2 Subway Lines (A and C) Crippled by Fire

[Kris]

January 25, 2005

2 Subway Lines Crippled by Fire, Officials Assert

By SEWELL CHAN

Two of the city's subway lines - the A and the C - have been crippled and may not return to normal capacity for three to five years after a fire Sunday afternoon in a Lower Manhattan transit control room that was started by a homeless person trying to keep warm, officials said yesterday.

The blaze, at the Chambers Street station used by the A and C lines, was described as doing the worst damage to subway infrastructure since the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001. It gutted a locked room that is no larger than a kitchen but that contains some 600 relays, switches and circuits that transmit vital information about train locations.

The A line will run roughly one-third the normal number of trains - meaning that riders who used to wait six minutes for a train might now have to wait 18 minutes - while the C train will cease to exist as a separate line, at least for the time being. The C will be replaced by the V in Brooklyn. Long waits and erratic service are likely to be the norm for 580,000 passengers who previously relied on the A and C each weekday.

Riders on the West Side of Manhattan and in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of East New York and Ocean Hill-Brownsville will find the available trains more crowded, and will likely seek alternate subway lines, crowding them as well.

"This is a very significant problem, and it's going to go on for quite a while," said Lawrence G. Reuter, the president of New York City Transit. He estimated it would take "several millions of dollars and several years" to reassemble and test the intricate network of custom-built switch relays that were destroyed in the blaze, which officials believe began when the homeless person - who has not been found - set fire to wood and refuse in a shopping cart in the tunnel about 50 feet north of the Chambers Street station.

The flames quickly spread to a series of electrical cables. "Those cables short-circuited as a result of the fire, causing arcing as well as fire inside a relay room," said a Fire Department spokesman, Michael R. Loughran.

The fire underscored the fragility of the antiquated mechanical equipment that keeps the subways moving and of the sensitive nodes where that equipment is stored. Officials said they believed that there were only two companies in the world that were able to repair the signals. One is based in Pittsburgh, and the other in Paris.

The fixed-block signaling system has been in use since the New York subway's inception in 1904. The transit agency has invested $288 million on its first computerized signaling system, scheduled to make its debut on the L line in Brooklyn and Manhattan in July. Computer-based train operation has been a goal of transit planners for decades, but since 1982 the transit agency has focused its capital spending on basic maintenance.

Dozens of signal relay rooms like the one destroyed on Sunday are scattered throughout the 722-mile subway system, and it is impossible to fireproof them, Mr. Reuter said. Firefighters had to forcibly remove the bolts when they arrived at the locked relay room on Chambers Street, but the locks did nothing to prevent the fire from entering.

Until Wednesday, there will be no A service between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. at Spring, Canal and Chambers Streets and at the Broadway-Nassau station in Manhattan and at the High Street station in Brooklyn to allow workers to perform critical repairs. During those hours, the A will operate on the F track between West Fourth Street in Manhattan and Jay Street in Brooklyn. Supervisors will manually operate signals using two-way radios and observation.

The transit agency, an arm of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said in a statement that there were "no plans for the restoration of C service in the near future."

An expert on the city's subways expressed amazement that a single fire in a confined space could have such a long-lasting impact. "It seems astonishing that a single signal room would be so central to the operation of the line that it would take five years to recover from," said Clifton Hood, a transit historian at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y. "That's about as long as it took to build that entire line of the IND."

The first segment of the Independent Subway System, of which the A and C are a part, opened in 1932. The city's three subway divisions were unified in 1940. Professor Hood noted that four stations that were closed after the Sept. 11 attack were reopened in a year.

Yesterday morning, the first commute since the blaze gave a taste of the irritation that awaits riders in the days and weeks to come. "All I can do is wait here and hope for the best," said Ana Reyes, 51, a medical receptionist from Boerum Hill who had waited half an hour for the A train at the Jay Street station in Brooklyn. "Nobody tells you anything, so I just follow everyone else. If a train comes, I'm getting on it, and I don't care where it goes."

Other subway lines buckled from the added load of passengers from the A and C lines. At the Atlantic Avenue station, a major hub in Brooklyn, Patrick Joseph, 40, a construction worker from Crown Heights, was unable to board a crowded No. 2 train. "This is the second train I can't get on," Mr. Joseph said, adding that he was in his fourth day of a new job. "I'm definitely late. I've been on the train for an hour and 10 minutes and I have only traveled from Eastern Parkway."

The blaze also showed the unforeseeable consequences of the weekend snowstorm. In addition to the fact that the homeless person was thought to have set the fire to battle the cold, transit workers were already grappling with frozen switches, ice-slicked tracks and service disruptions on seven other lines.

On average, there are more than 100 fires each month on subway cars, stations and tracks, but most cause no injuries or damage. So when "smoke conditions" were reported at the northern end of the Chambers Street platform at 2:04 p.m. on Sunday, the scope and extent of the fire were not immediately clear.

The Fire Department issued an "all-hands" request at 2:22 p.m. and 12 units and 60 firefighters ultimately responded, but they had to wait for electricity to be shut off to the room. The blaze was declared under control at 5:19 p.m. One firefighter had a minor back injury. "The room was basically totally destroyed, and all the relays and wires were gutted," Mr. Reuter said.

Near the charred equipment, investigators found pieces of wood and refuse, according to Assistant Chief Henry R. Cronin III, the commanding officer of the New York Police Department's transit bureau. "I don't think it was an intentional act of arson," he said. Fire marshals began interviewing witnesses, but no arrests were made as of last night.

The last time subway equipment was so badly damaged by fire was on March 11, 1999, and the affected station, at Bergen Street on the F and G lines, was less critical than the transit node at Chambers Street. Homeless people have been known to frequent the Chambers Street station. As a policy, the police do not eject them from the subway system during freezing weather, and the fire was an indication of the extensive use of subway tunnels as shelter. An April 2004 estimate by the city put the number of homeless people in the subway in Manhattan and Brooklyn at 582, but advocates for the homeless say there are far more.

Johanna Jainchill contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company


Service Alert (http://www.mta.nyc.ny.us/alert/alertnyct.htm)

[Edward]

The incompetence of the MTA is appalling. Using an antiquated relay system, not investing in the upgrade for quarter of a century, failing to provide security of the vital communication center – some people might see sabotage in these actions.

Now that Al Qaeda knows that one guy can cripple the subway system – for years - by burning some refuse, would they dispatch couple of guys with $100 worth of gasoline (how many gallons is that?) to completely destroy the subway?

Remember what occupied MTA recently? The law to prevent innocent tourists take pictures on the train. How pathetic.

[Deimos]

how are critical relay systems not in a fireproofed room? I think that any idiot could have thought of that.... even taking into account the lack of myopia that hindsight provides.

[Schadenfrau]

I saw a very indignant MTA employee telling a reporter that people need to be patient about the damage, because the burned equipment was "unique" and "one-of-a-kind".

Wha-huh? Did no one think to build a back-up?

[TLOZ Link5]

It takes MTA construction workers two years at most to renovate a station, while last century they might have been halfway done with building an entire subway line in the same amount of time.

Almost every time I go to the West 4th Street IND station, the date of completion for the elevator they're installing there is pushed back another month. Meanwhile, when it rains, the leaky ceiling results in a veritable downpour on part of the uptown ACE platform.

You could probably count on one hand the number of hours the construction workers are actually being productive in any given week.

[NewYorkYankee]

The MTA = sad,sad,sad :roll:

[NewYorkYankee]

The MTA makes the city look bad. Faulty stations, dirty stations,and decrepit cars. (Some of them Ive been on. One didnt have a door leading to the next car. Wind came gusting in!) Why dosnt the MTA wise up and start using techniques to gain money? Why not install vending machines in the tunnels? That would make money. Why not install TV that show when the train is coming and allow companies to have commercials? Come on MTA! Lets do something! NY'ers are paying higher fares for worse service!

[JMGarcia]

Blame our governor for cutting, year after year, upgrades from the capital budget and then forcing the MTA to issue bonds to pay for what it is allowed to do.

[TomAuch]

3-5 years? WTF is going on! :evil:

Since 9/11 I have told people who oppose building tall at Ground Zero that the next attacks will more likely be in the subways, and sadly I might be right. If a homeless person can do this much damage, than Al Qaida could destroy our entire subway system. If the MTA used to be able to build half of a line within two years, they damn well better become that efficient again.

[Gulcrapek]

NBC just reported the timeline for the A train has changed to 60-70% restoration within 2 weeks, and full within 9 months.

[TonyO]

NY1

NYC Transit Says A, C Service Will Be Back To Normal In 6-9 Months

JANUARY 25TH, 2005

Just a day after telling straphangers that service on the A and C lines in Manhattan would be disrupted for as many as 3-5 years because of damage caused by a weekend track fire, transit officials said Tuesday that full service should be restored to both lines within 6-9 months.

New York City Transit says it expects to have the A train back at 50-60 percent normal capacity by the second week of February, and up to 80 percent capacity sometime in April. It is still unclear when C service will be back to normal.

Currently, the C train is suspended indefinitely, and the A line is only running at 30-40 percent of normal capacity, meaning wait times can be much longer than usual. The disruptions, which affect nearly half a million riders, are also causing overcrowding on other lines.

“I think it's disastrous,” said a straphanger at the Ocean Avenue station in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. “There are many of us who have to go to work at a set time, and this way it's inconveniencing us. They don't even understand the situation. I think it needs to be solved as soon as possible.”

Investigators believe Sunday's fire, which broke out at the Chambers Street station in Manhattan, was started by a homeless man trying to keep warm during the blizzard. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority says the blaze spread to a small room housing the intricate system of relays, switches and controls for the A and C lines.

“The signals are basically knocked out really at the station and just south of the station,” said New York City Transit President Lawrence Reuter. “But you know, just like when you crimp your garden hose, once you've crimped the garden hose in any one spot, only so much water can go through it. It's the same thing with the trains."

The damage to the custom equipment, which is necessary to safely space out trains along the tracks, could take three to five years and millions of dollars to repair, Reuter said.

“It really is unacceptable,” a rider said. “They really need to do something better about it. It needs to be done immediately, as far as I’m concerned.”

"It's packed in there, and I hope it's not like this every day, because this is ridiculous," said another straphanger.

"It's crazy. It's ludicrous,” said a third. “I mean, people pay all this money for the subway, and basically this is what we’ve got to go through.”

