Posts from — December 2006

NY Hack Reconnects With Old Colleagues (NY Hack)
Subway Sign Smorgasbord! (Forgotten NY)
The Politicker Finds Long Lost Bloomberg Relative? (Politicker)
Staten Island New Home Of NASCAR Shopping Mall (SI Advance)
NYC Population to Hit 9.1 Million By 2030 (DCP)
Last Days To Get Your Gridlock On (DOT)
East Side Access Gets $2.6 Billion (NY1)
Post About Sidewalk Oil Tank Descends Into “Pataki Takes Office” Photo Above (Washington Heights & Inwood Online)

Next Stop by |Shrued on Flickr.

Well, if it’s going to take this long to automate a single subway line, we will have nothing to fear from Skynet. This time the hold-up is a disagreement over the (comfortingly named) “dead man” feature in a train’s control system. Today, train operators have to keep some kind of pressure on the controls or the automatic breaks kick in and stop the train. The TWU is pissed (aside from the loss of conductors) at the feature on the new trains, which basically has the operator pushing a little button every thirty seconds to let the robotrain know he/she is still alive. AMNY writes:

“If the operator has a heart attack and the train is programmed to go 30 miles per hour that’s 29 seconds the train barrels down the track. It’s thousands of feet,” said John Samuelsen, chairman of the transit union’s track division.

He further warned that a dozing operator could hit the “alerter,” which sounds an alarm after 20 seconds, as easily as a snooze button.”

Swell.

MTA Scraps Conductor-Less Train Plan (NY1)
Some More About the Robotrains (Wired)
Weekend L Service Restored (Gothamist)

Photo from Forgotten NY.

The Times ran a piece today detailing the frustration (and delight) Queens’ streets can pose to those unfamiliar with their system of numbering and naming as well as their curvilinear tendencies. The writer relates his first experience of biking from Manhattan to the Queens College campus in Flushing:

I kept expecting to see the Unisphere on the horizon, but instead came upon yet another row of two-family homes and, out of nowhere, Elmhurst Hospital Center. Queens, I was fast discovering, is a patchwork of villages connected by few direct routes, an exasperating procession of avenues, streets, drives and places sharing numbers but not always contiguous … There was no beacon like the Empire State Building to guide me. Street signs indicated neither east nor west, as if the borough were a giant, directionless Möbius strip.

If you think biking is difficult with all those twists, turns, and confusing names, try understanding the bus routes. Alas, The Big Apple reminds us that things were just as confusing in the last century, and highlights a helpful rhyming “topographical poem” from 1926:

In Queens to find locations best —
Avenues, roads and drives run west;
But ways to north or south, ‘tis plain
Are streets or place or even lane;
While even numbers you will meet
Upon the west and south of street.

They’re you go — no more excuses for getting lost.

Explanation of Street Naming (Greater Astoria Historical Society)
Queens Topographical Bureau (Queens Borough President’s Office)
Queens Bus Route Map (MTA)

And so it begins…welcome to the AllWaysNY Blog!