R10 2952

Very true; unlike you and I, some posters on these boards nowadays seem to be living in fantasy-land. Personally, I miss the days when INDman and/or SubwayGuy would give the foamers a verbal tongue-lashing. It kept things in balance.

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-nyc-subway-fatal-stabbings-20210213-5c2dfsxc3bdcnp6jqoqttv3y2u-story.html So basically a skell riding end-to-end on the line, preying on other skells. Not surprised by any of this; the A was my home line for over a decade, 207th was my stop- some hours the platform and the trains departing there were like a makeshift homeless shelter. You would think that from all the money paid in municipal income tax, something would be done to help these people off the streets, but deBlasio does jack-shit about it while taking backhanders from the real estate interests who have basically made affordable housing an impossibility in this city. He's just as bad as Giuliani and Bloomberg were in that regard.

Figuratively speaking, this is a question that has existed since the dawn of time. If Plato were alive today, he'd be writing philosophical musings about why the MTA work environment is one of the most toxic, dysfunctional organizations known to mankind.

Again, where are they going to get the money for all this? The agency is completely broke, and the federal government is not going to write them a blank check. Senate Democrats are having a difficult time as it is trying to get the coronavirus package passed through reconciliation, and Biden looks like he might still cave to Republican demands for axing assistance to state and local governments. If the state and city do not get that assistance, no amount of letter-writing or public pressure is going to change anything. Full CBTC will become a pipe dream and the R68s might end up sticking around for another decade or more. Can't award contracts if you don't have the funds.

Perhaps declining enrollment with the police department is a good thing; what I mean by that is 10-20 years ago there were so many recruits lining up to take the test that NYPD became ridiculously competitive; at one point it seemed like the only guys being accepted were all ex-military (Iraq, Afghanistan) dudes from LI and Westchester. Not saying there shouldn't be patrols, just saying that maybe if NYPD got more recruits who were college graduates or just civilians, we wouldn't have the problem of the Bloomberg years, where a bunch of out-of-towner army vets were treating the city streets and everyone on them like it's a war-zone.

Yeah, I still remember when they briefly reopened the out-of-system 50th Street passageway between the and a few years back; not only was it a hike, the whole thing looked like it came straight out of one of those gritty late '80s documentaries. As to station or line placements, I would say the bigger issue is the messy routing of most lines. BMT and IRT swapping avenues at Times Square; that sharp swing the make between Park and Lexington; the jigsaw puzzle that is Downtown Brooklyn.... feels like the engineering folks in the early 1900s made some things far more complicated than they needed to be.

"Undomiciled", "undocumented", "differently-abled", "body-positive"... the list goes on and on. Like some sort of verbal Wheel of Fortune. It's even worse with how they describe the drug addicts- "sufferers of substance abuse" or whatever. Few years ago one of these crackheads/skells stole my coworker's coat from a staff-only area in the workplace; some woman said to her "you know, he probably needs it more than you". I was like "f**k that, it doesn't mean he's got a free pass to jack other people's shit". Damn folks be acting like it's GTA and anything goes or something.

Well the MTA is definitely being non-transparent, trying to keep it on the down low thinking no one will notice, but what else is new? Honestly, it's not just in New York that the transit agencies are trying to pull this kind of stuff right now; off the top of my head, I can think of 3 or 4 other cities across the country where transit service has been quietly cut since the summer without so much as a press release. What's even more reprehensible is that when confronted about it, they try to use the coronavirus as an excuse to justify their underhandedness...

I know, some of the linguistic gymnastics people will engage in to describe it all is just... 🤦‍♂️ If they put that much effort into actually helping the homeless, maybe things wouldn't have become so bad in the first place. Also, the larger issue is they're resorting to excessive kneejerk-reaction policies, ruining things for the rest of us just because of a few folks sleeping on benches. It's like when the phone companies removed all the full-size payphone booths in the '80s because of concerns re: the homeless, and replaced them with the shitty little open-air metal kiosks. Anyone who had to stand in the rain using one of those things in the late '90s or early 2000s will know what I'm talking about; I still remember how ecstatic everybody was when the downsized cellphones started coming out around 2003- 'no more getting wet', LOL.

Pretty much; if I recall correctly, all the projects that were proposed by NYCTA during the '50s and '60s to realign the el east of Broadway Junction and add a third track mostly fell through due to cost. Why the BMT failed to eliminate the Crescent Street bottleneck during the Dual Contracts in the 1910s is beyond me.

Considering I grew up riding 18-20 year old GMC RTS junkheaps on the old PBLs that were held together with literal duct tape, an Orion VII NG being 9 years old is a complete non-issue to me...

Politics, that's why. Local politicians and businessmen from the late '50s onwards kept bitching about the Jamaica El and its supposed effect on business and quality-of-life; same situation as what caused the Third Avenue El in Manhattan to come down. Eventually they got the ear of Mayor Lindsay, and by the time the "Program for Action" came around in 1968, replacing the el with a tunnel was added to the list of projects. The Transit Authority wasn't all that interested in demolition, but political meddling (as always) forced their hand. The biggest irony is that a lot of these same businesses along Jamaica Avenue actually lost a lot of customers and eventually went under once the el was gone.

Not surprised about commercial rents not being in-line with reality; the old Municipal Parking Garage built in the '70s at Queens Plaza used to have a bunch of storefront space that was never rented out because the costs were exorbitant. It was a real head-scratcher why it was so high especially considering the building itself was a big concrete eyesore:

So it looks like Manchin is the new Lieberman, he's gone rogue and there won't be a $15 federal minimum wage anytime soon... brings to mind the larger issue of the Democrats' inability to overcome a Republican filibuster. Looking like 2009-10 all over again 🤦‍♂️. Historically, overcoming a filibuster used to require 67 votes; then, it was reduced to 60 sometime in the 1970s. Personally, I think it needs to be reduced to 55 votes, with the ultimate goal of eliminating the filibuster entirely in 10-15 years or so. I'm tired of a bunch of right-wing jerkoffs from Redneckistan trying to impose their pro-corporate, anti-government agenda on the rest of us, especially considering we actually outnumber them population-wise.