In the meantime, the C train effectively does not existed, replaced by the V train in Brooklyn but with no substitution in Manhattan. To avoid delays, A train riders in Manhattan are encouraged to take the No. 1 or 9 or the B or D. The MTA is advising Brooklyn commuters to stay on the No. 2 and 3, the No. 4, the J/Z or the L instead of the A.

In addition, through Wednesday, A trains will run on the F line between Jay Street in Brooklyn and West 4th Street in Manhattan in both directions between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.

To get a better idea exactly what commuters will be going through, a NY1 reporter boarded an A train at Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn - luckily we found a relatively empty one - and rode to 14th Street in Manhattan. NY1 made it to 14th Street in 27 minutes.
Not bad - but the bigger problem is the wait on the platform. One woman said she waited half an hour for her train.

"I am angry, yes. I am angry, because they have to do something,” she said. “It's affecting my life, my child's life, and my employer is not going to understand."

"It's a disaster. It's a total disaster,” said another rider. “It has to be rectified as soon as possible."

Meanwhile, in the wake of the fire that crippled the C train, one City Council member says the MTA needs to get its act together.

Queens Councilman John Liu says the MTA is not making safety its top priority. Liu says the fact that so much damage could be done to sensitive switching equipment by someone trying to keep warm is proof of how vulnerable the system really is.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg says keeping an eye on the subways is not easy.

“It's a constant challenge when you have a system the size of this subway system - open 24 hours a day, seven days a week - how you guard against every possible intrusion,” Bloomberg said Tuesday. “What I think you see is that we're not doing as good a job as we should do."

Liu, however, says the agency needs to beef up security instead of cutting critical safety measures.

[MrShakespeare]

From the Wall Street Journal today:


Take the C Train (Please)

January 26, 2005; Page A16

As residents of New York City, we thought we'd seen everything. But this week the city learned that a Sunday fire at a major subway station will disrupt service on the C Train for -- we're still trying to wrap our heads around this -- at least several months, and perhaps as much as three to five years. The rest of the country should think of this as the perfect liberal storm.

It seems that a local homeless man caused the fire trying to keep warm. And the city is lucky that's all it was because -- this being a good, progressive town -- just about anybody is allowed to roam the subway tunnels during freezing weather, according to official police policy. In other words, compassion for the homeless, on whom taxpayers already spend millions annually to provide shelter, requires that the city grant largely unmonitored access to people who could just as easily be planning anthrax or poison gas attacks as looking to keep warm.

Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani made some progress against aggressive panhandling and vagrants, but they've both been returning with a vengeance under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. A genuinely compassionate city -- or at least a Mayor seeking re-election this year -- would require that those refusing the city's many legitimate venues for help be institutionalized, not granted blind-eye acceptance of their "alternative lifestyle."

Meanwhile, only in Manhattan could a burned-out switching system take years to repair. Most cities pretending to be world class would have long ago replaced 1930s-era wiring, and that certainly would have been true of New York when Robert Moses ruled. But for decades New York has been quite literally mortgaging its future by taking on debt and putting off infrastructure upgrades in order to keep feeding its out-of-control public sector unions.

Mr. Giuliani also made a temporary dent here, but as politicians tend to do he left big bills to his successor. And rather than use events of September 11 to promote changes, Mayor Bloomberg has acquiesced to the big spending political culture. He's even proposing his own larger spending projects, such as a taxpayer-financed Manhattan stadium for the New York Jets. He has said New York is a "luxury good" for which people should happily pay higher taxes. Thanks, Mike.

Readers interested in the history and cause of New York's descent should consult an essay by the Manhattan Institute's Edward J. McMahon and Cooper Union Professor Fred Siegel, which is excerpted in the current issue of the Public Interest magazine. The authors describe the city's core problem as its "distributional politics and entitlement culture" that tend to prosper "in settled, affluent places that combine large pockets of wealth with sufficient comparative advantages to create the illusion of economic invulnerability."

This political culture has created a public-sector workforce close to one-seventh the size of the entire federal government's -- or some 300,000 workers. Along with a like-minded state government in Albany also dominated by public-sector unions, this culture has fed a cycle of high tax rates that feed greater spending in the boom years, followed by bankruptcy, or close to it, when a slowdown hits.

The result is also visible outside our office windows in lower Manhattan, where we can see that Number 7 World Trade Center is going up nicely with private money and under private direction. Meanwhile, the square that held the Twin Towers -- and that requires government agreement in order to develop -- remains a snowy, inactive hole in the ground three years after September 11.

We hope Congress is paying attention to what it's getting for the $20-some billion check it wrote the city in the aftermath of 9/11. That's not to mention that the city has utterly failed to take advantage of the fact that Wall Street, its cash cow, was helped immensely by President Bush's dividend, capital gains and marginal rate tax cuts.

No one should expect even the C Train fiasco to cause New York to change; that won't happen until the local political class understands the problem that Messrs. MacMahon and Siegel describe. We do hope, however, that New York's woes will serve as a warning to other parts of the country in danger of succumbing to the same liberal political fate. Californians were descending into a similar mire a couple of years ago with a dysfunctional political class in Sacramento, but they were fortunate to have the initiative process that allowed them to elect an outsider like Arnold Schwarzenegger. New Yorkers are stuck waiting for the C Train.

[MrShakespeare]

From the New York Times today:


EDITORIAL

A Subway, Not a Shelter

Published: January 26, 2005

It started with a very cold night and, probably, a homeless person - one of hundreds hiding in the subway. A fire was lighted somehow and spread, incinerating a small control room. That loss of wires, cables and connections doomed almost 600,000 New Yorkers to various levels of commuter hell for months and possibly years.

The New York City Transit obviously has to make repairs fast, while also shoring up other similar control rooms - there are perhaps a dozen - throughout the city's antiquated subway system. Obviously, the first estimate of up to five years to fully restore the A and C lines was unacceptable. After a storm of criticism, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and city transit officials shortened that estimate yesterday to six to nine months for returning to the old schedule, a vast improvement. But that had better just be the start.

The subway is also no place for the homeless, and it's a sign of the system's shaky state that hundreds of people have been allowed to live in its grapevine of tunnels and passageways. It is not safe for them and, as Sunday's fire makes clear, it is not safe for the millions who ride through those tunnels every single day. The city's police and homeless outreach programs need to be mobilized right away.

Infuriated riders who need to vent their anger should understand that neither the station manager nor City Hall is the right target. The buck really stops at Gov. George Pataki's office. He appoints the people who run the M.T.A., and his proposed budget skimps on the kind of maintenance and infrastructure upgrading that could help prevent the disruptions subway riders are seeing this week.

Mr. Pataki could start getting involved by contacting Lawrence Reuter, president of New York City Transit, and his team to make sure they work harder to communicate with commuters. Garbled announcements and bad advice from transportation workers have added to riders' frustrations in recent days. If the delays are inevitable, the confusion about how to cope with them is not.

[Kris]

January 26, 2005

Subway Disruptions Expected to Last Months, Not Years

By SEWELL CHAN and ANDY NEWMAN

Graphic: Fire Compromises Antiquated System (http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/01/26/nyregion/26subwaygraph.jpg)

Transit officials said yesterday that service on the A and C lines could be restored to full capacity in six to nine months, substantially revising their earlier prognosis that a fire in a Lower Manhattan signaling room would disrupt service on the lines for as long as three to five years.

The new time frame for repairs will still mean months of confusion and inconvenience on two lines that have an average weekday ridership of 580,000, and hardly diminishes how the fire underscored the vulnerability of a signaling system based on electromechanical switches that were first developed in the 1870's.

Several former transit officials said yesterday that the agency has repeatedly acknowledged over the past 20 years that the signaling system was obsolete or unreliable, but nonetheless chose to devote the vast majority of its limited capital funds to other projects. Reports after two fatal crashes, in 1991 and 1995, recommended improvements in the signal system, though neither blamed the system for the deaths.

The limits of the system were brought into focus on Sunday afternoon when a Depression-era signal relay room, one of dozens distributed throughout the 722-mile subway network, was destroyed in an underground fire north of the station on Chambers Street that serves the A and C lines.

Lawrence G. Reuter, the president of New York City Transit, said at a news conference yesterday that replacing the custom-made signal relays, switches and circuits would take less time than expected. "We were just this morning able to come to the determination that we could actually do this in six to nine months," Mr. Reuter said. "We were actually able to find enough relays left over in our system that we could salvage out of other jobs we had to do this work," he said.

About 90 relays were found to begin replacing the 600 that he said had been "totally destroyed" in the signaling room. About 4,000 feet of signal lines were damaged in the blaze.

The transit agency, an arm of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said that it would take a series of three stopgap measures to restore partial service.

Mr. Reuter said the A line - with an average weekday ridership of 470,000 - would be running at 50 percent to 60 percent of its regular frequency by early February and at 80 percent by the middle of April. It will take a full nine months to restore regular service on the C line, which has a ridership of 110,000. "We could do it faster but we'd have to shut the system down," Mr. Reuter said.

Full functionality on both lines, including the ability to run trains in reverse, will still take three to five years to restore at a cost of $25 million to $60 million, Mr. Reuter said. He noted that repairs to the station at Bergen Street in Brooklyn, which was ravaged by a March 1999 fire, were not yet complete. But even when A and C service is revived, the restored signals will be only a refurbishment of the signaling system upon which the agency has relied since 1904. Upgrading and computerizing the entire signal system - as is already being done on one line - would cost billions, Mr. Reuter said.

For decades, transit officials have been aware that the system was obsolete, but updating it - both logistically and financially - has been seen as impractical.

"The issue of the signal system was always the same," said David Z. Plavin, the transportation authority's executive director from 1981 to 1985. "Everybody knew it needed to be replaced, but nobody could figure out how you could do it without shutting down majors parts of the system for extended periods of time." Mr. Plavin, now president of a trade association, the Airports Council International-North America, added: "It was a system that was very clearly not state of the art, and most people understood that it needed to be replaced. In effect, most people ultimately resigned themselves to the fact that there was no way to do this and keep the system functioning."

Fixed-block signaling uses track circuits to detect the location of trains, wayside signals -which have three colored lights that are similar to traffic lights - to communicate authorized train movements to train operators, and mechanical trips to stop a train if it passes a red signal.

