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One Day at New York Underground
  
     
 
 
     
     
  Jason's rules for the NYC subway posted May 30, 2003 at 12:18 pm  
     
 

1. Get the hell out of my way, I'm coming through.

2. Do not stop at the top of the stairs to put your MetroCard back into your purse/wallet. You are between me and my train.

3. Act more like a particle and less like a wave. When you're weaving all over the platform like a drunken sinusoidal, energetic particles like myself -- who, in keeping with Newton's first law of motion, like to remain in a uniform state of motion until acted upon by an outside force -- cannot easily get past you.

4. Slower traffic keep to the right.

5. Yield to persons crossing the platform from the express train to the local train (or vice versa). They need the right-of-way more than you do for that 15 seconds of your existance on this earth.

6. Have your MetroCard out of its holster before you get to the turnstile. Before.
7. If you are waiting for your train, suppress the urge to wander the crowded platform aimlessly. Pick a spot and stay exactly there. If you need to move, do so with purpose and well-defined direction.

8. I'm embarrassed that I even need to mention this one because it's so bloody obvious, but get out of the way and let everyone off the train before you attempt to board.
(Calling Malcolm Gladwell...why haven't you written a NYer article that explains the particularly brain dead human behavior of people crowding into subway cars and elevators before people have exited them?)

9. Get the hell out of my way, I'm coming through.

 
     
     
 
 
     
     
 

Most subways of the world are, at least, mostly civilized. NYC subways are, shall we say, not always so perfect. None the less, without underground transportation I would never visit much of Manhattan as the buses are achingly slow.
Originally, several subway companies built the elevated and underground systems starting over 100 years ago. And although we don't use the terminology of my youth much anymore in describing what train to take, you will now know why the cars are so different from one trip to another.
The smallest cars and by far the most intimate and charming of the three major lines are run by the IRT, the numbered trains: 1,9,2,3,4,5,6, and 7. This line runs the famous red cars for the last 30 years or so and is just now replacing them with 1) the nicer metallic cars put into service 10 years ago and 2) the new, most sterile cars ever invented. Be prepared to feel as though you are traveling in a mobile MASH unit. They also offer no comfort from the bench seats. I apologize profusely for the inadequacy of the metro designers.
The IRT line maintains the shortest and narrowest cars by a wide margin. Several turns, near Wall Street, lines 2 and 3, and along the 7 Line near the Queensboro (59th Street) Bridge, cannot be made with a wider or longer carriage.
The IND and BMT have larger cars, some much more comfortable than others, and move many people from the far reaches of Queens, Brooklyn, and The Bronx into Manhattan.
IRT stands for Interborough Rapid Transit. BMT is Brooklyn Manhattan Transit, and IND is the Independent line.
Next we'll go over how New Yorkers figure the quickest as well as the most reliable transit to get somewhere.

  
     
  Safety: Do what the New Yorkers do.  
 


The safety issues: While standing on the subway platform it's easy to get into the "look for the train" position. Nevertheless, when you can see the lights of the train step back a few feet behind the yellow line. This alleviates the fear of tripping or being pushed. I don't even think about this action anymore, I just do it. And don't bend over the track. You may even be surprised at the direction the train will arrive.
When ridding the trains, at the busy stops many people will exit, so don't crowd toward the doors. Be patient and also be a little aware of pickpockets when getting jostled at this time as well as in any crowded situation. At smaller stations move toward the doors before the train reaches the station. Usually the local stops require more exit preparation time.
"Traveling late at night" is probably a discussion topic among your group. If you are on the well traveled Manhattan lines you'll have a longer wait but I personally have never seen any problems. Stay together and in the middle of the train. Always have your Metro Pass ready when you reach the turnstile as many times a train will be pulling into the station just as you arrive and you will hate missing a train late at night.

More complex stations, such as Canal Street at Broadway, Fulton Street, and even 59th Street on Broadway are incredibly confusing. When you exit to the street, stop and remember the street corner!!! Later this action can save you 15 minutes of being lost in the endless caverns of these stations. Take my personal word for this! Even after years of using these stations I still get confused.
- Richard

  
     
     
 
 
     
     
 

Getting around New York City can be a daunting task. Traffic and crowds, combined with confusion and getting lost can make even the most pleasant visit to New York City a nightmare. But it doesn't have to be that way! Review the information below and you'll be well on your way to navigating the New York's subway and buses like a native.

