View from Underground

Via Gothamist comes word of Jason Eppink’s public art installation in the subways: Take a Seat. Explains the artists:

Take a Seat is an ongoing series of public furniture installations aimed at increasing the availability of seating options in New York City subway stations. Perfectly functional chairs are rescued from trash piles and reassigned to stations where limited seating options leave subway patrons no choice but to stand for extended periods of time…

More than 5 million riders pass through the New York City Subway system every day, sometimes waiting as long as an hour or more for their trains. Unfortunately, benches intended for waiting passengers are sparse and inadequate, leaving many riders standing. According to NYC MTA’s founders, “the subway should be an inviting and pleasant environment, geared to the user, with the highest levels of design and materials.” I agree! What is more pleasant than sitting while waiting for your train?

So the next time you’re in the subway, bemoaning a lack of seats, just go grab your own and take a load off.

Photo via Jason Eppink on flickr.

Second Ave. Sagas wasn’t around when the MTA unveiled architectural renderings of the 96th St. rehab on the West Side IRT. But we are around today, and Curbed has a great a great illustration, above, of what the completed station will look like.

The scan is from a union trade magazine that, amusingly, predicts a future in which MTA construction projects are completed on time. But utopia New York aside, that’s a pretty sweet picture considering the disastrous state of the station in renovation right now.

While digging up some background information on my post this morning about the MTA’s anti-terror ad campaigns, I came across a gem of a subway public service announcement on Korey Kay & Partners’ website. KKP has long been the MTA’s go-to advertising agency, and one of its favorite ads to promote comes to us from the dark ages of 1993.

I remember seeing this one in the subways, and at the time it was very appropriate. As you can see above (click here for a larger version), the ad plays on the MTA’s notoriously unreliable public address system. Fifteen years, the MTA swore they were working to improve the PA system. Based on what I hear on the trains and in stations every day, I’m guessing that the PA overhaul is one project not quite there yet.

This may have been a tad bit extreme. (Photo courtesy of Reuters.)

New Yorkers often like to gripe about traveling around the city with a common refrain. “I coulda walked faster,” we’ll say about slow subway trips and sluggish cab rides through the congestion Big Apple. Tonight, I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that.

In an effort to get myself home from law school tonight, I had to travel from W. 4th St. back to Park Slope in Brooklyn. It was after midnight, and that spells trouble in the subways. My first mistake was getting on an F train. Those are running on the A. I tried to switch to a 4 at Fulton St., and while the train came pretty quickly, we pulled into Wall St. and sat and sat and sat and sat. Eventually, the conductor told us about some single-tracking through the Joralemon St. tunnel due to track work.

When we finally made it to Atlantic Ave., the train ran express instead of local and, thus, would have bypassed my stop. I switched to a 2, and ninety minutes after swiping through, I made it home. According to Google Maps’ handy new walking directions, I almost could have walked faster.

I was pretty irate when I got home. A lack of communication on the part of the MTA — surprise! — had me and the other disgruntled passengers guessing about which train was heading where. The conductor on the F didn’t know if the train would go to Coney Island or travel along the A. The conductor on the 4 couldn’t tell us much of anything for nearly 15 minutes. But, hey, at least we’re not in Argentina.

Yesterday, a group of Argentinian commuters set fire to a delayed train. Reuters reports:

Furious rail commuters in Argentina set fire to a train on Thursday in anger over delays during the morning rush hour. Television images showed black smoke and flames engulfing the train at the station of Merlo, in the western suburbs of the capital, Buenos Aires. At nearby Castelar, passengers hurled stones at the ticket office and blocked the rails.

“We understand that people get angry when the service is delayed or canceled, but they absolutely can’t attack a public service in this way,” Gustavo Gago, a spokesman for rail company TBA, told local television.

Many passengers said the delays, caused by a broken down train, had cost them a day’s work.

I’m sure New Yorkers on many occasions felt the urge to burn their delayed trains. But that doesn’t solve the problem; it just causes more delays.

Yesterday evening, at around 6:40, I had to get myself from 44th St. between 5th and 6th Aves. to 55th St. between 8th and 9th Aves. I could have walked, but I had been carrying around a really heavy backpack all day. So as I walked by 47th St., my Unlimited MetroCard and I decided the subway it would be.

I knew that the B or D at Rockefeller Center would get me over to 59th St. in short order, and that two-block walk, after exciting through the Hearst Building, is much less painful than negotiating midtown at the end of rush hour with a backpack and an eight-pound book on contracts. Little did I realize how wrong I would be, and in taking this short, two-stop trip, I remembered and observed why so many New Yorkers have such a love/hate relationship with the subway.

