SUBWAY - Random Thoughts Topic

[B35 via Church]

14 hours ago, Lawrence St said:

I know, but its sad that it comes down to people wanting to fight other people for trying to do the right thing.

spent $225 million on the "pay your fare" campaign and everyone laughed at them. 

$225 million or w/e it was, to try to clean up a culture of farebeating that they let exponentially grow in the past 10-15 years or so..... Just goes to show that you can't always throw money at anything & expect matters to be promptly rectified.... I've said this enough times on here, there is a complete lack of pride in public transportation in this city - and worse than that, there is a growing amount of people that hold the attitude that MTA's services are barely worth paying for, if at all - and it aint just the working poor or the unemployed either....

Edited February 11, 2021 by B35 via Church

[R68ACTrain]

8 hours ago, Calvin said:

The  had a drop in ridership, the TA had plans to continue the route with its cut schedule. 

The , the fleet amount may be the cause of this (pooled with the  using R46)

 

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-subway-service-cuts-f-c-lines-mta-20210211-3f2a644bhzctjmoqqebjzzywj4-story.html?fbclid=IwAR3PHt8XUI5imO3Hgj8gXmqcJrcLj-xiICe1h9fWwlb7D5nKICglqyj3Dx4

Huh, no wonder why when I was at Kingston railfanning, the  to 168th Street was running on 11-13 minute headways.

[darkstar8983]

10 hours ago, Calvin said:

The  had a drop in ridership, the TA had plans to continue the route with its cut schedule. 

The , the fleet amount may be the cause of this (pooled with the  using R46)

 

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-subway-service-cuts-f-c-lines-mta-20210211-3f2a644bhzctjmoqqebjzzywj4-story.html?fbclid=IwAR3PHt8XUI5imO3Hgj8gXmqcJrcLj-xiICe1h9fWwlb7D5nKICglqyj3Dx4

If this is the case, it’s the perfect opportunity to do something about the nonexistent spare factor in all B-division yards except Jamaica

[darkstar8983]

1 hour ago, R68ACTrain said:

Huh, no wonder why when I was at Kingston railfanning, the  to 168th Street was running on 11-13 minute headways.

Yeah I think the Saturday schedule is now in effect on the  from Monday thru Saturday

[MHV9218]

8 hours ago, GojiMet86 said:

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-subway-service-cuts-f-c-lines-mta-20210211-3f2a644bhzctjmoqqebjzzywj4-story.html

Kind of a bullshit headline imo – no shocker from Clayton Guse. What's "permanent" mean, anyway? Throughout covid? Until demand returns? Subway ridership is still in the toilet. It's not some great offense that they're still running diminished service. Talk to me when everybody's got the vaccine and people are commuting again. The estimates I read suggest we're not gonna see even 80-90% of ridership until six or so months from now. 

Look at a line like this:

"But unlike earlier reduced schedules, the new schedules for the C and F lines aren’t being justified by a major emergency."

Like, damn, Clayton, do I have to spell it out for you? What do you think is going on right now? How many people do you see wearing a mask on the street, and when's the last time you ate inside a diner? Unless the MTA waves a flag and says "this is because of covid," you don't get it? Look around the subway and tell me if ridership warrants peak 2019-2020 service guidelines. Sometimes I wonder if he's actually this dumb, or if his bosses just insist on articles that make him seem like it. 

[VIP]

1 hour ago, darkstar8983 said:

If this is the case, it’s the perfect opportunity to do something about the nonexistent spare factor in all B-division yards except Jamaica

They need to keep this energy with the Astoria line and get RID of the useless  line

[Trainmaster5]

14 minutes ago, MHV9218 said:

Kind of a bullshit headline imo – no shocker from Clayton Guse. What's "permanent" mean, anyway? Throughout covid? Until demand returns? Subway ridership is still in the toilet. It's not some great offense that they're still running diminished service. Talk to me when everybody's got the vaccine and people are commuting again. The estimates I read suggest we're not gonna see even 80-90% of ridership until six or so months from now. 

Look at a line like this:

"But unlike earlier reduced schedules, the new schedules for the C and F lines aren’t being justified by a major emergency."

Like, damn, Clayton, do I have to spell it out for you? What do you think is going on right now? How many people do you see wearing a mask on the street, and when's the last time you ate inside a diner? Unless the MTA waves a flag and says "this is because of covid," you don't get it? Look around the subway and tell me if ridership warrants peak 2019-2020 service guidelines. Sometimes I wonder if he's actually this dumb, or if his bosses just insist on articles that make him seem like it. 

