#metropolitan transit authority

[aboutoriginality]

[blood-space-war-in-heaven]

i have a soft spot for well-intentioned schemes that go awry. the attempted (and generally failed) refurbishment of melbourne’s harris trains into what became known as ‘grey ghosts’ is no exception. only one of the refurbished carriages still exists, at the newport railway museum.

(id: two photographs of the side of a train carriage painted grey. the first photo shows part of the door and the window, but focuses on a handpainted green and yellow logo: a kind of trefoil logo of lines converging and swirling, beneath which are the words ‘metropolitan transit’. the second photo shows a stamped carriage number: ‘903m’.)

[searchsystem]

Order / The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) / Sign / 2024

[aryburn-trains]

Metro-North FL9 No. 2020 and a borrowed NJ Transit F7 emerge from the tunnel under the Bear Mountain Bridge with a GCT-Poughkeepsie commuter train on 10 July 1992.

[20th-century-railroading]

The business end of the New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA) rail grinding train manufactured by Speno is seen at Coney Island Yard on June 12, 1966.

[eightopals]

WMATA not DC.

I can't believe DC just went with it.

[fightforthesoulofthecities]

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”7298″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center”][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1701240254479{margin-bottom: 0px !important;}”] Join the Strategy and Soul Pit Stop at Ciclavia South LA THIS SUNDAY Dec 3rd 2024 9am-3pm We’re excited to host a Pitstop at CicLAvia South LA this Sunday December 3rd 2023 9am-5pm.  The Strategy Center has fought for a car-free city…

[transit-fag]

A bill has been proposed in the Illinois state legislature to merge the CTA, Metra and Pace into one agency to reduce redundancy and better fund transit in the Chicago Area

[questionableadvice]

~ New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority, 1962

[3liza]

every single "but the poor YA authors" reply on the piracy post are genuinely convinced that "just go to the library" is a universal option for every person on earth, that every book or album or DVD is represented in every library collection, and that when an author's sales hit the shitter there's absolutely no explanation other than those awful pirates voraciously stealing their urban fantasy shifter novels. could it be that the book is bad and there's no other way to make people pay for it than to prevent them trying before they buy???

i live in a super liberal metropolitan area in the usa and my own city library is barely accessible, has enormous waiting lists for stuff that should just be piled on the shelf, rotten hours, bad transit access, and even though I do have a library card i just never use it because it will take me hours or days to find out they don't even have what i need in their extended loan collection. this happened enough times that i gave up

friend texted me this a few days ago, we live in the same city:

major work in the English canon that every library would presumably have adequate copies of, the type of book that libraries get too much of and have to sell or send to the pulper regularly right? maybe a librarian can confirm here. i don't think the YA writer people who say "just go to the library" actually read. i think they write fanfic and change the names so they can publish it on amazon, and probably read free copies of the same genre given to them by their writer acquaintances for the purpose of blurbing covers, but anyone who has actually reads extensively and broadly, who has had to depend on a library for their media provision, would know you can never "just go to a library" for everything either literally or metaphorically outside of maybe three cities in the world. libraries "having everything" is a liberal fantasy that i wish was true

edit: im not blaming the library for ANY of this. it is a funding issue and politicians do not give a shit about public services and have been systematically attacking libraries for decades. this is not the fault of libraries, librarians, or people who actually support libraries. i am in favor of giving libraries more money and support. all im saying is that the material reality right now is that libraries cannot replace piracy as a way of accessing media and claiming they can is just evidence that you dont actually care that much about media of any kind.

[mta-official]

I just realized I should make a pinned post, so here goes:

Hello! This is the official* Tumblr blog of the Metropolitan Transit Authority, serving New York, New Jersey**, and Connecticut. This blog consists mostly of jokes and interactions with other train blogs, such as @amtrak-official or @penn-central-official. I like and follow from @luxcalibur, so keep that in mind.

Note: This blog is not affiliated with the Metropolitan Transit Authority or the State of New York. Please do not sue me.

Note: The MTA does not provide service to New Jersey outside of a single bus stop.