Intro to the New York Subway and Bus System
Mass transit generally falls into two categories, buses and subways. Subways serve much of Manhattan and the boroughs very well and in those areas where the subways are not ideal, there are buses that can get you where you need to go. If you're interested in some trivia and history, check out the MTA's web site for more information on the New York Subway.

  
     
 
 
     
     
 

New York Subway and Bus Fares
As of May 4, 2003, New York subway and bus fares are $2.00 per trip. (Express buses, running from the boroughs directly into the city are $4.00 each way.) There is a one-day "Fun Pass" that entitles the bearer to unlimited rides for $7. For visitors staying for a longer time, you can buy a one week unlimited card for $21 or an unlimited monthly card for $70. The one day card is valid from first use to 3 AM the following day; the 7-day or 30-day unlimited cards run out at midnight on 7th or 30th day of use. To help you make your MetroCard decision, you can find more information on the MTA web site. You can buy MetroCards at subway stations with cash, credit or ATM/debit cards. Be aware: buses only accept exact fare in coin or tokens -- drivers cannot make change. Of course, you can also pay with a MetroCard. Senior citizens and those with qualifying disabilities can get reduced fare MetroCards that entitle them to pay half-fare.

New York Subway Maps and Routes
See the Subway and Bus Map Index for maps of the outer borough buses and the Staten Island Railroad.
In general, trains run every 2-5 minutes during rush hour, every 5-15 minutes during the day and approximately every 20 minutes from midnight 'til 5 a.m. Check out bus schedules for all five

  
     
 
 
     
  A Day in the Subway, as It Rolls Up a Century  
  By RANDY KENNEDY  
     
  A New Yorker just one day shy of turning 100 years old, the subway kept crazy hours yesterday. In other words, there were no hours it did not keep. As its neighbors around the world locked up their stations and turned out their lights, the subway started a new day, just as it has more than 36,000 times since Oct. 27, 1904.
A few minutes after midnight, as she always does, Celeste Clarke stood inside a red brick building looking out over the vast Jamaica Maintenance Yard at the southern tip of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, the nesting place where more than a thousand subway cars from the E, F, R, V and G lines return at the end of their runs, to be washed and swept, greased and patched, and then sent out again.		  
     
 
 
     
     
  Ms. Clarke stood in front of a big green panel with 86 levers that looked like something designed by Willy Wonka, above which sat an antique-looking lighted map of the yard and its fanned-out tracks. To the squelch of walkie-talkies and the light rock on the radio, Ms. Clarke walked up and down, her hands in motion like a maestro, opening the switches and signals that pumped trains back into the system like valves in a giant heart.
"I'm like the Vanna White of the subway system," she said.
The levers she moves look like the ones her predecessors moved when the subway started. The trains she dispatches still run on the same kind of wheels (steel), sit atop rails of the same gauge (4 feet, 8.5 inches) and draw the same blue-sparking direct current (625 volts) from the ominous third rail. The trains themselves might no longer have straps or cane seats or ceiling fans, and the price of boarding one might have increased 3,900 percent over a century, from a nickel to $2. But the experience of taking the subway in New York has changed little in its fundamentals since 1904, drawing an unbroken line back to that first day, when Mayor George B. McClellan grabbed a silver control handle and, at 2:35 that fall afternoon, started the subway in motion for the first time.		  
     
 
 
     
  Trying to describe a day in the subway is a little like trying to take a snapshot of the wind. It's everywhere and nowhere in particular. You can feel it and hear it yet chase in vain to capture the essence of the life lived along some 700 miles of track, inside 468 stations, where New Yorkers have done everything they've done on the streets above and more. They've been born there and died there. They've lived there and eaten there and slept there and dreamed the dreams they missed during the too-short nights before. They've found their muses and their soul mates. They've lost their wallets and their patience and, sometimes, their minds.
Today, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and thousands of others will celebrate the subway's centennial with ceremonies and speeches. But telling the story of an average day in the subway - in all its mundane monstrosity - is as good a birthday present as any for a working monument that helped invent New York City by holding it together, day after day.
  
