Freakin' Out

Remember yesterday when I quoted The New York Times as saying service on the A train would be reduced by one-third? Today that has been revised. A train service has been reduced to one-third of normal service. The MTA announced that "there are no plans for the restoration of C service in the near future."

So for every nine trains we used to have, there will now be three. Frequency was insufficient as it was; heading downtown in the morning it was not at all uncommon to have difficulty shutting the doors by 145th Street. Going home on the evening rush, sometimes you'd encounter a train so full that there wasn't room for one more person and you'd have to wait for the next. Now that wait, which was around six minutes during rush hours, will be eighteen minutes. There won't be room for you on that one, either.



This is what I mean by "crowded." Forget about getting a seat. You will be lucky even to get on a train. People in my neighborhood really don't have an option. I am a twenty-minute walk to the nearest other line, which is also already overcrowded. Imagine spending approximately two hours of your day, every day, doing this. (That's assuming you only go one place a day.)

With the C train gone, the A train will probably have to make all local stops on weekends, as the B train does not currently run on weekends. The express took about 25 minutes to run from 59th Street/Columbus Circle to my stop at 181st Street. Along the way it stopped at 125th, 145th, 168th and 175th.

Now it will stop at 72nd, 81st, 86th, 96th, 103rd, 110th, 116th, 125th, 135th, 145th, 155th, 163rd, 168th and 175th. It probably adds 10-20 minutes to your travel time, depending on how far you're going.

It will take perhaps five years to restore service.

Did I mention there's a 9% fare increase next month and another one coming in 2006?

The fire, which was reportedly started in a tunnel by a homeless person trying to keep warm, destroyed a room containing signal equipment which told operators where the trains were. So yes, it's mess, and a big one. But I cannot understand a five-year repair estimate. A transit expert interviewed by the Times said this entire subway line was built in five years -- and that was in the 1930s!

According to the Times, daily ridership on the A/C line is 580,000, more than the population of the city of Seattle.

Therefore, I call for an immediate federal investigation and emergency funds. The president of New York City Transit said it was "impossible" to fireproof signal rooms. That's ridiculous. The current signal system dates back to 1904. It's time to modernize, and the new system can't have its crucial components located inside the subway tunnels. The nation's largest and most important mass transit system cannot be this vulnerable, especially given the current terrorist threat. What if there were a similar incident on the 1/9 line? Transportation on the entire west side of Manhattan would be paralyzed.

I think riders could reasonably be expected to deal with this kind of inconvenience for six months, possibly a year. But severely compromising the only transportation available to 580,000 Americans for up to five years is utterly unacceptable. Federal funds must immediately be made available to upgrade and modernize the system as quickly as possible. Currently the MTA wants to take five years to restore the unsatisfactory and vulnerable status quo, while raising fares and forcing customers to endure long waits and inhumane overcrowding.