This is how you get a headline: Let it slip that you’re planning to eliminate two entire subway lines!

The Daily News has a story today speculating that the MTA’s upcoming budget proposal will slash jobs and kill the W and Z trains.

As a reminder to those of you who don’t live in New York, subway lines here are not like subway lines in other cities. Most NYC Subway lines share track with other lines, and most stations are served by multiple trains. So when you eliminate a line, there’s always another train to pick up the slack. How would this work if the W and the Z go to the great rail yard in the sky? Time to play Fantasy Subway:

Let’s start with the Z train, since that’s easiest. It’s an express J. They could have called it the J Diamond. A lot of New Yorkers have never even seen a Z train. Kill it. Over!

The W is more complicated. It’s a daytime local on the Broadway line in Manhattan and then runs local up to Astoria in Queens. It stops running after 9 p.m. weekdays and doesn’t run at all on weekends, when the N runs local in Manhattan to haul tourists from Times Square to Ground Zero alleviate crowding. Eliminating the W without making other adjustments will mean the R will be the only local train on the Broadway line on weekdays. I have a hunch the MTA would just put the weekend schedule in effect all week for the Broadway line: No W, R local, N local, Q express. That makes a lot of sense, but they would have to run more Q trains, especially to pick up passengers riding over the Manhattan bridge to and from Brooklyn, and enough N trains for the rush hour riders in Astoria. An alternative would be to ramp up R service on the Broadway local line during rush hours, and stop the weird rush hour M service on the 4th Avenue line in Brooklyn (which has to share track with the R).*

Most likely scenario: Public outcry will pop this trial balloon. The state will cough up a few more bucks, the MTA will raise fairs fares, and the cuts will hit other things that still hurt the quality of the subway experience but that don’t sound so drastic.

* UPDATE: WCBS-TV reports that the MTA is considering cutting the M line in half, which I’m guessing means stop the 4th Avenue rush hour service. Same treatment may be in store for the hapless G train.

… knowing full well that some of the people they handed it to were journalists who would blog about it, as I did here on my work blog. I give this stunt an ‘A’ for effort.

My sense of things: New York (and my community in Brooklyn in particular) is more electrified about this election than any event in recent memory. The enthusiasm level is much higher than when the Giants were in the Super Bowl, for example.

I’ve been trying to make sense of the sudden increase in location shoots going on around the city. Gossip Girl has been taping all over Brooklyn in the last month or so; they were shooting on Prospect Avenue in my neighborhood Tuesday night.

Generally, film and TV productions cause minor disruptions. They will take over all the street parking on a block, set up a bunch of trucks with diesel generators, and spread heaps of cables and equipment all over the sidewalk. Sometimes they’ll close a restaurant or a coffee shop for the day. And rarely, for the biggest movies, they’ll block a sidewalk or a road entirely. I think most New Yorkers get such a kick out of seeing our city fictionalized in movies and on TV that we accept these small inconveniences.

The Times has a story today explaining why there are so many shoots going on right now: Tax credits.

Today is the 6th anniversary of a major event in my life, the day I moved from Pennsylvania to Brooklyn. I’m still here (in the same apartment!) despite my original idea that New York would be a four-year plan.

In honor of becoming a seventh-year senior, I decided to open the backup files of the blog (then called a “journal”) I had on my site in 2002. They are predictably embarrassing! For your enjoyment, some excerpts follow.

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Welcome to part II of my occasional series, “Weird stuff the Vanderbilts built.” (Previously: Atlantic Avenue Tunnel.)

Today I rode my bike to the abandoned Long Island Motor Parkway. It was built by William Vanderbilt II to connect Queens to Long Island; the first segment opened in 1908. (Hey, that was 100 years ago!) The Motor Parkway operated as a toll road until 1938, when it was unable to compete with the free parkway that Robert Moses built. As soon as it closed, Moses turned it into a bike path. And so it remains today, an overgrown strip of blacktop two lanes wide. It looks like any rails-to-trails bike path, though the hills leading up to the overpasses are steeper than a typical railroad grade. I was surprised by how narrow it is; the parkway was only two lanes wide.

The Parkway was one of the first roads to use elevated bridges (grade separation) to create an express highway. Some refer to it as the country’s “first superhighway,” but the Pennsylvania Turnpike, as a divided highway, has a stronger claim that title.

