The chair thing still gets harped on when Penn does not have public seating either outside of the LIRR and Amtrak ticketed waiting room and within restaurants. No shit they don't want homeless people. Yeah it would be nice to be able to sit while I wait for a train on the general concourse but it's not my biggest gripe with the station tbh. I agree the waiting room should be bigger and be 24/7 and add some kind of way for family member or anyone waiting for someone on an arriving train (not that hard to tell apart someone waiting vs a bum).

My bigger gripes are that the main area IMO should have been designed with dedicated queue space near each escalator so it's not a free for all, and perhaps have built even more escalators if possible. They could have maybe been more bold and lower the entire concourse to be closer to track level so it's quicker to get to the platform. The platform width I know remains the big problem which I'm annoyed this project did nothing to address.

This whole area is unfortunate. When there was a second elevated subway line adjacent to the current one perhaps the sheer width of this abomination of a roadway made sense but not so anymore. I'm hoping the renovation of QB station will make it a bit more pleasant. It's a pain to cross right now and often feels unsafe with cars ignoring red lights, blocking crosswalks, and coming in hot off the bridge at 50 mph. Also it's shitty to cross by bike, there are no actual lanes going across so you have to use the crosswalks basically.

Same, people were like wow you're poor, but my family has had a plan with T-Mobile for so long it was always cheaper and now they've really really come a long way, IMO, with network size and reliability. I never have any issues really and in the days of contracts we'd always have great deals for unlimited data. At one point a while back we were paying $5 per line for unlimited if I recall thanks to a grandfathered rate back with blackberry devices :)

RIP to the temples of transportation of old. Thank god for advocates keeping GCT from being razed for skyscrapers decades ago

There's some concepts floating around that in the long term, the earth as a whole may be better off getting food from intensive agriculture that is maximized for efficiency, versus using water and nitrogen on smaller scale or boutique farming setups, or for example in this case using energy to produce offseason food outside their ideal/economized environment. You could argue perhaps the shipping reduction by having it right here is better, or that it's not enough to make up for the losses in yields from more productive farming. All that is just a thought experiment anyways since this is a simple shipping container demonstration/education setup basically, so I don't have any particular problem with it.

So there is a stronger case to give them a raise then since they were already less fortunate yes?

I mean would you work at a job that didn't give you a raise in 10 years? I sure as hell wouldn't lol

You may be waiting a long time. It was only in the past 1-2 years if I recall right that Uber changed their financial prospectus and shareholder info on their long term strategy. Originally, yes the entire system was predicated on removing the biggest cost: labor, through automation. But then, to no one's surprise, the cost of development and lobbying for regulation of fully autonomous vehicles in challenging environments become apparent. Uber cut back development money and no longer is "counting" on automation, hence the rising prices, because they know they cannot survive for potentially many years losing money "waiting" for automation that may never even come. If they were confident that automation was near we'd still see low prices to suck everyone in, but I think they had a come to Jesus moment lol

Great article Matt.

> But last month, the monitor argued in a report that neither he — nor, perhaps, the proposed federal receiver — could turn Rikers around

That's pretty damning lmao. At this point clearly the current plan is not working, so I say go for it with a federal receiver. If even that fails well it's on the feds then not us, but is still a pretty damning assessment of NYC's ability to run services

Gonna have to disagree, maybe you live on a good line but for some of us on the N and R it's already bad and even worse on weekends, I ain't looking forward to potential 30+ minute headways for the N in Astoria on Saturday night lol. The overnight cuts in service could be brutal

Just for context, some of you who may say oh who cares, the MTA doesn't deserve more of our money they are so wasteful. You need to realize, if the money is not found, they will NOT fill the gap by economizing. They will cut service. Then, you may not be so happy waiting 20 minutes for your train instead of 10 and ask whether your complaining was worth it. We're really at a pivotal moment, yes ridership is down and some may say well adjust for ridership, that also means service cuts. Do we gimp service and make it even worse and lose even more riders? Or do we accept this is a public service, for the good of the city, and keep it funded and even try to improve it such as better weekend service to make more fare revenue? I do not disagree the MTA needs economizing, but the political and labor union reality is that service will be cut before anything else.

