Underground Cell-Phone Reception Overtaken By Technology; Apparently All Of Those Unsightly Towers Are Actually Doing Something!

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!

Express Trains . . . Who Needs Them?

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.”

Well, I Suppose If Staten Islanders Repeatedly Tapped Into That Pipeline To Steal Jet Fuel And It Then Exploded, Killing Hundreds, Then It Might Evoke Something Along The Lines Of The Recent Accident In Lagos . . .

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.

They Find A Way To Replace All Mechanical Parking Meters With Cheat-Proof Computerized Models But Something Truly Useful — Computerized Subway Signals, Say — Is Still Like 40 Years Away

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!)

MTA To Train Enthusiasts: Sit Down!

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.