What bothers me about this is that some people take this type of article as fact and run with it without any context. Meanwhile mass transit ridership is down across the country because of the virus, crew members are out of service industry wide, and even when the economy picks up somewhat the service levels are not going back to the pre-pandemic level because the jobs are not going to be there anymore. Service cuts are coming across the board because the older schedules can’t be justified to those who fund the transit systems. My opinion. Carry on.

[Lawrence St]

15 minutes ago, VIP said:

They need to keep this energy with the Astoria line and get RID of the useless  line

You do that and Astoria will lose their minds.

[NewFlyer 230]

I was on the  recently and every time I pass 18th street I just always think to myself this station is super close to 14th and 23rd street. 

Why wasn’t 18th street ever closed especially when the platforms were extended on the IRT stations at the time? 

Another set of stations in close proximity of one another that I can think off of the top of my mind is Chamber Street and Park Place on  and . You literally pull out of Chamber Street slowly and 15 seconds later you hear the announcement play for Park Place. I guess they kept Park Place around for the transfer to the  and perhaps reduce over crowding. 

[MHV9218]

15 minutes ago, NewFlyer 230 said:

I was on the  recently and every time I pass 18th street I just always think to myself this station is super close to 14th and 23rd street. 

Why wasn’t 18th street ever closed especially when the platforms were extended on the IRT stations at the time? 

One difference is that 14th on the 7th Ave. extends South, whereas 14th on the Lex extends North. So 18th got closed there, since the 16th St. exit at Union Square was barely two blocks away from the station and even closer if they had extended platforms to 10 cars. But on the 7th Ave. the station runs down to 12th St., the other direction. At 96th on the 7th Ave., station goes south, so it was too close to the 91st St. stop.

[CenSin]

6 hours ago, MHV9218 said:

One difference is that 14th on the 7th Ave. extends South, whereas 14th on the Lex extends North. So 18th got closed there, since the 16th St. exit at Union Square was barely two blocks away from the station and even closer if they had extended platforms to 10 cars. But on the 7th Ave. the station runs down to 12th St., the other direction. At 96th on the 7th Ave., station goes south, so it was too close to the 91st St. stop.

Interestingly, during normal daytime service, Park Place and Fulton Street are the only two stations where 7 Avenue express and 8 Avenue express/local have a transfer where the platforms overlap/touch—no long corridor to walk. For 7 Avenue local those stations are at 59 Street–Columbus Circle and 168 Street.

I know they were not built at the same time nor with any foresight, but had the two lines been coordinated, the station placements definitely could have been better…

[trainfan22]

There will rappers and other celebrities doing new covid PSAs on the subway soon. IDK if there's an article about this but go to Jadakiss and Camron IG Pages and it's on there. I don't have IG and you can't lurk that site unless you have an account so I can't post the clips.

 

 

 

Edited February 13, 2021 by trainfan22

[bobtehpanda]

2 hours ago, CenSin said:

Interestingly, during normal daytime service, Park Place and Fulton Street are the only two stations where 7 Avenue express and 8 Avenue express/local have a transfer where the platforms overlap/touch—no long corridor to walk. For 7 Avenue local those stations are at 59 Street–Columbus Circle and 168 Street.

I know they were not built at the same time nor with any foresight, but had the two lines been coordinated, the station placements definitely could have been better…

7 and 8 Avenue is probably unavoidable given simply where the roads are. At some point, Manhattan simply became too dense to thread a new north-south line and reliably hit transfers.

Arguably, this problem existed even when the 7th Av Line was built, because it didn't quite properly intersect the 9th and 6th Av Els either.

[R10 2952]

3 hours ago, CenSin said:

Interestingly, during normal daytime service, Park Place and Fulton Street are the only two stations where 7 Avenue express and 8 Avenue express/local have a transfer where the platforms overlap/touch—no long corridor to walk. For 7 Avenue local those stations are at 59 Street–Columbus Circle and 168 Street.

I know they were not built at the same time nor with any foresight, but had the two lines been coordinated, the station placements definitely could have been better…

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.  

Edited February 13, 2021 by R10 2952

[Lex]

3 hours ago, R10 2952 said:

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.  