The whole downward trend of rail transport in this country after World War II; in the '40s and '50s, the politicians, the Teamsters, and industrialists were all pushing the mentality of "out with the old, in with the new". The Interstate Highway System, Hoffa's beefs with railroad workers, and public complacency all combined to form a nasty trifecta. Couple that with stuff like General Motors using front companies to buy out streetcar lines and convert them to buses, the railroads themselves sometimes being their own worst enemy with all the mismanagement, and you get the situation we have today. Right now there are endless car-only towns all over the NY/NJ/PA/CT area and beyond that had regular passenger connections to NYC as recently as the late '60s. Freight also used to be a different ballgame- used to either come in on barges from NJ, or across the bridge in Poughkeepsie. Now there's only one float left, and the closest active bridge is all the way up in Selkirk. Throw in the decline of the West Side, Evergreen, Bushwick, Lower Montauk, Bay Ridge, Putnam, Port Morris, North Shore Branches and what we're left with is a pretty mediocre state of affairs. Personally, I think none of this would have come to pass if the railroads had simply been nationalized like in continental Europe (leaving the clusterfvck that was post-war U.K rail transport out for good reason)- or at the very least, conditions would never have gotten as bad as they did. But as long as there is no coherent national policy, nothing will change; it's why we have mostly exhaust-belching diesels in this country instead of electric locomotives, several different, highly-siloed regional operators along the NEC instead of just having Amtrak run everything, and can't even get the ball rolling halfway decently on the whole concept of high-speed rail.

Because that's where the New York Central Railroad tracks were; the West Side had freight service from the 1840s until the 1980s and potential interference with those operations, whether real or imagined, was used as a rationale to not have els or subways on the Far West Side.

My thoughts exactly. The other thing that some people seem to forget is that the MTA is at least twice as broke now as they were in 2010; it's definitely not raining dollar bills at 2 Broadway, so all this talk I hear from certain folks about option orders, fast-tracking replacements for the R62s and R68s, is utter fantasy and nonsense as long as there's no extra money in the budget.

I'd chalk it up to the image quality; the track definitely existed- in addition to the picture from nycsubway.org, I found this: https://nycma.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/detail/NYCMA~5~5~210547~539793?sort=borough%2Cblock%2Clot%2Czip_code&qvq=w4s:/where%2FLexington%2BAvenue;sort:borough%2Cblock%2Clot%2Czip_code;lc:NYCMA~5~5&mi=550&trs=1066 If you zoom in, you'll see the track crossing the avenue. Between that and the buildings visible in the aerial between Lex and Park, it looks like there was indeed an ancillary facility for 99th Street Yard- strange how they set it up that way.

Do people really take that idiot seriously? I thought he was in the same league as Pinesniffer...

From what I've found here and there online, the yard was in the lot bounded by 98th, 99th, 3rd and Lexington- one block east and south of the bus depot. It's the place where the NYCHA Lexington Houses currently are. The yard's retaining wall still stands and is incorporated into the foundation of the Housing Authority site. The single, non-electrified track came out of a gate and then crossed Lexington into the lot between Lex and Park, but there don't seem to be any photos or indication of what was on the west side of Lexington. My best guess is there was some sort of ancillary facility to the yard there, but since information is scarce and all this was before my time, I really have no idea; makes me wonder if there possibly was a connection to the railroad on Park Avenue (in the 19th century, before it became grade-seprated).

Exactly; maybe the along 4th Ave would've made sense if it had gone to 95th to allow for an cutback to Whitehall, but that ship sailed in the late '80s as far as I'm concerned- the ridership patterns have long changed since then.

Having seen how rail transport operates in more severe climates (Canada, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe), the issue is not "trains running in the snow". The real issue here is the MTA's total f**king incompetence in dealing with said snow.

Been trying to wrap my head around this one- System: New York City Transit Line: 3rd Avenue El Location: 99th St. Yard Route: Fan Trip Collection of: Frank Pfuhler Date: 3/30/1947 Notes: Crossing Lexington Ave. Fantrip. Hard to believe there used to be an actual railroad track crossing Lexington Avenue; seems like another world entirely. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any indication what it led to or where it ended once reaching the west side of Lexington Avenue. Browsed through archival City tax photos from the 1940s, but no leads. @Trainmaster5 any ideas what it might have been for?

Way back in the early 19th century, the first iteration of the West Side rail line ran at street level all the way down to Lower Manhattan, ending in the vicinity of Chambers and Hudson Streets. The line was cut back to a terminal at St. John's Park after the Civil War, and then elevated in the 1930s and rerouted to a purpose-built freight station on the new High Line. Personally, I always wondered why no consideration was given back in those days to running passenger service on the rail viaduct. Would have loved to see the line resurrected for some useful transportation purpose instead of conversion into a park, but the railroad demolishing the line below 14th Street in the 1960s made it functionally useless after that point- I'm actually surprised the northern half lasted in freight service until the '80s.

Thank you for bringing this up; it's the main reason I've opposed the current routing from the very start- same problem as when the meandered aimlessly from Metropolitan to Bay Parkway, really. The other issues I've always had with the is the excessive interlining (line went from sharing tracks with four services to five) and capacity issues; the 480' trains do not handle rush hour on Queens Blvd as well as the 600' trains on the did, not by any stretch of the imagination.