. . .thanks to the economic contributions of Center Moriches and Bridgeport:

New data show the New York metropolitan area is the largest contributor to America’s gross domestic product, but its position at the top of the national ranking may be due more to the inclusion of neighboring economic powerhouses such as Greenwich and Stamford, Conn., than its own economic strength.

New York City actually is responsible for less than half of all economic activity in its own metropolitan area, the data show. According to the city comptroller’s office, its economic activity constitutes 43% of the region’s total economy.

. . .

The New York City metropolitan area, which includes parts of Connecticut up to Bridgeport, as well as Long Island and northern New Jersey, accounts for 6.6% of the country’s population while contributing 9.1%, or $1.129 trillion, of the country’s GDP.

The Los Angeles metropolitan area came in second place, contributing 6.3% of U.S. GDP or $788.9 billion. Although the New York region has 7% more people than the Los Angeles area, New York contributed 43% more to the country’s GDP.

San Francisco has homeless people and New York gets bees:

Thousands of years of evolution and cultivation have led honeybees to seek certain qualities in a home — the ideal being something like a hollowed-out wooden tree limb.

A few hundred years of construction by humans in New York City, it turns out, have resulted in an abundance of structures that mimic the conditions bees like best — from the water towers that dot the rooftops to the cornices and overhangs that adorn the buildings.

And each year about this time, thousands of bees swarm to those sites in the city, setting up hives and causing a certain amount of apprehension among the people who spot them.

Many calls are made to the Police Department, and are directed to Officer Anthony Planakis, 46, a beekeeper in his free time and for the last 14 years the department’s in-house expert on the subject.

When Officer Planakis joined the department in 1994 he had to fill out a form listing his areas of interest and expertise, and he put beekeeping — a skill learned from his father — at the top of the list

“New York City provides endless places that make great hives,” he says.

On Tuesday, for the second time in two days, Officer Planakis was dispatched to an apartment building in the Bronx, on the corner of Crotona Avenue and 182nd Street, where a swarm of bees had congregated to build a hive.

On Monday, dressed in a protective suit and mask, he had sprayed sugar water to weigh down the bees clustered on a corner of the three-story brick building. He then brushed the queen bee and some 6,000 of her loyal protectors into a brown box and carted them off to his personal hives in Newtown, Conn.

. . .

The largest hive he was called to remove in New York was in a forested area off the Moshulu Parkway in the Bronx, where someone had been keeping bees illegally.

“There were 12 separate hives, each with at least 60,000 bees,” he said.

The keeper was never found.

Although raising bees in New York City has long been a violation of the city health code, the rooftops make an ideal place to keep honeybees and there is a thriving illegal bee scene.

The good news is you get a view from above right down the avenue. The bad news is you have to cut back all those damn trees:

Howard H. Roberts Jr., the president of New York City Transit, said on Thursday that he is considering bringing the two-level buses back to Fifth Avenue.

Mr. Roberts said his interest was based on simple economics. Double-deckers can carry about as many people as the longer bus that the transit agency now uses, according to Joseph Smith, senior vice president for the agency’s bus operations. But they cost less to maintain because they lack the complicated connector and accordion apparatus that links the two portions of an articulated bus.

Those who rode the double-deckers in their heyday have fond memories.

“Back in the days when money was important, it was great to take a date out and you could have a nice ride up and a nice ride back on a summer evening,” said William J. Ronan, 95, who first rode the buses when he came to New York during his student days in the 1930s (three decades later, he became the first chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority).

“It was sort of a genteel way to travel and perfectly respectable,” he said. “Between that and the Staten Island Ferry you could have a wonderful date.”

Mr. Ronan said the seats in front on the upper deck were considered the best ones. “You tried to get up in the front seats, which were great because you had the view up the avenue,” he said.

. . .

Mr. Ronan tried to bring the double-decker buses back in 1976, when the transportation authority bought eight of them from a British company to be used in a pilot program. [Transit spokesman Charles F.] Seaton said the buses had mechanical problems and were off the road after about two years.

But there were other problems, including on the continuation of some Fifth Avenue routes where the buses travel along Riverside Drive.

“The problem then was all the trees along Riverside Drive had grown such that the branches were in the way of the bus,” said Robert A. Olmsted, who worked at the authority with Mr. Ronan. If the buses are brought back, he said, “they’d have to do some clearance runs and trim some trees, which may upset some people, too.”

Seventy years after the Sixth Avenue el ceased operations, the elevated train is back. Sort of:

The people don’t always ride in a hole in the ground. Those aboard the No. 1 train in Lower Manhattan are now riding part of the way through the air.

There is no view to admire. The trains are still well below street level, on tracks running within a box-shaped concrete tunnel that bisects the World Trade Center site. But instead of soil, the south half of that 975-foot stretch of subway rests on a newly built network of brawny steel beams atop a forest of minipiles reaching down to bedrock.

And in recent weeks, workers have dug out so much soil from around those minipiles that they have created an underpass beneath the subway large enough for construction machinery to pass through. In the reconstruction of the trade center, it is a significant milestone of east meeting west.

Gradually, the entire volume under the subway box will be cleared of soil, until the section from Liberty to Vesey Streets is structurally more like a viaduct than a tunnel.

That will open up nearly 40 feet of vertical space under the tracks. And given how many purposes the site must serve, every cubic inch is precious.

The subway box will eventually be an integral part of the larger, multilevel subterranean structure at the trade center site. Meanwhile, it must be supported on a sturdy but temporary structure while everything is built around it.