"It remains a 19th-century technology operating in a 21st-century environment," the subway system's chief transportation officer, Kevin T. O'Connell, said at a City Council hearing this month.

The agency estimates that it has made more than $40 billion worth of capital improvements since 1982, when the system began to reverse a decades-long decline. Many New Yorkers remember graffiti-scarred subway cars, decrepit stations, brittle track and frequent derailments that were emblematic of the subways at their nadir.

Immediate safety needs like faulty tracks and higher-profile projects like station rehabilitation took priority over the signaling system. And most of the capital spending on the signaling system has gone toward equipment replacements rather than upgrades.

"Everything had been underinvested in, literally everything: the stations, the platforms, the track, the signals, the right-of-way and the tunnels and bridge structure, the rolling stock," Mr. Plavin recalled.

The disastrous signal-room fire on Sunday came just as the transit agency was finally making progress on upgrading the signaling system, on a much smaller line. Since 1992, the transit agency has been planning a $288 million system known as communication-based train operation on the L line in Brooklyn and Manhattan. In April, the agency plans to start using the system on a trial basis and by July plans to use the system to operate the trains.

The push for the new system came from two fatal crashes - one at Union Square in August 1991, the other on the Williamsburg Bridge in June 1995 - that exposed weaknesses in the existing signaling system. Reports by the agency recommended improvements in the signaling system, but neither crash was attributed directly to signal failure.

The authority's latest five-year capital plan, which has not been approved by Albany, calls for two additional computerized signaling projects: $266 million for the No. 7 line in Manhattan and Queens and $350 million for the portion of the F line between Bergen Street and West Eighth Street in Brooklyn.

The proposal also requests $247 million to rehabilitate complex train switches, known as interlockings, in preparation for eventual computerized train operation of the E, R and V lines in Queens and the G line in Brooklyn and Queens.

The new system would permit transit engineers to track the precise position and speed of each train. It would also allow trains to operate at higher speeds, reduce wait times and, eventually, tell passengers when the subway will arrive.

The computerization of the L line's signals will be only the start of a process that is expected to take decades.

"I can't resignal the system in a few years," Nabil N. Ghaly, the transit agency's chief signal engineer, said in an interview last year. "It's going to take a lifetime."

David L. Gunn, who was the president of New York City Transit from 1984 to 1990, said that few advancements were made in signaling over the years compared with other areas. "We were basically trying to bring all the systems to a state of good repair as quickly as possible," said Mr. Gunn, now the president of Amtrak. "But there was no great leap forward on signals. We weren't trying to revolutionize the system. We were trying to get reliability and modern equipment so we could get replacement parts easily."

Not all of the signaling equipment is outmoded. Train control has been consolidated from a system of hundreds of local towers to about a dozen or so master towers, and eventually, signal engineers will be able to monitor train operations from a centralized rail control center. On the former IRT division, 95 percent of its 241 miles of signal systems have been modernized; on the IND and BMT divisions, with 480 miles, 59 percent are modernized.

"Remember, the signal system 20 years ago still had people who sat in towers throwing switches," said Mortimer L. Downey, who was the authority's executive director from 1986 to 1993. "It was like being out in the Wild West. All of that was replaced. So that was a significant improvement. But it was not a jump to new technology or a new form of signaling, which is ultimately the direction you want to go in."

Transit veterans disagree on the extent to which upgrades have been hobbled by a lack of funding.

"It's a question of money," said Seymour Dornfeld, a former signal engineer, who worked for the transit agency from 1946 until he retired in 1983. "This is not an engineering decision, but a policy decision."

Mr. Gunn, however, said: "The issue was not dumping more money on it, but doing the rebuilding in an orderly, phased manner, which we did."


Subway Gear Depends on a Pair of Suppliers

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

Shifting technological demands and years of consolidation in the transportation industry have left only two manufacturers in the country that make the kind of subway switches destroyed by a fire on Sunday in Lower Manhattan, a company official said yesterday.

The two companies - Alstom Signaling Inc., based in Rochester, and Union Switch and Signal, based in Pittsburgh - have been manufacturing the electromechanical switches, known as vital relays, for at least as long as New York City has had a subway.

The relays control signal lights, track switchers and other machinery throughout New York City's 722 miles of subway track. But in recent years, most major metropolitan transit systems have been converting to computer-controlled switching systems, leaving transportation manufacturers with little incentive to get into the business.

"Not many companies are going to invest their money into old technology," said Ulisses D. Camilo, the managing director of Alstom Signaling.

"New York is in the process of upgrading its system," Mr. Camilo said. "But that takes a while, because it's the biggest subway in the U.S., and they have a lot of legacy technology." The switch design itself, he said, is at least 50 years old.

The fire, in a relay room at the Chambers Street station, affected the A and C lines, and city officials initially said that it could take three to five years for service to be restored to full capacity.

Yesterday, officials substantially revised their time frame, saying service might be back to normal in only six to nine months. However, it could still take years to restore the signal machinery to full operations, city officials said.

Mr. Camilo said it would take three to six months to manufacture replacements for the destroyed switches, which are designed and built to exacting standards. Most of the delay in repairing the destroyed signal room, Mr. Camilo said, would come from the time needed to install, wire and test the replacement switches.

Alstom Signaling was founded a century ago as General Railway Signal and purchased in 1998 by Alstom Corporation, an industrial conglomerate based in Paris. Union Switch and Signal was founded in 1881 by George Westinghouse, the inventor and railroad entrepreneur, and acquired in 1988 by Ansaldo Signal N.V., a global transport company based in the Netherlands.

Alstom sells 10,000 to 15,000 of the switches a year, mostly to subway systems in New York, Chicago and Toronto. (A sister business, Alstom Transport Inc., manufactures train cars, and is under contract with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to deliver hundreds of new cars to the New York subway system beginning next year.)

The parent company, Alstom Corporation, reported about $2.2 billion in losses in fiscal year 2004, and has struggled to avoid bankruptcy.Union Switch and Signal has supplied signaling equipment to transit systems in Montreal, Dallas, and Miami as well as New York. Company officials were unavailable to comment yesterday.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

January 26, 2005

Confusion on the Lines Adds to a Maddening Commute

By COREY KILGANNON

Transportation officials might do their best to varnish and explain the situation, but to Chris Foster, 25, of Brooklyn, yesterday's morning commute for A train riders could be summed up simply.

"It's just mad delays all morning," said Mr. Foster, 25, an aspiring rapper and singer who works as a clothing salesman in Manhattan.

He arrived at the Broadway Junction stop yesterday in Brooklyn to take the A train to work, but orange-vested transit workers gave him the news. Workers were telling passengers that the C train was no longer in service and that an overflow of passengers on the A would make switching to the latter line inadvisable. The V line has replaced the C in Brooklyn.

"The A and the C are so much faster into the city," Mr. Foster said. "Why shouldn't I take them?"

Notices on subway platforms and advice from transit workers did little to temper the frustration of riders of the city's A and C lines, as those passengers got a taste of what their daily commute might be like for many months.

"The Downtown A is now local," said a voice over the loudspeaker. "There is no C service."

Service on those lines may be crippled for six to nine months, transit officials said, because of the fire on Sunday that destroyed a control room responsible for handling train traffic on the lines. The officials said that during the peak commuter hours, the A line was running eight trains an hour in each direction - instead of the usual 26.

In Manhattan, Ashley Moldonado, 15, said she left home in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx at 6 a.m. and, partly because of the confusion, had waited for an hour on the subway platform in the 168th Street station for an A train to take to her school on 137th Street in Harlem. By 8 a.m., she was still waiting and still confused.

"I'll have to get my mother to call the school and tell them the trains made me late," she said.

Nearby, another passenger, Scot Anthony, 34, watched several A trains pull into the station that were too crowded to board. "Look at this," he said, standing next to the open door. "I'm not getting on this train. And the next one won't be any different."

Mr. Anthony, an aspiring filmmaker from Brooklyn who works nights as a security guard at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, was clearly frustrated. "They're not letting us know anything," he said.

He said he heard on the news about the fire in the room in Lower Manhattan that destroyed the circuitry that helped run the lines. The A and the C lines have a combined ridership of 580,000 on weekdays. In some places throughout the city yesterday, the problems on those lines caused crowding on the E and the B lines as well.

"I don't understand how a fire at one station can cause this much damage to a whole line," Mr. Anthony said. "They're telling us a homeless man started a fire by lighting up his shopping cart? If that little room was so important to keep the system running, shouldn't it have been better protected?"

Charles F. Seaton, a New York City Transit spokesman, said yesterday that there were crowded trains and delays of up to 20 minutes.

"That's what happens when you're running 40 percent of your service," he said. "Customers had longer waits because we had fewer trains, but it was better than Monday and it will keep getting better."

Meanwhile, at the Atlantic terminal in Brooklyn, James Healey, an actor from Fort Greene, said he usually takes the C train to Times Square, but, anticipating problems on the A, he had gone out of his way to take the Q train. "If the C and A are having the trouble," he said, "then why is the Q so messed up, too? It's amazing how vulnerable this system is."


A Fire Disrupts a City's Lifeline (6 Letters)

To the Editor:

Re "2 Subway Lines Crippled by Fire; Long Repair Seen" (front page, Jan. 25):

New York City Transit officials need to do better by the 580,000 weekday A and C train riders than telling us there are "no plans for the restoration of C service in the near future."

The city should demonstrate its commitment to public transportation by making the speedy restoration of service as much of a priority as the cleanup of the World Trade Center site.

If the debris from that site was removed in less than a year (1.8 million tons in 10 months), is "several years" really the best it can do to replace a room's worth of switches?

As a key link to Kennedy International Airport, Penn Station and the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the A train is many visitors' first impression of this city. I don't want them to witness what I did on my morning commute today.

Lauren Starke
New York, Jan. 25, 2005

•

To the Editor:

Now that the A and the C subway lines may not run normally for three to five years, shouldn't riders receive a refund for unavailable and therefore unused service? A reversal of the fare increase soon to begin seems in order.

Howard Sage
New York, Jan. 25, 2005

•

To the Editor:

Re "2 Subway Lines Crippled by Fire; Long Repair Seen" (front page, Jan. 25): It's projected that A and C train riders will have to endure years of disrupted service during the slow repair. If commuters must suffer anyway, shouldn't the Metropolitan Transportation Authority install a modern signal system instead of the antiquated status quo?