Agreed, it's a public service, it should not "have" to be 100% profitable and yes it should be kept in a good position via state revenue. It is a state agency, it's the governor's and senate's responsibility to keep it in good working order and to hold bad actors (i.e. inefficiency) accountable. Highways purely from a budget perspective lose billions, we toll few of our highways and still have unpaid bridges all around the city. The subway could lose billions too, but without it the city would crumble since you could not move the millions of workers around.

There's much to economize yes. Booth attendants and for example newer trains going DOO (driver operated only), one guy who does the driving and doors, but labor unions are too powerful

> audit the ceos and the big wigs

No lmao google "LIRR overtime king", there are/were employees literally making more than the CEO and board members for abusing OT policies. Biometric time keeping is helping now but there are still a lot of make work jobs around on contracts and because so many staff were let go during pandemic it's taking overtime by remaining staff to fill the gap due to the time delay in training new drivers

Oh absolutely, our office saw the same thing happen to these ipad knockoff terminals they installed on every conference room to book the rooms. They worked fine for a while and clearly we had staff who knew their functioning, then one by one after a while they'd go wonky, offline, or into a state where you could access the admin panel and mess with the Windows Embedded operating system. The original office designers and staff present when we moved in were all gone so no one had any idea who even to call to fix them lol

If you don't believe ice machines get moldy take a look inside almost any machine in a white collar office kitchen. I never saw ours cleaned once in years until enough people noticed hmm that brown sludge on the walls doesn't look quite right lol. I think businesses and office have a habit of buying equipment and either assuming it'll magically maintain itself or never bother to setup proper maintenance

I think bike rooms being default in new buildings is a good idea forward, I've seen new housing lottery luxury buildings with bike rooms completely full or require a wait list. They usually don't need much space either, I've seen some plenty simple ones that looked basically like a storage room with some racks installed in an otherwise unusable space

> You need to stem the flow at manufacture and import.

We really need cops and consumer authorities raiding fly ebike popup stores and similar shit across the city. Confiscate all the illegal mopeds, arrest sellers, until then as you say, yeah there is really no risk right now to this market

What card do you have? I have an EdenRed benefit cards and it works. Add it to your account for auto-reload. I've read there is sometimes an issue with the zip code but it's possible to get it to work

Worry not friend. Take a look on the OMNY FAQ. The roll-out of OMNY includes physical cards which are currently available from retailers as you mention, however, as MetroCards are phased out they will bring online new machines which dispense OMNY cards. They will work the same whereby you can pay cash or credit card. It'd be illogical to remove MC machines, no one wants to "have" to go to CVS to buy their card and reload it manually at a cashier, it's just that they wanted to get physical OMNY cards into the public hands a bit sooner before the machines are ready.

So I think there are ways to do it whereby you keep the current basins and cover conduits basically for the water to flow into them, but I am not 100% sure of current design standards if that is what the city would do or consider

I believe you are quite right that sounds very familiar and you're spot on, some projects are already miracles to begin with so if you add two agencies into the mix then it's a giga-miracle, and 3 or more... not even god himself can achieve the coordination 💀

Look is it perfect, no, but it's in the right direction. I've ridden the 9th Ave bike lane a lot and it's a shitshow, a very chaotic situation indeed as the article posted below mentions. This treatment seems to be working nicely on 8th Ave so I can't complain too much :)

Yes, NYCDOT does not do road diets or bus lanes, for example, without performing a traffic analysis. They would have already determined that the roadway can support one less lane under the same conditions. The second bullet also will help a lot "expand commercial loading..." so I am glad they likely acknowledged the problem you mention (which is very bad in many places) of truck activity. Slowly there has been positive movement at DOT to do more curb regulations for commercial loading to try and improve double or even triple parking that is pervasive around the city.

> Why would they not actually extend the pavement to make it seamless?

The NYCDOT's strategy is to avoid what is called "capital construction", or pouring concrete or utility work, at almost any cost. This is why they only almost always do painted treatments such as painted curb extensions, aka bulbouts, medians, refuge islands, etc. You're probably asking well if they save all this money, when do they ever do capital construction? I can't tell you, despite the budget approved this year being 1 billion dollars, no clue lol. The biggest "problem" with expanding the sidewalk is drainage, you would need to move every catch-basin which involves digging up the road and can be quite costly.