Yes, there are times when it just might be better to get out and walk:

Riding the New York City Marathon on the city’s mass-transit system was almost as grueling as running it.

It took seven buses and three subway trains to trek through five boroughs along roughly the same 26.2-mile route some 40,000 runners will follow this Sunday.

My race began on the S53 bus in Staten Island, and like the start of the actual marathon, there was little space to breathe.

I had to duck errant elbows and fists, and thanks to one of my fellow riders, I was overcome by the odor of a thousand people sweating.

. . .

If I made every single connection, I could complete the marathon in three hours, 45 minutes — a respectable finish an hour quicker than my running time last year.

. . .

I crossed the finish line in Central Park in four hours, 57 minutes — two minutes slower than I ran the race in 2006.

Of that time, I spent three hours, 15 minutes riding buses and subways and another one hour, 42 minutes waiting for them.

Along the route that took me on seven buses and three subways, I swiped my MetroCard 10 times.

There’s also a low-tech version of this, which is called a bus schedule:

The wait for a bus may seem more predictable at 11 stops where New York City Transit has begun testing electronic signs that show when the next one is due.

The signs relay information from a satellite positioning system that has been installed as part of a pilot project on 168 buses that operate on several routes in Manhattan. The routes include the city’s busiest, the M15, which runs on First and Second Avenues, where seven of the signs have been placed.

Under the system, each bus communicates location data to satellites, which transmit the information to a center in Brooklyn. From there, a radio signal goes to the electronic signs, which post the number of minutes until the next bus.

Inferiority complex, anyone? The results are in on the race to number two:

The Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park will reshape Manhattan’s skyline and force a revision of the record books that catalog the city’s giants.

The 54-story building stands 945 feet tall, but tops out at 1,200 feet with the addition of an ornamental spire, inheriting the title of New York’s second-tallest skyscraper. It was held by the Chrysler Building since Sept. 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers were destroyed and the Empire State Building returned to the top spot.

“The building is topped off already,” said Jordan Barowitz, director of external affairs of the Durst Organization, the real estate development firm that partnered with BofA to erect the building. “The last piece of steel went in a few weeks ago and the first tenants will arrive in May 2008.”

One Bryant Park doesn’t break any records without its decorative spire, but the use of such a device to raise a tower’s bragging rights isn’t out of the ordinary.

That the 1 train provides the best service, according to the Straphangers Campaign, is reason enough to stop you in your tracks (ugh). (If it’s so good, why bother with that fancy new train station then? Maybe because 1 train service actually sucks?)

So then it must be just a big joke that the G is rated “most reliable”? As in, it’s the most reliably sucky train? Read the report (.pdf) to find that the “G line ranks tied for 5th place out of the 22 subway lines.” No kidding!

The Times explains Manhattan’s good old steam heat and what to look for to avoid trouble:

The gray mist that rises from manholes when water touches the steam pipes below seems as much a part of the New York landscape as hot dog vendors.

But five days after a steam pipe exploded in Midtown, leaving one person dead and injuring dozens of others, New Yorkers had reason to be apprehensive about the vapor, particularly after heavy rains yesterday produced fresh trails of steam from manholes around the city.

Bob Flanagan, a 29-year veteran of Con Edison’s steam division, was particularly careful yesterday as he circled the city in search of vapor plumes, which might indicate a problem with the steam pipes below.

Because water collecting inside a steam pipe or seeping into one has been a cause of previous pipe ruptures, the company routinely checks manholes for vapor after rainstorms and pumps out water that reaches the height of the pipes.

There are several possible causes of vapor streams. One is rainwater, which vaporizes when it hits the hot pipes. Sometimes water mains leak onto steam pipes. And Con Edison sometimes intentionally lets off steam during underground construction.

“I’m looking for something over one foot high but with a little force behind it,” Mr. Flanagan said, before driving his minivan past a swirl of steam at the intersection of East Broadway and Pike Street in Lower Manhattan. Without a map, he drove over the steam mains beneath South Street, Water Street, Broadway and smaller roads, pointing to buildings that buy steam from Con Edison.

Every few minutes, he spotted a “whispering” vapor stream too thin to worry about. But about five times during his one-hour loop, he found a manhole that “gushed” steam strong enough that he radioed a dispatcher, who then sent a crew to pump out the water accumulating below.

Mr. Flanagan is one of 10 Con Edison supervisors who travel the city streets after rainstorms. There are also 12 two-person crews around Manhattan that pump out rainwater.

The New York Times’ William Neuman explains in great detail why he was late to work yesterday:

The beating of a butterfly’s wings, it is said, can lead to a hurricane an ocean away. And a break in a Manhattan subway rail, though it may lack poetry, can really foul up the morning trip to work in Brooklyn and Queens.

That is what happened at 6:55 a.m. yesterday, when the operator of a Queens-bound N train leaving the Lexington Avenue station radioed a dispatcher to say that the train was being delayed by a red signal that should have been green.

For many riders on the N, R and W trains, that was the beginning of a morning journey that was more headache than head-to-work.

. . .

The radio call from the N train went to a dispatcher at the Rail Control Center, the subway system’s computerized nerve center in Midtown. The dispatcher told the train operator to go slowly past the signal.

A call then went out to a pair of track maintainers based at 57th Street and Seventh Avenue, two stops from the problem.

They jumped on a train and by 7:15 a.m. were at work at the Lexington Avenue station, according to John Johnson, the Rail Control Center’s assistant chief. They discovered a break in a rail about 1,200 feet from the east edge of the platform.

