New MTA Rules to Encourage Running on the Platform

The MTA announced a new batch of rules yesterday, including a ban on moving between cars. Notably absent: a ban on photography (woo hoo!). The Times explains what’s new:

Subway riders afflicted by broken air-conditioning, foul odors, children selling candy bars for occasionally dubious causes and even the random groper have long sought relief by quickly switching cars.

No more.

Moving between cars – as well as resting one’s feet on the seats, sipping from an open container (even a cup of coffee) and straddling a bicycle while riding the subway – will be prohibited under a new set of passenger rules adopted by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s transit committee yesterday, the first such rule changes since 1994.

While riding between cars is already forbidden, managers at the authority said they wanted to make clear that even quickly darting from one car to another while the train is in motion is dangerous.

There is only one way, they said, to move safely to another car – exiting the train at the next station and then quickly re-entering it, even if passengers making a such a dash could face other perils, like tripping, smashing a finger or losing a purse between rapidly shutting doors.

Ha. Exactly.

The MTA’s full board now must vote on the changes. Apparently there is some dissension about the proposed moving-between-cars rule:

Mark Page, the city’s budget director, who represents Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on the board, observed: “It is, from time to time, convenient to absent oneself from a car or from a particular group of people.”

Let’s put it this way — it is from time to time convenient to absent oneself from a car or from a particular group of people when, say, a big J.O. party is underway on the 3 train:

Riders like Beatrice McCants, 30, said they had faced many such occasions. Ms. McCants, who works as a newspaper distributor in Midtown, said she was riding a Brooklyn-bound No. 3 train Wednesday when a man began masturbating in plain sight. “I thought, ‘I’ve got to get off this train,'” she recalled. “Now I’m going to get a fine for that, for running from a flasher? I won’t pay it!”

Now that’s a quote! (Nice job, Sewell!)

This quote, however, doesn’t help:

“Let’s say you get on the train in the front, but you’re in a hurry, and you need to exit in the back,” offered Manny Guzman, a 15-year-old high school student from East New York, who was observed yesterday moving between two cars on an uptown No. 2 train. “It is unsafe, but I do it all the time.” Banning this practice, he added, “makes no sense.”

No, no, no! Don’t say it’s unsafe! That doesn’t make sense! (Bad job, Sewell!)

The final vote is set to take place tomorrow.

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Quotas — We Have Productivity Goals For That!

If you’ve stepped outside at 8:02 a.m. to find your car towed, this is probably why:

Traffic Enforcement agents don’t have ticket-writing quotas – they have “productivity” goals, police officials insisted yesterday.

“The number of parking summonses which has been issued is certainly part of the overall assessment of their productivity,” Assistant Commissioner Susan Petito said yesterday at a City Council transportation hearing.

Last year, the NYPD’s 1,100 agents issued 5.4 million tickets, carrying fines of about $500 million. At the Transportation Committee hearing, police officials repeatedly sparred with skeptical Council members over whether quotas exist.

“The primary purpose of these ticket-writing agents is to write tickets,” said Transportation Committee Chairman John Liu (D-Queens). “Do you judge them on the number of tickets that they write?”

“No,” said John Valles, head of the NYPD’s Parking Enforcement District. “We judge it by the accuracy of the summonses.” Petito quickly said other performance measures do include productivity.

$500 million, just so you know, is about two-and-a-half times the City of Buffalo’s budget.

Meanwhile, the Times notes the use of “expectations” as opposed to “quotas”:

The city has added hundreds of agents to issue summonses for parking violations. It counts on them to generate more than $500 million for its budget. And it has definite “expectations” for how many tickets they write.

But lest there be any confusion, the city wants New Yorkers to be sure of one thing: Those parking tickets on their windshields are not a result of a quota system.

That was the mixed message the Police Department delivered yesterday to skeptical members of the City Council. Some of them accused the department of imposing a stealth tax on New Yorkers through a concerted ticket blitz in recent years. Police officials denied that accusation, and said they did not force ticket writers to meet numeric goals.

But in careful language, they acknowledged closely tracking the number of tickets issued and using that data to assess the productivity of parking agents. Chopping his way through a semantic thicket, Councilman John C. Liu of Queens, chairman of the Transportation Committee, said the police were, in effect, admitting to an undeclared quota system.

And Always Tip Your Cabbie

The New Yorker’s Ben McGrath attends an off-duty book party in honor of a publication about neoliberalism in the taxicab industry (don’t ask — that’s not what’s interesting here) and discovers what cabbies hate most about their clientele:

Exactly what the full range of party chatter was is tough to say, because a variety of languages were spoken, but an interloper, with a little persistence, was able to discern that most drivers would probably disagree with the cheery characterization of the yellow cab (made at a recent design forum at Parsons) as “New York’s movable public space.” A fairer, if blunter, slogan might be: “Our workspace, where you annoy and disrespect us.”

“They treat the car like they’re slobs,” a driver whose handle on the Bengal Cabbie Association’s CB radio channel is Babar said of his passengers. He added that those who sit in the front seat, and who make radio requests, are usually drunk. Drunk passengers occasionally throw up, and the smell lingers for weeks.

Said interloper (McGrath) learns more; for example, who knew that multiple stops were a problem? Not I:

“There are so many things,” Rizwan Raja, a Pakistani driver, said, rattling off a list of his pet peeves: putting one’s feet up on the partition, smoking, crossing the street lackadaisically. Requesting multiple stops is also frowned upon. “These people come out of expensive, posh bars, where one beer is twenty dollars, but they make groups together so they can share a taxi and save a couple of dollars,” Raja said. “‘Three stops’—that really, really blows me off.” Tips, ever since the fare increase, have been meagre: “Sometimes forty cents, sometimes twenty cents.”

Raja went on, “The worst is when they ask, ‘Where are you from?’ Once you answer that question, then it’s ‘What is the relationship between Al Qaeda and the Pakistani government?'” Raja, who says he is asked that question “almost every day,” has recommended that his passengers see “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

The Relentless March of Progress

The single-screen Beekman Theatre on the Upper East Side is being bulldozed to make way for progress:

Immortalized in “Annie Hall,” Woody Allen’s 1977 romantic comedy, the 53-year-old upper East Side movie house – one of the last single-screen theaters in the city – closed for good last night.

A throwback to the premultiplex era of neighborhood cinemas, the Beekman, on Second Ave. and 66th St., is being cleared to make way for a breast cancer treatment center.

. . .

“This is an assault on the character of what makes New York wonderful,” said George Reisz, 56, a nearby resident. “Some day, there’ll be nothing left.”

Starbucks, McDonald’s, Home Depot, breast cancer treatment centers . . . where will it end? Sloan-Kettering must be stopped!

But How Did The Dodos Taste?

From a Times article about the dearth of solid, affordable one-star restaurants in Manhattan:

The affordable high-quality restaurants that were once so common in Manhattan are not quite dodos, but rather like kakapos, ground parrots that are endangered on the island of their birth. Like the kakapo, they have been transported from their natural habitat to other terrain. In the restaurants’ case, that place is Brooklyn.

Trust me, it makes more sense when you read the whole article, but not total sense . . .