Gotta love NY! Where getting to work each day or going home is a mission at times. Yesturday their was a train collision on the Long Island railroad where two trains heading eastbound bumped into each other and one train derailed in Jamaica. Luckily none of the 300 passengers on the two trains were hurt. But needless to say, this caused a great deal of delays and cancellations on my commute home last night. Two tracks were out of commision in Jamaica. But they worked round the clock last night to remove the train and fix the switch, which they are saying may have been the cause. Just another day in the life of my NYC commute.

899942.jpg (172 KB)

272583.JPG (4 KB)

As many of you will know – we all need to do our part for the environment and be greener. For this very reason I got a bike and started cycling to work. The government spend money campaigning to get people cycling, they print of cycle maps, offer discounts on bike lights and god knows what else to make it a more attractive option. Companies have schemes to help get their employees more affordable bikes too!

I have always really admired those people who cycle to work no matter what. It might be raining, freezing, foggy, windy, whatever! Without fail they will cycle to work. If you pay £2 (roughly $4) or whatever each day for a bus, it soon adds up over the weeks, months and years that a bike is really economical.

So back to my biking to work. I was really up for it. Biking in summer mornings and evenings is great. I soon encountered some key problems. Firstly, they call them cycle lanes, but really they have just painted a line along the edge of the road. This is where all the gutters, drains, manholes and other random obstacles are. Not to mention buses pulling in and out. So all in all its a rough ride. If this was not bad enough, you have to dodge eager pedestrians, vehicles pulling out of side roads, vehicles entering the cycle lane to avoid oncoming vehicles moving into their lanes because cars park on the side of the road. Wide vehicles like buses and lorries which take up pretty much an entire lane leaving you very little margin for error. Lets face it – it is terrifying. As the summer ended and autumn started then winter followed the weather got pretty grim. You start having to wear special clothes just to cycle anywhere. It is not ideal.

After just under a year of cycling:

I had one near miss when a truck hit my back wheel and I came off the bike but did no damage to my person (except for a scraped elbow and knee).

I killed a pigeon which flew into my front wheel as I was racing along a main road.

I got wet through countless times when it rained.

To add insult to injury, my bike was finally stolen despite being chained right outside my workplace.

I no longer cycle. I now walk when it is dry and get the bus if it is raining. I hate getting the bus – but that is another matter altogether.

My biggest commuting nightmare was several years ago, before the job market slump in the Bay Area. Before the dot.com debacle. I worked 4-1/2 miles from my home. Would you believe it took me 90 minutes to get home one night? And of course that was the one time I had scheduled a delivery at my house for 5:00, thinking a half hour would be more than enough time to get home. Not!

digicat@sbcglobal.net

For what it’s worth, mass transit, including subways are still, by most intents and purposes, a cheap and semi-fast alternative to get around, despite all the years it’s been around without a major upgrade. It’s still highly regarded in my mind and is one of the major reasons I don’t feel like moving out to a suburb in which going to a movie or toy store won’t require gas and alert driving.

That said, the amount of near-homocidal rage and frustration fed to me by the dopes who run such a system is just at the point where I must yell about it to someone.

I take a multi-train commute to work everyday, from the border of Brooklyn/Queens at the L-train’s Dekalb, all the way to the north of Queens at Astoria-Ditmars Blvd. How I planned to get there without losing myself would be a feat colonial explorers would be proud of, if only for the lack of a train way up there. Now, I know you’re thinking “But there’s a G train there, you jerk!”, and you’re right, had it not been for the unreliable slowness the G brings. For a major inter-borough train (Hah, yeah, laugh that up), they are fewer and farther between than most buses. As well, from there I have to travel up several flights of stairs just to transfer to the 7, waiting outside to catch one, just for one ride.

My alternative is going INTO Manhattan, then going only the 4,5 up to Lexington, then relaxing till I get to the job spot. Takes a bit longer, but it’s less hassle for me, and L trains arrive pretty often anyway.

This rant comes to you now as a result of the destructive habit the MTA has gotten into of upgrading absolutely nothing for days at a time, namely the 2 trains I ride on daily: The L and the N/W. By now, people out of state can tell you how often the L train goes down at certain segments, this month being all of Manhattan’s side. On the weekends, they divide what would be a 1 train ride into 3, having you transfer at Bedford, then at 14th St/Union Sq. But for me, that can be worked-around by the slow and unsteady G.

Then comes my nightly terror, Astoria-Ditmars. For those un-N/W savvy, Ditmars is the last stop on the train, which would mean an absolute abundance of trains, right?

WRONG

Despite how many working trains full of commuters are dumped there, the MTA workers at the station constantly yell at commuters who just want to sit down somewhere nice, away from the cold (Bonus fact: It’s an outdoor station, so we can frolic in the wintery frigid snow all we want =D), because that train is out of service or just plain “Isn’t taking anyone anywhere”. So they’ll go through ALL the cars, and systematically kick out people who STUPIDLY think that trains, a paid service, will actually BRING you somewhere. No, that’s never the case. And once that train goes, another comes in it’s stead, and all commuters stand there, shivering, watching, hoping that it’ll be salvation from the blasting snow or drenching rain. Just yesterday in fact, all of the people at the station had to be kicked out of 3 trains, and I have to say “Kicked out of” because they exclusively tell people to get off AFTER they’ve gone in, rather than preventing people their high hopes.

I’ve no pictures to show, but if anyone has a picture of a bulls-eye and perhaps a sledgehammer…