playing catch-up

The 1 train was held by the dispatcher at 137^th street after creeping into the station from 145^th. Normally when I complain about the train being held, it’s because I know for a fact that there is no other train in front of the one I’m in and therefore no reason for the hold-up. In this particular case, I was not able to make such an assumption because I had to run up the stairs two by two in order to catch the train waiting at the 225^th street station, so I didn’t have any way of knowing how long it had taken for that train to arrive and thus how reasonable it was to be held by the dispatcher at 137^th. I mean, in my mind, it is never reasonable to be held in a station – but it’s less reasonable when a 10 minute gap has preceded the arrival of a train at any given station.

At 116^th street, the next station was announced as being 103^rd street, but it was not announced that 110^th street was being skipped. Nobody seemed alarmed by this, perhaps because no-one heard the announcement perhaps because everyone was wearing headphones, or maybe that they just know the tone taken when being told that their stop would be skipped and the tone in this case was a casual tone. The mistake was never addressed and anyway it was clear for some invisible reason that he had simply meant to say 110^th street but didn’t. Since I was only 2 stops removed from being held in a station by the dispatcher, and was feeling generally spiteful towards the MTA, it occurred to me that this type of human error would have been unlikely were we on the 2 or 6 or L or any of the other mechanized voice trains. I shook that thought from my head, though, as mechanized voice trains are the primary villain in the saga of the subway commuter. I will get to why one of these days.

We pulled into 96^th street at the same time as a 2 train and I was able to run across the platform for a transfer. On the 2 train, we passed a 1 train at 66^th street and another at 50^th street. Although the 2 slowed to a crawl after passing the 1 train at 50^th street, letting that train then pass the 2 once again, yet it still waited at 42^nd street with doors open until the 2 train riders were able to transfer across the platform. I was one of those tranferers. I was ambivalent about the transfer for a second or two because I thought to myself that if the 1 train then waited at 42^nd street for the next express to come, I would have begun talking out loud. But, I decided that it was worth it anyway because were I to get off the express at 14^th street, I would really be at 12^th street because I was all the way at the front of the train (I didn’t have time to walk to my normal spot on the platform at 225^th street). I would have to walk back up to 17^th street and the time I gained by staying on the express would have been lost by being farther from my eventual destination. The 18^th street exit on the 1 train, on the other hand, is more toward the middle of the station, so even if I was at the front of the train, I wouldn’t have too much extra walking to do. As it turned out, everything was fine and all trains left when they should.

I was trying, however, to think of how much time I had saved by transferring to the 2 and then catching up with not one, but two 1 trains and arriving at 18^th street two 1 trains ahead of where I got on at 225^th. I figured that by the time we passed the 1 train at 66^th street, the 1 train I had originally been on would have been at, say, 79^th street. This was a difference of only 2 stops between 1 trains. This is, if everything is running correctly, about two minutes between trains. But, another 1 train was also passed at 50^th street – just another two stops away and thus another difference of two minutes. Using this logic, if I were to have arrived at 225^th street four minutes before I did, I would have been on the train that I eventually wound up on. Something tells me, though, that this is not the case. Trains do not usually come two minutes after one another. They are not scheduled to, anyway. At rush hour, they are generally scheduled four minutes apart, or so. There were some delays. I think I would have had to get to the 225^th street station, I estimate, eight minutes before I did in order to get the 1 train I wound up arriving at 18^th street on. That’s what I think. The sad news is that I was still late to work…

Later in the day, the R train was found going at a reduced speed between 28^th street and 34^th street. No explanation. There was also a +5 second time differential between when the conductor announced that we should stand clear of the closing doors, and the actual closing of the doors. A guy and a girl – perhaps colleagues, discussed the authenticity of a homeless man asking for money. To the guy, he did not smell bad enough to warrant full homeless status. He postulated that while there may be showers in shelters, people didn’t really use them all that much. This guy did not smell bad. The guy thought that train begging was a “pretty good gig.” For the girl, his authenticity didn’t matter – if he had had a kid, though, with him – she would have given money, no questions asked.