The things in Manhattan that you brought up are tied to pre-IRT decisions (Central Park makes running any sort of rail service directly underneath for anything beyond a short stint foolish, while the present-day Metro-North would make it all but impossible to have a straighter trunk line without barring certain trains, and with the current third rail setups and federal regulations...). As for Downtown Brooklyn, well, the IND is the rough equivalent of 30 monkey wrenches in any plan to tidy up how that looks. (That said, I'm not complaining about the assortment of routes over there, given how important it is, especially since the courts are there.)

[CenSin]

5 hours ago, Lex said:

As for Downtown Brooklyn, well, the IND is the rough equivalent of 30 monkey wrenches in any plan to tidy up how that looks. (That said, I'm not complaining about the assortment of routes over there, given how important it is, especially since the courts are there.)

The entire premise of the IND was equivalent to a rail fan saying “it ought to be done my way” with the associated costs of doing so.

[R32 3838]

On 2/11/2021 at 11:15 AM, Trainmaster5 said:

What bothers me about this is that some people take this type of article as fact and run with it without any context. Meanwhile mass transit ridership is down across the country because of the virus, crew members are out of service industry wide, and even when the economy picks up somewhat the service levels are not going back to the pre-pandemic level because the jobs are not going to be there anymore. Service cuts are coming across the board because the older schedules can’t be justified to those who fund the transit systems. My opinion. Carry on.

Ride the train during the early rush hours, it's like the pandemic never exsited on that line.

Most subway lines that serve low income areas got a majority of its ridership back, most of those people went back to work.

We shouldn't be to quick to call for service cuts then when they do em, the ridership comes back. look what happened in 2010, We cut service when most areas close to the city and in certain parts of brooklyn were booming due to redevelopment.

 

 

On 2/11/2021 at 10:44 AM, MHV9218 said:

Kind of a bullshit headline imo – no shocker from Clayton Guse. What's "permanent" mean, anyway? Throughout covid? Until demand returns? Subway ridership is still in the toilet. It's not some great offense that they're still running diminished service. Talk to me when everybody's got the vaccine and people are commuting again. The estimates I read suggest we're not gonna see even 80-90% of ridership until six or so months from now. 

Look at a line like this:

"But unlike earlier reduced schedules, the new schedules for the C and F lines aren’t being justified by a major emergency."

Like, damn, Clayton, do I have to spell it out for you? What do you think is going on right now? How many people do you see wearing a mask on the street, and when's the last time you ate inside a diner? Unless the MTA waves a flag and says "this is because of covid," you don't get it? Look around the subway and tell me if ridership warrants peak 2019-2020 service guidelines. Sometimes I wonder if he's actually this dumb, or if his bosses just insist on articles that make him seem like it. 

 

The is only doing this to also to avoid using the R32's. If they went back to full service, they would have to use some of them . the was going to get reduced even if the pandemic diidn't happen just to get rid of the R32's, The governor even told to go ahead and cut service on the just to get rid of the R32's.  This is why they wanted to retire the R32's in April of last year.

Edited February 13, 2021 by R32 3838

[4P3607]

On 2/10/2021 at 11:10 PM, Calvin said:

The  had a drop in ridership, the TA had plans to continue the route with its cut schedule. 

The , the fleet amount may be the cause of this (pooled with the  using R46)

 

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-subway-service-cuts-f-c-lines-mta-20210211-3f2a644bhzctjmoqqebjzzywj4-story.html?fbclid=IwAR3PHt8XUI5imO3Hgj8gXmqcJrcLj-xiICe1h9fWwlb7D5nKICglqyj3Dx4

Of course the news doesn't give the full story; the main reason the was on a supplement schedule was a result of Culver CBTC and Kings Highway interlocking work. Those extra rush hour to Kings Hwy runs couldn't terminate on the middle track at that station and therefore couldn't run. Ridership was another factor that contributed to the decision to keep the schedule this way but CBTC work was the primary reason, planned before 2020 even began. 

Those two runs were likely paused for ridership reasons; I don't know the details on that.

 

Over the summer there were several given dates the interim R160s on the were supposed to return to the to restore full service, the first date being August 25 then postponed by a few weeks a few more times; of course that didn't happen and the R160s slowly left the from September until Dec 11. 

A few R160s seem to be or were doing random interim service on the (at least what I observed in December on top of the Siemens / 98-9900s swap, there were a few more 94xxs being borrowed in the mix). 

