“What’s new?” the Metropolitan Transportation Authority asks in its new marketing campaign — the perpetually beleaguered transit agency’s latest attempt to turn around straphanger sentiment.

“Less mystery,” replies one poster, pointing out that riders can receive text and e-mail alerts about delays and service changes. “Connecting more with you,” responds another, noting that the agency’s Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube accounts have all been revamped.

A third advertisement answers the question with a list that concludes on a hopeful bit of punctuation, the onward-and-upward ellipsis: “Better connections, better bus service, better trips, better info, better bridges, better …”

the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s latest effort in reputation enhancement.

One such poster, spotted on an uptown no. 1 local train the other night, already featured one rider’s hand-written rejoinder, scrawled in an angry blue ink.

“What’s new?” the poster asks. “Higher prices!” replied the marker-toting wag.

The graffiti points to the vast public relations difficulties of an agency whose very nature — operating a system that virtually every New Yorker depends on — makes it a lightning rod for all manner of criticism, deserved and not.

The agency, increasingly wary of politicians’ criticism and less than flattering news coverage, has been trying a direct-marketing approach in making riders aware of the work it is doing to improve the transportation experience.

The new slate of promotional posters, to be displayed in subways, buses and commuter rails and on some station walls, is a complement to the agency’s “Improving, Nonstop” campaign, started earlier this year. the idea was to remove outdated slogans — “Going your Way” is now gone — and create a more streamlined, simpler aesthetic for the agency to inform its clientele.

“There was a feeling that the M.T.a. hadn’t been as effective as we could be in communicating things that are going on to our customers,” said Jeremy Soffin, a spokesman for the transportation authority. “This is a way of trying to improve that.”

The “What’s New?” posters advertise faster buses on First and Second Avenues in Manhattan, a result of new bus-only lanes and sidewalk kiosks that allow riders to buy their tickets before boarding. “We said we’d make buses go faster, and we did,” the ad says proudly.

Another poster discusses improvements to the Henry Hudson Bridge toll plaza, where E-ZPass users no longer have to wait for a mechanical arm to rise before driving through. One ad promotes the agency’s newly consolidated help lines and provides three customer service telephone numbers for riders to use.

“What’s New?” the ad asks. “Fewer phone num6ers.” (The numeral 6 is not a typo.)

“Rather than having a scattered campaign with different message and designs, it hangs together,” mr. Soffin, the spokesman, said.

It remains unclear whether the new advertisements have achieved their intended effect. the authority said it had received only anecdotal responses to the posters, and it would not comment further.

A Decal That’s Friendlier, to Bikers and Cabs Alike

the newly approved decal.

Over 20 years in the New York City taxi business, Warren Prosky has seen all manner of calamity befall the beat-up steel-frame doors of his Brooklyn-based fleet of yellow cabs.

“Fling open the door and you hit another car, hit a pedestrian. most recently, you hit other bicyclists,” mr. Prosky said on the telephone the other day. “Ever since Mayor Bloomberg put all these bicycle lanes throughout the city, the bicyclists are at more risk now than they ever were.”

That may not be technically true — the city’s Department of Transportation maintains that bicyclists are safer now than at any other time in the city’s history — but “dooring,” a longtime scourge of the city’s bicycling class, remains a dangerous prospect for anyone trying to navigate the streets on two wheels. Taxicabs, which sometimes make up the bulk of vehicular traffic in Manhattan, are a prime culprit.

Mr. Prosky, a third-generation taxi operator, decided that action had to be taken. So he designed an informational decal, simple and short, to be pasted on the rear windows of yellow cabs, where passengers can clearly see them. the message: “Please Exit Curbside and Watch for Cyclists.”

A group of fleet owners brought mr. Prosky’s idea to the city’s attention, and last week, the decal was approved by the Taxi and Limousine Commission for inclusion in yellow cabs.

“Bicyclists can be surprised by the unexpected opening of a door,” David S. Yassky, the taxi commissioner, said in an interview. “We’re always on the hunt for modest improvements in street safety and curbside safety. I think it’s a nice idea.”

Mr. Prosky recalled that years ago, taxi interiors were often festooned with a hodgepodge of stickers and decals. Then the city called for a cleanup.

