the seat. It’s the right thing to do.

After the jump, a look at the version of the ad that will be hanging in buses. Click the image above or the one below to enlarge.

Playing off a piece on Beliefnet, last week, we discussed the ethics of using the emergency exit to speed up travel times out of a crowded station. While it is illegal to use the emergency exit not in an emergency without permission from the station agent, that doesn’t stop too many straphangers.

On Friday, in the second part of her series look at the ethics of subway riding, Hillary Fields examined more bad behavior on the subway. She and Beliefnet Entertainment Editor Dena Ross put together a list of the worst subway offenders. My favorites:

The Big-Backpack-Wearer: This offender, often a tourist, a young student, or an oblivious yuppie, sports a gigantic knapsack, usually positioning himself or herself in the middle of a subway car (or worse, the door–see The Door-Blocker), getting in the way of all who traverse the crowded train.

Proper Subway Etiquette: Remove the knapsack from your back and hold it at your side. I don’t care if your arm hurts. Put it on the floor next to you if you must (gag!) but don’t be inconsiderate by blocking people from moving around. I’m not an expert on fire hazards, but I’m thinking big back packs are one of them…

The Door-Blocker: Despite signs all over the subway cars advising against it for safety reasons, these riders prefer standing against the door and refuse to move out of the way for people entering and leaving the subway. These inconsiderate losers are the bane of my existence.

Proper Subway Etiquette: Move out of the way! If for whatever reason you find myself stuck at the door with a number of people looking to get off (and onto) the train at a given stop, get off the train along with those exiting, making sure to stay close to the door. This ensures that everyone exits the train in a semi-orderly fashion, without having to step around you. Plus, you’ll be one of the first ones to enter the train. You deserve it for being so courteous!

The Music-Sharer: I’ve really got to thank you Mr. DJ, for playing your crap music (is it your band?) so loud on your iPod that I, and the entire subway car, are forced to listen to your tunes (if we’re luckily, we get to hear it on repeat! Yay!) Here’s a little secret, even if I like the music you’re playing–maybe I’m even mouthing along the words–I’m still cursing you under my breath for being a jerk.

Proper Subway Etiquette: If you’re unsure whether your iPod is likely audible to your neighbors, take off your headphones (with the volume on your desired setting) and hold them in front of you. If you can still clearly hear the music, it’s surely disrupting your neighbors when it’s on your ears. If so, turn it down!

The two writers also tackle seat-stealers and people who aren’t discrete in their cell phone use, among others. It’s hard to argue with any of these. The plague of music-sharers has reached epidemic proportions, and as numerous people around my age blast their iPods, I can imagine myself living in a New York City full of deaf 60-somethings in 40 years.

For better or worse, the subway is a microcosm of the way we behave toward others in New York City. Are we considerate on the subway? Do we get out of the way when others need to exit? Do we remember that 50 other people have no desire to hear our music or our cell phone conversations? By and large, New Yorkers manage the subway with perhaps not with grace and aplomb but grudging respect for other straphangers. Those who flaunt the societal rules deserve the wrath of Dena Ross and those who pass judgment on the behavior of others.

Photo of a subway seat hog by flickr user MikeyPics.

Not the most practical of emergency exits. (Photo by flickr user rlboston)

As the great social mixing bowl of New York City, the subways provide ample opportunities for people from all walks of life to interact on a daily basis and make choices that impact each other. Should one offer to give up a seat? Should one cut one’s nails on a half-empty train? Should one block the doorways as other straphangers try to exit?

While the answers to those three questions are “probably,” “definitely not” and “get the hell out of the way,” other debates are not so clear cut in the minds of many riders. Enter the emergency exit. The emergency exit doors represent the pinnacle and subway egress. The gates are alarmed sometimes, and they’re far faster than the traditional ways to leave the system. A commuter in a rush will bypass long lines at the HEET exits or turnstiles, and if the alarm goes off, so what? While it is against New York City Transit regulations to use the emergency exists in non-emergency situations, that stops no one.

Yesterday, as part of a new series on Underground Ethics, Hillary Fields, a writer and editor at Beliefnet, inaugurated her column with some musings on the Emergency Exit debate. She writes:

Each morning, as I approach the IRT line, the dilemma looms larger and larger. The Subway Emergency Exit. Meant, as is so clearly blazoned on its push-bar, to be used only in cases of, you know… emergency. Should you dare to make it your egress, it will shrill loudly–nay, I daresay deafeningly–piercing the eardrums of all those around you. The sound echoes off the dingy station tiles, lingers unendingly in the air, pisses off the riders on the platform, wears out the alarms, and drives the beleaguered station agent just that tiny bit closer to a lethal meltdown.

So why the f*&k does everyone and his brother think it’s OK to use it instead of the turnstiles?

It is, of course, a personal decision and one many make to maximize time, other riders be damned. Fields takes a life lesson from her emergency exit experiences. “It amazes me,” she writes, “how expedience takes precedence over values at times like these, and perhaps can explain some of the other behaviors I see on the fly.”

Anyway, check out this new series. It will make for some interesting debates over how to approach personal actions underground. No one, after all, likes hearing the emergency exit siren, and everyone likes to exit the subway faster than that other person on the train who elbowed them on the way up the stairs. Choices, choices, choices.

Every now and then, the roll signs indicating a subway route are wrong. I often see an Orange Q, a remnant of the Manhattan Bridge work, instead of a Yellow Q bullet as the trains head past me. That is, generally, the most egregious of minor errors.

Earlier this week, Second Ave. Sagas reader Jeffrey P drew my attention to the above sign on a Manhattan-bound 1 train. The 1, which shares rolling stock with the 3 and 4, was mislabeled but not as a train in service. It was bulleted as a 13 train. It certainly piqued my curiosity.

In the annals of New York City subway history, the only train designated by the number 13 was the pre-1967 BMT 14th St./Canarsie Line, now better known as the L train. At no point did the IRT lines — today’s current numbered lines — make use of a 13. Maybe one day, the future holds a red 13 for New York City straphangers.

Jeffrey sent me this picture via Twitter. For another view of this mysterious 13 train, click here. Be sure to check out and follow Second Ave. Sagas on Twitter if that’s your thing.