A Gentleman’s C

As subway “grades” consistently come out C or C-minus, why is the MTA continuing the charade of asking? There should be one grade — “needs improvement”:

The R and V subway lines received mediocre grades in the latest rider report card results released by New York City Transit.

Straphangers gave both Queens-to-Manhattan lines an overall C-minus grade.

The R received its lowest grades, Ds, for inaudible station and train announcements and uninformative station announcements. The V also received a D for inaudible station announcements.

Seriously, just do whatever it was you planned to do and get on with it! And on a related note, wouldn’t you feel dumb if your subway got an A? What would happen then?

Build It And They Will Come . . . To The Conclusion That A Grand Expansion Of A Convention Center Is No Longer Viable

The “galvanizing power” of a 7 train extension leads to . . . a renovated-but-no-more-expanded Javits Center:

Gov. Eliot Spitzer declared in a speech eight months ago that he would build a “thoroughbred” of a convention center in New York City and scrap the $1.8 billion plan he had inherited to expand the black-glass Javits Convention Center on the West Side.

Since then, state officials — struggling with escalating costs, competing demands and limited land — have had to shrink their ambitions, devising a series of alternative plans that provide a far more modest expansion than envisioned three years ago.

Now, in the latest blow to the governor’s ambitions, the city’s hotel association is balking at requests to triple the hotel tax earmarked for the expansion. That could force state and city officials to abandon plans for an expansion and settle instead for simply renovating the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.

Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue, But When The Times Interviews You Try Not To Be Such A Douche

Shut yer trap, undergrad — this is serious:

So the idea yesterday was to ask passengers on the No. 7 and L lines what they would do if they were put in charge.

On the No. 7, several passengers said they would order bigger cars. Never mind that subway-line managers’ check-writing authority may not be as big as the passengers’ imagination might want.

. . .

On the L, Jeffrey Griffith said he would redesign the cars. “In Japan,” he said, “all the seats on trains flip up. The conductor latches the seats up so at rush hour there is standing room only.”

He also said he would move the poles away from the doors because “people get packed in around the poles — it causes congestion.”

Other passengers on the L said they would put a priority on bringing reality to signs that are supposed to tell riders how long before a train is due. Passengers complained that the signs sometimes say a train will arrive in one minute. They said 15 minutes can tick by before the white eyes of a train appear in the darkness beyond the platform.

. . .

Other passengers said they would put a premium on different kinds of communication.

Travis Moe, a New York University student, said that if he ran the L line, he would order “unexpected things” — like having the conductors recite poems as well as deliver their announcements.

Iambic pentameter or heroic couplets? How would Emily Dickinson say, “Watch the closing doors,” anyway? Mr. Moe did not say.

“The thing about subway culture, if you can call it that, is that people don’t talk, they stare at the floor,” he said, adding that presenting “poems instead of information” would change that.

You Want To See Fancified Exposed Brick And High Ceilings Where There Is Only Laminate Flooring; Who’s Got Scoreboard Now?

May Queens never lose its charm. A maligned rehab earns top honors from the Chamber of Commerce:

Some people looked at an unused former Eagle Electric Company factory at 19-19 24th Ave., Astoria as nothing more than a derelict shell. Joseph Pistilli, president of Pistilli Realty, saw the building’s potential. Where there was once an empty shell of a factory now stands a residence boasting 186 spacious co-operative apartments, served by a 24-hour concierge and offering spectacular views of the East River, Astoria Park and the Manhattan skyline, with prices starting in the mid- $200,000 range.

The Queens Chamber of Commerce honors Pistilli’s perspicacity and drive at its 95th annual Building Awards dinner this year. Pistilli Riverview East is one of seven buildings deemed winners in the Rehab category, sharing the honor with a single-family residence, a bank branch office, a senior adult center, a branch of the Queens Borough Public Library, an MTA subway maintenance shop and car washing facility and the Visitor and Administration Center at the Queens Botanical Garden.

(Laminate flooring.)

Someone Obviously Spent Too Much Time Playing Monopoly Over Thanksgiving Weekend

Buried lede: San Francisco’s BART system is nowhere near as cool as the 7 train:

Howard H. Roberts Jr., president of New York City Transit, will announce an overhaul today of how the subway system is run. The changes are designed to give individual subway lines a greater degree of autonomy by putting each one under the direction of a manager who will be responsible for almost everything that happens on the tracks, in the trains and in the stations.

The goal, Mr. Roberts said, is to have 24 subway lines operating in many ways as 24 self-contained railroads. (The number may vary, depending on how the lines are counted.) They will compete against one another and be rated on service, cleanliness, on-time performance and other measures.

. . .

The obstacles are numerous, and it is not clear that the reorganization will be the panacea that officials envision. Many problems extend across the system. The lines share miles of track, flooding can disrupt service across multiple lines, and work on the tracks must be coordinated with an eye toward the entire system. In many cases, union rules will make it difficult to isolate personnel decisions to a single line. Signals and train movements will continue to be directed from a master control center.

And a manager running just one line still has sprawling responsibilities. There are 394,000 passenger trips each weekday on the No. 7 line alone, more than the daily total for the entire BART system in the San Francisco area.

. . .

Mr. Roberts insisted that the changes are more than superficial. Currently, he said, the people who make decisions are often several bureaucratic layers removed from the problems that riders experience.

A request to fix a leak that causes slippery conditions on a station staircase can languish for months or years, he said. Most changes in train schedules have to be submitted to an executive who oversees the schedules on every line.

Under the new system, the general manager for each line will be able to make most of those decisions, large and small. They will be responsible for the workers who drive the trains, staff the token booths and clean and repair the cars.

“The general managers who take over the 7 and L are going to be running their own railroads,” Mr. Roberts said.