“It was a beautiful thing for our industry,” he said of the de-stickered cabs. “But there are certain stickers which are necessary to remind the passenger about their safety, as well as the person right outside the cab, when people open up doors.”

The clear decal, 3.5 by 4 inches, will not be mandatory. “Hopefully, it will limit everybody’s liability, and make the streets safer,” mr. Prosky said.

Bike advocates expressed their support. “This is another positive step toward helping cyclists, drivers and pedestrians share our streets safely,” e-mailed Michael Murphy, a spokesman for Transportation Alternatives.

Cab trips often end with a Taxi TV reminder to remove any belongings and watch out for cyclists. But mr. Yassky conceded that the sticker could prove more effective.

“Lots of people don’t pay attention, and don’t necessarily read that screen,” he said.

Our transit reporter, Michael M. Grynbaum, advises you on the latest chatter from the city’s roads and rails. Check back every Monday. got a tip? he can be reached at .

The third Avenue El originally traveled all the way down 3rd Avenue to South Ferry. The line was slowly cut back: It was cut back to Chatham Square in 1950, and was cut back to 149th Street in 1955.

As far as tying it into another line goes, the only line with enough capacity would’ve been the Manhattan section, but since they tore it down, there was nothing it could connect to (it couldn’t connect to the Concourse Line even if they were able to build the connection because the line was built to IRT specs.

I do think they should’ve kept the portion in the Bronx, though I agree with them tearing down the Manhattan portion (even though it left the East side of Manhattan with an overcrowded subway line). I doubt the UES would’ve become the wealthy neighborhood it is today if the third Avenue El were still around (and, as people pay a premium to live in Manhattan, I think it would be wise to keep the property values as high as possible)

In the Bronx on the other hand, the El would benefit the area by providing transit service right to the neighborhood. even though it would be a blight, it would prevent the neighborhood from having to depend on buses for transportation.

They are a blight, but a necessary one to provide decent service to an area. for example, when I lived in Brighton Beach, the trains used to screech around that curve, but people put up with it because it provided fast, frequent service to Manhattan.

Five Senate Republicans, led by Sen. John Bonacic, are making transit advocates an offer they can probably refuse. The payoff is appealing: state authorization for bridge tolls on the East River bridges. but the price they are demanding in return, the total repeal of the payroll mobility tax outside New York City, is too high to pay.

The basic contours of a road pricing-for-reduced payroll tax swap could potentially turn into a big win for transit riders — the right deal would reduce traffic, improve bus speeds and reliability, and raise a substantial amount to plug the gap in the MTA capital program.

Bonacic’s bill, however, is not the deal transit advocates want to aim for. It would only authorize the New York City Council to institute tolls over the East River bridges, not the Harlem River bridges (a fact which may be related to the fact that four of the five sponsors represent the Hudson Valley, not Long Island). and it seems that the rate to charge motorists would be left up to the city. So right off the bat there’s a lot of uncertainty about whether the City Council would act and what level of tolling they would consent to.

If the city charged $2 tolls in each direction, as was proposed by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and endorsed by Public Advocate Bill de Blasio in a 2009 plan, East River-only tolls would likely raise around $240 million, according to an analysis by road pricing expert Charles Komanoff. (UPDATE: due to revisions in his model, Komanoff now estimates that $2 tolls would bring in $300 million.)

In comparison, the seven suburban counties in the MTA region contributed roughly 30 percent of total payroll tax revenues. In 2010, the payroll tax brought in just under $1.35 billion. Without the suburban counties, that would have dropped by $405 million.

In other words, swapping the suburban payroll tax for $2 East River bridge tolls would end up costing the MTA roughly $165 million each year.

The Bonacic bill does not appear to have an Assembly equivalent yet, suggesting that it isn’t going anywhere right now. It does, however, mark the first attempt to legislate an often-suggested swap: a lower suburban payroll tax in exchange for bridge tolls or congestion pricing. A differently structured deal, one which partially reduces the suburban payroll tax while guaranteeing a more robust road pricing system, could be much more attractive, especially given that raising revenues through bridge tolls has the added benefit of cutting congestion and speeding up buses.