As they say, when you have a lemon, it's an opportunity to make lemonade.

Matt Nadler
New York, Jan. 25, 2005

•

To the Editor:

New York City Transit's claim that it will take three to five years to repair switch relays destroyed in a fire at Chambers Street should be viewed with great skepticism.

Only two companies in the world are said to be able to do the job. What is the reason, I wonder, for a sign on the I.R.T. No. 1 station at Broadway and 231st Street saying that it will take until July to repair the closed northeast stairway? Is it that nobody knows how to make steps?

I suspect that the real reasons for such unacceptable delays in both cases is inept management combined with a disregard for the needs of riders.

James Grossman
Bronx, Jan. 25, 2005

•

To the Editor:

It's laughable that New York's subway system is so antiquated that an entire line can be put out of service for several years when an accident strikes a single control room. This is especially true after 9/11. And New York wants to play host to the Olympic Games in 2012?

Perhaps we'd be better served by concentrating on making the city function competently before trying to bring the world to our doorstep.

Robert S. Haas
New York, Jan. 25, 2005

•

To the Editor:

That a fire set by one homeless person can essentially disrupt subway service for three to five years on the A and C lines is unfathomable. If Bangkok can build an entire subway line within six years, what does this tell us about the decline of American ingenuity?

Douglas Kremer
New York, Jan. 25, 2005

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[TonyO]

The obvious question is: why aren't they trying to automate these lines at least partially now they have the chance to stop using those archaic and hard-to-find switches?

[NYatKNIGHT]

^Exactly. Use this opportunity for an upgrade, or else pay twice as much and reinstall the archaic switches now and then upgrade again in the future.




New York Times EDITORIAL

A Subway, Not a Shelter

January 26, 2005


It started with a very cold night and, probably, a homeless person - one of hundreds hiding in the subway. A fire was lighted somehow and spread, incinerating a small control room. That loss of wires, cables and connections doomed almost 600,000 New Yorkers to various levels of commuter hell for months and possibly years.

The New York City Transit obviously has to make repairs fast, while also shoring up other similar control rooms - there are perhaps a dozen - throughout the city's antiquated subway system. Obviously, the first estimate of up to five years to fully restore the A and C lines was unacceptable. After a storm of criticism, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and city transit officials shortened that estimate yesterday to six to nine months for restoring service, a vast improvement. But that had better just be the start.

The subway is also no place for the homeless, and it's a sign of the system's shaky state that hundreds of people have been allowed to live in its grapevine of tunnels and passageways. It is not safe for them and, as Sunday's fire makes clear, it is not safe for the millions who ride through those tunnels every single day. The city's police and homeless outreach programs need to be mobilized right away.

Infuriated riders who need to vent their anger should understand that neither the station manager nor City Hall is the right target. The buck really stops at Gov. George Pataki's office. He appoints the people who run the M.T.A., and his proposed budget skimps on the kind of maintenance and infrastructure upgrading that could help prevent the disruptions subway riders are seeing this week.

Mr. Pataki could start getting involved by contacting Lawrence Reuter, president of the New York City Transit, and his team to make sure they work harder to communicate with commuters. Garbled announcements and bad advice from transportation workers have added to riders' frustrations in recent days. If the delays are inevitable, the confusion about how to cope with them is not.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[Clarknt67]

Sigh! :roll:

From www.gawker.com

Post-Fire, MTA Keeps Vigilant Watch Over ‘Harold And Kumar’

http://www.gawker.com/news/haroldk1.jpg

Hey, remember way back on Sunday, when that homeless person caused a fire that pretty much destroyed the C train? Still wondering how this sort of thing could ever happen? A Gawker spy enlightens us all with this lovely image de camera phone, taken yesterday morning at the 4 train platform at Borough Hall. What you see, according to our source, is an on-duty transit cop watching the movie Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle on a portable DVD player with the volume turned up. To his left is the security monitor, which we suppose should be watching.


Have a safe commute home, everyone!

http://www.gawker.com/news/culture/subway/index.php#postfire-mta-keeps-vigilant-watch-over-harold-and-kumar-031265

And this is MY home Subway Stop!

[Schadenfrau]

Ha! I was just going to post that.

[Kris]

January 27, 2005

Will Real Estate Miss the Train?

By ERNEST BECK

THEY may live at opposite ends of the disabled A and C subway lines, but Kevin McCarthy and Bentley Rand had the same worry this week: Will the transportation breakdown caused by a signaling room fire also derail white-hot real estate values?

"Let's face it, real estate is all about location," said Mr. McCarthy, who lives with his partner, David Sokol, in a two-bedroom co-op in Hudson Heights, a gentrifying outpost on the northern tip of Manhattan. "I love the neighborhood, but in the minds of some people the location has now changed. It might appear that it's on the outskirts again."

In the overheated real estate market, where property prices and a neighborhood's popularity are tracked as closely as the Super Bowl, the disruption in subway service is causing considerable tooth-gnashing.

That uncertainty has been compounded by conflicts in estimates of how long the troubles may last. On Tuesday transit officials said that service on the lines, which carry 580,000 passengers each weekday on average, may be restored within six to nine months rather than an original prognosis of three to five years. But getting them back to "full functionality" could still take years, officials added.

Meanwhile Mr. Rand is concerned about the investment he and his partner, Roy Gabay, made in Fort Greene, a gentrified area of Brooklyn. Their two-family brownstone has a rental unit, and "it will be harder for people to come look at houses," he said, because "it's a longer trek." The walk to the nearest open subway station, which was half a block, is now six long blocks.

"People want a neighborhood that is convenient to the city," said Mr. Rand, who added that the increase in distance may make it more difficult to rent the building's garden apartment. Mr. Rand and his partner bought the brownstone last year for $1.3 million and have made substantial renovations. The one-bedroom garden unit rents for $1,300.

While some homeowners fretted over the newly erratic nature of A train service and wondered whether gypsy cabs would flood the streets, others in prime real estate areas gave a "what me worry?" New York shrug.

"If you have money to plunk down for an apartment on Central Park West, you can take a cab or the 1 train or hire a car service," said Frederick Peters, president of Warburg Realty. "You won't be flinging yourself out of your Central Park apartment window." Or feeling impelled to put your apartment on the market anytime soon. Brokers said there has been no rush to sell properties in many areas served by the crippled lines and no drop in the number of bidders trying to lock down deals.

"Living in Midtown Manhattan just isn't an option, financially speaking," said Daniela Yaar, who was looking at properties in Hudson Heights on Tuesday with her husband, Rotem. During rush hour, the couple test rode the A train to the area without any delays.

Mitchell L. Moss, a professor of urban planning at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, said apprehension over the subway disruptions could lead to an initial weakening of the real estate market. But with the average price of a New York apartment now at over $1 million, and with interest rates low and the inventory of available properties bone-dry, the market is likely to bounce back. "Good housing is always attractive," Mr. Moss said.

Historically there has been no fixed correlation between New York property values and direct access to an express subway stop. Experts say that proximity to good schools, parks and sushi restaurants - as well as to transportation - all weighs on a buyer's mind. Up-and-coming enclaves like Red Hook, Brooklyn, and 23rd Street between 10th and 12th Avenues are virtually off the subway grid.

"We can be assured that eliminating an amenity for a period of years will not be a plus for any area, but how much of a negative depends on many factors," said Michael H. Schill, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a former professor of urban planning at the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University.

"If a neighborhood is truly on the fringes," Mr. Schill said, "there might be some worry about isolation."

He added that those most affected would be people wanting to move into a neighborhood.

"Those who already live in a neighborhood have good reasons to stay and are unlikely to sell," he explained. "In-movers might be less willing to pay top dollar for a location that is inconvenient."

Convenience was one compelling reason for Mr. McCarthy, 38, and his partner to head up to Washington Heights. Their co-op in Hudson View Gardens, a Tudor-style complex built in 1924, cost $262,500 in 2001 and is now worth $500,000 or more, he said.

"Ads for this neighborhood always said it's an easy commute," said Mr. McCarthy, who works for a retail consulting company on Canal Street.

Brokers, who closely monitor the psychology of property acquisition and have unshakable faith in the lure of homeownership, say that nothing can stop a determined buyer, even if the property is in a changing neighborhood rendered less accessible by the subway disruption like Bedford-Stuyvesant, which has recently had an uptick in sale prices.

"If a gorgeous classic Edwardian town house comes on the market in Stuyvesant Heights and is priced between $500,000 and $600,000, you'd still have a bidding war," said Jerry Minsky, a real estate broker at the Corcoran Group's office in Fort Greene.

"Nothing will stop New Yorkers from buying," he said, "even if they have to yellow-cab it to the house."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[ryan]

The obvious question is: why aren't they trying to automate these lines at least partially now they have the chance to stop using those archaic and hard-to-find switches?

They have been working on automating the L right for a while (should start running automated in the spring, from what I've read). They chose the L because it is a relatively short line and there are no express/local complications.

I think we should have a congestion toll & east side bridge tolls to fun capital investment in the MTA. It's scary to trust your life to such antiquated equipment everyday...

[NewYorkYankee]

Yeah, they're UPGRADING the ENTIRE L line, arnt they?

[TonyO]

Daily News

TA fix will be track to the future

BY PETE DONOHUE
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Transit officials scrambling to fully restore C and A train service will be laying the groundwork for a futuristic computer-operated train system.
A no-frills signal system will allow officials to get up to full strength in six to nine months, officials said Tuesday - a day after predicting the job could take up to five years.

Yesterday, officials said their long-term plan is to stock a fire-ravaged relay room at the Chambers St. station with computer-friendly gear.

The agency is in the process of bringing a computerized system known as Communication Based Train Control to the L line.

That system is a major step forward from the current fixed-block system that relies on antiquated technology and limits how many trains can run on subway lines. The upgraded system uses computers and radio signals that should allow trains to run much closer together, increasing service.

Sunday's fire at the Depression-era relay room knocked out controls for signals and switches for a 4,000-foot stretch of track.

"The decision has been made to make it CBTC-compatible while we are in there," Transit Authority spokesman Paul Fleuranges said. "It's good planning."

The TA so far has spent about $288 million upgrading the L line, which should be operational with the computerized system later this year.