[magnetictapedatastorage]

full article under the cut

June 12, 2024

By David Wallace-Wells

Opinion Writer

Here is what the indefinite pause on New York City’s congestion pricing program, if it sticks, will cost: 120,000 more cars daily clogging Lower Manhattan’s bumper-to-bumper streets, according to a New York State analysis, and perhaps $20 billion annually in additional lost productivity and fuel and operating costs, as well as health and environmental burdens and a practically unbridgeable budget shortfall for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that will straitjacket an already handicapped agency and imperil dozens of planned necessary capital improvement projects for the city’s aging subway system.

Here is what it gains Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, who announced her unilateral decision about the suspension last week: perhaps slightly better chances for New York Democrats in a couple of fall congressional races. According to reporting, these are especially important to the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, who may still be somewhat embarrassed about his state’s performance in the 2022 elections, when surprise victories for several New York Republicans kept the House of Representatives out of Democratic control. It has also handed the governor several news conferences so bungled, they have made reversing a policy unpopular with voters into a genuine political humiliation.

In her announcement, Hochul emphasized the precarious state of the city’s recovery from the Covid pandemic, but car traffic into Manhattan has returned to prepandemic levels, as has New York City employment, which is now higher than ever before; New York City tourism metrics are barely behind prepandemic records and are expected to surpass them in 2025. Tax coffers have rebounded, too, to the extent that the city canceled a raft of planned budget cuts. The one obvious measure by which the city has not mounted a full pandemic comeback is subway ridership — a measure that congestion pricing would have helped and pausing it is likely to hurt.

In announcing the pause, she also expressed concern for the financial burden the $15 surcharge would impose on working New Yorkers, though the city’s working class was functionally exempted from the toll by a rebate system for those with an annual income of $60,000 or less. In a follow-up news conference, she emphasized a few conversations she’d had with diner owners, who she said expressed anxiety that their business would suffer when commuters wouldn’t drive to their establishments. But each of them was within spitting distance of Grand Central, where an overwhelming share of foot traffic — and commercial value — comes from commuters using mass transit.

Robinson Meyer, a contributing Times Opinion writer, wrote for Heatmap that delaying the plan will be “a generational setback for climate policy in the United States,” adding that “it is one of the worst climate policy decisions made by a Democrat at any level of government in recent memory.” He called it worse than the Mountain Valley Pipeline and the Willow oil project in Alaska — not just because of the direct effect on emissions, though that would be large, but what a pause means for the morale and momentum of any American movement toward a next-generation, climate-conscious urbanism.

For years, the country’s liberals have envied the transformation of London by its Ultra Low Emission Zone, which generates hundreds of millions of pounds annually and quickly cut nitrogen dioxide air pollution in central London by 44 percent from projected levels. And liberals practically salivated over the remaking of Paris by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, whose policies have significantly reduced the number of cars in the city center, cutting nitrogen oxide pollution by 40 percent from 2011 levels, and turned huge swaths of the urban core into a paradise for pedestrians and bikers.

Similar programs have been carried out in Stockholm and Oslo, proving remarkably popular, and while it didn’t exactly seem likely that all the world’s cities were on the verge of leaving behind the car, the fact that any American city was taking the leap looked like a sign that change was possible. There aren’t many places in the United States that could plausibly hope to take even a few steps in the direction of the 15-minute city. But the New York City metro area — which has higher public transportation ridership than the next 16 American cities combined and whose residents account for 45 percent of U.S. commutes by public transit — was the obvious place to try. At least until last week.

To enthusiastic reformers, the reversal was all the more painful because the obvious hurdles had already been cleared. Especially after the Inflation Reduction Act kicked off a frenzied real-world spending spree, progress-minded Democrats have argued about the difficulties of building things at anywhere close to the necessary speed, taking aim at a bundle of obstacles to more rapid development and build-out of green infrastructure — rampant NIMBYism, burdens of environmental review, permitting and zoning challenges, social justice litmus tests. It had taken a few decades, but congestion pricing had jumped through all the necessary hoops. The everything bagel had been slathered with cream cheese and was ready to serve. And Hochul put the kibosh on it anyway.

