The Fig File for 12.15.08

The Fig File for 12.15.08 by: Mike Figliola

The Fig File: Here is a potential MTA Service Advisory: The M line is screwed come January.

Well that is what it should read anyway - and I should know. I ride the M Train everyday as part of my daily pilgrimage from WOR studios to my home in Queens; a full 35 minutes from the start to last stop. The ‘Mary’ Train, as conductors refer to it as not to get mixed up with the N or ‘Nancy’ Train, has been named as one of the lines on the chopping block under the proposed service cuts to save the MTA. Here’s the pitch: The M would make stops only between Metropolitan Avenue in Queens, and Broad St., Manhattan plus: midday schedules would change featuring less frequent trains from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

This is not good news for Mother Mary straphangers.

I take this train on off-peak due to my early hours on The John Gambling Show - but off-peak is a malleable term: there are students, construction workers, the elderly, mothers and their infant sons and daughters, day trippers, those who work the day and take on the night shift to help pay for the nightmare that this recession has ravaged on their pockets. This isn’t off peak for them. The M Train already runs at a slow lumbering speed; cutting the service in any way would leave these people, let’s collectively call them the doomed, stranded and waiting on out door station platforms - a boast in good weather, but not in January folks. This from MTA as the M train was ranked next to worst by NYPIRG's Straphangers Campaign for scheduled service. NYPIRG’s study also says M train cars break down more often than the average train as well. Aint that a gas! 

Speaking of gas: The MTA saw just under 140 million riders in September 2008  - and serves over 1.5 billion annually. That comes out to approx. 280,000,000 a month in revenue just on subways and buses alone and yearly...well, you can do the math. Bottom line? Don’t tell me you have to make service cuts. Not on dear Mary. And not on me.

Part II: Your fare at work:

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and MTA Long Island Rail Road unveiled a “talking kiosk” to help visually impaired and other customers navigate the concourses, passageways and platforms of Pennsylvania Station. To help them find the Kiosk, it emits the song of the lark sparrow (Chondestes grammacus), a bird species native to the American West that is found by audiologists to have a unique set of phonetic properties that make it most effective at assisting in directional wayfinding. It costs $23,000, or less than half the cost of the previous model, which was removed earlier this year.

The above is verbatim -  straight out of the official release sent to my e-mail box by the press office at the MTA. Now, while I believe in and support serving everyones needs, especially those who have disabilities, the old Kiosk could have stuck it out a little longer right? I know it cost a mere 23 thousand clams, but going along with all this belt tightening the MTA has been preaching about since the talk of the Doomsday Budget began, did we really need a brand new Kiosk? I’ll put my money on that no one knows what a talking Kiosk is, where to find it or get any real use out of the information it provides. In fact, I’ll bet you the song of the lark sparrow will tick straphangers off to the point that they might go bird hunting at Penn. Station.