Completely restoring the Chambers St. relay room could take up to five years, partly because only two companies in the world make the equipment necessary, TA officials have said.

"A more modern system may not have survived the fire, but replacing all of the signals and equipment that were destroyed would certainly be easier," said Jeremy Soffin, public affairs director for the Regional Plan Association. "It would absolutely be faster to repair a more modern system. The fault is not with the MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority). It's with the lack of funding."

The MTA's proposed, $27.6-billion capital program envisions computerizing two other lines, but Gov. Pataki's proposed budget offers just $19.2 billion.

Investigators have not determined the cause of Sunday's fire, though transit officials believe it may have been started by a homeless person.

With John Marzulli

[Kris]

January 27, 2005

Cause of Fire That Affected A and C Lines Is Unclear

By SEWELL CHAN and LESLIE KAUFMAN

The cause of an underground fire that destroyed a vital transit node in Lower Manhattan on Sunday, paralyzing two subway lines, remains unclear, according to police and fire officials, who backed away yesterday from an earlier theory put forth by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that a homeless person had started the blaze to stay warm.

The fire gutted a signal relay room that transmitted information about train positions and movements, and transit officials say that they will need six to nine months to restore regular service on the A and C lines.

Transit officials had said that a homeless person might have caused the fire and that a shopping cart containing wood and garbage was found near the scene of the blaze, about 50 feet north of the Chambers Street station used by the A and C lines.

That prompted Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to say on Tuesday, "We know it was arson, and we do not have any suspects."

But police officials expressed doubt about that theory yesterday. "It is not determined as yet whether this fire was caused by a homeless person," Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said. "We don't know exactly how the fire started."

A Fire Department spokesman, Michael R. Loughran, agreed that it was too early to draw conclusions. "Fire marshals are continuing to investigate who or what caused this suspicious fire," he said.

Police and fire officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation had not been completed, said yesterday that investigators still believed that the fire was caused by a person and not by electrical sparking or equipment failure.

Lawrence G. Reuter, the president of New York City Transit, an arm of the transportation authority, said on Tuesday that the account of the shopping cart had come from a transit employee. "One of the train operators reported seeing a shopping cart with debris on fire," he said. Yesterday, his aides referred calls to the Police and Fire Departments.

Regardless of what the investigation determines, the fire evoked memories of a different New York: a Serpico-era city where many homeless people lived in the dank and dangerous recesses of a neglected transit system.

In the 1980's, two encampments - the former New York Central Railroad tracks under Riverside Park and a warren of unused tracks attached to the Second Avenue station at Houston Street - were so established that residents had mattresses, pets, coffee pots and even televisions.

While homelessness is far less visible in transit facilities today, across the city, homelessness among single adults has been growing.

The city estimates that as of Tuesday, 8,805 single adults were in shelters, compared with an average daily census of 8,199 in 2003. Not since 1989 has the average daily figure been so high.

Deaths of homeless people in the subways are rare today. "Deaths went way down, which says to me that homelessness in tunnels has gone way down," said Richard W. Schaedle, a social worker who until December supervised a homeless outreach project under a contract with the transportation authority.

"There was a lot of vandalism, with homeless trying to break into storerooms, but I don't recall Chambers Street as a prime area."

A former New York City Transit president said the agency traditionally focused on keeping passengers safe, not on protecting transit facilities from arson.

"We were concerned about the vulnerability of the system, but the primary concern was the safety of passengers and rooting out the undesirables," said Alan F. Kiepper, the president from 1990 to 1996.

"What we did was chase them out of the system. Unfortunately, I assume they went someplace else, but they weren't on the subway system."

Mr. Kelly echoed that assessment. "There's some notion floating out there that there are communities that live in the subway," he said.

"That's simply not the case. There may have been 10 or 15 years ago, but that's not the situation now."

The police had 4,932 contacts with homeless people in the subways last year, according to a deputy commissioner, Paul J. Browne. Officers brought 2,776 to shelters and arrested 877, leaving alone the remaining 1,279 adults, who declined to seek shelter and were not violating any laws.

Colin Moynihan contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

January 27, 2005

METRO MATTERS

Underground, Both Security and Logic Fail

By JOYCE PURNICK

THE story is a familiar one: A control room fire destroys subway signaling equipment, seriously disrupting service. Subway riders know that the relay system is critical to the subways' running safely. And that the system is fragile, old and vulnerable to accidents, like that fire - in March 1999.

Yes, it has happened before, six years ago in a control room of the Bergen Street station in Brooklyn. There was indeed a precursor to the even more destructive fire last weekend in a signaling room north of the Chambers Street station, but somehow little was learned, and it happened again.

Repairs to the damage from the 1999 fire, caused by an electrical short triggered by water leak, are still under way. Repairs to the equipment destroyed in last weekend's fire have slowed and disrupted service on two lines that have a daily ridership of 580,000. Accidents are often unavoidable. But this fire, still under police investigation, has been ruled suspicious; police and fire officials now say it was set, though not necessarily by a homeless person, which was the initial theory.

In other words, in a city that has been on alert for over three years; where ugly concrete barriers stand guard in front of office buildings and security guards third-degree visitors as if they were criminals; where plastic ID cards are ubiquitous forms of neck decoration; where the police can check out scores of reports of suspicious unattended items in a day; where staging a public event is still cause for apprehension; where going to a concert means having a backpack treated like a weapon; where metal detectors dominate the entrances to public buildings - in that city, someone may have gotten near enough to fragile subway equipment to wreak havoc on hundreds of thousands of people.

The riders of the C and A lines will have to cope with delays and limited service for at least six to nine months (not the three to five years originally predicted), and riders of many other lines are facing even more crowding than usual.

THOUGH it was known from earlier experience that a control room fire can have dire consequences, it would surely appear that the Chambers Street facility was not secure. The fire started outside the control room, but close enough to spread inside. Fire investigators have ruled out an electrical accident.

Not that officials of New York City Transit have been unmindful of security. They've proposed banning photography on subway trains and in stations, to foil terrorists in pursuit of subway secrets. The plan awaits review by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board.

There must be some logic in that equation, though it does seem a tad elusive: photography - no. Easy access to vulnerable equipment - yes.

How was the Chambers Street control room, and others like it, protected? It seems logical that they would be inaccessible and fireproofed. Charles F. Seaton, a spokesman for New York City Transit, declined to comment. "Security is the N.Y.P.D.'s bailiwick," he said.

Paul J. Browne, the Police Department's chief spokesman, said police officers take most of the homeless people they find in the subways to shelters or arrest them; some are left alone if they are not violating any laws. "We enforce the laws," Mr. Browne said. "We are not responsible for all M.T.A. equipment."

So, New York, it is not clear who is responsible for securing the system's equipment. And who is responsible for the continued reliance on archaic equipment? Since technical experts say they would have to shut down the subways to replace all of the equipment all at once, they are doing so incrementally. The M.T.A.'s new capital plan includes $616 million for new computerized signaling projects, for instance.

But Gov. George E. Pataki proposes financing the Metropolitan Transportation Authority with only $15.2 billion of the $17.2 billion the authority says it needs just for basic upkeep in the next five years.

"Obviously, this is a dreadful accident," said Richard Ravitch, the authority's chairman from 1979 to 1983, "and proves that it takes a lot of money to maintain a system that is as complex and capital intensive as the subway system in New York. I still do not understand why there is so much resistance to provide funds for M.T.A.'s core program in the next five years."

Even Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg voiced muted displeasure that the Pataki budget doesn't include enough for the buses and subways. He said in Albany this week that he was "deeply depressed" about it.

We suspect that he is not the only one.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[NewYorkYankee]

I'm glad to hear they're going to replace the damage with modern equipment. Kudos to the MTA for that!

[Kris]

January 28, 2005

With Signals Out Downtown, Trains Use Manual Transmission

By ANDY NEWMAN and COLIN MOYNIHAN

Let history note the state of the art of dispatching trains in a world-renowned subway system, circa 2005.

A southbound A train pulled into the Canal Street station in Manhattan just before noon yesterday. A mustachioed man on the platform with an orange vest approached the motorman. The motorman slid open his window. The man in the vest asked where he was going. "Lefferts," the motorman replied.

The man in the vest wrote this down, in pencil, on a clipboard, along with the time and the train's number, 5264. He got on his radio to the underground control tower at the next station, Chambers Street, and asked if the coast was clear. It was not.

The man in the vest leaned in the motorman's window. "Tell your conductor to announce that the train is going to be held for a few minutes," he said.

Time passed. Finally, the control tower radioed back. There were no trains up ahead. The man in the vest instructed the motorman to proceed and got on the radio again.

"Fifty-two sixty-four coming your way," he said.

Then, two words of parting advice for the motorman: "Stay safe." The train lurched forward.

The New York City subway's Depression-era signal system, with its traffic lights and levers and switching relays encased in glass, may seem quaint enough. But the stopgap measures put into place to keep the trains running at Canal Street make the relay room that was gutted by fire on Sunday seem as advanced as the Saturn space probe.

Men with pencils and walkie-talkies tell the operators to stop and go. Motormen themselves pull levers on the tunnel walls to unlock emergency brakes. And workers flash lanterns and blow whistles to clear the tracks.

On an ordinary day on the A and the C lines, the steel wheel of a train entering a section of track would close a circuit, turning signal lights red up and down the track.

But on Sunday, the underground fire in the relay room just north of the Chambers Street station disrupted the way in which information is transmitted about train positions and movements, and transit officials said this week that it would take six to nine months to repair the problems.

The C line has been temporarily eliminated, and the ripple effect has caused delays and confusion on other lines.

Things could be a lot worse. On Monday, three stations - Canal Street, Chambers Street and Broadway-Nassau Street - required the services of people on the platform to give motormen (and women) the go-ahead. By yesterday, it was down to one, Canal Street.

"But that one stop, people don't realize how critical it is," said a line superintendent, Albert Capone, who took over for the man with the mustache just after lunch. Holding up a train at one station, Mr. Capone explained, sends ripples of delays through an entire line.

When the system is working normally, rush-hour trains can run so frequently that one seems almost to ride another's tail.

Now on the A tracks at Canal, Mr. Capone said, a rare condition occurs known as "absolute block." That means that before a train can pull out of the station, there can be nothing on the tracks between Canal and Chambers. No trains. No workers. The only exceptions to the rule scurried along the track bed on four hairy legs.

