The Dry-Erase Board — It Worked Well Enough On Your Dorm Room Door, Didn’t It?

Things you don’t want to read after Wednesday’s commute include MTA employees had to be reminded not to surf the ‘net so much while everyone else was trying to get service updates on the mta.info website:

Of course, the scale of New York’s subways, which deliver 4.9 million rides each weekday, dwarfs any other system in the country, making it much harder — and more expensive — for the authority to maintain and improve its communications system. On Wednesday, the authority’s Web site, one of the busiest in the country, was updated frequently and received a record 44 million hits. (A hit is a request for a single file on a Web server.)

However, untold numbers of people had trouble getting through to the site. The firewall software that screens users on the network could not handle the surge in traffic, so technicians tried to free up capacity by asking employees to limit their online activities and by disabling bandwidth-consuming functions, like videos of old board meetings, on its Web site.

“To say the Web site was down is not correct,” said Christopher P. Boylan, a deputy executive director of the authority. “It was just at its maximum capacity.”

And just so you understand, this is part of why the people in the little boxes never seem to know anything when you ask them:

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the PATH system, has since January been sending e-mail alerts to nearly 9,000 riders. They are notified of any delays of more than 15 minutes, and they can customize the alerts so they receive information only about the lines they use.

It will be a while before the Metropolitan Transportation Authority can do that for subway riders. “Usually when stuff happens, it happens quickly and we’d have to send out 100,000 e-mails very quickly,” said Wael Hibri, the authority’s chief information officer. “We’re still thinking it through.”

Here, then, is how word of major disruptions goes out for many riders: Employees stationed near train dispatchers make a telephone recording of the disruptions. The recording goes out to station agents, who are supposed to write down the information on white dry-erase boards in each booth using ink markers.

“We keep an ample supply on hand,” Termain Garden, a transit official, said of the markers.

Besides the boards, there are still other time-tested methods: the phone line, which plays recorded messages, and the public-address systems. (However, 92 of the 468 stations lack such systems.)

At Some Point Isn’t It Just Easier To Simply Do Your Job?

Even with “productivity goals” and a kibosh on the old fake license plate scam, traffic enforcement agents still find a way to slack off:

Four NYPD traffic agents were caught on the wrong side of the law yesterday — after they were busted writing dozens of phony tickets, police said.

Investigators with the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau caught the agents — Davey Griffin, 30, Raheem King, 26, Julian Fisher, 24, and Gregory Baird, 56 – allegedly writing tickets for parked vehicles hours after spotting an infraction, to cover up for the fact they were eating lunch or sitting in their cars rather than actually working.

Some tickets were issued to cars that were not illegally parked.

The agents “were on extended meal periods. They were in uniform. They were on foot. They stayed in one place. They didn’t do their jobs,” said IAB Chief Charles Campisi.

He said the men acted out of pure laziness.

“They have to show they’re going out and working. They would go and hide and fool their supervisors that they were working all day,” Campisi said.

. . .

Typically, agents create tickets by scanning the bar code on a car’s registration with a handheld computer, leaving a printout on the windshield. The data is later uploaded into a central computer. But tickets for out-of-state vehicles, which don’t have New York bar codes, must be handwritten.

Investigators followed the four agents around on June 21, and spotted them jotting down license-plate numbers — usually at the beginning of their shift — but not actually writing the tickets until much later, when they were lazing about in their cars or in restaurants eating, the probers said. But the time code on the filed paperwork would make it appear as if they were working through their entire shifts.

That’s Great . . . If Only The MTA Signed My Timecard

Underground this, underground that . . . sometimes you wish they never got rid of the Sixth Avenue El:

Powerful thunderstorms swept through the New York metropolitan area this morning, tearing up trees and damaging cars and creating mayhem during the morning commute.

Subway stations were flooded, forcing commuters out onto the streets and into taxis and buses, bringing traffic in many areas to a standstill. The region’s three major airports — La Guardia, Kennedy and Newark — all reported flight cancellations and delays.

No subway line was unaffected by the heavy rains and winds, according to the M.T.A. For the time being, the M.T.A. was advising commuters to stay at home.

. . .

