R10 2952

You're not alone in that, believe me. Some days I see what's going on and I go into default Murtaugh:

Vision Zero was hardly the leading issue people voted him in for; most were tired of three terms of Bloomberg's uber-capitalist elitism and looked to DeBlasio in the hope he would take steps do undo the inequality greatly exacerbated by Bloomberg's policies. And as I mentioned before, quite a handful of communities opposed many of the redesign plans his administration laid out (Woodhaven Boulevard being the most infamous example). Tell them it wasn't controversial and I think they'd disagree. Either way, outside of the military, 'my way or the highway' is no way to run things. I didn't like it when teachers did it, didn't like it when bosses did it, and I don't like it when elected officials do it. If a reasonable alternative exists, then I support the alternative- hence my position that major issues at the local level should be decided by referendum, and not by a bunch of politicians on a massive ego trip.

I wouldn't go so far as to call them constitutional or charter issues, but I do say that major, controversial changes across the city should not be imposed unilaterally by a single person or their administration. Vision Zero was definitely not an item that had reasonably-broad consensus. Read through the forum's topic history and you'll come across plenty of articles by @BrooklynBus that document how the NYC DOT blatantly ignored input from community boards and civic organizations to ram through their initiatives. Hence my original point that many of DeBlasio's (and earlier, Bloomberg's) traffic concepts would not have come to pass had they been referendums on the ballot. Nobody's going to vote for something that will make driving around more difficult unless a genuine, concerted effort is made to improve and expand public transit. Bus lanes are a jack shit half-measure compared to building an actual subway. And even then, you have people claiming that congestion pricing is a must for new subways to happen, even though the real issue (pre-COVID anyway) was not a genuine lack of funding, but the fact that the politicians didn't adequately fund the MTA from already-existing, dedicated revenues in the first place. DeBlasio pushing his anti-car agenda while he simultaneously opposed calls for the City to increase its contribution towards NYCT 5-6 years ago is case in point of why I don't blindly count on local elected officials to "do the right thing".

I watched the debates and his performance came across as anger without a plan. Walked away from that convinced he would sink like a stone. On even more of a side note, the total votes in that election were barely over a million. No wonder all the candidates are crap when less than an eighth of the city's population bothers to vote.

Easy to claim without knowing the context; to put it in perspective I'll give an example- term limits in NYC. Term limits were approved by voter referendum in 1993 and 1996. In 2009 however, Bloomberg and other term-limited officials used the recession as a convenient excuse to override the limits and give themselves a third term. Voters were pissed. Bloomberg only got re-elected because his main opponent was completely incompetent, and a year later in 2010 a voter referendum to reinstate term limits passed by 73 percent. That's where I'm coming from on this. My point being that large, potentially-controversial issues at the local level need to be decided by the voters themselves, and not some narcissists who win a glorified popularity contest every four years.

I grew up in Queens near PBL local routes, back in the day; the single-file line was definitely a thing I saw only in that borough and nowhere else. That said, I never saw people storming the bus or anything in the Bronx... you'd have to go elsewhere in the world to see something like that.

@B35 via Church@Via Garibaldi 8@JAzumah To me, the express buses became a lot less useful once Vision Zero kicked in. The expansion of pedestrian plazas, deliberate mistiming of traffic lights, lowering of the speed limit to 25 miles per hour even on major arteries like Queens Boulevard, and the overall attempts to artificially induce gridlock have largely stifled the utility many of these routes used to have. More generally, I am neither pro nor anti car- I just don't like it when a mayor and his career bureaucrats think they can arbitrarily impose their ideology upon the rest of us. Doesn't matter to me what side of the political aisle they stand on. Had their initiatives been presented directly to the voters as referendums, I doubt even half of them would have passed. Something like congestion pricing would never have gotten off the ground in NYC had it been a ballot measure.

No surprise to me. Look no further than what's going on at the local level; coronavirus erased the '90s-'00s rebound of public transit in New York practically overnight. People are now looking at NYCT buses and subways with the same disdain as they did in the mid-'80s, albeit for a different reason. Back to square one and then some. That's the way it is, sadly.

Yeah, these things tend to follow a cycle where they become a popular fad and then things get out of hand. Fidget spinners, selfie sticks, wokeness, the whole "yeet" thing... I don't get it.

My whole problem with many unions is that they protect on the basis of seniority as opposed to actual merit. Scumbag teachers in high school, slacker co-workers and supervisors on the job that made my skin crawl. I don't support the whole corporate-backed "right to work" union-busting, but I do firmly believe that if unions want to win back the respect and support of the general public, they need to come clean and devise a new way of doing things so that they protect those who deserve actual protection. Don't back up the bad apples- cut them loose instead. Also, supervisors should never be allowed to be union. Once you make it to management, that's it. You don't need the same protection that an entry-level employee needs. Because right now too many unions operate like Hoffa and the Teamsters; saw Scorsese's film The Irishman last year and I was like, 'Hey, their sit-downs are just like my local's monthly meetings' 🤔

I'm not in transit, but I have been in the public sector for a few years now; the words above are a down-to-the-T description of a supervisor I worked for not too long ago. Guy was never a star performer, always 'my way', egotistical, micromanagerial attitude. Yet somehow, he managed to get kicked upstairs, fail upwards, or what have you. He has shafted subordinates left and right, and was overall a dickish, pedantic bastard, but since the organization allows supervisors to simultaneously be part of management and members in the union, he would play both sides of the fence. All the authority of a managerial-level employee, with all the benefits that come from starting work when you were 17-18 and having 30 years on the job. Human Resources wouldn't lift a finger because the dude was management; union protected him at all costs on account of seniority. Basically untouchable. Don't normally go on these kind of tangential rants, but it's only 2-3 times in my life (believe it or not) that I've personally encountered such an unpleasant excuse for a human being in the employment context. Am glad I moved on from that particular experience, really and truly.