"I'm upset that the rats aren't wearing their orange vests," Mr. Capone said.

Duty summoned Mr. Capone back to the edge of the platform, and as a train pulled in, he welcomed the motorman, Allan Jordan, to the station. He told him to tell the conductor to announce a slight delay.

Mr. Jordan seemed unfazed. "Not a problem," he said. "We're just doing what we can to keep people moving."

A flock of late passengers bounded down the stairs, and Mr. Capone herded them into the train. "Jump on, jump on, let's go," he said. "Up, up, up, up, up."

Mr. Capone got the go-ahead from the tower and relayed the news to Mr. Jordan. "Give two to your conductor and you're ready to proceed," he said. Mr. Jordan gave two buzzes on his buzzer.

Ding dong, came the response, and the doors slid closed.

"Key on," Mr. Capone said to Mr. Jordan. "Proceed at 10 miles an hour."

Mr. Jordan pulled 10 feet into the tunnel and stopped. There was a lever mounted on the wall. He pulled it. An emergency brake called a stop arm disengaged. The track unlocked.

Mr. Jordan accelerated, slowly.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[NewYorkYankee]

What is it with the rats? Ive never seen a rat in the subway, nor in NY anywhere.

[Kris]

January 28, 2005

Fire Prevention in Subway Signal Rooms Was Urged After 1999 Blaze

By SEWELL CHAN

In March 1999, shortly after a fire destroyed a signal relay room at a Brooklyn subway station, an internal investigation by New York City Transit determined that smoke detectors and fire-retardant material should be installed at all relay rooms throughout the system, according to agency documents.

Nearly six years later, at least 40 of those approximately 200 rooms, which contain vital signaling devices, have not been equipped with fire-prevention equipment and remain extremely vulnerable. Among them was the relay room in Lower Manhattan that was destroyed by a fire on Sunday, disabling service on the A and C lines.

The fallout from the fire continued yesterday, as New York City Transit's president, Lawrence G. Reuter, apologized for initially saying that the restoration of regular subway service could take three to five years - an estimate that was lowered the next day to six to nine months - and as transit officials announced increased alternative service.

"I must have misspoke or didn't clarify myself very well on that," Mr. Reuter said of his time estimate. "And for that, I'm sorry."

Mr. Reuter spoke at a meeting of the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, New York City Transit' s parent.

In an unusual move, the chairman of the authority, Peter S. Kalikow, said it had hired an engineering consultant, Carter & Burgess Inc., to review the circumstances of the fire. A task force led by a board member, Barry L. Feinstein, will oversee that review. New York City Transit is also conducting its own review, and does not normally hire consultants to review fires.

Mr. Kalikow stopped short of rebuking Mr. Reuter, who has run New York City Transit since 1996, but he made it clear that he was dismayed by the poor handling of communications to the public about the fire's impact.

The day after the fire, Mr. Reuter also said that a homeless person might have set the fire to keep warm - a theory the police have called premature.

Mr. Kalikow said, "In our zeal to communicate with riders, to let them know what was happening, we might have spoken too soon." He added, however, that the authority might need to adopt a "zero tolerance" posture toward people who unlawfully enter tracks, tunnels and other transit facilities. Electronic surveillance equipment might be part of that move, he said.

Mr. Reuter said yesterday that investigators were looking into reports that transit workers had left flammable materials near the relay room.

New York City Transit announced last night that it would run additional B trains to relieve crowding on Eighth Avenue between 59th and 145th Streets in Manhattan. Service on the C train, which normally supplements the B on the Upper West Side, has been suspended. The extra B trains will run from 7:45 to 9:15 a.m. and from 4:45 to 6:15 p.m. on weekdays.

Mr. Reuter repeated that it would still take years to replace and upgrade equipment that was destroyed in the fire in the unprotected room, including 4 switches, 24 signals and 90 relays.

According to records, the transit agency's office of system safety made seven recommendations about protecting signal relay rooms from fires after a blaze on March 11, 1999, at the Bergen Street station in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, used by the F and G lines. Repairs to that relay room and control tower are still not complete, although service was revived within months.

In an 11-page report dated March 27, 1999, the safety office urged that "fire-stopping material be installed" around relay rooms to prevent flames from spreading to control towers. It also recommended that "relay rooms be provided with smoke detection equipment that can be monitored at a central location."

A copy of the report, which was signed by Leroy B. Spivey, the vice president for system safety at the time, was provided to The New York Times by transit officials yesterday.

The report urged that "power disconnects for relay rooms and other station rooms be clearly identified or available for the immediate use of emergency response personnel." It took more than three hours before firefighters declared Sunday's Chambers Street blaze under control. Fire officials have said that firefighters had to wait for power to the relay room to be shut off - a problem that had been identified in the report on the Bergen Street fire.

Since 1982, Mr. Reuter said, 158 of the roughly 200 signal relay rooms have been modernized and equipped with anti-intrusion devices, fire detectors, special cables that can send warnings when signals are interrupted and extinguishers that emit a fine mist that smothers fire.

Officials emphasized that the upgrades require intricate adjustments, time and money. "If somebody gave us $50 billion tomorrow, we could not any faster upgrade these signals," Mr. Kalikow said.

The use of noncombustible materials and fire extinguishers in transit systems is among the widely accepted standards developed over decades by the National Fire Protection Association, which drafts fire-safety codes.

William D. Kennedy, the chairman of the association's committee on passenger rail systems and a vice president at Parsons Brinkerhoff, an engineering firm based in Manhattan, said, "There's an old saying that it's better to minimize the hazard rather than to maximize the protection."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

January 29, 2005

For Some Riders, a Subway Line Is Hallowed Ground

By SEWELL CHAN and COLIN MOYNIHAN

There is no doubt that a major disruption of subway service in New York City results in longer waits, aggravating delays and general inconvenience for hundreds of thousands of commuters.

But for a certain breed of subway rider, the fire that destroyed a signal relay room in Lower Manhattan on Sunday did more than cripple service on the A and C lines. It unsettled the rhythms of urban life and the unique satisfaction that comes from executing a well-planned trip.

Kigana Wright, a translator who recently moved to Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, described his usual journey on the C train into Lower Manhattan this way: "It's kind of mindless. You fall into a routine. Your body takes over. Your legs know how many steps there are on the staircase. Before you know it, you're in the flow of the crowd. It helps the continuity of your day."

Now Mr. Wright, 30, must take the V train, which has replaced the C between Jay Street and Euclid Avenue in Brooklyn. "There's apprehension," he said. "There's frustration."

Previously, Mr. Wright said, his trip was a time of tranquility: "It gives you a period of the day to relax or think about other things." Now, he said: "You're on guard. You're always wondering, 'How long will this take?' "

The unease expressed by Mr. Wright was echoed by a number of other passengers who said they were disquieted by the interruptions in their routines.

Liz Gwinn, a graduate student in museum studies, said she felt a strong aversion to the orange seats that are used in most V trains. She said she preferred the consistency, however drab, of the gray, benchlike seats on the C trains.

"I hate the color orange on the V," said Ms. Gwinn, who is 25 and lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant. "It's a really obnoxious and industrial orange, and it's kind of irritating."

The C mostly uses cars from the R32 series of subway cars, introduced in 1964 and '65, while the V trains are almost entirely made up of cars from the R46 series, delivered between 1975 and '78. "You're talking about subway cars from two different decades and philosophies," said a spokesman for New York City Transit, Charles F. Seaton.

Riders on the A and C are not the only ones feeling disoriented. Jason Roth, a high school math teacher, usually uses his morning ride from Harlem to Chelsea to prepare lesson plans. But this week, so many riders from the A and C have migrated to his lines - the Nos. 1 and 9 - that he has not been able to find a seat.

"It's unnerving," said Mr. Roth, 27. "At the end of the day, I want to put my head back and relax. I know there are greater tragedies in the world, but I deserve it."

Gene Russianoff, the head of the Straphangers Campaign, part of the New York Public Interest Research Group, said that service disruptions remind riders of their relative powerlessness. "Being in the subways is sometimes like being subject to an angry, cruel and indifferent god," he said. "It's out of your control. Some unseen force of nature, it seems, dictates where you're going to go."

Mike Wallace, a historian at the City University of New York Graduate Center, said New Yorkers are inevitably disturbed by any slowdown in their pace of life.

"This is a city that has worked very hard to increase velocity in all aspects of life, in sending the mail, in moving goods in and out," he said. "Everywhere you look, this place is about speed. The downside is that we don't necessarily concentrate as much on why we're trying to get somewhere or what we'll do when we get there."

Many riders forget that predictable subway service is a relatively recent phenomenon, said Mr. Seaton, the transit spokesman.

"What they have become accustomed to is the reliable service we give them," he said. "If they had been riding the subway 20 years ago, they'd remember that it was a completely different story. There was no guarantee that they'd get home the same way in the evening that they got to work in the morning."

Lily Koppel contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[NYCResident]

5 years? A and C trains coming back tomorrow..

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/02/nyregion/02subway.html?hp&ex=1107320400&en=947b38e4c35fc69b&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[Kris]

February 2, 2005

5-Year Subway Repair Is Suddenly a 10-Day Job

By SEWELL CHAN

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/a.gift first, the estimate was grim, a subway rider's nightmare. It could take up to five years to get the A and C trains running normally after a fire in an underground signal relay room last month.

Then the forecast improved: transit officials said it would take only six to nine months to fix the disruptions.

Now the estimate has come down once more. The new prognosis for restoration of most service on the subway line?

Today. Just nine days and 15 hours after the fire.

The president of New York City Transit, Lawrence G. Reuter, announced yesterday that C trains would begin running again at 5 a.m. and that the A train would run at nearly its regular frequency, after what he called a herculean effort by repair workers toiling nonstop in 12-hour shifts since Jan. 23, when a fire at the Chambers Street station in Lower Manhattan halted the C and crippled service on the A, the third-busiest line in the system.

Peak-hour service on the two lines will be at 70 percent of normal frequency on Manhattan-bound trains and 80 percent on Brooklyn-bound trains, Mr. Reuter said, and service at other times will be close to normal, except for partial shutdowns on occasional nights and weekends as repairs continue.

With the revival of C service between 168th Street in Manhattan and Euclid Avenue in Brooklyn, the V train, which had replaced the C in Brooklyn, will resume its normal route between Forest Hills, Queens, and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The B train, which has run more frequently at peak hours to serve riders on the West Side, will return to its normal schedule.

