An update for a manic monday
Good evening folks!
I hope all of you who are reading this entry have had a good weekend. I’m glad to say that baseball season is now into full swing, and my project shall be in full swing in the not to distant future.
Today I have decided to talk about a couple of more aspects of my project, which is the overall conditions for the rolling stock that the MTA relies on, and a couple of more social aspects of my project, since I happen to be a sociology major.
So, I’ll discuss some more social aspects about my project. As mentioned in previous entries, the main reason why I am doing this project is to show all of those who rely on the MTA’s subway lines to get to places how the MTA really works, and how poorly run its operations are, plus the fact that the MTA is quite good for saying one thing and doing the complete opposite. A recent example of this for those of you that have not heard about this is the fact that the MTA said it would improve bus and subway service once it can get a fare hike to take place, and as soon as fares went up, now they are saying that improvements will have to be delayed due to a lack of funding from real estate investments. In my opinion, if and when these “improvements” occur, there will be a whole array of new problems that they MTA will have to address.
As in any large bureaucracy, there is a good chance for corruption and mismanagement, and this is occuring all over the MTA. Everytime they decide that they need a fare hike, I have noticed that subway and bus service magically gets worse so it seems like more money is needed from us regular commuters to improve service, and once the MTA hears too many complaints, they magically find a very, very large amount of surplus money out of the blue, and to me, this makes me believe that the MTA has at least more than two sets of books for their so called budgets.
The other large problem with their bureaucratic MTA is there mismanagement. Here in New York City, a lot of us rely on the MTA’s bus and subway service on a daily or near daily service. But, since the MTA is not very keen of what they do, their misjudgements really effect us. Delays cause people to be late to where they have to go, and that can lead to lower productivity in businesses. Delays cost money since they usually have to work overtime when there are delays, which increases the overall payroll for the employees, and then the MTA will say its short of money for its projects. But in a social manner, if the MTA keeps on allowing mismanagement to occur, it is not good for society. Lost productivity, being late to important appointments and functions, students and faculty arriving late to school and overspending definately effects how New York City functions. Also, I have noticed by talking to people that have moved into New York City, that they try their best to avoid neighborhoods that does not have very reliabe service provided by the MTA, and since realtors have noticed this trend, that leads to residents that choose to live near subway lines with better service to pay a significantly higher amount of rent, which leads to gentrication of neighborhoods, and usually means that working class people are forced to move out since they can no longer pay for the increasing rents surrounding lines with better service.
So there is some more insight for that part. Now let’s talk about the rolling stock for the subway lines.
As of now, the oldest cars in service are the R-32’s, and the newest ones are the R-160’s. The MTA loves to complain about the older rolling stock (which is now the R-32, the R-38, the R-40, the R-40/R-40M and the R-42). They think, just because these cars are older, that they are not very reliable and need to be replaced by cars that have computerized techonology. But to me, that’s not always the case.
Any subway line that has steep grades along its course, whether it be from going over a bridge (especially the Manhattan Bridge), will effect the perfomance on the cars, especially on very crowded trains. These steep grades force the motors within the trucks to work harder, and a lot of times, especially for the trains that continually run over the Manhattan Bridge, this causes for motors to be burned out, especially in the R-68/R-68A’s. Burnt motors are not so bad, but too many burnt motors can shorten the mean distance a car can run before it needs some maintanance. What doesn’t help in the case of the burnt motor syndrome is that the MTA is not intelligent enough to really realize that the R-68s-R68A’s are the heaviest cars in the fleet (they weight about 94,000 pounds each without passengers), and practically the entire fleet of these cars run over the Manhattan Bridge on the B,D,N and the Q. So that is the reason why the R-68/R-68A’s have the highest percentage of burnt motors per train set. I have seen some of these sets where there are 8-10 burnt motors on the train, which tells you something there, and shows you that the age of a car, in most cases, does not effect how well it runs, but rather how these cars are treated.
Today, as I took the E train from its Eastern part in Queens into Midtown this afternoon, it must have been a set of R-32’s that were frequently run over the Manhattan Bridge, or were used on lines with very steep grades in the tunnels that connects lines between boroughs. The train set that I was on has 8 burnt motors, and these motors were burnt to the point that they sounded like a combination of motors for an R-32, R-46 and a R-68 at the same time, and while the train was running through the 53rd street tunnels, the lights flickered on and off as if this was a set of R-33 Worlds Fair cars. But this is really not due to the age of the R-32’s (Aka the Brightliners), but rather where these cars are ran and how they are treated. And, just to show you, the R-32’s were built between 1963 and 1965, and the R-68’s were built from 1987 to 1989, showing you that in the case of burnt motors, age is not an issue.
Most importantly, I have noticed something with the operations of the older fleet. The MTA keeps data sets on what the average is of what particular subway car runs before a failure. For the older cars, this average magically decreases when the MTA desires to obtain newer cars, and once they get their newer cars, that average for the mean distance before failure increases again. That spells out that the MTA is using preferred maintanance towards new cars, is rigging the numbers for the mean distance travelled before failure, keeps chaging its mind on what car failure is, or is just doing this to trick the public so that people will think it is necesarry to obtain new cars.
So that is it for today! As time moves on, I shall discuss how the R-68/R-68A’s are costing taxpayers a lot of money, tell you more stories about the MTA’s mismangements, what the data for my project is showing, and how train operators that are not so good at their jobs are effecting the operations of the New York City Subway System besides have poor management over them, and how train operators that are not prudent about their job are also effecting the quality of subway cars.
As mentioned before, you folks are more than welcome to send me questions or comments to my email address, which is BrooklynBrightliner55@gmail.com
Take care folks until my next update!
Yours truly,
BrooklynBrightliner55