Glad the MBTA's trying to get the ball rolling on electrification again. 2-3 years ago I remember being stuck in a crowded first car behind an F40PH that had a badly-calibrated fuel pump; the smell and sight of blue, unburned fuel exhaust was nauseating. Hell, there's been some days that Back Bay Station during rush hour smells like a crude-oil fire.

Eventually the music will stop, and it will all come crashing down, albeit in slow-motion over a period of several years. Late-stage capitalism in a nutshell; this country is beginning to resemble the last days of the Soviet Union in certain respects. Socially divided, politically bankrupt, and economically crippled. But just like those in modern-day Russia who praise Brezhnev, there are still idiots in America who think Reagan was a savior...

Unfortunately, a lot of these bad practices (stopping for someone who's clearly not getting on, deliberately waiting for a green light to turn red, not passing a bus of the same route even though there's a service gap and bad crowding) stem from the byzantine, trivial, nit-picky rules put in place by the people in charge. For better or worse, truth is most bus drivers are scared shitless of being written up by their supervisors over some BS... That said, nothing is going to change as long as the agency continues to be run by out-of-touch executives and an absolutely toxic level of middle management.

I think you're seriously underestimating just how big an aspect of the job dealing with petty supervisors and non-stop micromanagement can be; every acquaintance I had growing up who worked in NYCT said putting up with shitty bosses was at least 50% of the job. No job can truly be enjoyable if the person directly overseeing you, his boss, and most layers of management above are rotten to the core, and will try to get you severely disciplined or even fired for the slightest or even perceived (i.e. nonexistent) infraction. You talk of job enjoyment, but the reality is that for the majority of us ordinary folks in this country, life is not about doing what you want to do, but doing what you have to do to not end up on the streets.

For what it's worth, I think tying SAS into the Montague Tunnel would actually make sense. At the very least, it gives 4th Avenue Brooklyn riders a seat to the East Side. And to piggyback off of what you were saying earlier about 4-tracking, if they did that all the way down to Water Street-Hanover Square, they could kill two birds with one stone; create cross-platform transfers at Chrystie St station, and tie in the west of Essex. Over the years it's become clear to me that the Nassau Line is too close to the , and too far from the East River to either attract or generate sufficient ridership on it's own. If they ever had an opportunity, I would say Nassau has to go- the configuration there has never worked right.

Unfortunately, the same thing happens on here as well; there's a bunch of people on these boards who act like CBTC, open gangways, deinterlining, trains packed to the brim with overly complicated electronics, and everything London, Paris or Tokyo do are the only conceivable options for improving New York and North American transit in general; as you yourself experienced firsthand, they put down dissenting voices and act like they know better than anyone else. There were some great transit personnel, folks who were involved in preservation/restoration efforts, and others who used to post on here 5-10 years ago, including another Torontian (ttcsubwayfan), but many have left and frankly I see a strong correlation- nobody wants to stick around a place where they feel they've been isolated. In all fairness though, some of the points regarding resignalling, best practices from overseas, and new designs do make sense from time to time, I just wish the individuals pushing these concepts were more open to various, legitmate counterpoints that have been raised in response. One can't be right 100% of the time; I certainly haven't, and as far as public transportation goes, there is always more than one way to skin a cat. In my opinion, the best you can do is frame your ideas as clearly and reasonably as possible, and if people get uptight about it, that's on them.

I always thought that screeching was the transmission?

Closing the station is a kneejerk reaction and needlessly punishes the legitimate commuters who need to get to and from home. Also, it doesn't take months to clean shit and needles out of an elevator. SEPTA really dropped the ball on this one...

The spin doctors most likely put such a negative slant on the alternatives because someone from higher up (i.e., Cuomo) told them to. It's why I take many of these studies at face value. Follow the money to see who stands behind things, and then you realize it's not so much logic and reason as it is who's got the money and the power to impose their will on others.

Yeah, I don't get how anybody could take this seriously. That petition is just a bunch of foamers trolling and nothing else.

No surprise there. My workplace is exactly the same.

The Brooklyn 91xx RTSes with the Cummins.

LOL it's collective memory; family's been in NY for three generations. Together, we've spent 55 years hating on the mayors... Anyway, I've been saying for a while now that if the average New Yorker actually took the time to educate themselves on their civic history, we wouldn't have ended up with seven shitty mayors in a row.

I would go further and say that we know the MTA in it's current form can't get these things right on the first try; Andy Byford tried to plan for the best-case scenarios, and look how that turned out. With this agency, the only you can do is account for the worst-case scenario and nothing else, really. And to add on to what you mentioned about the R30s, I would even question what the rush was in retiring all the R27s, to be honest.