Joel Up Front

42nd and 59th on the 8th Avenue Line are just as bad but the tiles have held up over the years. The 42 does look a lot like the old IND tile but it takes up an entire tile and the scheme's reversed. Never mind those tacky giant 42 and 59s. I'm surprised they kept the mosaics at 34th but went with those bland "34s." Not that it matters considering if I ever go to Penn, my main objective is to get out of that basement as fast as possible. It's not much of a train station if it's literally slammed between an underground shopping mall and subway tracks.

Roosevelt Avenue is even worse... I know I come off as a foamer, but I am a huge stickler when it comes to history and what things looked like when they were new. Unless the old signs were absolutely confusing or there were none, there's no reason to deviate from the old style... just look at it.

You call this preservation? Never mind the giant stains, those are decades to century-old pipes... they did a shit job of trying to emulate the IND tile. I wonder how they were able to use the proper tile for East NY Broadway Junction..

That faux-IND tablet the is insistent on installing makes me sick. Canal Street on the 8th Ave. line is a good example of it. Roosevelt makes my eyes bleed even worse. The stupid plaques at Columbus Circle on the 7th Ave. line are equally tacky but they were merciful enough to spare the beautiful IRT mosaics. Also, , maybe I just want to see some LIRR schedules. I don't want to be brought to the goddamned Weekender every time I want to access your site. Hell, half the work they're planning doesn't show up if you try to use the little Service Status box that's up when the Weekender isn't. It forces you to use that crappy annoying map.

1700 rewrapped, stripe removed.

I went on a whim into Manhattan last Friday to see how the Freedom Tower came along. This was early in the morning, took an N45 to the N22 to the and tried to get the at Kew Gardens, but that failed and I just went down to Forest Hills for the and took that to 5th Avenue. I almost passed out from not eating combined with not getting much sleep (get your sleep, I could write an essay about sleep deprivation and not eating breakfast ****s your **** up) so I ran upstairs and got some Subway, then ran back down and waited for an . The train that came was naturally crowded, mostly from riders trying to get to the PABT and Penn Station... Anyway, there's nothing much here to visit. Maybe if you go farther up north, around Roslyn and towns like that, you'll find something. Otherwise I just go into the city if I'm bored here because every other town looks the same.

The N51 picks up stragglers from the 43/45.... it gets mildly better after the 11:00 class lets out because more students are either on break or done for the day and need to get to RFM.

That schedule was from 1968... everything was typewritten back then. I just noticed the "Express Buses to Shea and Yankee Stadiums" on the side.

Cool find: An old 1968 schedule for Mid-Island Transit, one of the old LIPBLS: http://www.hempsteadplains.com/miditran.htm The text claims that the route no longer exists, but the N45 does follow the route's path from RF all the way down. Duplicate services, perhaps?

I was on the earlier going into Manhattan, but between 65th Street and Northern Boulevard (IIRC), the T/O slowed down and blared the horn as if there were track workers around, but there were none. Why did that happen?

Cuts again? As if even more crowded buses and newbies barely keeping schedules was bad enough. Nothing screams "I take bribes" than paying a company linked to your friend to run empty buses in your town and then claiming the county's broke...

But they were smart with the N22 and kept the Limited...

I can totally see NICE personnel retorting with the fact that the doesn't run anything out there any longer, so their rules are no longer valid. Other than half the NGs. And the MVMs at Hempstead. And the fareboxes. And the data readers needed for the fareboxes to read MetroCards.

If you're talking about the ones that date way back (they still read "MSBA" and looked as if they were typewritten).... When were you there? I was there from around 3:45 to 4:00. Everyone always comes late...

On top of them giving out ishtty speeds, they dare throttle my Internet during peak hours... just tried to play MW3 and joined one lobby. Two seconds in, I just slow down and then start slingshotting over the place and then stop. When the game catches up, I'm already dead.

You really should come out here, then, and see half of this for yourself... it seems that the farther north the route operates, the more FUBAR the runs go on a daily basis.

The N2 and 3 barely had any riders before 2010. I suppose the rush hour trips to Jamaica got a good amount of N6 stragglers, and N6s get crowded quickly. The NGs just make the situations worse. I love standing in the rear aisle in them because I have some room to put my bag behind a seat.

There's an ancient Bee-Line stop on the N4 by Montague Street. I don't know if it's still readable or not because I haven't seen it since 2010, but the County is too damned lazy to remove it so they left it there.

"Five times faster than Verizon's High Speed 3MBps internet." Dumbasses at CV: Basic FiOS is 25/25. 25 MPBs is over 8 times as fast as what I can get... on a good day. The Optimum app is unstable and crashes half the time, the "original" channels suck, and Madison Square Garden's teams suck. If I ever have to be around to watch them remove the boxes from my home, I'll just tell them "my parents can't afford it anymore."

I love how all these towns are broke and have the marathons on the same day. There's one going through NCC as well today.

N6, N40/41... N16 during school days.

I took a 32 out of Hempstead at at 4:40, there was an n6x waiting to back up while my bus passed by. There were three people in it, not including the B/O, while a line of about 35 people for the local gave collective "What the f--k" looks and gestures. They've even had to label locals just so that people don't get confused.

The wrapped NGs also show them. Looks kind of cool. I do want to see a white NG CNG. N32 I was on earlier almost got into an accident after some bro in an Infiniti G35 makes a u-turn with the NG I was on only 4 feet away... the B/O caught it just in time. It turned out that bro was on his phone...

And the seats in the former are god-awful. Even those faux-cloth seats from the NYC Orion Vs were better. The highlight of the meltdown in October for me was riding 728 from Spring Creek on the N16. That was a comfortable ride on top of the bus accelerating more quickly than the LIB Orion Vs... kinda ruined by me being sick that week, but still.

The newer NGs all came with plastic seats. If you've ever ridden the BTE buses, the '11 NGs came with the same (or similar) seats. That was probably from a retired NYCT Orion V.