MHV9218

6705 remains a Manhattanville bus. 9680 is new to Manhattanville. There really haven't been that many OGs retired just yet. MV is down to 22 OGs, but keep in mind 6690, 6692, 6700, 6711, 6717, and 6726 are all at Quill now. MV does have a number of buses out for work which is also affecting the changeover process.

Sorry to hear that – what an awful thing to go through. Here's hoping...there has definitely been some limited evidence of the vaccine helping 'long covid' symptoms, but nothing conclusive yet. Hopefully you'll be one of the cases that speaks to that.

I mean, in the olden days, the only artic routes you'd ever seen standards on were the Bx15 and Bx36. All the Manhattan routes and the Bronx mainlines were pretty much consistently 60-footers.

Eh, unless they took the needle and bathed it in trash-water between the tracks, you'd be fine. The air itself isn't going to do anything to a needle that's already sterilized and experience about 1.5 seconds before they give you the shot. And yeah, might be a van anyway. I say great. Keep up the gimmicks. Get the damn people vaccinated.

Is it possible those buses are going to MTAB to knock out some 3000s? Those are not old buses.

Until 2016, is the answer to that. There was a nice base of ridership traveling UWS to the Village, Downtown, SoHo, and vice versa, and then they pointlessly curtailed the route in Midtown and ruined the service. Now it's a ghost town on Riverside.

Note that those are still on Hold at MJQ (could become MTAB fleet if necessary) but you're right, they haven't moved in a while.

de Blasio sure isn't my boy, but let's remember, the governor runs the subway. This is like telling people to be afraid of one of your own children.

Very different thing between acknowledging how some riders feel and point blank going out and trying to scare people with BS platitudes about your own daughters.

Take a look at this a**hole. Now, granted, this is a meaningless political stunt designed entirely to make the city look bad and force more cops into the subway, so it shouldn't even be taken seriously, but the notion of the guy who's in charge of the MTA going on this fear-mongering nonsense... Insanity. Ridiculous fear-mongering that will depress ridership and, shock of shocks, make the subway LESS safe and even worse for everyone else.

Probably right, except the R46s were doing badly even when there was no ridership. Never say never with the 32s given how rough the MDBF has been. If they didn't think there was a chance of using them, they wouldn't be keeping them prepped.

It varies a little bit by neighborhood, but you get two problems at once imo: 1) specific nuisances by NIMBY boards – won't allow a new restaurant, a liquor license, a bar; favor projects approved by other rich people and their staid suburban-esque lives 2) specific nuisances that the city then learns from, internalizes, and turns into a policy norm – i.e. board X in Queens refuses to approve a bus lane/bike lane and threatens to sue, the city doesn't want to risk losing the right to build any bus/bike lines, so they give up ever trying to build bike/bus lanes because they want to avoid the conflict That second category has a real insidious, subtle effect where the whole scope of projects attempted by the city gets weaker and lamer by the year because they anticipate losing out to community boards that (as bobtehpanda is saying) don't really represent anybody and tend to skew towards the people who can show up at their weekday afternoon meetings (by and large old people, retired people, people with more money, and you can go figure from there what that looks like demographically).

Not for nothing, if we got rid of community boards tomorrow, New York City would be a significantly better place.

How about 1305-1306? Those buses outlived the entire fleet by, what, almost a year?

2910 is out right now on the QM6. Rasputin!

Eh, during covid times they sure as hell should have the windows open. I know they're loud but it's worth it.

Yeah I guess 8090 is the first example of that, we went through multiple different versions of that bus. More what I mean is that they skipped the whole thing with a test batch of buses - the 90 buses BT&E, or the 5-5 with the XDE40s. It's one the first major orders in a brick (like they say in the DMV) that we didn't have a couple demos or test buses for.

That's after the order was in though. Pretty much every order has started with a pilot or two – 6365, we went through like three different buses before they settled on a spec; 8750-8751 were pilots, 1000-1001 and later 5407, etc.

Thinking about it, are the LFS HEVs the only major order the MTA has had since 2010/2011 or so with the BT&E program that didn't first come in a pilot batch? Hell, even the XDE40s (which are a smaller order than the LFS HEVs) were split into two 5-bus test groups for spec decisions. Everything has been tested in some capacity unless it was a small order (XE60s) and yet the LFS HEVs we just pull the trigger on all of them. Sort of interesting.

There would be no reason to remove the decals. Some of them are peeled off from advertising on the roofline that removed the adhesive, and some are just old stickers that are coming off. Stickers on buses usually last about 8-10 years in direct sunlight...RTS numbers were all peeling off by the end.

To be fair, so long as you can un-click you're not trapped, and the person upside down hanging is probably in better shape than the person who went flying head-first at the floor in a rollover. This was an early argument against seatbelts – better to get thrown clean – and it didn't pan out.

So wait, they actually ran 179s for a little while with no C/R boards for the 4/4 8-car consist? And just dealt with it? That's something else.

Why is so hard for people to conceive that the MTA NEEDED the money it received? Farebox revenue was zilch. Nada. Not only did ridership collapse, bus ridership was FREE. So yes, two things can be true at once: they received a ton of money, and they still have to be cautious about expenses, because that's how singularly terrible this pandemic was. By the way, somebody page me when we're at even close to 70-80% of 2019's farebox numbers and then we can talk about how to spend...

You know that the solution to all of this is massive public investment in infrastructure, right? The reason the Italians have such a good train network is because they put a great deal of resources into the network, and to this day the private service (Italo) is no better, sometimes worse than the state-run Frecciarossa. That kind of thing is entirely possible in America, so long as we actually try for it. I assume you support Biden's infrastructure bill? That's how we get reliable high-speed intra-state and cross-country rail.

You guys are dating yourselves! The ruined tiles at West 4th from water damage have been cleaned up for two or so years now. It was around the time they cleaned up the original 1930s enamel signs on the lower level, too.