Sweet sassy. Look at this!! It’s a blog by a guy that chronicles his daily trips on the LIRR and Subway. Buuuut then he drops in little tidbits about his weight lifting. Kinda weird. Anway, it is what it is.
Category: Rider Strategy
How to get to the St. Patrick’s Day Parade
How to get to the St. Patrick’s Day Parade
It’s official, 7 train riders can come get drunk with the rest of us!
Yes, that’s right. Stranded weekend 7 train riders in the outer boroughs can come celebrate St. Patrick’s Daywith the rest of us in Manhattan. The MTA has decided to officially resume weekend 7 train service just for the holiday weekend.
See the MTA’s 7 Train Service Page. It’s tiny, but it says that service will be normal March 17-19.
And in completely unrelated news, this might be the grossest thing I’ve ever seen. Thanks to AMNY Tracker for this…
It’s official, 7 train riders can come get drunk with the rest of us!
Yes, that’s right. Stranded weekend 7 train riders in the outer boroughs can come celebrate St. Patrick’s Daywith the rest of us in Manhattan. The MTA has decided to officially resume weekend 7 train service just for the holiday weekend.
See the MTA’s 7 Train Service Page. It’s tiny, but it says that service will be normal March 17-19.
And in completely unrelated news, this might be the grossest thing I’ve ever seen. Thanks to AMNY Tracker for this…
The Electronic Signs Work! More or less.
(ok, so this isn’t one of the platform signs, but it is still really funny.)
So the New York Times went underground to do some of the hard-hitting investigative reporting that they are known for. They sent a reporter, armed with a stop watch, into the subway system to ride the L trains and test the monitors.
Turns out, they were accurate! The times reflected on the boards actually synched up with when the train arrived. What a concept!
On this day, however, the signs worked like a charm. A stopwatch revealed that the trains came and went as predicted. It was almost unnerving.
Agreed.
However, since it is an MTA operation, there had to be a slight flaw. To accompany the electronic boards, the system incorporates a prerecorded voice that announces the arrival times. On this occasion, the announcements sounded like the techno remixed version.
“The next train will arrive, will arrive, will arrive.” But hey, at least something about them is working. That’s more than can be said for the boards in the past.
Walking to the subway is a bitch
On snowy days like today, walking to the subway is a real pain in the ass. Mostly, it is due the joy that is crossing over intersections. Most look like this. The slush in the streets gets up to your knees in some places.
The MTA also does a pretty crappy job of clearing the stairs. The snow, slush, and ice builds up quickly, so people cling to the handrail to keep from breaking their asses. Then you have to climb back up the slippery stairs to get out of the subway.
But once you’re there, the train is way better than trying to drive. It’s even better than the busses. I saw two busses on the same block stuck in the street! Once of them spun out its back tires causing it to fishtail into a sign pole. Yikes.
Ride the Subway for Free?
Stop the presses! There’s actual talk of making the subway FREE to ride. I know, it makes me a little nauseous too.
Theodore Kheel donated $100,000 to the Institute for Rational Urban Mobility to fund a study about making the subway free to ride. Kheel believes that it can be done.
Hold on to your seats because here comes the scary logic:
If New Yorkers don’t pay a fee to use the police and fire departments, they should not have to pay to use the city’s mass transit system.
Ok, that makes sense. SUBWAYblogger can get behind that. It just really freaks us out to think of all the people getting on the train for free, that’s all. People overload. All of a sudden, our subway will look like the Tokyo subway. We’ll have to hire the little men with white gloves to stuff people into the trains!
At this point, it is just a study. Kheel believes that the whole thing could be funded by charging drivers to drive on the busiest streets of the city. All that revenue would offset the subway costs.
It certainly would have a lot of revenue to generate. What few people don’t realize is that the hundreds of millions in subway fares collected each year hardly gets put back into the system. Much of the revenue generated today goes to fund other city projects. That’s part of the reason the city suffered the TWU strike. The money that could have paid for wages and benefits was essentially already tied up in funding other city projects.
The fact is that the transit system is quite the nest egg for the city. Getting rid of that gold paved money road would cause quite the uproar. So the city street car tolls will have to really make up the missing cash.
Ok, my head hurts.
PATH train riders get email alerts. Subway riders get…to work late?
New Jersey Transit has just started a new email alert program for the PATH train that alerts subscribers to service disruptions. It’s a free service, and so far they have signed up over 2,700 users.
When was the last time the subway got something cool like this? Try never. The last cool thing we got was the MetroCard instead of tokens. Yeah, it’s been that long. This would be especially cool for people that carry BlackBerries and other PDA’s. We could get the alerts right on our phone.
Even regular cell phone users could get them. Did you know that you can email text alerts to yourself? If you have Verizon wireless service, you can just email yourself at vtext.com. For example, just send an email to 2125551234@vtext.com. That message will get sent to your phone! Just insert your number before the @ symbol.
Anyway, because of that, these email alerts would be great. It would definitely have helped during yesterday’s debacle. Sure, wireless service is limited underground. However, if you got the alert ahead of time, you could make alternate arrangements before you reached the subway.
We think it is time the MTA got in the game!
Portable Reading
Isn’t it great how the Wall Street Journal is now a more commuter friendly size? SUBWAYblogger thinks so.
In case you didn’t notice, the WSJ recently trimmed about three inches or so off the width of the paper. The result is more of a “travel size” version.
The paper claims they did it to make it easier for the typical public transportation user to carry the Journal with them. However, we all really know that it’s the $15 million $18 million + that they will save in paper costs that really inspired the move. Still, it was a great move.
SUBWAYblogger has seen more (or maybe we’ve just been looking more) WSJ’s on the train the past few weeks. How long before the NY edition of the New York Times does the same?
Also, did you catch the Wired Magazine predictions for 2007? They predict that a “major” newspaper will switch to an online only operation this year, leaving their print operation behind.
Live from the subway, back to you in studio…
SUBWAYblogger 