The first warning sign came when I arrived down on the IND platform. While not particularly crowded, the few people standing there seemed to be peering expectantly into the tunnel. It was 6:41 p.m. As the minutes ticked by, the crowd grew denser and less patient. The looks down the tunnel grew more frequent, and a few passengers were agitatedly looking at their watches. Fifteen minutes later, at 6:56 p.m., a crowded D train arrived at Rockefeller Center, and the lights of a B train, directly behind that one, were visible in the tunnel.

In this little exchange — a fifteen-minute wait — the love and hate for the MTA came out all at once. We love the trains because, for a swipe of an unlimited card or for the $2 that no one really pays, we can go anywhere in the city at any time of day.

But the hate. Oh, the hate. We wonder why New York City Transit can’t install message boards, as they have just about everywhere else, telling us when the next train is due to arrive. Barring that, we wonder why station agents can’t make announcements warning of delays or why the subway scheduling gods can’t find a way to leave a little more lead time between trains. It’s not really a matter of disliking the transit system itself as much as it is disliking the features and technology it doesn’t have.

Later in the evening, as I traipsed back through Columbus Circle en route to the B train that got me home very speedily, I glanced around this station. As we know, the Columbus Circle station is undergoing a never-ending renovation, but as the end results in certain areas are coming into focus, I’ve wondered about the timing and approach to the project.

In various parts of the station, the “new” floors and walls have long been in place, but since the rest of the station is under renovation, the new parts already look 20 years old and in need of a good polish. The walls are bucking in parts; holes in the new tiling have already been paved. It all just looks so used and not in a good way. Why they didn’t wait on the floors until the rest of the project was completed, as much renovations do, I don’t know.

Again, it’s an issue of operations and approach. We love the subways for where they take and how quickly, when they arrive, the rides are. I was back in Brooklyn 30 minutes after my train picked me up at 59th St. But everything else around just needs an overhaul. We love it; we hate it; and it — the trains, the MTA, New York City Transit — is always there for us when we need it most.

They come from the midwest, the southeast. They come from up north and out west, from Boston and Maine and from St. Louis and San Francisco. For a bunch of jaded grad students and bright-eyed 18-year-olds, the last week in August marks the ever-popular orientation period while recent grads, through with their summers away from the grind or backpacking trips through Europe, often decide that now, before Labor Day, is the best time to arrive in the city for that grand experiment in New York life.

Those of us who have lived our lives in the city, those of us born in Mt. Sinai or Kings County Hospital, are nonplussed by these new waves of American immigrants coming to the shores of our fair city. Mostly, they’re in the way. They invade our neighborhoods; clog up our local watering holes; and just can’t seem to get out of the way fast enough. Clearly, there is something of a love-hate relationship at work. These new New York residents — and I’m not quite ready to call them New Yorkers — love the city while millions of natives hate them.

Today, in its typical fashion, The New York Times looks at the lives of these recent arrivals. Cara Buckley, the beat writer for young people in the city, looks at when these New York residents finally feel like New Yorkers. While most of them wax poetic about seeing the skyline on return flights from home states such as Texas and Oklahoma, a common theme unites a lot of the comments Buckley and The Times printed.

A resident of New York — a new one, recently arrived from somewhere else in the vast America that we all view with a wary eye — feels most like a New Yorker when he or she finally masters the city’s complex subway systems. I bet you didn’t see that one coming.

“Learning the transportation is sort of what I’m working on right now. I’m pretty good with the subways now, but at night it’s a little weird, and I don’t really know how that works,” Boris Chen said to Buckley. Chen wasn’t the only one bemoaning our complex subway sytem.

And that’s where it begins and ends. If someone living in the city can navigate the hot spots — the so-called Central Business District of Manhattan — without the aid of a subway map (except during the weekends), then a New Yorker that person shall be. If someone can, by and large, get from his or her local subway stop to just about anywhere else in the city, if that person would even be so bold as to offer lost tourists subway directions, then a New Yorker you will be.

Of course, a subway rider isn’t the only thing that makes up a New Yorker. I went to elementary school and high school with life-long New Yorkers who, by the time they were 11, had ridden the subway just a handful of times in their entire lives. But that is more a testament to the culture of New York City private schools than it is to the role of the subway in the city.

We don’t have five color-coded lines as they do in DC. We have a mash of subway lines and bullet colors that run all over the place in a way that, to the untrained eye, makes little sense. Master that map, and the city is yours to explore.

