Is it just me…
…or does NYC public transportation suck? Don’t answer that.
Lots of people in New York know that our commutes are the longest in the country. There are plenty of us who take over 90 minutes just to get from one place in the city to another (the city being all 5 boroughs). I consider myself lucky in that I can walk to work and it takes about 45 minutes. It took 3 hours to walk to our old apartment in Queens (did it on 9/11 with thousands of other people – not recommended on a regular day) but even by train it was an hour door-to-door. My commute now is about 30 minutes – 25 on a good day.
So today I get out of work at 6:30 after working for 9 hours without a break. I’ve done it before, though it’s obviously not something I like to do often. All I want to do is get home, have dinner with a glass (or three) of wine and watch TV until bed. It’s also been raining all evening – you know the kind of rain that’s probably snow 100 feet up, but it’s just this side of warm closer to the ground, so it becomes really, really cold rain. I walk a block to the E train and just miss one, but another comes relatively quickly, so it’s all right. I take it crosstown 2 stops and walk underground to transfer to the 6 which will take me home. One of the cooler things about the subways is that there are a few places where the subway stations for different lines are close enough together that you can transfer underground away from the elements.
I wait on the 6 platform for a train that’s not so packed that I have to get some woman’s bag surgically removed from my ass. One train comes after a few minutes and is immediately packed with people, so I let it go. Another train comes 5 minutes later (I checked my watch) which is an eternity for rush hour trains. Again, fully packed with more people trying to get on. During this time a man who probably just got out of jail but has nowhere to go let me know about the following things:
- Hell is hot because of the hellfire.
- There are smaller devils and bigger devils, the latter having more willpower.
- Once you’re in jail you cry behind the bars saying, “I want to go home” (This last one being truly sad, because I don’t know if he had a home.)
Long story short (too late,) I was in the subway station for 20 minutes (only three trains having arrived) before I decided to take the bus.
The MTA bus system is only to be used as a last resort. The average New Yorker can walk faster than a rush hour bus and can avoid the nausea that comes from the constant starting and stopping by leaving them alone. However, I’m tired, I’m hungry, I’m cold, and it’s raining. I’ll take the bus. I just missed not one, but TWO buses from the same line at the same stop there at the same time. Luckily I knew the average speed of said buses and was able to walk to the next stop just as the first bus was pulling up. I got on and proceeded to spend the next 20 minutes of my life looking forward to being in my chair at home watching TV. If the bus were running at normal speed, it would have taken 10 minutes to go the 20 blocks, including all the stop lights and the bus stops every 3 blocks.
I stopped by the liquor store to get a bottle of wine and checked my watch – 7:40. It took over an hour to make a 30 minute journey.
So what’s wrong with this story? How can we make it better?
1) People are very rude when they’re pushing by you to get on a packed train. I don’t know how to fix this – I just thought I’d put that out there.
2) The East Side of Manhattan has one train line (3 “different” trains running down one corridor.) The Flushing area of Queens (where I used to live) also has one train corridor. This means that if one train goes down, everything else is affected. You can’t easily transfer to another line. So if trains are late, you either wait or walk. There’s “going to be a Second Avenue Subway” but apparently that idea’s been bandied around for almost 90 years.
3) The subway system hasn’t changed all that much in the past 80 years. Look at a map from 1924 and one from 1948 and see if it’s much different from today’s map. The reason why there are so many delays is that the MTA has been fixing the entire subway system for the past few years (ever since the centennial in 2004.) They say it’s really necessary, but the entire system all at once? These poor tourists travel the subways on the weekend armed with useless subway maps because everything has changed. MTA workers try to inform people of the changes, and if you prepare, you won’t have a problem. However, more often than not, you don’t find out about a change until you’ve paid your fare and are waiting for a non-existent train.
4) Why do people think that looking down the tunnel will satisfy their curiosity? It’s like looking in the fridge again and again to see if the food fairy has left anything THIS time. Staring into space won’t make the train come any faster. What would help immensely is an LED display saying when the next train is expected to come, and if there are any problems due to signal malfunction, a sick passenger, etc. The people who tell the conductors when to leave a station know what’s going on, why can’t that be updated automatically? People can make more informed decisions. If I know I’m going to wait 20 minutes for a train, I might decide to walk instead. It’s the hope that maybe it’ll come any second now that makes people look down the tunnel.
5) The same goes for buses. Why can’t you have an LED sign telling you when a bus is coming? We saw them in Oxford and it really helped. In this picture (albeit in Brighton, but it’s the same deal) the name of the stop is at the top, to the left is the number and line of the bus, and the right tells you how long your expected wait is. Easy. In an age of GPS, why can’t we do something like this? Oh, sorry, I forgot, I live in New York. It’s news when police cars get this newfangled technology. Forget the average joe.
6) One of the reasons it takes so long for buses to get around is that people wait until they get on the bus to pull out their Metrocard to pay the fare. Another reason is that there are stairs, so people who can’t navigate them have a hard time getting on the bus. Passengers on the bus also get off the bus using the front door because it’s easier to do so, and the people waiting to get on have to wait more. A third reason is that car drivers double park and stand in the bus lanes. There is no enforcement to clear the lanes so that buses can, I don’t know, bus people from Point A to Point B.
As Adam said to me tonight, when I said that the subway system hasn’t changed, “But the city sure has.” We need a public transit system to shuttle the millions of people who travel to and from work and school each day. We’re hopelessly behind the times, and every year we wait to update things makes everything more expensive to the point where it’s cost-prohibitive.
One more thing, Upper Green Side, a group to which I belong, is dealing with just this very thing. If you’re in the neighborhood (or even if you’re not – we have members from all over) visit the website.
OK, post over. Nothing more to see. Move on.