Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)

tags: NYC subways, NYC Life, MTA

So I awoke this morning at 6am to the sounds of a deluge of biblical proportions. My windows are all wide open (no air conditioning), so this rainstorm was impossible to ignore. This deluge lasted approximately an hour and a half, and it flooded the sewers and the subways and it shut down most public transit. Well, all the subways, LIRR, and PATH trains were at a standstill (either shorting out or swimming with the fishes), so everyone instead used buses and cabs to get around, which resulted in gridlock.

You can only cram so many cars into the streets of NYC before things get clogged up.

Needless to say, NYC was at a nearly complete standstill, north-south traffic was gridlocked although crosstown traffic was possible, nevertheless incredibly slow.

I have often said that I love public transit. I think it is one of the best things that humans have developed, but there are times when public transit becomes incredibly difficult to deal with. Today was one such example. While I waited for a crosstown bus so I could get to a job where I scrounge a few bucks to survive on, a motorcycle cop drove up and spent a few minutes talking with me about the subway situation (the A train was finally running this afternoon), and the cop informed me that he had no idea of what was happening with the subways (It's really sad when a police officer has to ask a regular person such as myself about the state of the subway system!).

A fellow public transit refugee overheard our conversation and told us that Queens had two tornados this morning. This was a surprise to me, although I heard on the radio that Brooklyn had a tornado touch down this morning and that Staten Island was under a tornado watch -- something that strikes me as being very surreal. Of course, I come from earthquake country, so tornados are mostly beyond my experience, although I did experience a few when I was a kid growing up in eastern Washington state.

Okay, so in NYC, where the vast majority of the populace do not have their own transportation, we all rely on a neglected and aging subway system that is rendered inoperable when a simple rainstorm occurs. Heaven forbid that there might be a major disaster that requires NYC to evacuate, because in that case, WE ARE SCREWED. This suboptimal subway problem is at least due in part to the criminal negligence of MTA itself: Due to their corruption, MTA does not take proper care of the subways, yet they charge increasingly higher fares to use the subway system under the pretense that, if we, the public, pay more for service, the subway system will improve. Of course, this doesn't happen because MTA simply pockets the extra money they collect. Worse, MTA refuses to open their books before they demand a fare increase, and the mayor doesn't protect the public's interests by demanding that MTA defend their rate increases by opening their books before enacting them.

This neglected subway system poses a clear and present danger to the residents of NYC. It makes people (like me) want to get even with MTA by stealing free rides whenever possible since MTA has genuinely earned the public's contempt.

In short, if the subway system is ever going to improve, it would have done so after the previous three price increases that were enacted during these past five years, yet the subways have become progressively worse (Oh, and MTA also promises another price increase in the next few months, by the way).