It was not unexpected. A red signal of the type that stopped the N train is often a result of cracked or broken rails, according to Antonio Cabrera, director of track engineering. That is because electrical power for the signal system flows through the rails, and a crack can break the circuit to the signal, sending it into its default red position.

“It was a clean break, like if you cut it with a knife,” said Mr. Cabrera after reading a report about the work. “It was up and down. It looked like a joint exactly.”

The cause of the break was not clear, Mr. Cabrera said, although the cold weather may have been a factor.

The metal contracts in the cold, he said, increasing stress on the rail, and small cracks can turn into large ones.

Once the break was discovered, Mr. Johnson said, dispatchers at the control center halted Queens-bound trains heading toward the Lexington Avenue station.

Now workers had two separate problems. The break had to be repaired, and trains had to be diverted.

A repair crew was called in and by 8:20 a.m. had set to work. Power to the third rail was cut on that section of track.

Using a large drilling machine, a crew of three workers and a supervisor drilled holes in the rail on either side of the break, Mr. Cabrera said. Then they fitted metal bars to both sides of the rail and bolted them in place. At 10:15 a.m. an empty subway train made a test run over the mended rail. And at 10:20 service resumed under the East River to Queens, just over three hours from the time the broken rail was discovered.

The question “How are you getting reception in here?” is answered:

Thanks to advancements in cell phone technology and an ever-growing number of cellular towers, New Yorkers are increasingly able to get a signal in the subways even though the system isn’t wired.

“I talk whenever I can,” said Lateik Howard, 23, of Bedford-Stuyvesant, who often uses his phone while in the Jay St. station in downtown Brooklyn. “Cell phones are a necessity now.”

“I never used it in the subway before because I didn’t think I could,” said Vincent Palange, 77, staring with surprise at his working T-Mobile phone on the 66th St. No. 1 platform. “It’s ringing!”

With stations and tunnels that get reception scattered around the city, technology experts believe several conditions are necessary to allow the previously impossible underground phone call.

“The proximity of an antenna and the depth of a station has a lot to do with it,” said Nicole Lee, an associate editor who specializes in cell phones for CNET.com. “Certainly, the closer you are to street level, the better chance you have of getting a signal, especially with a newer phone.”

A number of subway lines, particularly the 2/3 line along the upper West Side into Brooklyn and the 4/5 along the upper East Side, can support a signal from the platform, and for a short time — up to 30 seconds, the Daily News found — in train tunnels.

And if you thought Rep. Weiner couldn’t possibly find some way to grandstand in this piece, you underestimate his special ability to do so:

Many straphangers and pols have pushed for the enhanced service so riders can call 911.

“Without emergency cell service, you can’t say something if you see something,” said Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn, Queens).

Nice work!

After two students broke a non-Guinness approved record for speediest trip on the entire subway system back in August, another group enters the record book with an official time. Moral — taking express trains may not save much time after all:

With their chins held high and their bladders full, the high school buddies waltzed out of the No. 2 train at 241st St. in the Bronx and basked in the attention lavished on them by a group of nearly two dozen loved ones and reporters.

“It’s really hard to describe what it’s like to plan something for so long, and then not only to achieve it, but to break the record by such a solid margin,” gushed Bill Amarosa, 28, after his team swept through the station at 4:37 p.m.

The group of friends managed to stop at all of the system’s 468 stations in a time of 24 hours, 54 minutes and 3 seconds — beating the mark set in 1989 by nearly an hour and a half.

In August, two students blazed through the length of the subway system in slightly more than 24 hours, but their feat was not counted by Guinness because they failed to stop at every station.

. . .

Their journey began just after 3:30 p.m. Thursday.

Along the way, the six men were sustained by energy bars, McDonald’s hamburgers delivered to them by devoted friends and the unwavering support of MTA workers and fellow straphangers.

A conductor on a downtown B train announced yesterday morning: “Everybody, you should know you’re riding on the train with the guys who are trying to break the record.”

Actually, on second thought it’s not really at all like Nigeria*:

It evoked what-might-have-been comparisons to a 1985 accident on Staten Island.

The explosion of a gasoline pipeline in Nigeria on Monday killed 265 people.

On Sept. 23, 1985, a backhoe operator working on the Buckeye Pipeline accidentally severed a valve, which caused high-octane jet fuel to geyser 60 feet above Victory Boulevard near North Gannon Avenue in Willowbrook.

Miraculously, nobody was killed. And there was only one injury.

The jet fuel, which travels underneath Staten Island from New Jersey to LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy airports, never ignited.

In the 15 minutes it took firefighters to respond and shut down the pipeline, 75,000 gallons of jet fuel had gushed out of the line.

. . .

The Buckeye pipeline system — comprising two 12-inch lines — carries more than 8 million gallons of fuel to the city every day with few problems, Haase said

“I don’t think people should be concerned,” said Haase, explaining that the 14-mile pipeline is constantly patrolled by vehicle and by foot, and “leak detection and location systems” automatically shut down both pipes when a leak is detected.

. . .

The twin Buckeye pipelines — and another major pipeline, the Transcontinental Pipeline — enter Staten Island from Carteret and Linden, N.J., at points along the West and South Shores and run underground near the Staten Island Expressway before exiting in Rosebank by the Alice Austen House.

Besides transporting jet fuel, the Buckeye pipeline system carries gasoline and home-heating fuel oil to storage yards in Brooklyn.

The Transcontinental Pipeline, meanwhile, carries natural gas from the Gulf Coast, by way of the borough and New York Harbor, to facilities in New York City.

Calls to Tulsa, Okla.-based Williams Companies, owner of the Transcontinental Pipeline, were not returned.