For me, I have my own story about newly-arrived New Yorkers. I started law school orientation this week, and after a law school-hosted party and a few more drinks at a local bar, I ventured home to Brooklyn well after midnight on Sunday night. One of my fellow classmates — from North Carolina — asked me the next day if I have a cut-off time for taking the subway. “Do you still ride it at four a.m.?” he asked me.

I just laughed. Of course, I’ll ride the subway at four a.m. I’ll ride the trains at any hour of any day. But then again, Cara Buckley isn’t writing about me; I was born with the subway gene.

That wacky and crazy subway map up there comes to us via The Panopticist who says it’s a product of Marc Grubstein’s.

A reader writes:

Need your help, want to get a gift for my Friend’s dad. He worked for MTA and in the 50’s and 60’s rode the #5 Dyre Ave line to his Aunts. Would you know what model subway ran that line. Was it the Lo-V’s or the R26…They have models of these cars and I want to make sure I get the right one. Hope you can help. Thanks.

Anyone know the answer to this query?

What happens when the subway ends? That’s what Andy Newman wonders in The New York Times today. Newman journeyed to the ends of every subway line, and what he finds is a complex study in the people and places that make New York City tick. The resulting article is a great piece of New York City journalism, and the accompanying interactive feature is just as fascinating. For those of you interested in whatever lies beyond New Lots Ave. or Dyre Ave. in Eastchester, this is your chance to find out.

The Overhead Wire notes that the Obama/Biden ticket seems to be the best transit-oriented choice for 2008. What that means for New York City and its beleaguered MTA, however, is entirely up for the grabs. I don’t think anyone should expect the Feds to bail out the MTA, and I’m not so sure a third Bloomberg term would be the way to go either.

Finally, the Launch Box has another round of images from the construction site along Second Ave. Just six more years until Phase 1 of the Second Ave. Subway is complete!

I angered the Subway Gods yesterday. When I wrote last night about my fast, efficient and painless rides between Manhattan and Brooklyn, someone up there — one of those subway watchers in the sky — decided to enact some vengeance, and when retribution came on Thursday, it was slow and painful.

On Thursday morning, during the tail end of rush hour, I had to venture again from Grand Army Plaza to Yankee Stadium/161th St. in the Bronx. This two-borough, two-subway ride usually isn’t too terrible. I find the 2 or 3 arrive fairly frequently, and switching to the 4 at Nevins St. is about as painless as it can get. But yesterday, my experiences on the 4 were dreadful.

The first part of the ride — the transfer — went about as smooth as can be. I caught a Manhattan-bound 2 as it arrived at Grand Army Plaza and made it to Nevins St. five minutes later. While the first train that pulled up on the express tracks was a rush hour 5 making stops in Brooklyn, the train right behind it was a 4. Little did I realize the trouble that 5 would present.

Since I didn’t feel like switching again at 149th St.-Grand Concourse for a Woodlawn-bound 4, I let the 5 pass me and boarded the 4 well ahead of the time I need to get to the Stadium. The 4 swiftly traveled to Borough Hall and then utterly crawled from Borough Hall through the Joralemon St. Tunnel and up the supposed express tracks underneath Lexington Ave. At no point did this rush hour 4 train seem like an express, and in fact, I could have taken the 6 from at least 86th St. — and probably 59th St. — and still beaten my 4 to 125th St.

At every station, the automated male voice would announce that the train was moving slowly “due to train traffic ahead of us.” Every five minutes, the automated announcer would “apologize for the unavoidable delay.” As the minutes ticked by, I sat there silently fuming, knowing that my ride was taking a good 10 minutes longer than it should have.

While Wednesday’s rides showed how the subways could be if the trains ran so frequently as make waiting times seem negligent, today’s rides showed what happens when subway lines are running trains at capacity. The East Side IRT lines are, by far, the most crowded lines in New York. That is, after all, why the MTA is working to build that ever-promised Second Ave. Subway. To address the crowds, the MTA has added train after train until we arrived at our present situation: a subway line packed with trains.

While completely saturating the Lexington Ave. Express line makes for a slightly less crowded commute, it also makes for the most sluggish express ride you’ll ever take. It makes for an express ride so slow that the local trains seem to be zooming by. While yesterday I had to urge more funding for trains, today, I have to wonder if the MTA has overdone it on the East Side IRT. Is it better for passengers, psychologically, to be on trains that actually go at express speeds or is it better for them to have the illusion of space at rush hour?

Thursday’s ride also, for me, highlighted the need for the proposed flip seats that would be in the up position during rush hour. If these flipped seats allow New York City Transit to decrease the train load on the IRT in order to speed up the trains, I’m all for it. Otherwise, the trains will fill up with passengers frustrated by one too many unavoidable delays.