It never fails to amaze me how much abandoned infrastructure there is in Brooklyn and Queens. As I was riding today, I crossed at least three disused railroad rights-of-way. One is the impressive tunnel and open-cut track that runs beneath the elevated L train south of Broadway Junction. The next was the overgrown right-of-way that runs through Forest Park (identifiably by the abandoned utility poles that run beside where the track was). And finally there was the Central Railroad of Long Island Creedmore Branch, which ran through what is now Kissena Park. It operated from 1872 to 1879 – barely six years!

More info:
NYC Parks Vanderbilt Motor Parkway sign.
NYCroads.com Long Island Motor Parkway page.
Forgotten New York Kissena Park page.

Today I went shopping at the most anarchic Target in America, the one on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. I wanted one of these:

Shopping in our disastrous Target requires patience, compromise, and a willingness to be surprised. And surprised I was when I saw a man wearing a T-shirt that said “Welcome to America - Now speak English!”

Whoa. I never thought I’d see anyone in Brooklyn wear that shirt. The shirt bothers me because it’s worn by those who can’t stand the idea of new people hanging around their town. It’s meant to be cruel. Of course new immigrants ought to learn English, but they have plenty of incentives to do so already. Putting it on a T-shirt seems kind of random, kind of obsessive. To quote the Big Lebowski: You’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole.

Most of all, it’s a pretty weird shirt to wear to the Brooklyn Target. All the Target signage is in English and Spanish, many customers and store employees are immigrants, and business is conducted in whatever language works. It’s an international community and nobody expects otherwise. (The Target mall sits around the block from, I kid you not, a Halal Chinese restaurant.)

The man in the “speak English” shirt was talking on a cell phone. As I approached him, I could hear clearly that he wasn’t speaking English. He was speaking what sounded like an Eastern European language. All of the sudden the shirt took on a whole new meaning. Either the guy couldn’t read what it said, or he read it as a joke and applied it to himself! Either way, I love it!

By the way, the Atlantic Avenue Target, which is always out of whatever I’m looking for, didn’t have any of these in stock:

Instead, I bought one for $1.99 from one of those Spanish discount stores on Fifth Avenue.

After work today I’m going to go climb the outside of The New York Times building.

I’m hoping to climb all the way to the top, where I will claim a corner office! Anybody want to come along?

Waiting for the Empire State Building observation deck is one of the least pleasant experiences in New York City.

In the best of circumstances, it takes at least an hour. You wait in line with tourists clutching wads of $100s they got at JFK. Many of them come from continents where lines are not treated with the kind of systematic order Americans are used to. You can watch the gears turn in people’s heads as they look for openings where they can cut. Meanwhile, the hucksters who work for the building bombard you with pitches for worthless extras (including but not limited to: pay more to cut the line, buy an $8 map, rent an audio tour, buy a Citypass good at a couple of 2nd-tier museums, buy a tour bus ride, buy a helicopter ride, ride the “similar to Imax” skyride simulator, and of course, get your photo taken in front of a greenscreen backdrop). When you finally buy the ticket, you can’t help but feel like you’re getting hosed. Prices are up to $34 for the 86th floor and the 102nd floor mooring mast, a new option which you’d be crazy to refuse. And right now, the whole place is under construction, so as you pace slowly through a maze of rope lines on the 80th floor staging area, you have nothing to do but stare at unfinished walls and bare wires and lights dangling from the black ceiling overhead.

Why? Why? Why? This is why:

I work in a big office building in the East Village, a few blocks below Union Square. On a nice day, it’s impossible to walk around the neighborhood without being accosted. There are two kinds of distractions:

• People who want money.
• People who want to give you something for free.

The people who ask for the most money are with the United Homeless Organization, a dubious outfit whose supporters set up tables with blue water bottles and say, “Even a penny will help!” Second place is Greenpeace, which dispatches young and enthusiastic volunteers to humiliate themselves by flagging people down on the sidewalk to sign them up for contributions. Third place is people with pets and cardboard signs… Some may or may not be homeless, some may or may not be associated with animal shelters.

Only slightly less annoying are the “street teams” that give away free samples. Energy drinks, energy bars and other miracles of food science are common freebies. Yesterday I was handed an entire bag of free samples and coupons by one of the city’s big drug store chains. It contained:

• Advil.
• A Soyjoy bar.
• A tablet of guava leaf extract marketed as a hangover cure.
• A 2-ounce plastic bottle containing an “energy shot” fortified with vitamins and caffeine (but merely 8 calories).

I can imagine the marketing brief: We’re trying to target influential, busy, exhausted young people with discretionary income. Recommended location: East Village. What are they, drug dealers?