Nyc Subway

There are just seven weeks left for the MTA to wrap works on the 2nd Avenue Subway if they want to meet their December 31st deadline. According to the Times, at yesterday’s MTA board meeting, officials relayed that an “unprecedented” effort would be required in order to wrap Phase 1 of the project on time.
read more here

Transit

November 8, 2016

MTA to increase L train service as M train undergoes repairs in 2017

An unlikely hero has emerged to save straphangers from the brunt of yet another MTA closure: the L train. In a statement released this morning by the transit agency, beginning June 2017, another 50 roundtrips will be added to the L line while repairs are undertaken on the M line at the Myrtle Avenue stop in Bushwick.
find out more here

Transit

November 7, 2016

MAP: Here’s what the NYC subway system looked like in 1939

We often think of the NYC subway as a relatively modern marvel, a system that has expanded and evolved tremendously over 100-plus years, and a shell of what it was when it first debuted in 1904. However, the reality is that the majority of the lines that make up today's network were actually built before The Great Depression. In fact, as graphic designer Jake Berman's insightful throwback map depicts, it was pretty much all systems go by 1939.
see the complete map here

November 7, 2016

The W train returns today, see the MTA’s new service map

When it came to reviving the W train, the MTA surprisingly stuck to their timeline, with restored service from Astoria to lower Manhattan beginning at this morning. The train will now run from 6:30am to 11:30pm no weekdays, but this means changes on the N, R, and Q lines, which account for the Q train getting rerouted once the Second Avenue Subway opens next month. To make things a little simpler, the agency has created a handy map detailing the new service and changes, along with an infographic of station-specific information (h/t Gothamist).
See the full map here

Transit

October 27, 2016

Independent engineer says two Second Avenue Subway stations are still far from ready

Despite MTA Chairman Tom Prendergast's seemingly unwavering optimism that the Second Avenue Subway will open on time, it's still not clear if the line's stations will be ready for their December ribbon cutting. According to the Times, following a Wednesday MTA board presentation outlining some of the outstanding issues (and the agency's commitment to smoothing them out over the next eight weeks), Kent Haggas, an independent engineer for the project, offered up a very somber outlook. As he told the paper, two of the three stations set to open December 31st have fallen behind, and that the system's "rigorous testing schedule was not being met." More alarmingly, he added that progress to date would need to be almost tripled on a weekly basis if the MTA is to meet its deadline.
Yikes

Transit

October 24, 2016

MTA puts up flyers touting the W train’s November 7th return

6sqft revealed last month that the W train would be making its triumphant return on Monday, November 7th, restoring service from Astoria to Lower Manhattan. Now that the date is only a couple weeks away, the MTA is putting up flyers touting the new re-instated line, reports Pix 11. Designed to look like a flashy Broadway marquee, the poster was spotted by a Reddit user over the weekend at the 34th Street-Penn Station platform of the A,C,E train.
Learn what this means for subway service

Transit

October 24, 2016

Second Avenue Subway will open in December without delay, officials say

MTA Chairman Thomas Prendergast is hoping to squash rumors that the Second Avenue Subway (SAS) will miss its December opening date. As Prendergast told the Times on Friday, “[we want to show riders] we live up to our promises” and that they are "now within striking distance of having it done.” The chairman's remarks incidentally coincide with some newly unearthed information from the Daily News, who also reported Friday that the agency spent a week shaving down parts of the new subway tunnel wall because 75-foot train cars couldn't fully clear curves.
more info from the MTA here

Transit

‘City of Women’ turns the subway map into an homage to the city’s greatest females

Modern cities are filled with signs that mark history, and that history often bears men's names. In New York City, for example, we have Astor Place, Washington Square, Lincoln Center, Columbus Circle, Rockefeller Center, and Bryant Park, just to name a few. In introducing a new book that addresses this status quo, The New Yorker points out that history-making women, on the other hand, "are anonymous people who changed fathers’ names for husbands’ as they married, who lived in private and were comparatively forgotten, with few exceptions," and that their names are notably missing from our streets. In their forthcoming book “Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas,” Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro offer us a New York City subway map that attempts to set the record right. “City of Women” pays homage "to some of the great and significant women of New York City" in the places they lived and made a difference.
See the full-size map here

City Living

October 10, 2016

VIDEO: MTA runs first test trains on Second Avenue Subway line!