A spider web of pipes carries natural gas and fuel across the borough, including about 15 minor pipelines that touch Staten Island as they carry products from Linden and Carteret to Bayonne. Also, the Colonial Pipeline, which runs to the Northeast from Gulf Coast oil refineries, ends at Kinder Morgan Staten Island, formerly Port Mobil.

*See, for example.

The last mechanical parking meter was taken out of commission yesterday, in a heavily attended ceremony:

The last New York City mechanical parking meter — an emblem of street life, object of driver frustration and source of fascination for children since 1951 — was withdrawn from service yesterday.

The demise of the mechanical meter was painless but not swift. Since 1995, when the city began using battery-powered digital meters and quickly found them to be more accurate, reliable and vandal-resistant than the older spring-loaded devices, the days of the mechanical meter have been numbered.

By the start of this year, the mechanical models made up only 2,000 of the 62,000 single-space meters in the city.

Yesterday morning, in a somber but unpretentious ceremony on the southwest corner of West 10th Street and Surf Avenue in Coney Island, Brooklyn, the last one was retired.

Fifteen employees of the City Department of Transportation watched as the meter was lifted out of its iron casing at 10:25 a.m. (The mechanical and digital meters both fit the same casing, which includes the transparent plastic display.) A new digital meter was slipped into its place, ready to take quarters.

“The world changes,” the transportation commissioner, Iris Weinshall, said by telephone. “Just as the subway token went, now the manual meter has gone.”

Ms. Weinshall admitted to a measure of nostalgia. “A lot of our employees feel very connected to these meters,” she said. “This type of meter will go into museums, just like other memorabilia of the city.”

Ms. Weinshall, 53, recalled that as a child in Midwood, Brooklyn, her father, a cabdriver, would use his taxi to run errands on weekends. “Whenever my father would park, it was really a thrill to put the coin in the meter and turn that little handle,” she said.

Yes, what a thrill.

In other news, the most prolific Times writer, like, ever again shows up his slacker colleagues by going the extra mile, as it were:

The first parking meter was introduced in Oklahoma City in 1935. After a trial run, meters were introduced in New York City on Sept. 19, 1951, to ease congestion — and provide revenue.

“It’s just another way of getting money out of people,” the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson grumbled at the time as an official dropped a dime into the first meter, on West 125th Street.

Mechanical meters work like wind-up clocks, with gears and springs. The original meters had no handles, according to Stephen Kerney, a meter-repair supervisor. Coins activated the devices, but, like old watches, the meters had to be wound every week, by a worker using a detachable handle.

Eventually, handles were installed, but they promptly became targets of vandalism.

“People would just knock the handles off using a hammer, to break the meters so they could park for free,” said Theodore R. Collins, chief of meter collections.

Other mischief-makers inserted gum, paper or foil into the coin slot. Still others — cheap drivers and confused tourists — inserted metal slugs or foreign coins. So many metal slugs accumulated in the meters that the city took to burying them at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. The city sold the foreign coins to collectors.

The city stopped buying mechanical meters about 10 years ago. Since then, as the meters were retired, they were disassembled, their parts used to repair other meters.

From a heyday of 69,000 on the streets in the late 1980s, the city has fewer than 5,000 intact mechanical meters now, all in storage. They will be sold for scrap or sold as mementos, said Michael Pipitone, director of field services at the parking bureau.

Some writers — even Times writers — just crib from the press release. Not Chan!

Now about those mechanical subway switches . . . (and just guess who wrote that article, too!)

The “Rail-fan Window” is slowly being phased out by the MTA:

Rachael Lambert, a 24-year-old office worker and part-time student from Howard Beach, Queens, took a practiced stance on Tuesday at the head of a J train that was clattering eastward across the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn. Peering out the scratched window at the front of the train, she offered in her slight Midwestern twang a running commentary on the view.

“You see the green-yellow?” she said, pointing to a pair of signal lights beside the elevated tracks. “We’re going, but we’re being diverted to the middle track.”

A few minutes later, the train reached one of Ms. Lambert’s favorite spots, near the Myrtle Avenue station, where the M line veers northward across the J line, and in doing so crosses a spaghetti-like tangle of rails.

“It’s great in winter,” she said. “When they’re afraid the switches are going to freeze, there are little pilot lights on them, and they light them, and it looks like the tracks are on fire.”

But Ms. Lambert’s is a dying pastime. Over the last few decades, and with increasing speed, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been phasing out cars with publicly accessible windows in front, a feature that is often called the rail-fan window because of its appeal to subway buffs. In 2000, nearly half of all cars had such windows, according to Charles Seaton, a spokesman for New York City Transit. This year, they appear in only about one-fifth of the fleet’s roughly 6,200 cars.

And over the next decade, rail-fan windows will probably disappear entirely. A new model of car that lacks the rail-fan window is currently being tested on the A and N lines; the city has ordered 660 of the cars, set to arrive in 2008, and has an option to buy an additional 900 or so.

MTA mapmakers battle it out in the geekiest of geeky subjects:

One day not long ago, in a sunlit apartment on the Upper West Side, John Tauranac could be found examining a large, taped-together draft of a subway map.

Mr. Tauranac, a 66-year-old New Yorker with mussed gray-black hair and gold-rimmed glasses, used to design maps for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, until he was, as he put it, “declared redundant” in 1987.

The draft on his coffee table, published in June, differed from the M.T.A.’s current map in obvious ways. It had separate pages for daytime and late-night service, and stops were marked with tiny box-enclosed letters that interrupted the line. Like Mr. Tauranac himself, it was chatty: in the bottom left-hand corner was a well-written little guide to the subway system that began, “The coin of the realm is the MetroCard.”

