Sclerosis
What if the incident had occurred on the East Side? That's all we're thinking this morning.
It seems that a homeless person, trying to stay warm in a subway tunnel, started a fire that took out a relay room attached to the A and C subway lines; MTA officials expect the damage to take three to five years to repair. Service on the A line will be cut to a third of former volume, and the C line, which runs over the same tracks, will be retired indefinitely. Commuters from the Rockaways are going to be massively inconvenienced; commuters from the Upper West Side will have the the old IRT, which runs under Broadway, to fall back upon. Had the 4-5-6 line - which we still call "the Lex" - been similarly afflicted, Upper East Siders would have no alternatives to fall back upon. Officials from Gov. George "Teflon" Pataki on down are dithering about whether finally to pay for completion of the Second Avenue subway. The Second Avenue's tunnels have been bored, but nothing more has been done to replace the elevated lines that were demolished fifty years ago. Ironically, it was the demolition of the 'El' that unleashed a massive redevelopment of the Upper East Side east of Lexington Avenue, making ours the most densely-populated US Congressional District.
Everything about this story points to a deadly sclerosis in the public sector. What was a homeless person doing in a subway tunnel during a snowstorm? The obvious answer is the wrong answer. What is this "three-to-five years" nonsense? Why rebuild a facility that can't, it seems, be fireproofed in the first place? Why not rethink the relay-switch system?
Again, the obvious answer is the wrong one. I demand the resignation of everybody, complete with promises never to run for elected office again! Let's start fresh: I propose handing the operation of the A and C lines to a consortium of whiz kids from Bronx Science.
Comments
Yeah, goddamn it, that is unacceptably ridiculous, and ridiculously unacceptable. How could it conceivably be three to five years? They're not building any new stations! Undoubtedly they'll fall back on some excuse about New York's subway running 24 hours a day making maintenance difficult. (In Boston, they use the excuse that our subway is too old to permit running the trains 24 hours per day. In fact, it's just lack of will; they're looking into discontinuing the "experimental" night buses that run along the subway lines only on weekend nights.) The incompetence of the way public transport in this country is run always boggles my mind; don't get me started on the MBTA, as I'll start flailing around my cubicle. On the other hand, I like to console myself, at least we HAVE some public transport, unlike so many pseudo-cities in the US with no real system (Phoenix, Houston, anywhere in Florida) or with weird toy pseudo-systems that aren't particularly useful (Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Detroit) either because they stink or because the dwelling zones (sorry, I can't bring myself to call Denver or Dallas "cities") are too sprawled for mass transit to be a real solution.
Which brings to mind what I said when a friend asked what I liked about Germany when living there in the early 90s. I mulled it over for a while, and all I was able to come up with was the public transport, and the yogurt. (In all fairness, I should also have included the Turkish food.)
The Second Avenue subway folly is mystifying.
Posted by: Max | January 25, 2005 10:36 AM
1) The Times says that the Police allow the homeless to stay warm in the tunnels when it is brutally cold.
2) The blame is all of ours: we don't wanna pay taxes. Pataki keeps closing mental health facilites and adds to the homeless population, Bloomberg keeps cutting back on services due to budget constraints and here we are. Not to mention a pack of mendacious scumbugs in Albany.
3) NO, the Second Avenue folly is NOT mystifying. Forget the 2nd Avenue Subway. The MTA can hardly pay its bills and no one in their right mind is going to sink money into a sinkhole like subway construction. Witness the 'Big Dig' in Boston and the horrific over-runs it produced--this would be a boondoggle worthy of Tweed. The MTA is building a headquarters that has vast vast over-runs? Can you imagine what they would do with this???
4) The unique over-lapping of the subway lines is the problem. I sometimes take the A or C from Canal, and they both come in on the same track but the C ends up on the same side as the E, and the D comes in on top of the A........
Posted by: PPOQ | January 25, 2005 11:01 AM
Even I will be dead before the Second Avenue subway is completed so why bother? The fare hikes are already going to go through the roof.... But at least we do have public transportation. Add Philadelphia to the list of cities with lousy public transportation. And don't even get me started with New Orleans. That is a joke. People will just have to read more on the subway as they wait. At least there is a subway to wait for.
Posted by: Lauren | January 25, 2005 11:30 AM
I am outraged but not surprised that the MTA estimates 3-5 years; replacing all the tile in the East 86th Street station has already taken approximately 2 1/2 years!! Subway repairs should occur from 10 pm-6 am, seven days a week, and should be done on a "3rd shift" rather than overtime basis. This incident further reveals the West Side Stadium proposal to be a cruel joke at the expense of the city's residents, commuters and tourists. Contrary to popular belief, not eveyone will use the stadium, but sports fans and bookworms alike rely on the trains for everyday needs as well as for optional pleasures. The money required for Bloomberg's Folly would be far better spent to bring the system into the 20th, if not 21st, century. The city can operate just fine without a stadium, but can't manage without the subway. Maintenance and capital spending are not abstract discretionary line items in the city's budget, they are critical requirements for the life, health and pleasure of its citizens.
Posted by: Kathleen | January 25, 2005 12:17 PM
Yes, excellent point about that the city can survive without the stadium, but not the subway. Going for the stadium is in the vein of fake sunbelt settlements which think that somehow, if they get that big stadium and land the sports team, they will be a real city.
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