It’s possible, of course, that the city would decide to charge more than $2 each way under Bonacic’s plan. Even if the new bridge tolls were as high as the currently-tolled MTA bridges and tunnels, however, that would barely make up for the lost payroll tax revenue. using the Independent Budget Office’s recent calculation of bridge toll revenue and holding constant the share of Komanoff’s East River bridge estimate to the total Silver plan revenue, even tolls that high would only raise around $517 million. That would net the MTA a small profit (but unless the tolls steadily increase over time, it could be an ever-shrinking profit — by 2014, the suburban share of estimated payroll tax revenue is projected to reach $485 million).

More importantly, once you’ve traded away suburban payroll tax revenue, you can’t get it back. There’s only one chance to get this deal right, and if you institute tolls just to offset a suburban tax break, you can’t use the revenue to pay for system repairs. to close the MTA’s potentially disastrous $10 billion capital plan deficit, both the payroll tax and bridge tolls will be necessary.

While the congestion-busting effects of East River bridge tolls are tempting, transit riders can’t afford to give up one source of funding without getting a bigger revenue source in return. Otherwise New York is still on track for a combination of rising fares and deteriorating transit service. The verdict on this version of the payroll tax-for-bridge tolls swap should be clear: No deal.

My friend Sumana Harihareswara is working on a geeky standup comedy routine (“about project management, Linux, relationships, Agile, public transit, science fiction, and these Kids Today”), and needs an audience of science fiction and computer nerds in front of whom to practice it.

To that end, she’ll be performing for half an hour, starting at 7 PM, on Thursday, April 21st, at Seaburn Bookstore, 33-18 Broadway, in Astoria, Queens, NYC. Looks like it’s near the Broadway stop on the N/Q, and the Steinway stop on the M/R. (That Google map claims the E also runs through Steinway, but the MTA’s map says otherwise. the Internet knows all things, including wrong things.) Chris and I are going to be there. (I might also show at Pacific Standard on Friday, since I can walk there.)

You may also know Sumana, and her husband Leonard Richardson, as the editors and publishers of Thoughtcrime Experiments, a science fiction anthology published under a Creative Commons license.

Question by Erick L: Is Penn station located in new York City? I am planning to go to new York City, to see one of the best Broadway musicals ever. and i just want to know if the Penn station is really located in new York City. Cause i don’t want to end up in a different place if is not in the city that i am talking about. Please let me know ASAP. thank you soooooo much and enjoy your day!

Answer:

Answer by old schoolyes

Give your answer to this question below!

Tags: City, located, penn, Station, York

This entry was posted on Monday, April 18th, 2011 at 6:19 am and is filed under New York City. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are a few truths New Yorkers hold to be self-evident. 1. You can’t get a taxi in the rain. 2. Anything can be delivered at anytime, to anywhere. 3. The official font of the MTA is Helvetica.

Okay, so maybe the last one is less self-evident. still, typography lovers and design aficionados know that Helvetica, the font that changed the world and warranted its own April Fools gag, also changed the New York City transit system. The pleasant (if boring) sans serif font adorns our trains, our signs, and our maps, and has done so since the late sixties, to everyone’s delight, right?

In the ambitious and highly readable “Helvetica and the New York City Subway system: the True (Maybe) Story,” Paul Shaw explains in great detail how Helvetica didn’t quite take the city by storm. There are today visible clues that other fonts were contenders (like the font on the intricate tile work that adorns most subway stations), but the full story lies in the history of the unification of three subway lines—the IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit), the BMT (Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit), and the IND (Independent)—and the evolution of the NYCTA (New York City Transit Authority) into the MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority, which incorporated the Long Island Railroad and MetroNorth commuter rail).

Despite numerous attempts at style standardization, the merging and growth of these various agencies proved an administrative nightmare. though Helvetica was always the choice font for typographic synchronization, it was simply too expensive to ship over from Amsterdam, where it was made (back in the days of metal type, lead font plates had to be imported, a costly endeavor, since the plates had to be custom manufactured to fit American printing presses). In the early sixties (much like today) New York City Transit just didn’t have the money. Instead, the MTA used a similar font called Standard, or Akzidenz-Grotesk, which took nineteen years to fully phase out. It wasn’t until 1989 that the MTA officially ratified the decision to replace it with Helvetica in its “Sign Manual.”