. . .

Then a tall, fierce-browed Italian graphic designer named Massimo Vignelli entered the picture. In 1972, Mr. Vignelli designed a completely new schematic map for the M.T.A., one that showed New York’s subway routes as rich, contrasting stripes of color, marching in lock step across a white background, and turning only at 45- or 90-degree angles. In contrast to the brilliance of the subway routes, aboveground New York was almost invisible: the outlines of the boroughs were stubby and squared-off; the parks were gray boxes; and the water was tan.

The map defiantly ignored the city’s geography: the Broadway line was shown crossing the Eighth Avenue line at 42nd Street (they actually cross at Columbus Circle); Bowling Green appeared above Rector Street (it’s below); and Central Park was a small square rather than a tall rectangle.

“Of course I know Central Park is rectangular and not square,” Mr. Vignelli said the other day, sitting at a green marble table in his studio on East 67th Street. “Of course I know the park is green, and not gray. Who cares? You want to go from Point A to Point B, period. The only thing you are interested in is the spaghetti.”

As it turned out, New Yorkers were interested in more than the spaghetti. Almost as soon as Mr. Vignelli’s map arrived at stations, people started complaining about its failure to describe the city’s geography. Tourists were getting off the subway at the bottom of Central Park and trying to stroll to the top, for example, expecting a 30-minute walk.

Mr. Tauranac, who at the time was writing guide books for the M.T.A., criticized the Vignelli map for throwing out what he called the “cartographic verities.” “You can go to any kid in grammar school and ask, ‘What color is water?’” In falsetto, he mimicked the response: “‘Water’s blue.’ ‘What color are parks?’ ‘Parks are green.’”

. . .

Neither Mr. Tauranac nor Mr. Vignelli was eager to revisit the fight. Nonetheless, Mr. Vignelli offered a parting thought. “Look what these barbarians have done,” he said as he examined his copy of the current map. “All these curves, all this whispering-in-the-ear of balloons. It’s half-naturalist and half-abstract. It’s a mongrel.”

See also: The non-mongrel 1974 Subway Map.

The Queens Gazette decodes asphalt graffiti:

Most native New Yorkers know the scrawls mean their streets or sidewalks are about to be torn up by some municipal agency or by the cable company, but few know which agency the colors represent.

Before the first shovel goes into the ground in any repair or development project, city homeowners, architects and developers are required to perform a survey to determine the location of “underground facilities.”

The surveys are performed by workers dubbed “locaters”, who measure and mark the distance of water, gas, electric and cable lines that lie precariously close to projects requiring excavation, a representative of the City Department of Design and Construction said.

A red mark denotes an electric project dealing with power lines, cables, conduit and lighting cables, Tony DeRoma, a manager at NY 1 Underground, a private firm hired by the city to provide project markings using New York’s Uniform Color Code, said. Yellow refers to gas, natural gas, oil and steam utilities. Orange markings refer to alarm and cable systems. Blue markings mean the job is related to water mains and other potable water systems. Pink paint is used to mark for temporary surveys-a “preliminary mark”, DeRoma said.

Markings in green paint mean a street is in line for new sewers or a new drainage system, and white paint indicates an “imminent excavation” near the marking.

Interesting, but what’s new here? In short, purple:

The city recently added a new color to the spectrum of its Uniform Color Code, DeRoma said. Purple markings refer to reclaimed water systems, irrigation and slurry lines, which could mean that work is about to begin on lines connected to a nearby car wash.

The color purple indicates water rated a degree below drinkable, but usable by a private business through a “holding tank.” The water, though “non-drinkable,” can be used in irrigation systems or in a filtered system that takes out suds, making it perfect for use by a car wash, DeRoma said. Such systems must be drained and maintained on a scheduled basis-a process that requires excavation.

Don’t ever let them tell you that it doesn’t save time to board cars close to the stairwells because it does:

At 6:06 a.m. yesterday, 24 hours and 2 minutes after setting off on their quest to pass by all 468 subway stations, Dan Green and Donald Badaczewski pulled in to the end of the No. 6 line — a full hour faster than the record two other pals set in 1998.

“I feel satisfied, I feel tired, and I can’t think straight,” said a yawny Green, 26. “I just wanted to get the hell off of the train.”

First on the list of things to do was a bathroom break, followed closely by strong coffee.

After traveling all of the 230 miles covered by the train system in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens, the new subway champions were greeted by Badaczewski’s girlfriend, Chris Kelly, and a bevy of TV cameras.

“I know this sounds really weird, but I’m so proud of them,” said Kelly, 24, who was waiting with a hug, balloons, and a sign proclaiming victory.

She also bore gifts of burritos and water for the weary champions.

Early in the evening before, the duo was running about 40 minutes behind schedule after boarding slow trains to Astoria and the Bronx.

But a few lucky late-night transfers and unexpected shuttle service to Bay Ridge had them back on track by 4 a.m.

After a sprint up the stairs at the Lexington Ave./53rd St. station to catch an uptown 4, the last leg of the journey had arrived. The pair transferred to a 6 at 125th St. and cruised into Pelham Bay Park before the sun came up.

Former college roommates, Green and Badaczewski, 24, planned their trip so meticulously as to know which train cars were closest to station staircases.

. . .

They aren’t planning on submitting their time to the Guinness Book of World Records, which only tracks a record for a person visiting each station.

But Michael Falsetta of the East Village, who did a similar ride in 25 hours 11 minutes with his college buddy eight years ago, conceded defeat.