The new timetable was only the latest episode in a bizarre chapter that began when the relay room, which transmitted vital information about train positions and movement, was gutted by a mysterious fire. On Monday, fire investigators said they had all but ended their investigation into the blaze, concluding only that the cause was "not ascertained."

Mr. Reuter's initial estimate that service on the two lines could be impaired for three to five years was met with bewilderment from riders, outrage from public officials, widespread attention from the news media and incredulity from historians, who noted that the entire first segment of the Independent Subway System, including the A and C lines, was built in seven years, from 1925 to 1932.

Mr. Reuter later apologized to the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, of which his agency is the largest component, for the incorrect estimate, and said that regular service could be restored in six to nine months.

Only on Monday night, Mr. Reuter said yesterday, did it become clear that C service could be restored far more quickly than expected. He added, however, that full or regular service would not return for at least three months and it could take several years to repair or replace the damaged equipment.

Borrowing relays from other areas of the subway system, officials said, signal engineers devised a "very basic, temporary automatic signaling" system that will permit trains to run with automatic signal protection.

That means workers will not have to clear every A and C train passing through the area around Chambers Street, as they have done since the fire.

"Some people might have called this a Rube Goldberg operation," Mr. Reuter said in describing the signaling system that will be in temporary use for at least several months. He later added, "The engineers are literally drawing it on backs of paper right now."

Mr. Reuter emphasized that he believed the trains using the temporary signaling configuration would be "just as safe as the rest of the system is now."

During peak hours, the time between trains will be about 5 minutes on the A line, instead of the usual 3 to 5 minutes, and 10 minutes on the C line, instead of the usual 7 minutes. In sum, 18 trains - 12 on the A line and 6 on the C - will operate in the peak Manhattan-bound direction during rush hours, down from the usual 26.

Several factors contributed to the speedy recovery, Mr. Reuter said. The most affected segment of the two lines in Lower Manhattan was closed last weekend and on several nights, giving workers time to assemble and connect new circuits and switches and run complex simulations of restored service

In addition, the relative straightness of the tracks used by the two lines around Chambers Street, and the fact that the trains there do not regularly switch tracks, allowed for the kind of improvisational signaling system that has been created.

Finally, Mr. Reuter conceded, his initial estimates were made before workers had made a full assessment of what he called "extreme damage" to the relay room that left behind "80-year-old wires that have been burnt and damaged, many beyond use and repair."

Such damage required days of assessment to determine which cables, circuits and switches could be salvaged. "This is not like building a brand new rail car or a brand new signal system," Mr. Reuter said.

Even so, Mr. Reuter appeared contrite for having altered his public pronouncements so dramatically. In the future, "we'll be more cautious in our estimate," he said.

The handling of the fire's aftermath has been an embarrassment for Mr. Reuter, 54, who took over New York City Transit in 1996 after leading the metropolitan transit agencies in San Jose, Calif. and Washington.

A transit veteran said he was still surprised that Mr. Reuter had given such an extreme estimate for the duration of the disruptions. "That was off the top of somebody's head and was unrealistic," said Charles Kalkhof, who worked for the transit agency from 1950 to 1984, when he retired as general manager for rapid transit, overseeing the subways. "When you're in an emergency situation, there's no reason why you can't jury-rig temporary signaling."

Mr. Kalkhof, 78, emphasized that full repair of the signals would still take a long time. "After six to nine months, there will still be a lot of work to be done to make it a viable, permanent installation," he said. "It's never done overnight. It takes some engineering know-how and people that are aware of the safety implications."

Mr. Reuter expressed similar caution during a news conference outside the agency's headquarters on Jay Street in downtown Brooklyn. "The job is nowhere near complete and there is still a tremendous amount of work to be completed before we can return to full service levels," he said.

Among the officials Mr. Reuter singled out for praise were Barbara A. Spencer, his top deputy; Michael A. Lombardi, the senior vice president for subways; Keith J. Hom, chief of operations planning; Jerome Martin, chief electrical officer, and Tracy Bowdwin, assistant chief signals officer.

Riders reacted with a mixture of relief and confusion.

"I am totally frustrated by all the jumpy changes," Caspar Stracke, 37, who normally uses the C train from his home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, said as he stepped off an E train in Chelsea. "Ultimately, I'm happy to have a better way back to Manhattan. I was already imagining the hell of not having C service for such a long time."

Christopher Elcock, 39, who lives near the Rockaway Avenue station on the C line, expressed disbelief when he heard of the officials' latest prognosis. "They've done a good job at confusing riders," he said.

Copyright 2005 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[ZippyTheChimp]

http://www.newyorkmetro.com/

The City Politic

Who Failed the C Train?

Not a homeless person. It was Governor George Pataki, and his enabler, Mayor Mike Bloomberg. A lesson in why budgets matter.
By Chris Smith (http://newyorkmetro.com/nymag/author_375)


Out along the L-train tracks, running from Chelsea to Canarsie, small black boxes are sprouting on stubby metal poles. This is the future of the subway system: a computerized signaling network that will allow trains to run closer together.

Well, this might be the future. The state-of-the-art signal system—called CBTC in transit jargon, for Communications-Based Train Control—has been in the planning stages for twenty years and is currently in its fourth year of construction; its debut was recently pushed back to July. Installing CBTC on a single, simple line has cost more than $288 million.

If the future runs—someday—through Williamsburg, the subway’s past and present are in a dark tunnel beneath Chambers Street. And it is sodden and charred. This is the remains of the Sunday-afternoon fire that in three hours destroyed a signal relay room that had operated the A and C trains since the thirties.

Replacement parts will be scavenged and the signals rebuilt in five years—scratch that, in nine months. Yet however long it takes to restore “normal” elbow-to-eyeball flesh-pile service, and whoever caused the fire—a homeless person, a giant rat—what’s really broken can’t be fixed underground. It’s the link between Albany and City Hall.

On a frigid mid-November morning, George Pataki and Michael Bloomberg stood chatting at the center of another aging city transportation wonder, the Brooklyn Bridge. They were killing time before playing their roles in a publicity event, waiting to greet runners carrying the final “bid book” for the 2012 Olympics. Whenever the mayor spoke, he kept his head down and his eyes fixed on the bridge deck, forcing the governor, who is eight inches taller, to bend over and lean in to hear what Bloomberg was saying. The mayor and the governor profess respect and admiration for one another, but their body language told of a more complicated relationship: Bloomberg grudgingly needing Pataki’s help, Pataki pretending, uncomfortably, to care about Bloomberg.

The dynamic between the two men has always been odd, but lately it’s grown even more puzzling. When Pataki was up for reelection in 2002, Bloomberg held off proposing commuter- and property-tax increases until after the governor won a new term. With Bloomberg running this year, Pataki shows no interest in returning the favor. Bloomberg was looking for three big breaks from the new state budget—help with the city’s ballooning Medicaid expenses, real funding of city schools as ordered by a state court, and a boost in the MTA’s capital budget.

Bloomberg went oh-for-three. Pataki didn’t just stiff the city; he’s proposed a Medicaid formula that could cripple city hospitals, and told the city to kick in a large share of the court-mandated education money. The MTA five-year capital request? Pataki slashed it by $8.5 billion.



“No politician wants to cut a ribbon on a rebuilt toilet. That’s how the TA collapsed in the seventies,” says David Gunn.



Part of this is simply the annual budget farce. Pataki and Bloomberg will threaten dire repercussions if they don’t get what they want; Shelly Silver and Joe Bruno will stall; by July, both the state and the city will have staggered to new budget deals. Meanwhile, the acrid smell in the Chambers Street station will be a reminder that the sloppy budget process has real-world consequences. “Long-term capital projects suffer terribly because of the politics of the state budget,” says Richard Ravitch, who, as chairman of the MTA in the early eighties, helped rescue the subway system. Even back then, the MTA was making plans to computerize its signal system, but the rebuilding was repeatedly shelved in favor of emergency needs.

Modern equipment can burn, too, of course, but it’s more easily replaced. And much of the transit system’s core is antiquated. “The problem you have is that the least sexy stuff you do in this business is state-of-good-repair stuff,” says David Gunn, an MTA executive in the eighties who now runs Amtrak. “No politician wants to cut a ribbon on a rebuilt toilet, you know? That’s how the TA collapsed the first time, in the seventies. There was no attention paid to the physical condition of the system. But a new route or a new service—politicians love that.” And Pataki’s budget, while trimming money for a new Second Avenue train and an LIRR link to Grand Central, does include extending the 7 train from Times Square to Eleventh Avenue—a project paid for wholly by city dollars.

The morning of his state-budget speech, Pataki called Bloomberg to give him a quick synopsis of the bad news. Pataki, according to Bloomberg, said, “Look, I’m doing the best I can.” The mayor didn’t divulge his response. But it likely was as mild as everything the mayor has since said publicly.

Bloomberg is admirably adult, and he’s right that name-calling is a waste of time. Pataki is doing whatever it takes to keep his presidential fantasy alive, and if that means cutting taxes while the subway crumbles, well, no one voting in the Iowa caucuses cares about the subway part. The mayor’s failure, though, is his inability to find an effective substitute for public ranting. He could have used the rebuilding of downtown as a lever against Pataki, but largely ceded ground zero to the governor in favor of taking the lead role in the development of the far West Side.

Yet that trade-off has weakened Bloomberg’s hand even further. The state owns the stadium site, and the MTA, a state agency, controls the air rights above the rail yard where Bloomberg wants to build a stadium for the Olympics and the Jets. Making the deal happen would be easier if Pataki pressures the MTA to keep the fee low. That would further reduce the money available for repairing the existing transit system, of course. But Bloomberg would get his ballpark, and, according to the mayor’s theory, the West Side stadium would become a Vesuvius of tax revenue, spewing more than enough money to help keep the subways humming, pay the exploding civil-service pension tab, and water the flowers in Prospect Park.