Below are photos from Shaw’s book that offer glimpses into the past, present, and what might have been in our subway system (click to enlarge).

(All images courtesy Paul Shaw and “Helvetica and the New York City Subway System”)

As the two of you along with @thepipebit who read my blahg, I commute to work by bicycle. I have been commuting for at least two years since the MTA along with our Rat overlords decided that they would raise the fair to the point where a guy living alone making an honest earning can’t afford to ride the train every single day of the year. When I moved to NYC in 1999 the fair was less than two dollars, now it is two fifty with talks of raising the fair again perhaps earliest as next year. once you do the math, you’d see for a year that it’s a ridiculous amount of money to throw at our public’s failing mass transportation system, hence commuting by bicycle. either way I love riding my bicycle, so it’s a win for me.

This has nothing to do with this post,
 it was dinner the other nightI work at one of the busiest intersections that I am currently aware of in the city (I could be wrong on that assumption) which normally has a police presence all day either directing traffic or watching the hooligans leaving school after a hard day of preparing for summer school by failing while their pants sag (kind of like their future). So in broad daylight a thief rolled up on my bike and ripped me off in the same spot I’ve been locking my bike for what ever amount of time I said in the previous paragraph. So walking out of work and seeing the situation laid out before my eyes, I was angered to say the least especially with such a heavy police presence.

with new handlebarsBasically having no choice in the situation, I strolled down Park Ave. with what was left of my bike minus handle bars. I did receive some odd glances from people looking at me and my violated bicycle as they passed me, and I wondered to myself if they felt sad for me or they thought I was stealing my own bike (which of course they didn’t know was mine). either way I was determined to make it to the Bike shop before it closed at 7, and so with bike in tow I scurried along (not unlike our rat overlords).

In the end, I made it to the bike shop and dropped more money than I wanted to spend to get my bike back on the road. I was able to ride back to Brooklyn, but not without catching a flat tire (the 2nd one in two days). I have to admit I am currently nervous about locking my bike in front of where I work, and so I am looking into securing my handlebars and stem before I resume riding to work. I just want to say thanks to that asshole who stole my cockpit, I really hope you get doored and then immediately have taxi run over your shitty ass, you ass.

(Andrea Bernstein, Transportation Nation)  using the NYC MTA’s information page, or any of the apps based on it can be an exercise in imagined bliss. on the one hand, it’s thrilling to get information on subway status, and whether a line is running before setting out for a subway stop. on the other hand, the information can come late, or be insufficiently detailed.

Here at Transportation Nation, we’ve often asked ourselves why subway information isn’t crowdsourced. If the a train is delayed, hundreds or thousands of riders know it before the MTA relays that information. now Roadify, the Brooklyn-based app outfit that started crowdsourcing arrival data for the B-67 bus, is adding all NYC subways lines to its crowdsourcing system.

True, the subways aren’t wired.  But Roadify’s Dylan Goelz says the hope is that a combination of information coming in from above-ground riders, riders leaving the subway, and riders entering stations will create a more complete and immediate picture than the MTA’s own info page.

Tell us how it’s working!

by Max Eddy | 4:56 pm, February 17th, 2011

Cult of Mac reports with some degree of certainty that Apple is planning to construct a new Apple Store inside New York’s Grand Central Station. This would be the fifth Apple store in Manhattan, and, if opened this year as reported, would coincide with the 10th anniversary of Apple’s highly successful foray into the brick-and-mortar retail business.

The new store is rumored to become the largest store in Apple’s retail empire, surpassing in size its current flagship store in London, which has some 16,000 feet of retail space. But finding that kind of space inside Grand Central will be very difficult, suggesting that Apple may not simply be occupying existing retail space. their source has suggested that walls may be coming down.

In addition to providing the most retail space, part of the function of the store seems to be removing pressure on the iconic glass cube store on 5th Avenue. Space in station will also provide easy access to the crowds around the Times Square area.

Apple is, true to form, staying tight-lipped on the subject, though Cult of Mac claims that an announcement is coming within a month.  If they go forward with these plans, Apple will face an uphill battle creating a space that is more stunning than the station itself.

(Cult of Mac, original image Cresny)