 

Now the line's main issue is those R46's: remember before March 2020 they pulled them off the because they didn't want to pay an extra crew just to relay them beyond the terminal and back*? The main reason they returned was to push off and retire the remaining R32s from political pressure**; there were several official options for fleet plans right before the R32 retirement; one being keep some 32s on the just to keep the 46s off the line. Of course they went through with option B retiring ALL the R32s; despite this as a plan however this somehow still caused an "equipment shortage" in the works (also remember there aren't as many 4-car R179s to fully provide service as they originally planned as some of those sets had an extra free B-car inserted for free by Bombardier and became 5-car sets for the ). 

*- more on that R46 issue: when an pulls up at Euclid or 168th, the train has to be taken into the relay after the station then change ends and pull back in the other way: with an R179 or R32 the operator can simply cross back to the other end of the train with already unlocked storm doors; with an R46 the operator must go through and unlock, relock and double check 12 storm doors and 4 cab doors just to get to the other end which is time consuming; this can be solved by simply paying another crew to board the rear cab when going into relay (double ended) and simply reversing back out however paying another crew is cost consuming.

**-Edit: @R32 3838 beat me lol, essentially this was all a result of them rushing the R32s out of service thus how this "equipment shortage" came to reality; and really the only thing they're short on is not wanting to deal with R46s requiring additional crews or manpower, therefore the situation was settled for a supplement schedule and run less trains under the reason of limited ridership. 

 

Edited February 13, 2021 by 4P3607

[Lawrence St]

So my conductor friend just told me that its against the rules to change the route on your trainset even when its to cause less confusion for the passengers. Why is this even a rule? If an gets rerouted to 145th St, would it not make more sense to change the signage to a to cause less confusion for passengers? Again, why is the always backwards?

[R10 2952]

9 minutes ago, Lawrence St said:

Again, why is the always backwards?

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.

Edited February 13, 2021 by R10 2952

[Vulturious]

1 minute ago, R10 2952 said:

10 minutes ago, Lawrence St said:

So my conductor friend just told me that its against the rules to change the route on your trainset even when its to cause less confusion for the passengers. Why is this even a rule? If an gets rerouted to 145th St, would it not make more sense to change the signage to a to cause less confusion for passengers? Again, why is the always backwards?

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 is one of the most toxic, dysfunctional workplaces known to man.

Damn, you beat me to it, regardless he has a point. This question will keep on being asked over and over again. The very questionable mindset these people have just makes me question more about why they're still around. They don't really know what it's like to run around in another person's shoe and see it through their eyes of what the  is really like. Then again, politics also comes into play here with some decisions just unavoidable because of it. 

[MHV9218]

33 minutes ago, R10 2952 said:

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.

Plato would be bummed out if the focus of his studies were the MTA.

I think Socrates said the unexamined life was not worth living. Maybe that was a recommendation that we spend all our time poring over RFPs and MTA Board meeting transcriptions.

Edited February 13, 2021 by MHV9218

[Lawrence St]

3 hours ago, Vulturious said:

Damn, you beat me to it, regardless he has a point. This question will keep on being asked over and over again. The very questionable mindset these people have just makes me question more about why they're still around. They don't really know what it's like to run around in another person's shoe and see it through their eyes of what the  is really like. Then again, politics also comes into play here with some decisions just unavoidable because of it. 

Well I know the reason why they prohibit it, because (at least from what I was told, don't quote me on it), it confuses dispatch and makes it harder to find a train based on a complaint or compliment. 

Like if someone complains that train car 8888 was 10 minutes late or something at Bay 50th St, whoever receives the complaint is going to look at the car number and be like "wait, the doesn't have R160's."

[Vulturious]

11 minutes ago, Lawrence St said:

Well I know the reason why they prohibit it, because (at least from what I was told, don't quote me on it), it confuses dispatch and makes it harder to find a train based on a complaint or compliment. 

Like if someone complains that train car 8888 was 10 minutes late or something at Bay 50th St, whoever receives the complaint is going to look at the car number and be like "wait, the doesn't have R160's."

Ah, it's a dispatch issue, ok that makes sense. Although, trains being rerouted via West End happens a lot so it would be normal. An  being rerouted is a whole different story. Regardless, the point still stands about  decision making.

[Lawrence St]

14 minutes ago, Vulturious said:

Ah, it's a dispatch issue, ok that makes sense. Although, trains being rerouted via West End happens a lot so it would be normal. An  being rerouted is a whole different story. Regardless, the point still stands about  decision making.

Thats if there's a regular G.O. Even the countdown clocks don't update in time to show a rerouted train (or even if they do, it shows the wrong line and destination.)