There are four main risks that Bloomberg says could blow a hole in his new budget, forcing the mayor to make large reductions in services or labor. Three of those items—the Medicaid formula, the settlement of the school-funding lawsuit, and the MTA’s capital program—depend on changing Pataki’s mind or evading the governor’s schemes. Perhaps this is all a setup, with Bloomberg lowballing the estimates of what he expects from Albany so that in June, with his reelection campaign officially under way, he can pull a fiscal rabbit out of the hat and say he’s spared the city major cutbacks. But that presumes a level of political slickness Bloomberg claims to disdain. And last week the word the mayor kept using when he referred to the coming skirmish with Albany was hope: “Hopefully, they’ll come through.”

For a man whose business acumen and Republican ties are supposed to reap major benefits for the city, that’s pretty lame. For a mayor who wants to be reelected, it could prove downright dangerous.

[Kris]

Learning from the Subway Fire (http://gothamgazette.com/article/transportation/20050202/16/1314)

[Kris]

DEPT. OF PREDICTION

THREE TO FIVE

by Ben McGrath

Issue of 2005-02-07
Posted 2005-01-31

In the wake of a natural disaster or a major accident, there is an inevitable rush to dredge up parallels. After the recent Chambers Street subway fire—which destroyed a Depression-era control room integral to the dispatching of the Eighth Avenue A and C trains— Stan Fischler, the hockey commentator and the author of a half-dozen books about the subway, compared it to the Astor Place flood of 1956, in which fifty million gallons of hydrant runoff spilled into the Astor Place station and collapsed the track bed. Transit workers repaired the damage in less than a week. “That was one of the greatest comebacks in the history of the city’s subway system,” Fischler said last Tuesday. “They fixed it up in record time.”

Tuesday’s papers had carried the estimate of Lawrence Reuter, the Transit Authority president, that full train service would not return to the A and C lines for “three to five years.” Riders were aghast. “We built the whole IND subway line in under five years,” Mayor Bloomberg (an I.R.T. regular) protested, referring to the original Independent line, which now services Eighth Avenue. “We built the Empire State Building in one year.” (There’s an election coming, and you know what they say about making the trains run on time.) The tabloids pointed out that the George Washington Bridge had been built in just four years, the Titanic in three. Others, engaging in a kind of office parlor game, named some less obvious parallels. Three years: a law degree. Five years: a lion grows its mane. Three to five years: a plausible prison term for the former basketball star Jayson Williams, for shooting his chauffeur in the chest.

By the time the M.T.A. had backtracked, later in the day, claiming that the restoration process would take only six to nine months, a couple of West Side residents had begun compiling a list of other recent “three to five year” estimates. There appeared to be a pattern. In baseball, for instance, this is the amount of time often cited as necessary for turning around a losing team (other than the Mets), or for a new stadium name to enter the public consciousness. Apparently, it takes three to five years to train an air-traffic controller, earn a black belt in karate, or, if you’re a salesman switching industries, to get comfortable with your new line of work. The same goes for stepkids adjusting to a “blended family.” The rule applies to real estate, too: it typically takes you-know-how-long for the flaws in defective houses to reveal themselves.

The pattern, of course, is that these aren’t so much estimates as default clichés, heavy on folk wisdom and light on deduction. Reuter insisted, late last week, that he “must have misspoke,” but that, for what it’s worth, it may yet take three to five years to finish rebuilding that control room, even after the trains are back up and running. But here’s another possibility: “three to five years” has become a fixed entry on the psychological timeline, the progression from “just a second” to “two minutes” to “next week” and so on. It’s what you might call a cognitive reference point, a shorthand expression representing a perception of time rather than a literal quantification of it. (The progression is logarithmic, because we recognize fewer and fewer distinctions—three to five years, a decade, a generation, a lifetime—as time extends beyond the present.) Viewed in this way, Reuter’s initial estimate was not a calculation but an expression of magnitude: an attempt to explain that, as subterranean disasters go, the fire was a really big deal.

Much of the relevant literature regarding temporal forecasting and “duration estimation” has dealt with smaller quantities of time (e.g., a day or less). But an informal poll last week of cognitive psychologists and behavioral economists demonstrated some enthusiasm for, if not actual familiarity with, the “three to five” hypothesis. “The span of three to five years is frequently regarded as a natural arc of personal transformation,” Mark Turner, of Case Western Reserve, said. George Lakoff, at Berkeley, added that the phenomenon of “subitizing,” which refers to our ability to count objects in a split second, might also come into play. “Between three and five is where the human boundaries are,” Lakoff said.

A number of academics also noted the “planning fallacy,” which says that we’re all overly optimistic when projecting how much we can accomplish, and how soon. In other words, six to nine months, the amended estimate, is a fool’s bet.

And then there’s always the cynical explanation. Stan Fischler said, “My wife’s theory is that it was an M.T.A. ploy to get more dough.”

www.newyorker.com (http://www.newyorker.com/)

[Kris]

February 3, 2005

Their Eyes Did Not Deceive Them: It Was the C Train

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/02/03/nyregion/02subway_lg.jpg
An entrance to the Euclid Avenue station in Brooklyn where C trains ran once again yesterday morning.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/f.gifor a moment, Rayna Purandaye thought it might be a cruel mirage, conjured up by the commuting gods to torment her weary straphanger's soul. She had heard the rumors, of course, and read the newspaper headlines. Still, she said: "I wasn't sure it would really happen. You never know - life is funny."

But as the ill-lighted blob of blue and white hurtling down the Eighth Avenue tracks slowly resolved into a familiar letter, Ms. Purandaye realized that her travails had come to an end: the C train was back in service.

"My heart skipped a beat," said Ms. Purandaye, whose 20-minute commute from 116th Street to 42nd Street, she said, had ballooned to nearly two hours after fire gutted a signal-relay room near the Chambers Street station last week, shutting down the C line and crippling service on the A line, which have a combined ridership of about 580,000 each weekday. "I'm so happy."

Ms. Purandaye is not alone. As the first train lurched out of the 168th Street station yesterday at 5:12 a.m., bound for Euclid Avenue, a note of bewilderment and good cheer could be detected amid the generally grim, under-caffeinated mood that prevails on subways in the early morning hours. The C train had been partly restored, far in advance of the three to five years originally predicted when the fire struck the signal-relay room.

"It's great," said Jose Diaz, who commutes each day between his home in Washington Heights and the New York Police Academy on 20th Street, where he is a recruit. After the fire, Mr. Diaz said, it was taking him up to 90 minutes to reach the academy on his backup, the No. 1 train. "Now I can get a seat, take my time, because I know I'm going to get there early."

Miguel Juarbes, who usually takes the C train as far as it goes and then car-pools to his factory job in Garden City, N.Y., said he knew the C would be running again by this morning, but he left home early anyway, just in case.

"I'm very happy," he said. "It's much more convenient." When he heard the original repair estimate, Mr. Juarbes said: "I was shocked. The Empire State Building didn't take that long." Leaning over, he confided, "I thought maybe it was just a way to get a fare hike."

Early in the morning, riders on the Brooklyn-bound C were sparse. A group of transit maintenance workers at one station seemed unaware of the C's restoration until a reporter pointed to the new service notice taped to a stanchion. A scent redolent of charred rubber could be detected at Chambers Street, where tracks of soot on the platform were the only remaining visible evidence of the fire that burned nearby two Sundays ago.

But as the morning rush began, C devotees began to emerge, like jilted lovers: tentative, hopeful, expecting the worst.

"I was skeptical when I saw it," said Sarah Sutphin, looking mildly dazed as she boarded a C train at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station. "It says C, but I didn't believe it." Ms. Sutphin, who works in the human resources department at Citigroup, had previously used an alternative route into Manhattan, forsaking the C for the G train and transferring to the A line at Hoyt-Schermerhorn.

"It's a relief that things are going to get easy again," she said.

Seemingly the most pleased person was Stanley Fowler, who was the conductor on the first C train out of 168th Street yesterday morning. As the ride came to an end at Euclid Avenue, he emerged beaming from his compartment.

"I'm glad for the passengers that they've got the service back," said Mr. Fowler, who last week was a guest conductor on the G and V lines, among others. "But it's good to be back where I'm supposed to be. This is where I want to be. This is my home."

Copyright 2005 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[NewYorkYankee]

That C train conductor sounds like a great guy! :) :)

[Clarknt67]

What is it with the rats? Ive never seen a rat in the subway, nor in NY anywhere.

Do you ever look down at the tracks? I see them ALL the time. I find it amazing you've never seen them.

And I see them on the street, just about anywhere there is garbage, alleys and what not.

[NewYorkYankee]

Yes, I look down on the tracks all the time. ::Shrugs:: Still have not seen one.

[Schadenfrau]

From Newsday:

East Side Subway Lines Shut Down
BY JOSHUA ROBIN
STAFF WRITER

March 16, 2005, 11:25 AM EST

A power distribution problem on the Lexington Ave. stranded tens of thousands of subway riders during the morning commute, but some service has been restored, MTA officials said.

The power failure on the line – the city's busiest – began at 7:20 a.m., but as of 9:50 a.m. trains were running fairly normally on the 4, 5 and 6 lines northbound, said New York City Transit spokesman Paul Fleuranges.

Partial southbound service on the 4 and 6 was restored at about 11 a.m. between the Bronx, Manhattan and Brooklyn. No. 5 trains were still running on the No. 2 line, he said.

Signal problems were still causing some delays, but Fleuranges said "hopefully we'll be back to normal" by the evening rush hour. "That's our goal."

"We are back in business on parts of the Lexington Avenue lines, but it hasn't been a good morning," Fleuranges added.

Earlier, the No. 6 line was suspended south of 125th Street to it's terminus at Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall; the No. 4 was halted between 145th St. and Nevins Street in Brooklyn; the No. 5 line was running on No. 2 tracks between 145th and Nevins streets.

When power failed, supervisors directed train operators to enter the nearest station, evacuate commuters and remove the trains from service.

NYC Transit officials were advising passengers to take lettered lines where they could, or buses. There were no emergency shuttles available.

"You're really pretty stuck," admitted one transit official.

Engineers believed the A/C electrical power failure started shortly after 7 a.m. near Grand Central Station, affecting the flow of energy to signals – the devices that allow subways to proceed with enough space between trains.

When crews attempted to restart the power, circuit breakers failed, leaving them to conclude there was a wider proble.

"We had a power problem, but the exact nature is not known. The cause is under investigation," Fleuranges said.

[mkeit]

1-I guess some stations don't have rats and other do.

2-Who will take the blame on wednesday's outage. if con ed admits they did work in the manhole, it might leave them open to suits.