Kudos to NYC Transit for its frankness about the overcrowding crisis on the subways. As any rider of the L train or the numbered lines knows, the system is straining at maximum capacity -- and, NYCTA says, it's not just that the trains themselves are full; so are the tracks.

“From my point of view, this is scary,” said Howard H. Roberts Jr., the president of New York City Transit, who presented the data to members of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s board. “This is scary in the sense that right now, on a lot of these lines, we’re several years and a big capital construction project away from being able to provide what I consider adequate service. We’re constrained.”

I've written a lot in support of congestion pricing, and I continue to support it. But the Transit Authority's report is a clear reminder that the need to couple congestion pricing with serious capital investment in mass transit upgrades is far from academic.

Among Charlton Heston’s wonderful, awful movies is the lesser-known "The Agony and the Ecstasy", in which he plays Michelangelo to Rex Harrison’s Pope Julius II. The movie revolves around the seemingly interminable painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (it actually took Michelangelo four years to finish the job). A running joke in the movie is the Pope constantly asking when it will be completed. His increasingly frustrated question, “When will you make an end?” is always answered, “When I’m finished.”

After spending the last 19 years riding the #7 train, and being delayed by the seemingly interminable track work, I find myself wanting to ask the workers, “When will you make an end?”

Since 1988, scarcely a week has gone by without some track work being done on one mile-long stretch of track, from just outside the Hunter’s Point station to the 33rd Street station. Near the end of this past winter, service was shut down for six consecutive weekends, but the real problem is during the weekdays, when trains are slowed or stopped due to the work crews doing … well, who knows what they’re doing?  read more »

Location

Mayor Bloomberg won't allow 311 operators internet access because he's afraid they'd shop at work.

The 311 non-emergency government information system is a program Mayor Bloomberg loves to brag about, touting it as among his greatest accomplishments during the 05 campaign.

311 operators' mission is to help citizens navigate the often confusing government agency maze. Theoretically, 311 could duplicate much of what the Public Advocate's office is charged with doing as the people's ombudsman. But that's theory. In reality, 311 is not much more useful than 411 directory assistance operators, with 311 often referring callers back to the agency whose non-responsiveness or unavailability, if the problem arises after the agency is closed, prompted the 311 call to begin with. One reason for the department's relative uselessness, is their lack of internet access.

It blows my mid, that in 2007, 14 years after the web became a mainstream information resource, that New York City won't allow people whose primary responsibility is to provide information, internet access.

I first became aware of 311 operators not having internet access in August 2005, nearly 2 years ago.  read more »

I love the snow. Absolutely love it. Grew up in Southern California, so I went camping in the snow but never LIVED with snow.

My first experience with LIVING with snow was, ironically, a White Christmas in Kyoto Japan. GORGEOUS! Japanese architecture seems designed to look gorgeous in the snow. Walked all over snow covered Kyoto that first snowfall in a place I lived.

Most New Yorkers I know hate it when it snows. They say the snow gets dirty too fast and it becomes impossible to walk and all the people who refuse to clean up their dog's shit leave frozen little presents for pedestrians to step on weeks later when the snow melts. All true, but by and large I love looking up at the snow falling through the light of the street lamps, love hearing the snow hitting the window as I sleep and love seeing the snow on the ground before anyone steps on it.

But today, NYC SUCKED in the snow, culminated in iced over stairs at train stations that no one was willing to deal with despite the fact that it made the stairs almost impassable.

First off, in NYC the corners of intersections get all the snow from the streets piled up, making it hard to cross the street. Fine, the road is clear, but the drains are now covered, so the street floods, and pedestrians can't cross without great effort. I used to see that as a minor irritant, but you try pushing a stroller through NYC city streets after a snow. It is terrible! I can only imagine what it is like for someone in a wheelchair or an elderly person. What's with NYC? Can't they figure out how to clear the corners? It's not like no one walks here. I understand that after one day you can't expect them to be cleared. But there are times they don't get cleared away for weeks, except for that tiny path hordes of people have to squeeze past that are formed by the pedestrians wading through themselves.  read more »

Are you are like me, constantly irritated that subway service declines even as rate hikes pile up...and the MTA keeps two sets of books, one to plead poverty so they can increase our fares, one to plead plenty so they can pat themselves on the back, and who knows which is true? Well, your perception of the declining subways may be true.

According to the Straphangers Campaign, subways have gotten dirtier for the second year in a row.

The number of clean subway cars decreased for the second year in a row, according to the eighth annual “subway shmutz” survey by the NYPIRG Straphangers Campaign, released today. The survey was conducted on 2,200 subway cars on 22 subway lines between September 2, 2005 and January 5, 2006.

Campaign surveyors rated 47% of subway cars as “clean” down from 61% of cars rated clean in a survey released in the spring 2005. This continued to reverse an earlier trend of improvement found between 2000 and 2004, with the percentage of clean cars going from 32% in the campaign’s 2000 survey, to 47% in 2001, to 59% in 2003, to 66% in the 2004 survey.

Cars on 15 of 22 subway lines saw significant deterioration since last year’s survey (2, 7, A, B, C, D, E, G, J/Z, L ,M, N, R, V and W), while cars on only three lines grew better (1, 3 and 4). Cars on the remaining four lines were largely unchanged (5, 6, F and Q.)  read more »