“Even Babe Ruth’s record fell eventually,” said Falsetta.

See also: Will Records Fall?, But What If You’re The Sick Passenger?

Not only will nature not win the game but we can force it to carry its weight around these parts:

The New York City Department of Environmental Protection says it is using bluegills to detect changes in the water quality at its reservoirs.

The fish are kept in holding tanks and the system detects tiny electrical signals the fish generate as they swim.

“It’s kind of like the old canary in the coal mine,” said DEP spokesman Ian Michaels.

“These are fish that are particularly sensitive to changes in water quality. You can monitor the fish for their level of agitation and for other changes in their behavior.”

Michaels said the fish have proven adept at detecting problems, including reacting to a diesel spill two hours sooner than any of the agency’s other early-detection devices.

If you’re the kind of person that obsessively figures out in advance the best car to board in order to make the most efficient connection, this might appeal to you:

Fueled by a mountain-climber’s determination to push oneself to the extremes of endurance — and by beef jerky — two New Yorkers plan to circumnavigate the subway system.

Matt Green, 26, and Don Badaczewski, 24, plan to set off tomorrow at 6 a.m. from the shuttle train stop at Rockaway Park in Queens and arrive at Pelham Bay Park on the 6 train in just under 24 hours. That’s what’s needed to beat the current record: 25 hours, 11 minutes, set in 1998 by Michael Falsetta and Salvatore Babones, both 28 at the time.

“We figured, [the subway] is there and someone should do this, so why not us,” said Badaczewski, a University of Michigan law student interning here this summer. “We’ve spent a lot of Saturday nights devoted to this project.”

For five months, they’ve poured over subway maps to find the route with the fewest transfers and they’ve fine-tuned their strategy with this week’s service advisories. (For instance, they’ll ride the L train during the day so they won’t take any shuttle buses.) They’ve visited the roughly 60 transfer stations to check which car is closest to the stairway for their next train.

“I’m not going to push any old ladies out of the way, but I’m going to run,” Badaczewski said. “When you’re doing something like this, you’re not worried about looking more stupid.”

What about bathroom breaks?

“This is an endurance test,” said Green, a transportation engineer from Bay Ridge. “We’ll be holding it in as long as possible and drinking as little as possible. I think we’ll only eat beef jerky in hopes it will be both meager and constipating.”

Let’s pray for a safe journey with no unavoidable delays . . .

The history: Amateur New York Subway Riding Committee.

The MySpace page.

It kind of sucks that the largest, most expensive public works project in New York City history is unseen by most of us:

It is the biggest public works project in New York City’s history: a $6 billion water tunnel that has claimed 24 lives, endured under six mayors and survived three city fiscal crises, along with the falling and rising fortunes of the metropolis above it.

Yesterday, the city’s Water Tunnel No. 3 reached a major milestone, as workers completed the excavation of an 8.5-mile section that connects Midtown and Lower Manhattan to an earlier section under Central Park. The tunnel is a multi-decade effort spanning four stages; yesterday’s announcement signifies the end of excavation for the second of those stages.

It was a major step forward for the tunnel, which was authorized in 1954, begun in 1970 and then halted several times for lack of money. The completion of the second stage will nearly double the capacity of the city’s water supply, currently 1.2 billion gallons a day, and provide a backup to two other aging water tunnels, allowing them to be closed, inspected and repaired for the first time since they opened, in 1917 and 1936.

“Future generations of New Yorkers will have the clean and reliable supply of drinking water essential for our growing city,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said, before he descended 550 feet into the city’s lower bedrock and sat at the controls of a 70-foot-long tunnel-boring machine, as it excavated the last eight inches of quartz, granite and silica.

Since 2003, the giant excavating machine’s 27 rotating steel cutters, each weighing 350 pounds, have chipped through the bedrock at a rate of 55 to 100 feet a day, more than double the 25 to 40 feet that could be excavated each day under the old drill-and-blast method.

For further discussion: “Tunnel Vision” (Popular Mechanics, April 2005).

This will interest only about five people who go to Target on the weekends, but G apologists are openly speculating that the MTA is quietly implementing a “de facto termination” of G service into Queens:

The G train has been called the “stepchild” of the MTA.

It is the only line that doesn’t pass through Manhattan. It runs with just four often-crowded cars per train between Brooklyn and Queens. The trains lack a conductor. Portions stink from sewage that leaks from pipes onto the tracks. It runs its full route only after sunset and on weekends — when it’s not shut for track work.

Sometimes, it even runs in two segments, forcing a transfer.

Still, thousands of people, especially in booming Williamsburg and Greenpoint, depend on it. But the MTA is calling for unspecified subway service cuts in 2007, and G-train riders fear the 13-station Queens Boulevard segment will get axed.

“At this time, we do not know which lines will be affected by cuts,” said MTA New York City Transit spokesman James Anyansi. Specific cuts, if any, will be announced by the end of the year.

Advocates say that the MTA should consider adding train service, given the population boom in the neighborhoods the G serves.

“It really shows a lack of foresight on the part of the MTA,” said Assemb. Joe Lentol (D-Brooklyn). “Greenpoint is becoming a major site of redevelopment on the waterfront.”

Some MTA board members suggested that might be possible, but that’s not reassuring enough for Teresa Toro of rider advocacy group Save The G.

“They’ve already done a de facto termination,” she said.

She was referring to ongoing work to replace Queens tunnel road beds on the G, which runs from Red Hook to Forest Hills. That work has meant no weekend G service between Long Island City and Forest Hills since January. Disruptions will continue until at least Aug. 14, MTA officials say.