The cash-strapped Metropolitan Transportation Authority has spent $500 million developing the system and installing its hardware, and the inevitable shortfall now means a much less ambitious future for the agency, to trust its spokesmen, which is now probably incapable of extending the Second Avenue Subway or undertaking the Interborough Express project, which promised to revitalize huge corridors of Brooklyn and Queens and give more than 100,000 New Yorkers more viable public transit commutes. (Hochul says the pause won’t imperil those projects.) The pause may even be illegal, as State Senator Liz Krueger argued last week in The Daily News.

But for all its inscrutability, Hochul’s reversal follows a recent partisan pattern, a sort of centrist backlash among establishment Democrats and their supporters against left-wing causes and their supporters in the run-up to the November elections, partly as a matter of electoral strategy and perhaps as part of a pre-emptive blame game in anticipation of Republican victories, possibly including Donald Trump’s re-election.

The backlash is perhaps most visible in commentary from liberal pundits, who in recent weeks have tried to blame the party’s left wing for President Biden’s dicey re-election prospects, though the most obvious drags on those chances are his age and voters’ perceptions about the cost of living. At the national level it is best embodied by Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who rarely speaks at length but happily seizes opportunities to punch left, particularly toward those protesting the war in Gaza. More locally, it is embodied by Mayor Eric Adams, who won election in 2021 as a kind of centrist backlash candidate — hailed at the time as a political counterweight to progressive candidates like Maya Wiley and progressive forces like the Black Lives Matter movement and perhaps even as a future face of the Democratic Party — and whose approval ratings are now lower than any other New York City mayor in decades, even as the city has inarguably bounced back from its pandemic trough on his watch.

Hochul has been a less visible and less polarizing figure than Adams. But every time she has poked her head up and made national news lately, it has been in the same spirit, to roll her eyes at or pick fights with those to her left. In February she mocked critics of Israel’s war in Gaza by saying, “If Canada someday ever attacked Buffalo, I’m sorry, my friends, there would be no Canada the next day.” (She later apologized.) In March she suddenly deployed the state’s National Guard to patrol the subways, on the same day that Adams boasted about rapid declines in subway crime. And now on congestion pricing, just weeks after bragging she was proud to stand up to “set in their ways” drivers, she reversed course out of apparent deference to those drivers and their outsize political clout. The state government and the transit authority have hard-earned reputations for ineffectuality, and faced with an opportunity to do something big, the governor chose to retreat and do nothing instead.

“It makes me think about the fight for progress, and how any real progress in the moment seems impossible,” wrote Cooper Lund in a melancholy reflection he called “Who Gets to Be a Constituent?” Nine times as many people ride public transit into the central business district each day as take cars there. There are 11 times as many people living in Manhattan who breathe the air polluted by automobile exhaust each day as there are who drive there for work. And those who work in the greater New York area lose 113 million hours each year to traffic, at an estimated cost of nearly $800 for each commuter. “With N.Y.C.’s reputation you’d think that the Democrats would be eager to uphold the city as an example of what a liberal, multicultural society is capable of, and to foster it,” Lund went on. “But both the mayor or the governor proved that they don’t have any interest in that. Instead, the things that would improve the city are pushed away for the suburban lifestyle that both parties seem to agree represents their actual constituency.”

A generation ago, it was common for informed liberals to lament the transformation of the country’s densest and most walkable city into a traffic-snarled carscape at the hand of Robert Moses in the mid-20th century. But despite the rise of YIMBYism and a sort of conventional wisdom new urbanism, the city hasn’t become meaningfully less automobile-centric since. More cars traveled into Lower Manhattan in 1990 than in 1981, more came in 2000 than in 1990, and although the rates dropped a bit after Sept. 11, they were still slightly higher in 2010 than they were 20 years before and have remained pretty flat since. Decades into new urbanism, the country’s most walkable city has just about the same number of cars driving into its in-demand downtown.

