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.

11 hours ago, IRT Bronx Express said:

If it were up to me, I'd go for it. Problem is, I can't even walk up the stairs at the present time (thank you, no thank you covid). So I'll just head over to my local doctor's and call it a day. Hopefully the vaccine can undo the remaining damage the virus did to me last year.

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.

On 5/2/2021 at 11:00 PM, QM1to6Ave said:

I see it carry air when it goes up riverside drive. Cant remember the last time i saw anyone get on at those riverside stops 

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.

On 5/3/2021 at 12:18 AM, Around the Horn said:

6728, 6731, 6739, 6754 scrap hold/farebox removed from MJQ

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.

Quote

Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Monday insisted many New Yorkers are “afraid” to take the subway —and that he wouldn’t tell his own child to ride the rails — in a passionate defense of the MTA’s months-long push for more NYPD cops on city transit.

“You want people on the subways. You can’t ignore the reasons why people don’t want to go on the subway,” Cuomo said during a press briefing in Manhattan, in which he was asked to defend his appointed MTA leadership’s recent focus on crime and harassment.

“I relate to it because, as you know, I am a New Yorker, born and bred,” Cuomo — who has ridden the subway once during the pandemic– told reporters, before appearing to assume the perspective of an average straphanger.

“Don’t lie to me. And don’t play me as a fool,” he said. “‘Come on the subway. It’s safe!’ Oh really. Have you been on the subway? Because I have, and I was scared.'”

“‘Tell your child to ride the subway! It’s safe!’ Yeah, I’m not telling my child to ride the subway, because I’m afraid for my child.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio and the NYPD criticized MTA leaders last month for publicizing customer concerns about crime and harassment on the system, which the city officials said would “discourage” New Yorkers from returning to transit after the COVID-19 pandemic.

They noted that crime rates dropped in recent months, while ridership increased.

The subways saw 2.32 felony crimes per million riders in March 2021, compared to 2.65 felonies per million riders the previous month, NYPD stats show. But both figures are significantly higher than the 1.47 crimes per million riders across the year 2019.

MTA customer surveys found crime and harassment were among the top concerns of both current and “lapsed” straphangers, with 36 percent of lapsed riders saying those concerns are holding them back from returning to the system.

The MTA is preparing a publicity campaign to help bring riders back, state officials said.

“If you ignore the problem, you’re not fooling anyone. You’re not deceiving anyone. You can’t say to anyone in New York City today, ‘Don’t worry, it’s safe,'” Cuomo said.

“You guys have to get out of the mentality that everybody lives in Manhattan.”

Cuomo’s comments came after his announcement that 24/7 subway service would resume, as well as the lifting of some COVID-19 restrictions.

He instituted the policy a year ago with the goal of clearing trains and stations of homeless people and other stragglers so the system could be cleaned daily amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

He insisted on Monday that “homeless people on the trains” had deterred potential riders since the start of the pandemic, and urged the MTA and city to continue efforts to remove vagrants from stations and encourage them to accept services.

“We’ve gotten to this point where we’ve accepted, well, the subway system is really a homeless system,” he said. “No! No! I don’t accept that!” 

Ridiculous fear-mongering that will depress ridership and, shock of shocks, make the subway LESS safe and even worse for everyone else.

39 minutes ago, trainfan22 said:

Yep, they did this when the R30 cars were retired with nothing replacing them until the R143s came along. NYCT made it work. This isn't the deferred maintenance era and the fairly young NTT's make up a good portion of the fleet. Things will be fine with the R32s retired.

They had a great run, 55+ years is an excellent run for a railcar.

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.

6 hours ago, B35 via Church said:

I'm not all that high on them either, but I'm curious as to why you deem this city would significantly be a better place without em.... I think it would be immaterial/wouldn't make much difference if they didn't exist.

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!

16 hours ago, trainfan22 said:

Today on the train some crazy guy opened all the windows in the car rambling something about air circulation. I HATE when riders on the subway open the windows in a car, cause of the loud noise of the train traveling though the tunnel. Other riders in the car were also annoyed about this and two other riders closed the windows soon after he opened them.

Besides those little windows don't circulate nothing, their so small, opening them just annoys your fellow riders. It's funny as I transfered at Broadway Junction to the and the R160 car I got the HAVC was broke and there was no type of breeze inside the car whatsoever with all those little windows open.. 

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

1 hour ago, SevenEleven said:

They're not using the same amount of buses as pilots anymore. Also, they tend to use the first in service bus, send it back to Nova and get a brand new one in return.

0022 (orig 9620) and 9622 came and left. 22 is away at a vendor, 9622 is not even in the system anymore.

0023 (orig 1300) was piloted and not in the system right now. The second 1300 is at CP.

8755 is in but that should be here to stay as that's an option bus off the HEV order and also pretty much the same bus as the 8504-8754 batch.

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.

14 minutes ago, 1train2255railfan said:

Then again, we did have a pilot bus (22) to test out the technology 

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.

38 minutes ago, 1train2255railfan said:

I noticed that certain Orion 7 Hybrids (6725, 6736, 3850, etc) have partially peeled off "Clean Air Hybrid Electric Bus" labeling. Could that be due to age/wear and tear or are the decals beginning to be removed because the said buses are being retired soon? 

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. 

10 hours ago, R10 2952 said:

I can easily see this seatbelt idea blowing up in the regulators' faces; big difference between a 5-6 person car and a full-size motor coach.  An overturned bus with 30+ people trapped hanging upside-down just seems like a recipe for a lawsuit.

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...

8 minutes ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

I'll tell you why... Because the riders accept such conditions. It's "the City", so filthiness is supposedly ok. It's one of the reasons I started my group. We've become very complacent with unreliable service, filthy trains and buses and so on. Like you, I've traveled extensively, primarily in other countries. You travel about 7 hours up to Montréal and see how clean everything is. Outside of the Downtown area with some trash here and there, the residential areas are so immaculate you can eat off of the ground. Sure, transit is an issue in other places, but there is more investment in them running punctually and being clean. I lived in Florence, which had no subway system then. You get around the City by bus if you use public transit, and it's a very well run system. The inter-city trains generally run well as well (at least in Northern Italy anyway (Southern Italy or the "mezzogiorno" is another story lol)). Hell I can go from Florence to Bologna faster than I can going from parts of the outer boroughs to Manhattan. lol

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.