On weekdays, the G travels from the Smith-9th streets stop in Red Hook, to Court Square in Long Island City. On weekends and weeknights, it is supposed to continue to the last stop at 71st-Continental in Forest Hills.

There is, however, apparently movement towards extending the G deeper into Brooklyn:

Even though there’s a chance of a partial line closure, there’s actually talk of expanding the G by five stops in Brooklyn, some MTA board members said.

The southernmost G stop is Smith-9th streets in Red Hook. But after the last passenger departs the train, it has to pass five stations, down the F line tunnel to Church Avenue, where there’s enough room to turn the train around. Some MTA board members and rider advocates have suggested that the G simply keep picking up and dropping off passengers since it is going to Church Avenue anyway.

Backstory: G Love (And That Special Sprint); The Little Train That Couldn’t Get Any Respect; Ironic, Because Everyone Knows The G Never Comes.

New York Magazine explains once and for all what happens when manhole covers explode:

The copper electrical wiring running beneath the streets is hung on the manhole walls and sheathed in insulation, which can crack and warp owing to age (many are 60 years old), chemical corrosion (a major culprit is road salt, which is carried down with rain), or hungry rats.

Cables carry an average of 13,000 volts. With demand up, the cables have to carry more power and begin to heat up. This heat, coupled with the electricity leaking through the cracks in the wiring, starts to burn the insulation.

Carbon monoxide, an extremely flammable gas, is released from the smoldering insulation and collects in the empty chamber; the cover is pushed up like a lid on a pot of boiling water.

An electrical spark can ignite the gas. This is surprisingly common: In one 24-hour period in July, the Fire Department reported 25 manhole explosions in Astoria. Not all result in the covers being shot into the air: That depends on how much gas and electricity is involved. But some covers have been flung over 50 feet.

Con Ed can’t get a break as the power goes out in Staten Island, affecting 16,000 “customers”*:

The latest power failure occurred as the utility and the city braced for a second summer heat wave that could endanger a fragile electrical network in Queens that is still being repaired.

The power failure on Staten Island began at 4:15 p.m. when three overhead lines were damaged — just 12 hours after Con Ed announced that electricity had been restored to the last customers in the Queens blackout. Around 10 p.m., Con Ed said, power was restored to all of its customers on Staten Island. The term “customer” includes residential and commercial buildings as well as households.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg canceled plans to visit Queens last night to go instead to the affected areas of Staten Island. “The good news is the temperature is reasonably cool and we do expect to get everybody back very soon,” the mayor said last night in a news conference at Dongan Hills.

The mayor further noted the difference between above-ground and underground power lines:

He took care to distinguish between the power failure on Staten Island, which uses overhead lines, and the blackout in Queens, which relies mostly on underground networks.

“This is a very different situation than existed in Queens,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “Here, when a cable is out, they know that everybody downstream is not getting power, so their estimates are very good. In an underground system, there are multiple paths to every house, so they don’t have a way of knowing.” In Queens it took Con Ed four days to correctly estimate the number of customers without power.

*And don’t let the terminology fool you — 16,000 customers could turn out to be a lot of people.

Each year the Department of Transportation takes in hundreds of pounds of foreign coins inserted in city parking meters:

So numerous are the foreign coins that the city, for the past decade or so, has taken to selling them annually to the highest bidder. The latest batch — 700 pounds of foreign coins — is now on sale by the city’s Department of Transportation, which is accepting bids until 11 a.m. on Wednesday.

In the past, winning buyers have paid roughly $2 to $4 a pound.

“We’re not here to make a killing or a windfall,” said Anthony A. Alfano, deputy chief of meter collections. “We’re here to flush out the spurious coins that are not of value to the city. We don’t have the resources to pull out 3 Swiss francs, this and that. We’re not collectors here.”

Each day, the city takes in about 1.2 million quarters, or $300,000, in parking revenue, officials said. While multiple-space meters have coin-return slots, meaning they will not accept improper coins, the traditional single-space meters do not, so foreign coins end up with the quarters whether or not they are recognized as legitimate.

. . .

Although Canadian quarters, Dominican pesos and Greek drachmas have traditionally been quite common, a quick survey of coins from a 50-pound canvas bag that is part of the sale revealed money from at least 50 countries, with both current and obsolete coins of many sizes, metals and even shapes. (A square coin with rounded corners from Aruba was in the mix.) While it is easy to envision the voyage of a pocketful of change from, say, France or the Dominican Republic, countries that were well represented, it is harder to imagine the journey that coins from French Polynesia or Uzbekistan took to wind up in a New York City parking meter.

The denominations in this sample varied widely too: a 10-franc coin from West Africa, a 5-shekel piece from Israel, 50 centavos de lempira from Honduras, 10 kroner from Norway, 5 korunas from the Czech Republic, 25 cents from the Bahamas.

Most of the coins were about the size of a quarter, but some were much smaller (like a euro cent coin from Germany) and others much larger (a seven-sided 50-pence coin from Ireland, and now withdrawn in favor of the euro).

The highest face-value coin was a 2-euro piece, worth about $2.50. Some of the old Polish and Chinese coins, while worth tiny fractions of a cent in face value, if anything, were probably worth a few cents to a collector. Some of the coins were shiny and new and looked as if they had hardly been in circulation; others were so dirty and worn that few collectors would want them.

The International Rail Rodeo comes to the Coney Island rail yards this weekend:

It’ll be hand-to-hand combat — at the controls of trains — at the Coney Island rail yard this weekend.