While it's still unclear whether or not the Second Avenue Subway will meet its December opening date, it does look like the rails themselves are just about ready to take on riders. Over the weekend, Youtube user Dj Hammers spotted the agency running trains past the line's Lexington Avenue-63rd Street station (where a public area has already opened), testing out the third rail, signals and track.
more details and a video here

Transit

September 26, 2016

Second Avenue Subway may miss December opening date

After 100 years of chatter surrounding a Second Avenue Subway, it's no surprise that the MTA can't seem to stop flip-flopping on whether or not the line will meet its December opening date. In April of 2015, the agency announced that Phase I was 82 percent complete and on schedule, but this past June, reports of construction snafus signaled what many felt was an inevitable delay. NBC New York now confirms that the MTA is reassessing its timeline due to issues with elevator and escalator testing at the 72nd Street station.
More info right here

Transit

September 26, 2016

NYC Transit paid $431M in settlements to people injured by trains or buses in last five years

We’re frequently reminded of the MTA’s efforts to tighten security and keep us safe from terrorists; now the Daily News reports that errors in safety procedures have led to an alarming number of accidental injuries over the past several years. And victims are definitely saying something–at an average of $86.2 million in settlement payments per year, totaling $431 million over the last five years.
Take a look at the numbers

Transit

September 22, 2016

W train service starts up again November 7th

NY1 has learned that the W train will make its triumphant return on Monday, November 7th. The line was taken out of service in 2010, along with the V train, due to MTA budget cuts, but the idea to revive the line came about last summer as a way to better connect Astoria when the Q train is rerouted once the Second Avenue Subway opens. As Curbed notes, at first it will operate between 57th Street and Whitehall Street in Lower Manhattan, but will eventually extend to Astoria-Ditmars Boulevard.
More details

Transit

Image via Alan Bloom/Flickr

September 12, 2016

MTA kicks off an intensive two-week subway cleanup

By Metro New York

Image via Alan Bloom/Flickr The rats won’t like this. The MTA’s Operation Track Sweep to spiffy up New York’s subways commenced Monday and will continue for two weeks. More than 500 MTA workers are part of the intensive system-wide cleanup to remove trash and debris from the tracks at all of New York City’s 469 […]

Transit

September 7, 2016

Uniqlo’s NYC subway-inspired t-shirt collection hits stores

By Rebecca Paul

The New York City subway map is an icon of our modern urban culture, and it was only a matter of time before the popular graphics made their way on to a t-shirt in some trendy way. Uniqlo just released a new line of SPRZ NY tees featuring designs pulled from the The New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual, a graphic system designed by Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda in the late 1970s. The new line of tees were produced in collaboration with the MoMA and appropriately named, "The Subway and the City."
see more designs here

September 7, 2016

Video: The first of 300 new R179 subway cars has (finally) arrived at the MTA’s 207th Street yard

The future has arrived, and it's delayed, of course. The first of the city's shiny new subway cars was delivered to the MTA yard at 207th street in Inwood last night. The new R179 cars are being made upstate by Canadian company Bombardier and are slated to replace old cars on the C, A, J, M and Z lines (the trains on the C line are the oldest); a final decision on which lines will get the new cars hasn't been made at this time. The newly-arrived car is a test model, though; we won't be packing into the new cars like sardines until at least 2018.
See the future pulling in

Transit

August 29, 2016

Subway Reads offers free e-books based on the length of your commute

It can be a bit frustrating to start getting into a book on your commute when you just as soon have to put it down, which is part of the idea behind a new initiative called Subway Reads, a web platform that offers free e-books to subway riders that can be timed to their commute. The program is a collaboration among the MTA, Transit Wireless (the company behind the $250 million+ project to put Wi-Fi in 278 underground stations), and Penguin Random House. According to the Times, the platform was launched as a way to promote the fact that connectivity has already reached 175 stations, but it will only last eight weeks. During that time, users can download novellas, short stories or parts of complete books to their cellphones or tablets, and they can make their selections based on how long they expect to be on the train (the formula accounts for about a page a minute).
Find out how it works