     
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  T 12:05 a.m., as Ms. Clarke was pumping fresh trains into the lines, Larry Taylor, 41, a security guard at an office building on Columbus Circle was riding the longest one, the A train, which runs 31 miles from the top of Manhattan through Brooklyn and Queens and then across Jamaica Bay, where passing gulls drop clams on the tracks to shatter their shells.
As he does every night Mr. Taylor was heading back home from work in Midtown, joining the first waves of night riders: the graveyard-shift workers, club goers, case-carrying musicians and sleepy, wandering homeless people who populate the trains from midnight to dawn.		  
     
 
 
     
  "They call the A train the 'Animal Express' because there are so many wild things riding here at night," Mr. Taylor said, his legs stretched stiffly into the middle of the aisle, the Barcalounger freedom of the night rider. "If you don't see it on this train, it ain't anywhere to be seen." This night was mostly calm, but Mr. Taylor said he had seen some things that amazed even him on the weekends, when the drinkers come out in force and "the real function at the junction gets started."
"I might snooze once in a while on the job," he said. "But no way, no how I'm snoozing on this line. Homey definitely don't play that." 		 
     
 
 
     
     
  On another A train headed to Bedford-Stuyvesant, Natasha Abbott, 23, was telling two friends her great subway story, the one about the magician. One night last month aboard the A, she said, a magician was trying to pull a quarter from behind a girl's ear. The girl's boyfriend misunderstood and, just as a fist was on its way to the magician's face, a dove burst from the magician's breast pocket and flew out into the car. "It was so intense," Ms. Abbott recalled. "The whole train started laughing."
  
     
 
 
     
     
  By 2:15 a.m., on another A train making its way from Utica Avenue back to Manhattan, the cars were starting to get that familiar overnight saloon smell. LaRay Farrow, a onetime subway singer and now a salesman at an electronics store, was headed to the West Village to a bar called Alibi, and was trying to prime the pump.
"I get my buzz going on the train before I get to the bar," explained Mr. Farrow, 30, sipping from a bottle of Beck's in a brown paper bag. "Beer is too expensive at the bar so you got to do your work before game time." He reminisced about his first years in New York, when money was tight, and he took that leap that so many other brave and desperate subway riders have taken: He decided to sing and pass around the cap for his supper. It was one afternoon on the platform at the Broadway Junction station in East New York, where the crowd was tough and the police were tougher.		  
     
 
 
     
     
  He chose Donny Hathaway's lovely "A Song for You," which has a few lines oddly appropriate for a subway singer:
"I've acted out my life in stages
With 10,000 people watching
But we're alone now
And I'm singing this song for you."
But his career in subway music ended early and badly.
He was arrested.
"No joke," he said, adding: "That was a New York City come-to-realize kind of moment."
But in a subway system that practically invented the mass transit busker - mimes, doo-wop groups, mariachis, singers dressed in horse suits, Michael Jackson impersonators, people who play everything from kazoos to zithers to musical saws - other performers sometimes fare much better.
ORENZO LaRoc, stepped out of a cab on 42nd Street in front of Grand Central Terminal at 6:37 a.m. It was still dark, but Mr. LaRoc, the Heifetz of the subways and probably one of the highest-earning musicians in the system, no longer has to take the train to his gigs. He plays a strange electric instrument with a Plexiglas body the size of a violin and the longer neck of a viola.
His lone roadie, Robert Colon, unloaded Mr. LaRoc's equipment from the trunk of the cab - three amplifiers, a car battery, a microphone, a folding table, a folding chair and a box of compact disks - and tied it onto two carts, which they haul down to the mezzanine level at Grand Central and drag through the turnstiles near the 4, 5, and 6 trains, his regular stage.		  
     