That’s when the world’s finest subway conductors and train operators will be competing against each other in the cutthroat annual contest known as the International Rail Rodeo.

The event pits transit workers from 18 cities against each other in tests of skills and wits. Events include subway driving, maintenance, safety and customer service.

Although no one will lasso any trains Saturday, rodeo organizers say the competition has no shortage of cowboys

“There’s a lot of intimidation and trash-talking,” said Melanie Hazel, the chairwoman of the rodeo, which is sponsored by the American Public Transportation Association. “The competition is taken very, very seriously.”

But is there a Roger Toussaint angle here? Of course there is:

Meanwhile, transit-union boss Roger Toussaint may try to embarrass the MTA by launching some kind of protest outside, union sources said.

Now that there are fewer token booths and more “HEETS” — i.e., High Entry/Exit Turnstiles (I’m totally geeking out now that we know what those are called!) — plans are underway to outfit subway stations with emergency exits, as the Daily News EXCLUSIVELY reports:

Nearly 1,370 swinging gates will be outfitted with panic bars by December 2006, TA President Lawrence Reuter told The News when asked about the Lawrence St. station.

“The idea is to [quickly] get you out of a station in any kind of emergency situation, be it a fire or smoke condition … any reason we need to evacuate the system,” Reuter said.

Reuter said he doesn’t believe the current setup at subway exits and entrances is unsafe, describing the new equipment as an “enhancement.”

But riders, elected officials and even Police and Fire department brass have expressed varying degrees of concern about the TA’s moves towards automation, including the removal of token booth clerks and the rise in the number of ceiling-to-floor barred turnstiles.

Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. (D-Queens) wrote to transit officials earlier this year that riders could find themselves “trapped behind gates like lower-class citizens.”

The News in July reported that the number of ceiling-to-floor turnstiles, called HEETS, have increased from 10 to 529 in the past eight years.

The new safety initiative is a response to riders’ concerns and has been in the works for a year, the TA said.

The Census Bureau crunched the numbers and found that New York City’s population increases by 563,000 people each day:

The Big Apple swells by 563,000 people during the day — more than any other city in the country, according to the Census Bureau’s first-ever estimates on daytime population changes.

The report tracks how the nation’s cities are affected by commuter traffic.

Officials say the data, based on the 2000 Census, can be used for planning and disaster-relief efforts.

New York’s daytime growth, while huge, is only 7 percent of the city’s population of 8 million.

Other towns that would benefit from a commuter tax included Washington, D.C. (411,000 people, or 72 percent, commute into the district), Boston (41 percent), Atlanta (62 percent), Seattle (28 percent) and Denver (28 percent).

The Daily News profiles the guy whose job it is to fish coins out of city fountains:

Here’s what happens to all those coins that get tossed into city fountains by wish-makers: If the homeless don’t get to them first, they go into city coffers – courtesy of Joe McBain.
McBain, 53, is an unsung hero of New York whose job is making sure city park fountains in Manhattan are kept clean of debris.

In addition to coins, he’s found everything from MetroCards to cell phones to watches during his watery rounds.

“It’s New York City,” McBain said with a wide smile. “Anything goes.”

The homeless, he said, usually snatch up quarters, dimes and nickels under the cover of darkness, when the fountains are off for the night.

By day, McBain fishes out all the pennies – as well as leaves, discarded food and other trash.

No word on how much money is generated this way but if Mr. McBain sees it, he’ll fish it out:

Sometimes, when wish-makers see McBain pulling their coins out, they fear their dreams won’t come true.

He’s quick to assuage their worries.

“I tell them it’s like a prayer,” McBain said. “Once the money hits the water, their wish is answered.”

Once the money hits the water, the wish is answered . . . sure, sure . . .

The Times’ Dan Barry asks where those ubiquitous black umbrellas come from, and finds out:

Down in yesterday morning’s wetness to West 28th Street, where pumpkins adorned a flower shop window display, and where Oscar Rodriguez stood outside another wholesale store, chanting the season’s theme song to the rain. “Umbrella, umbrella, umbrella.”

He said that when he arrives at the store at 7:30 on rainy mornings, the peddlers are lined up, waiting to buy a dozen for $10 – which they then sell piecemeal for whatever they can get. “Depends on the area,” he confided. “White people pay more.”

Finally, to a dreary storefront with a sign saying wholesale trade only: Imperial Umbrellas. You have to be buzzed into its drab showroom, where the multicolored umbrella display somehow added no color, and where the fluorescent light’s buzz provided the only music.

Several peddlers in wet clothes stood before a worn desk, behind which sat a small man with white hair and hound-dog eyes: Solomon Korn, for 30 years a Man To See in wholesale umbrellas.

As the peddlers placed their orders, Mr. Korn and an employee in the back engaged in an umbrella-model duet.

Employee: “Mr. Korn, Mr. Korn. One dozen W, two dozen 58-58, one dozen 22S?”

Mr. Korn: “One dozen W, two dozen 58-58, one dozen 22S. Give him the black, with the cover.”

The peddlers counted out their wet dollar bills and handed them to Mr. Korn. He smoothed away the crumpled dampness as best he could, and laid the bills neatly in a side drawer. Then the peddlers grabbed their cardboard boxes and left to make some more wet bucks.

Mr. Korn sells high-end and low-end umbrellas. He sells those cheap ones that end up like dead crows in the garbage for $9 a dozen, which means the peddlers pay 75 cents an umbrella. “They sell them for $3 if it’s raining,” he said with a shrug. “Two dollars if it’s not.”

His profit on each dozen of the cheap ones, he said: 50 cents.