In Brooklyn, the F train was delayed, and as trains started up again later in the morning, subway cars were heavily overcrowded.

John Han, 50, a financial adviser, said he arrived at the Fort Hamilton stop at around 7:45 a.m., but about an hour later had given up and was going home.

“The cars are running, but real slow,” he said, accompanied by his wife. “It looked like a sardine can. We are going home and taking a shower and going to try again, because we are very sweaty.”

Around Brooklyn, motorists drove in search of an open subway line, so that they could park and take the train.

In Manhattan, the Nos. 1, 2 and 3 lines on the West Side, and the Nos. 4, 5 and 6 lines on the East Side had ceased operations as of 8 a.m.

The 42nd Street shuttle was also suspended. The E and L lines were not in service, as were significant portions of the F and J lines.

Furthermore: Commuters Try To Board A Manhattan-Bound 7 Train YouTube Video, Commuters Try To Board A Manhattan-Bound N Train YouTube Video.

Yes, Daddy, It’s Positively Miserable And You Care Not A Whit!

If he’s done nothing else in office, Bloomberg has mastered the New York City Mayor-ism “Come on, it’s not so bad!” (Giuliani was good at it, too; done properly, the brushoff’s cadence drops down at “on” and crescendoes on the upside again with an annoyed, almost whiny “bad”). This after we find out that he goes to work around 7 a.m., long before anyone else is on the train:

Two days after transit officials announced that some subway lines are operating beyond 100 percent of capacity at peak hours, Mayor Bloomberg questioned the figures and said his own commute isn’t “that crowded.”

“I take the Lex line most days and it’s not that crowded,” the MetroCard-carrying mayor told several hundred people at a Crain’s New York Business breakfast forum in Midtown.

“So you stand next to people. Get real. This is New York. What’s wrong with that?” added Bloomberg.

Two of the lines that the mayor uses to get from his townhouse on East 79th Street to City Hall, the Nos. 4 and 6, were listed at 103 percent of capacity. The third line, the No. 5, came in at 102 percent.

That makes them the most packed in the system, along with the L line.

. . .

Aides said the mayor usually hops on the subway between 7 and 7:30 a.m. That might explain why he doesn’t experience the most intense crowding conditions. Transit surveys show that the passenger load is at its heaviest between 8 and 9 a.m.

A study from 2002 provided by the Straphangers Campaign found 19,348 passengers were carried from 86th Street and Lexington Avenue, one of the stops the mayor sometimes uses, between 7 and 8 a.m. The number swelled to 28,479 between 8 and 9 a.m.

(Actually they’re missing the best part of the Crain’s breakfast, which came when Hizzoner suggested — and didn’t sound like he was joking either — that Robert Caro should write his next great tome about Daniel Doctoroff . . . what masterbuilders these guys are!)

Paul Auster’s “Smoke,” Reimagined, Or, Eyeing The Flash

Some people are not so much upset about the due process issues of red light cameras as they are annoyed by the flash itself:

Since September, the number of such cameras in the city has doubled, to 100, and one of the more controversial new arrivals is attached to a pole on Ninth Avenue near 57th Street. The picture is taken by equipment in a glossy beige box the size of a hotel minibar. Above the box sits the flash, a 300-watt strobe light.

Fixed 20-odd feet above the street, the flash points not down but straight out to the southeast, making it resemble a sort of semaphore, beaming messages into the ether.

Across the street and one block south, the flashes invade the antiques-filled eighth-floor living room of the Cahnmann family. They live in the Parc Vendome, an imposing complex of condominiums that fills the square block bounded by Eighth and Ninth Avenues and 56th and 57th Streets.

“When the lights are out, it’s like someone outside our house is taking a photograph,” said Emily Cahnmann, an event planner who works from home. “But even in the daytime, people go, ‘What’s that?’ And I say, ‘Oh, that’s the paparazzi, taking photos of us.'”

The traffic camera was installed only in December. But Ms. Cahnmann has already developed a weary familiarity with its ways, as have other residents of north-facing apartments in the Parc Vendome. “On Saturday nights, between midnight and 3 in the morning, it goes off much more,” Ms. Cahnmann said. “I guess people think, ‘It doesn’t see me here.'”