Caught in the ‘subway desert’!

New York / DPA

Tourists Rob and Mary Ann Gorlin are delighted. Ignoring the many attractions that New York City is famous for, they have come early to 72nd Street Station, the newly opened subway station on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
“It’s immaculate and beautiful inside,” says Mary Ann, who hails from Detroit. After inspecting the new network diagram on the clean and bright station, the two head off Downtown in a sparkling new train.
Plans for the extension were initially discussed as long ago as 1929, but the Wall Street Crash and the economic crises of the Great Depression intervened. Then came World War II. Poor planning and the city’s lack of funds further delayed the start of construction.
Foundation stones were laid and tunnelling was begun in the 1970s, but this false start was terminated by a municipal financial crisis.
Work was restarted in earnest in 2007.
Now, at a cost of US$4.5 billion for just three new stations, the Second Avenue Subway has been opened with a dubious title: the most expensive underground railway in the world.
“Immaculate and beautiful” are words not commonly used to describe the Big Apple’s subway network, which is suffocatingly hot in summer and plagued by rats throughout the year.
For example, the C train is a rumbling steel monster where delays are routine for the average 5.7 million passengers every weekday.
International tourists who have experienced cutting-edge underground systems in cities like Paris or Munich or Tokyo are frequently astonished by the sleaze and chaos.
Morning is breaking at the new stations on 72nd, 86th and 96th Street, where tourists are taking pictures on the escalators and commuters are expressing delight at the time saved.
“The line here takes me straight to Times Square. That could save me easily 20 minutes,” Scott Schwamp estimates. After keeping an appointment he intends to make his way back to New Jersey.
“If I had walked to the 6 train, I would have been late,” bakery manager Latifah Williams says.
Opened in 1904, the New York City Subway Service is only slowly stepping into the 21st century. The network does not even extend to large parts of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, leaving many New Yorkers in the “Subway Desert” as these areas are jokingly termed.
While the three new stations will serve the Upper East Side, whether the extended line for the Q trains will ever reach as far as Harlem or the southern point of Manhattan remains uncertain.
The most populous city in the United States desperately needs new subway lines. The trains, now running at the highest possible frequency, are unable to cope with peak hour passenger numbers, which rose 12 percent between 2009 and 2016.
Interchanges between the lines are badly congested, with passengers often forced to watch several full trains pass before forcing themselves into the overfull cars. Information on departure times remains the exception rather than the rule on many lines.
The crush is not made any easier to endure by the way some passengers sit with legs spread apart to claim more seat space.
New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is running a poster campaign against “man-spreading” to counter the spread-legs menace, making the practice an offence under the system regulations.
And the city’s police attempt to track down gropers by means of security cameras, although with limited success.
But there has been progress. Mobile-phone reception and free wi-fi are gradually becoming standard on the network.
New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo has plans to spending 27 billion dollars over the next five years to modernize existing stations and to switch to walk-through trains, as operate in several European capitals.
Better lighting, real-time signboards and charge points with USB connections in the trains are part of the plans.
But for the present, New Yorkers will have to be content with the three new stations.
At 72nd Street, where an increasing number of passengers gazed into the dark tunnel waiting for the rumble of an approaching subway train, one was heard to mutter: “New station, same delays.”