Taxi registrations doubled from 1980 to 2010 and then grew even more rapidly through the Uber years that followed, so that there are now five times as many taxis registered in the city as there were nearly 40 years ago and two and a half times as many taxi rides. (The difference between the two figures suggests that a pretty big portion of the increase is empty cars idling or cruising without fares.) Since 2006, excess congestion has grown by 53 percent, and since 2010, the average travel speed in the central business district has fallen 22 percent, from a crawl of 9.1 miles per hour to a glacial 7.1. I can comfortably run faster.

As has been the case everywhere, the kind and size of cars in New York have changed, too. When I was growing up there in the 1980s and ’90s, I could look out at the streetscape and see things other than trucks and supersized sport utility vehicles — trees, storefronts, pedestrians on the opposite curb, each of them visible because the streets were much less packed with automobiles the size of small elephants. Parking spots were not walls of S.U.V.s back then but lines of sedans, nestled along the sidewalk, it seemed, almost like a string of small boats puttering by the boarding platform of a flume ride. I remember climbing down into cars then, even as a 9- or 10-year-old. As a grown-up, I’m now climbing up, into what feels more like a cockpit and an imperious claim to the street.

My parents and in-laws remember a different kind of city still, the kind where you could park right in front of restaurants, play stickball in the street with infrequent interruptions, ride bikes down the cobblestones of SoHo and see only the occasional delivery truck along the way. I never knew that world, except through photographs and the haze of secondhand nostalgia. By the time I came around, the streets were already pretty full of cars. But even so, the city as a whole didn’t seem to belong to them yet. Certainly they didn’t seem to be holding its future hostage.

[mariacallous]

On Wednesday, New York governor Kathy Hochul shocked the state and the country when she announced she would indefinitely shelve New York City’s long-in-development congestion pricing scheme. The policy, in the works since 2007 and set to begin in just three weeks, was designed to relieve car traffic, curb road deaths, and send a billion dollars in annual funding to the city’s transit system by charging drivers up to $15 a day to enter the busiest parts of Manhattan, with rates highest at “peak hours.” (Truck drivers and some bus drivers could have paid more than $36 daily.) At heart, the idea is straightforward, if controversial: Make people pay for the roads they use.

But congestion pricing was also set to become one of the most ambitious American climate projects, maybe ever. It was meant to coax people out of their gas-guzzling vehicles, which are alone responsible for some 22 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions, and onto subways, buses, bicycles, and their feet. Policymakers, researchers, and environment nerds the world over have concluded that, even if the transition to electric vehicles were to happen at lightning speed, avoiding the worst of climate change is going to require fewer cars overall.

Now, the movement has seen a serious setback, in a country where decades of car-centric planning decisions mean many can only imagine getting around in one very specific way. Just a few years ago, cities from Los Angeles to San Francisco to Chicago began to study what pricing roads might look like. “Cities were watching to see what would happen in New York,” says Sarah Kaufman, who directs the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation. “Now they can call it a ‘failure’ because it didn't go through.”

On Wednesday, Hochul said her about-face had to do with concerns about the city’s post-pandemic recovery. The congestion pricing plan faced lawsuits from New Jersey, where commuters argue they would face unfair financial burdens. Cameras and gantries, acquired and positioned to charge drivers while entering the zone, have already been installed in Manhattan, to the tune of some $500 million.

Kaufman, who says she was “flabbergasted” by Governor Hochul’s sudden announcement, says she is not sure where the policy goes from here. “If we can’t make courageous, and potentially less popular, moves in a city that has transit readily accessible, then I’m wondering where this can happen,” she says.

Other global cities have seen success with congestion schemes. London’s program, implemented in 2003, is still controversial among residents, but the government reports it has cut traffic in the targeted zone by a third. One 2020 study suggests the program has reduced pollutants, though exemptions for diesel buses have blunted its emissions effects. Stockholm’s program, launched in 2006, upped the city’s transit ridership, reduced the number of total miles locals traveled by car, and decreased emissions between 10 and 14 percent.