August 24, 2016

This 1927 city subway map shows early transit plans

If you're navigating the NYC subway and wishing you could start from scratch, these map outlines from 1927 might prove interesting. Found by hyperreal cartography, the maps, from the state's Transit Commission Office of Chief Engineer, outline the "plan of existing and proposed rapid transit lines" for New York City. What's shown on the map appears to be the Independent Subway System; the ISS or IND, as it was known, was first constructed in 1932 as the Eight Avenue Line. As one of the three networks that was integrated into the modern New York City subway, the IND was meant to be fully owned and operated by the city government, as opposed to the privately-funded Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) and Brooklyn–Manhattan Transit Corporation (BMT) companies. The three lines merged in 1940.
Investigate the possibilities

August 19, 2016

Video: Take a gritty summertime subway ride to Coney Island–in 1987

From the archives of '80s NYC nightlife videographer Nelson Sullivan comes this summertime classic video. Young Village Voice writer Michael Musto, artist Albert Crudo, and photographer Liz Lizard with her two kids in tow join Sullivan on the trip to Coney Island from Manhattan on a very different subway than we're used to today (h/t acapuck via Reddit). Their destination, too, won't look the least bit familiar to anyone who's visited the aforementioned beach destination in recent years, though there are many among us who fondly remember the beautiful decay of the boardwalk environs and the thrill of its garish attractions in the pre-MCU, pre Keyspan days. We never tire of checking out the graffiti-covered cars and fellow riders who probably only look more menacing. And at some moments if you don't look too hard, everything appears pretty much the same: The noise, the heat, the underground grit–and the fact that when it comes to fashion, everything a few decades old looks cool and new again.
Take a day trip to the '80s

History

August 18, 2016

VIDEO: The MTA tells all about dumping its subway cars in the Atlantic Ocean

6sqft first learned about the MTA's interesting history of dumping old subway cars into the Atlantic Ocean through Stephen Mallon's insane photo series. The initiative began in late 2000 as a way to create artificial reefs and revive marine life along the Eastern seabed. Today, 2,400 cars now rest on the ocean floor in six states from New Jersey to Georgia, and we even got a peek inside them thanks to footage from novice divers at Express Water Sports, who lead scuba tours of the Bill Perry Reef system in Myrtle Beach, SC. Now, a video from the MTA itself (h/t Tracks) explains the history of the program, its financial viability, the environmental measures involved in the process, and some concerns about the reefs in the future.
Watch the full video here

Transit

August 10, 2016

Mapping Subways, Buses, and Free Transfers in One Place

One MetroCard. One map. Done.This new set of maps from map obsessive Anthony Denaro shows all the ways we can use the New York City transit system's unlimited MetroCard and transfers in one convenient, color-coded place. This includes both subways and buses, and important junctions where you can transfer within and between them. Included are all NYC transit services that can be accessed with an unlimited MetroCard. As the map's creator puts it, "Millions of NYC residents live beyond a 15-minute walk to a subway station. Hundreds of thousands of people start their commute by boarding a bus and then transferring to the subway. This is a map for us. One complex transit map, for one complex transit-reliant city."
The map, and the idea behind it

Transit

August 2, 2016

New Interactive Subway Game Lets You Build the Transit System of Your Dreams

A new interactive New York City subway planning game created by electrical engineer Jason Wright gives you a chance to try your hand at building the subway system of your dreams. Though based on a similar idea to Dinosaur Polo Club's Mini Metro, the game goes further and gives players a lot more to work with. “Brand New Subway” lets players start from scratch or use current subway maps, modify historic maps dating as far back as the 1900s or use maps from the future (like the planned 2025 subway system map pictured above) (h/t DNAinfo).
Try your hand at playing god of the subways

July 28, 2016

MTA Likely to Implement Fare Hike to $3 by 2017