Sunday, December 04, 2011

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Metro Transit

Misspelled ad for Whole FoodsThe photo on the right (click it to enlarge it) is a shot of a Whole Foods advertisement on a Metro-North train. Their unriveled commitment to quality clearly doesn’t extend to spelling.

In other New York City transit news, on a Manhattan-bound L-train from Brooklyn last night, there was a fake pile of poop on one of the benches. Passengers all speculated on whether it was fake (no smell, too neat and regular), with assured pronouncements that it was. Still, no one tested it, and no one would sit within four feet of it.

Only in New York.

2 comments:

William M. Irwin said...

"on a Manhattan-bound L-train"

Is that the subway? Forgive me, Barry, but I don't get the local transportation lingo for NYC. I do know that I miss having at least walked downstairs to take a peek at the subway system during my April, 2010 visit to Manhattan (besides missing out on meeting with you, of course). God, I wish Gainesville had something like that: they could lay a shit on every other seat and I would be happy, just to have such an incredible transportation network like the NYC subway...

Barry Leiba said...

Yes, it's the subway. The NYC subway system has an interesting history, and sometimes confusing terminology. The different subway lines weren't all developed together, and we originally had the IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit), the BMT (Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit), and the IND (Independent Subway System), all of which were consolidated into one system by the City of New York long before your time and mine. It's now all run by the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA).

The lines are also coloured on the maps, so non-New-Yorkers often talk about "the green line", "the red line", or "the blue line", as though they were on the D.C. Metro. Locals would refer to them as Lexington Avenue trains, Broadway trains, and Eighth Avenue trains, respectively, except for the old-timers, who still might talk about "taking the IRT".

But mostly, we call the trains by the letter or number designations. The blue-coloured Eighth Avenue trains that used to be the IND are now the A, C, and E trains. The 1, 2, and 3 go up and down Broadway (red), and the 4, 5, and 6 are the Lex line. You can take an F train to Coney Island on one end, and to Jamaica, Queens, on the other. And the L train goes from Manhattan to Canarsie and back.

All in all, there are more than 20 subway lines (see map here), with major construction of a new Second Avenue line going on. Yes, it's a good system, and it's absolutely essential for getting around in the city.