Handbill Handout

The electronic sign just below the roof of the subway car says "Cortland Street &" and then it blinks and says "Will Not Stop"as though it can't bear to complete the sentence even though it's almost a decade since that stop description was rendered obsolete. We roll past the blue wooden boards obscuring the place where the downtown platform used to be and the boards are plastered with ads for some security software company. "(Security software company) is backup" "(Security software company) is recovery" "(Security software company) is security" "(Security software company) is compliance" If the train would zoom through the station at high speed those ads might be a subliminal cartoon of some sort. The trains never zoom through that stop. Why? Safety? Memory? The layout of the rails? The "Cortland Street &" disappears from the electronic sign long before the ads do. "Cortland Street &" i...

I have been staring at subway tracks for about a quarter of a century. Not continuously of course but at random intervals of varying duration. I would bet that I have spent more time staring at subway tracks (and the rails in particular) than 99% of the people alive on earth today which is of course a mathematical trick since probably at least 80% of the world’s population has never even been in a subway. The tracks lay there but if you stare at them long enough and pay close attention you can hear them speak. When a train is coming they make a sound like hailstones on a tin roof before the lights of the train even reach the station. If you watch carefully you’ll know that a train is approaching even before the rails begin to talk because you’ll see mice running out from under the rails. The mice feel the vibration of the approaching train before you can hear it and they run from under the rails into the gully separating the tracks or they scurry under the platform. The mice are more o...

The new bus fares kicked in last week and now I have numbers that aren’t zero to the right of the decimal point when my Metrocard scans. It annoys me. You have no idea how much it annoys me. For years we had the symmetry of a two buck subway fare and a five buck express bus fare which made it easy to run your card right to zero when it started getting worn down. I’m not one of those people who buys a new card every time the old card runs out of money; I think if more people reused their cards the TA might save a few dollars and not raise the fare as frequently. Or I’m just naïve. Or I’m just bugged by the piles of cards people leave scattered on the floor by the vending machines and the turnstiles and on the edifices-formerly-known-as-token booths that are now “information centers”. In any event, the change to having change on the card bugs me. Sometimes you don’t know what you had until you have something else. The other day I heard the bass line of my cuckoo clock's hourly c...

Some of you may remember when I wrote about properly positioning yourself on subway platforms and other keys to executing a successful commute. Many who don’t go through the relentless daily grind of trying to transport yourself more than a couple miles within the tri-state area probably thought I was insane, or some kind of obsessive at the very least. Well, I’m not alone. The notion of properly positioning yourself on the subway went mainstream today in a NY Times article . I quote: “Which side of the car should you stand on?" “The nonplatform side, so you’re not hurled onto the platform at the next stop by angry-looking passengers” getting on or off, Mr. Russianoff said. “I grew up on the D line, the Brighton line, in Brooklyn. It opens on either side, depending. To know the 11 stations from Sheepshead Bay to DeKalb Avenue, that’s knowledge given only to native sons and daughters. You ping-pong back and forth.” What subway car should you ride in if you’re going to Yankee Stadi...

Anyone who has spent a significant amount of their working life commuting in the tri -state area will tell you that there are certain strategies and methods used to make the experience less annoying. These strategies vary depending on what mode of transport one uses. Some of us have to use multiple modes of transport (in my case I often do the NYC subway-Staten Island Ferry-SI Railway combo when evening traffic looks ominous) so you need a plan for every step of the way. As a public service, I will offer you my tips and strategies for dealing with the journey that I have developed over 23 years (and counting) of commuting to and from Staten Island to the other boroughs. Today’s lesson will be handling the Broadway Local (R, W lines) from midtown to Whitehall Street/South Ferry. Know where the doors are: The biggest key to getting a good position on the train (or sometimes even a seat!) is getting on the train first. Proper platform position is your key here. Observe the train wh...