Now That's Irony!

Last Wednesday, I sat on an F train in the tunnel between the East Broadway and York St. stops for well over an hour. The story we were told was that a train at the Bergen St. station was "in emergency brake mode," and so we were stuck, as were all the trains behind us.

As we were all sitting there under the river that afternoon, City Council was holding hearings in which they hoped to find out why there had been so many subway failures of late: electrical problems, signal problems and track fires that have disrupted the commutes of hundreds of thousands of people.

Transit Authority officials did pretty much what everyone expected them to do-they accepted a little bit of the blame, then passed off most of the problems as things "beyond their control."

Granted, if some inconsiderate ass jumps in front of a train or some jerk-off pulls the emergency brake for no reason (I'm not sure if that's what happened at Bergen or not), that's a delay that's beyond their control. But the things they cited were not beyond their control at all, like paper and other trash on the tracks starting fires. They have maintenance people whose job it is to pick up that trash; they've just been cutting back on the maintenance crews to save money. And according to Transit Workers Union leaders, the MTA has been pulling the remaining staffers who normally do that job away to work on other things, like track repairs. In fact, the union leaders made it sound like we commuters have a choice in the weeks and years to come: regular delays as a result of smoke conditions, or regular derailments.

It's not a comforting choice.

These useless City Council hearings leave me wondering why it is the MTA was never properly taken to task for the cooked-books scandal of a few years back, and why they're still allowed to get away with pleading poverty today. But as long as they're allowed to get away with it, they'll have an excuse (apart from incompetence and corruption) to explain the ongoing collapse of the system.

They might as well just warn commuters to always have reading material with them, and leave it at that.

-Jim Knipfel