 
 
     
     
  For a performer as successful as Mr. LaRoc, the show unfolded with almost scientific precision. It began with Mr. LaRoc laying out seed money, four one-dollar bills - it takes money to make money, he explains. He then repeated only two songs, both of his own composition - "Savage Lover" and "Montuno in F." He keeps the list short, he says, because he estimates that his audience turns over completely every four and a half minutes. And his entire concert lasted only about 2 hours, through the height of the jam-packed rush, during which he sold 67 of his CD's at $10 a copy and had a wad of bills piled in his violin case.
By 9:30, it was time to pack up. "We made money," he announced triumphantly." The cops left us alone."
He added: "If I stayed, I'd clean up, but I'd be taxing my creative energy."		  
     
  RUSH hour was now winding down, the last eddies of office workers swirling out of trains at Penn Station and Times Square. It was 9:45, almost time for Millie Mendez, a platform conductor on the uptown 1, 2, 3 and 9 platform in Times Square, to take off for lunch. "Lunch, breakfast, whatever you want to call it," she said.
"I call it lunch, baby. I start here at 6."
A train pulled in and Ms. Mendez - who has become somewhat famous just for doing her job and unleashing her foghorn of a voice, which has earned her the nickname "the Ethel Merman of the subway" - bounded into the crowd for the last time before her break, imposing order and enforcing manners.
"Step aside," she boomed. "Let 'em out! Let 'em out! Please and thank you! Thank you and please!"
As the train departed, she was asked whether she had any wisdom to impart on the occasion of the centennial. Not much, she said, other than Millie's First Commandment of the Subways:
"Don't worry, honey. There's always another train coming."		  
     
  Michele Acosta, 38, from Bay Ridge - legal secretary, mother of two, wife of a police officer - was among the last wave of the rush-hour commuters to arrive in Times Square on the R train, long renowned as one of the slowest in the system. But like many working mothers, she does not mind. She had a seat. She had her book - "How to Make Millions in Real Estate in Three Years Starting With No Cash."
And best of all, she had anonymity and quiet, the kind of quiet that only New Yorkers can hear. Yes, the train wheels might be squeaking and the train deafening, but no one is talking to you, calling you or asking you to do anything. "Riding the subway is like a vacation," she said, "because at home - it never stops."
The trains do not either, though they were beginning to thin out. By 12:30, the crowds were sparse enough so that riders on an uptown No. 2 train could easily recognize their fellow passenger: Mr. Bloomberg, who made a campaign vow to ride the subways and has valiantly stuck to it. He was on his way to Columbus Circle, standing as usual, with his bodyguards, and letting the fellow voters have the seats.
"It's nice to see him on the subway," said Vojtech Bystricky, who has spotted the mayor underground more than once. He added, appreciatively, "He is as likable as a Republican can get."
With the autumn sun beginning its early descent, the tide of humanity began to flow back the other way. Ms. Acosta was back on the train, taking a different, faster route home, the 6 train from Grand Central to Union Square and then the R - a sacrifice of a seat, maybe, for speed at the end of a long day. Paul Schneider, 24, a headhunter from TriBeCa, was getting off the 6 at Canal Street, along the route of the original subway line that ran from the old City Hall station through Midtown and up to 145th Street. Though his daily routine has blurred his appreciation of the great institution through which he travels, he grew almost patriotic when thinking about the landmark the subway would reach the next day.		  
     
  "It typifies New York City," he said, and then added, taking in the station, "Look at all the trash people throw around. They wouldn't do that in an old church."
As midnight approached last night at the Jamaica yard, a tower operator, Marianne Kreuter, was ending her shift. She was pulling the big levers in the room overlooking the yard, preparing to send trains out into a new century. "It's like choreographing a ballet,'' Ms. Kreuter said as she flipped the switches on the control panel. "And you can call me Georgette Balanchine." 		 
     
 
 
  references/  
 

http://www.nycsubway.org/
http://www.essentialbigapple.com/subway.html
http://www-tech.mit.edu/Subway/
http://www.cmap.nypirg.org/netmaps/Straps/Straphangers.asp
http://www.nyctourist.com/subway_page1.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Subway
http://www.earthcam.com/usa/newyork/timessquare/
http://www.newyorkmetro.com/

  
     
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