But in New York, the future of the program is unclear, and local politicians are currently scrambling to figure out how to cover the transit budget hole that would result from a last-minute nixing of the fee scheme. The city’s transit system is huge and sprawling: Five million people ride the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s buses and subways, almost double the number that fly every day in the US.

In New York, drivers entering the zone below Manhattan’s 60th Street would have been charged peak pricing of $15, but would have only faced the charge once a day. They would have paid $3.75 for off-peak hours. Taxi and ride-hail trips in the zone would have seen extra fees. After years of controversy and public debate, the state had carved out some congestion charge exemptions: some vehicles carrying people with disabilities would not have been charged, lower-income residents of the zone would have received a tax credit for their tolls; and low-income drivers would have been eligible for a 50 percent discount.

[aryburn-trains]

New York Penn Station by Bob Anderson Via Flickr: Multi-view,New Haven FL9 pair 2013 2010. GG1 4938 approaching Hudson River Tunnel, Long Island fleet standing by. Sept 1967.

[fenrislorsrai]

LASER TRAIN

LASER TRAIN

LASER TRAIN!!!

For transit agencies in the eastern portion of the U.S., the leaves falling off the trees can be a problem for their railways. Leaves have a slippery substance on them called pectin and, when crushed beneath the wheels of a passing train, said pectin can present a hazard to safety and operations by reducing friction between the wheels and rail. This condition can result in flat spots on wheels, higher maintenance costs, unsafe braking and even derailments.   Three different East Coast transit agencies -- Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (MTA) Metro-North Railroad in New York, New Jersey Transit (NJ Transit) in New Jersey and Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) in Philadelphia, Pa., have recently started using new equipment to clean the tracks of pectin to ensure trains continue operating safely and reliably.  The MTA’s Metro-North Railroad uses its laser train to clean the tracks. The laser train was introduced by Long Island Rail Road in 2017 before Metro-North began using the train on a trial basis in 2022. During the pilot, Metro-North Railroad safely cleaned more than 12,000 miles of track with the laser train, which resulted in a 40 percent reduction in slip-slide events.  The train operates on the Hudson Line, the Harlem Line and the New Haven Line and can travel at speeds up to 60 mph. Two three-kilowatt lasers are mounted on each side of the train to put down an approximate 1.2-inch cleaning band.  

LASERS!!!!

also dead at the previous rail cleaner is called "Waterworld".

[drcyrusbortel]

CyberGwen: Midnight Drive

Ship: Miles/Gwen Summary: Gwen and Miles enjoy a quiet drive after the raid in "Jumpoff Point".

=/=

2.1: "Midnight Drive"

The first sweep had taken even longer than expected, and they were both dead tired when they piled into the car. 

Over a century ago, the City of New York had rammed massive elevated highways through every part of the growing megacity in an orgy of destruction - a process that had only been halted by the rail-oriented political machine of the Rapid Transit Development Corporation, which instead had carved a dozen new subway lines (and miscellaneous satellite cities) across the metropolitan area, filled in half the East River and a third of the Hudson, and extended Manhattan all the way past Governor’s Island in a bout of real estate megalomania that had yet to abate. 

For her part, Gwen was quite happy that the City had overcome opposition and forced a highway through the lush greenery of Latourette Park all those years ago, giving their black government SUV a straight shot to Brooklyn.

They turned onto the big road-and-rail suspension bridge over the Narrows, and Gwen stole glances at her partner, silhouetted… attractively… against the glittering supertalls of the LoLo Manhattan Reclamation.

Miles tugged at his collar. “What?”

“Just admiring the view.” Gwen smiled. 

“Oh.” Miles tried to return her smile. 

They slid into the monolithic podium of the big RTDC housing estate, and made their way up to Miles’ apartment, perched high above the Urban Renewal Authority brownfields of the South Brooklyn redevelopment project. 

True to his word, Miles set up the bed while Gwen enjoyed a luxuriant shower, and she collapsed into it without a thought.  

=/=

Author's note: Still grappling with voice and characterization, and figuring out how to weave Miles, Gwen, and the themes and aesthetics of spiderverse into a compelling fic.