MESSAGE
DATE | 2017-08-05 |
FROM | Ruben Safir
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SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] MTA
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The Spring and Summer of 2017 has brought a crisis to the working people of the City of New York with the MTA. Long festering problems seemed to have bubbled up into a frothy cauldron of troubles leaving New Yorkers contemplating the viability of a living in this city.
Commuting, family trips to the Zoo and the Beach, doctors appointments, every routine trip has become cause for worry. Venturing into our mass transit system has become arduous and dangerous. A typical trip involves confronting menacing, endless pan handling, religious sermons, confrontations with the mentally ill and otherwise dangerous individuals, urine human feces in stairwells and elevators, and shanty town encampments at subways stations all along the system.
Added to this, the system itself is in a state of total dysfunction.
Rush Hour has been effectively cancelled by the MTA several times in May and June to the cost of billions of dollars of business losses and wages. Twice, the MTA has reported that power outages in Brooklyn's Dekalb Avenue hub had forced the shutdown for over 45 minutes the entire Atlantic Avenue - Dekalb Avenue complex during apex of the morning rush hour. Both on May 7th and May 9th, 2017 the MTA reported outages by ConEd. ConEd in turn reports that there was no outage on Sunday, just a voltage dip and that on Tuesday they can't find any such equipment failure. This is not how an enterprise ready system should function.
These mystery outages shut down rush hour traffic for the B,D,N,Q,R,2,3,4, and 5 trains, covering the bulk of the Borough, and affecting broadly traffic all the way to the Bronx. And yet power was up and everything lit up all about Downtown Brooklyn leaving angry commuters cynical about the durability of the system and the competency of the upper management. How is it possible that a system that has successfully run for well over one hundred years, that carried in the 40's and 50's nearly twice the traffic that it does now, that successfully negotiated two world wars, the great depression, the fiscal crisis and near bankruptcy of the 1970's, the abuse and neglect of the 1980's, 9-11, and yet seems to be succumbing to signal failures and minor power outages late into the second decade of the 21st century?
How is it possible that after recently pouring billions of dollars into track work and platform improvements, to the tune of over 40 billion dollars of MTA capital debt, that the system is now incapable of its primary function which is to move trains and people in a clean, and safe manner.
Commuters cynicism has been cruelly confirmed with a head-on derailment of the A train in July, the result of sloppy maintenance secondary to track work. The resulting rush hour derailment killed service uptown and in the Bronx, stranding everything above 59th street, including Harlem, Washington Heights, Ingelwood, and the Bronx, while disrupting service all along the A,C,D and B trains.
http://www.brooklyn-living.com/mta_crisis.html
-- So many immigrant groups have swept through our town that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998 http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002 http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive http://www.coinhangout.com - coins! http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and and extermination camps, but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013 _______________________________________________ Hangout mailing list Hangout-at-nylxs.com http://www.nylxs.com/mailman/listinfo/hangout
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