I’m in an R train at city hall. We’re being held here because of a track fire south of Rector St. They said FDNY is on scene.
They’re telling us to get off and go uptown to canal. All downtown traffic on the Broadway line is going over the bridge.
Side note, apparently NJT and LIRR are having some major issues tonight as well.
Just when you finally managed to stop pondering all of the things that could go wrong when riding the NYC Subway, it turns out that the computer system that controls the trains crashed for a few minutes yesterday.
It was only “down” for a few moments. However, when it came back online, the system was unable to find many of the trains in the system.
The system that crashed only controls the numbered lines. While the system went down and recovered, many trains were forced remain in stations or mid-tunnels while dispatchers manually radioed individual trains to determine their location. Yikes.
Perhaps some of the MTA employees that read SUBWAYblogger could enlighten us on why the computer can’t locate trains after a reboot. I assume the trains have to pass some sort of sensor on the track. So if the trains weren’t moving, they hadn’t passed over a sensor since the reboot.
Thanks though!
Wouldn’t you know it. Just as the MTBA up north digs into their own issues with computer geeks hacking the CharlieCard, it turns out we have our own homegrown hackers right here in NYC.
I had written a post wishing the MIT students would come down here and beat up on the Metrocard system, but it turns out there was a few guys that already hit the jackpot…a $800,000 jackpot as a matter of fact.
Apparently, three guys discovered a vulnerable Metrocard machine at Penn Station that they somehow got to spit out cards. They would then sell the rides.
However, it looks like they started the scam back in 2005, and it’s taken this long for them to arrest the guys. An audit revealed the discrepancy, but who knows how long that took to uncover.
Apparently there is a strange odor at the 53rd and 7th station that has caused it to be evacuated.
B, D, and E trains are bypassing the station at this time, and last we heard, passengers are not being allowed to enter the station. However, the MTA says the V train is running with residual delays. So I guess it’s at least partially open?
The strange odor is allegedly coming from a faulty elevator motor. Of course, that is no shock.
In other musical news today, have you ever seen this guy? He’s awesome.
He has a synthesiser on his violin or something that makes it sound sort of like an electric guitar. So it’s like a hard rock hairband with a fiddle.
Axl would be so proud.
Ok, we promise no more subway music for a while.
Cruising the interwebs for some subway video, I came across this music video for a band called “The Subways.”
You know, they’re actually not bad. Anyway…
I could have sworn I just saw that the Metrocard machines were down again. As I walked into my station, I pass a whole wall of Metrocard machines. All of them said “CASH ONLY” across the top.
There were a lot of confused looking people too.
Did anyone have any problems on the way home tonight?
Who knew all we needed was some MIT kids to help us get around any future fare hikes.
Apparently, some students at MIT made it a class project to hack the Boston subway system (aka the T). As a matter of fact, the title of the project is: “The Anatomy of a Subway Hack: Breaking Crypto RFIDs & Magstripes of Ticketing Systems.”
Now, the students are computer security majors, so you can see the fit.
They planned to give their 80+ slide presentation at Defcon, a very large security conference.
However, the MTBA sued to have the presentation stopped. A judge ordered a temporary restraining order keeping the presentation quiet.
The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) got involved to fight the order.
Anyway, the kids had successfully shown how to generate and reverse engineer CharlieCards and CharlieTickets, the Boston version of Metrocards.
They basically did in a semester what any professional hackers could do, but planed to use it as an educational tool. Sure, stealing rides is illegal, but the bigger issue is that some students were able to beat a system pretty easily.
Makes me wonder what kind of havoc they could wreak with the Metrocard system.
Further proof that the MTA is an embarrassing bureaucracy.
The MTA released the results of a comprehensive study that found the subway is dirty. Folks, I wish it was a joke. The MTA’s advocacy group’s 61 page [gasp] report said the stations are dirty aaaaaand many of them are literally falling apart.
Honestly, why do we need to study this stuff? Can we just take a weekend, ride around to all the stops, and identify the ones that need the most work? Oh wait, that’s all of them.
In other news, the new MTA Headquarters fire emergency plan was released:
(STEP 1) Deny the existence of the fire as long as possible.
(STEP 2) Ignore the first 100 emergency phone calls (min) related to this “alleged” blaze.
(STEP 3) Mount a task force headed by an MTA Board member. Call it the “Matchstick Committee.”
(STEP 4) Hold a press release to announce the results fire existence study.
(STEP 5) Hold emergency budget meeting to discuss fire extinguisher purchases. Turns out, the ones in the building from 1932 are filled with seltzer water.
(STEP 6) Increase fares. New fire extinguishers won’t pay for themselves.
(STEP 7) Perish in blaze. Luckily, no MTA board members were actually in the office. They were off hiding their government issued EZ Passes.
Sort of. Also, it turns out you can’t blog about it on your Blackberry while you are in the process of screaming at a scrawny bum.
Anyway, this morning it was raining pretty hard as we all know. On my train, there was an open window that obviously had water leak down it and formed a puddle in one of the seats.
Unfortunately, I found myself standing directly in front of that seat. I didn’t want the seat, but saw the open space. So I spent much of the ride trying to explain to old ladies that they couldn’t sit there because of the puddle, as they pushed me out of the way.
About half way to my stop, a skinny a-hole homeless guy got on the train screaming . F-this and F-that. Screaming at random people to get the f out of his way. What are they looking at. Then telling women he could see down their tops. A real specimen.
Little eagle-eye spotted the open seat and squirmed his way though the packed train car where I (and others around me) said the seat’s wet. Note: I’m standing almost close enough for my shins to touch the front edge of the seat, that’s how packed the train is. I’m at mid car, near the middle doors. The wet seat is one spot in from the end of the bench.
So he comes in from my left and reaches down to the seat and brushes the puddle of water off the seat onto the front of my pants! Like a big, fast wiping action to flick the water off. He only got about half of the water off the seat when he started to spin around to sit down.
At first I was in shock, but then I said, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
I will leave the rest to your imagination. I don’t want to go into any details, but he was not on board the train when we left the next station.
I have a fairly high tollerance for these guys because clearly they have mental problems. However, when you are saying things like he said and splashing water on me, it really gets to the point where action needs to be taken.
SUBWAYblogger 