The Tautological Brilliance Of The MTA

Useless train announcement of the day goes to:

Due to an incident involving trains at the Flushing-Main Street Station, there is no train service in both directions between the Flushing-Main Street Station and the Willets Point-Shea Stadium Station.

China Could Extend The N Train To LaGuardia!

So bascially Thomas Friedman is holding Peter Vallone, Sr. responsible for the United States’ alarming lack of transportation infrastructure:

As I sat in my seat at the Bird’s Nest, watching thousands of Chinese dancers, drummers, singers and acrobats on stilts perform their magic at the closing ceremony, I couldn’t help but reflect on how China and America have spent the last seven years: China has been preparing for the Olympics; we’ve been preparing for Al Qaeda. They’ve been building better stadiums, subways, airports, roads and parks. And we’ve been building better metal detectors, armored Humvees and pilotless drones.

The difference is starting to show. Just compare arriving at La Guardia’s dumpy terminal in New York City and driving through the crumbling infrastructure into Manhattan with arriving at Shanghai’s sleek airport and taking the 220-mile-per-hour magnetic levitation train, which uses electromagnetic propulsion instead of steel wheels and tracks, to get to town in a blink.

Then ask yourself: Who is living in the third world country?

Buried Lede: Authoritarian regimes can do a lot of cool shit, can’t they?

Next Thing You Know We’ll Have MetroCard Co-Ops And MetroCard Subscriptions

All we need is three examples for a trend piece:

Once, it was clear, black and white: One token got you one ride. Now, while MetroCards have created a more elastic, fluid system for riders, they have also created an ethical gray area:

Do I swipe in a stranger? Is that legal? Can I share my monthly card with my spouse or a friend? What if someone offers to sell me a swipe at a discount? And what if a machine accidentally gives me a free ride — something token booth clerks were not known for. Do I take it?

The ethical quandaries of the free ride were spotlighted this week by the disclosure of a computer glitch that allowed hundreds of people to get free tickets and MetroCards — most of them unwittingly — from vending machines in Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad stations.

Selling a swipe on a MetroCard is illegal and can get you arrested. Bending a MetroCard’s magnetic strip to fool the turnstile into letting you through is also a form of theft.

But letting a friend or a relative use your unlimited-ride MetroCard when you are not using it is perfectly legal, as long as you don’t charge for it, said Paul J. Fleuranges, an authority spokesman. (The card allows only one entry every 18 minutes.)

Mr. Fleuranges said it is also legal to help out a stranger who asks you, as a favor, to swipe him through a turnstile free as you are leaving a subway station — although it certainly deprives New York City Transit of a fare.

I Said A Skip Stop The Skippy To The Skippy The Skip Stop, And You Don’t Stop

As on-time performance plummets amid talk that fares could rise again, the MTA scrapes the bottom of the barrel for a solution:

Overcrowded subway trains would skip certain stations during rush hour under a plan New York City Transit is considering to speed up lagging service.

One of the slowest trains, the No. 4, had an on-time record of only 70 percent in May, according to the latest statistics, underscoring the need to find solutions quickly, agency officials said.

But transit advocates immediately expressed skepticism, especially because transit officials stopped skip-stop service on the former No. 9 line in 2005.

“If you were along the part of the line that was skipped, you hated it,” said Gene Russianoff, a staff attorney for the Straphangers Campaign, an advocacy group.

. . .

No. 4 train riders were mixed on the idea.

“It’s a great idea as long as it doesn’t skip me,” said Katy Burke, 23, of Throgs Neck.

Admit It: Yankee Stadium Sucks!

Screw the stupid frieze:

As players were beseeched by countless members of the news media to eulogize Yankee Stadium as it hosts its last All-Star Game, those sufficiently provoked Monday were willing to discuss what they would not miss about the old — very old — ballpark in the Bronx.

Players from the past had no problem saying goodbye to the Astrodome’s rats and Candlestick Park’s hurricane-force winds. Today’s All-Stars have their own reasons to dry their eyes at Yankee Stadium’s funeral.

“The smell,” the Texas Rangers’ Michael Young said.

“The tiny clubhouse,” Justin Duchscherer of the Oakland Athletics added.

“Hitting my head on the dugout,” the Chicago White Sox’ Joe Crede offered. “Every time somebody scored or got a hit, you jumped up and forgot how low the ceiling is in there.”

Yankee Stadium is holding up about as well as any 85-year-old can be expected to, but the ballpark’s 1970s facelift has begun to droop. Players found reasons for moving on easy to come up with.

Olfactory issues led the voting, although few players were able to identify what the problem has been. Is one of Babe Ruth’s half-eaten hot dogs still rotting under one of the grandstands? Are the foul lines marked with sulfur? And how long does pine tar keep, anyway?

“Especially when it rains, the smell that comes up through the drainage system is not pretty,” said Jason Varitek of the Boston Red Sox. “It affects your sinuses, I’ll tell you that much.”

Young added: “It depends on the day. The last time we were there, which was a couple of weeks ago, a pipe burst. I was going back up the tunnel, and there was a flood — a sewer line broke or something like that. So I still have that kind of in my nose right now.”

Location Scout: Yankee Stadium.