During Thursday’s Metro-North shutdown, many people on Twitter started railing (for lack of a better term) into the organization for its ongoing troubles over the past few months. The hyperbolic language some took to using on Twitter led some rail enthusiasts to point out that, while troublesome, Metro-North’s recent woes are barely a blip compared to some rail’s worst moments. Continue reading
Commuting has been an experience from the get-go. I very much love my train rides overall; they’re generally quiet, uneventful, relaxing (who wants to drive in that traffic?) and I use the time for myself: To read, solve a few logic puzzles, or, best of all, nap. Of course, when things go wrong, it’s usually pretty bad, and last night was a doozy. Continue reading
The company for which I’m employed, Pixafy, moved offices in September. Unlike the last move, which was literally a block uptown from the previous office, but both were around 31st Street and Park Avenue South, this time we made a larger move and ended up at 53rd Street and 7th Avenue, putting us right outside of Times Square. The adjustment to the commute over, I’ve been increasingly taking in what my commute now contains. Continue reading
Passengers await an “extra” Metro-North train as it pulls up to a crowded platform in Stamford this morning.
Wednesday morning, Metro-North had its latest problem strike when a feeder line powering a portion of the lower New Haven Line fail, eliminating all electric service into Grand Central Terminal. The resulting changes that have followed have been limited, challenging and at times frustrating. Yet it also shows an agency that manages to work through yet another emergency with some pretty skillful and creative strategies. Continue reading
I recently wrote about commuting for my company’s blog, some light fare revolving around things one can do during a daily commute to keep busy. It’s actually a process that’s evolved in the almost three years since I said yes to working in the city, something that was not even top of mind prior to this job. Continue reading
The MTA has not generally been known for being technologically advanced, although it’s hard to fault an organization that relies on equipment and infrastructure whose age can sometimes be marked with three digits in the years column. That said, occasionally we get a glimpse of what progress can bring, and one such example just recently made its debut on the app store in a beta release. Continue reading
When my family first moved to Connecticut, we signed up for accounts at People’s Bank in Bridgeport. We ended up there solely because my father, who had moved up to the state a few months before, got an account there. Going on 20 years later, the now-renamed People’s United Bank, excepting a brief, horrid flirtation with Fleet (now Bank of America) when I was in college), has been my steady,long-term relationship of a bank. Continue reading
A picture I took of an M8 at Stamford station at a time when I saw them much more often.
Metro-North Railroad is in the middle of replacing its older train cars with a model called the M8, manufactured by Kawasaki. They include such features as pre-recorded audio with station stop announcements (and matching signage), higher headrests one every seat (and easier grips for people to be able to safely move about), and other technology advancements that come with redesigning a train car 40 years after the last major redesign.
The only problem is, I’m having trouble finding them. Continue reading
Someday they’ll have wi-fi on the trains themselves. A man can dream…
One of the more frustrating parts about my commute is the black hole of service that occurs during the 10 minutes each direction that the train is departing or arriving Grand Central Terminal. Given my commute’s 45 minutes, it takes effectively 1/4 of the time I could use to be productive, and leads me to rarely break out the laptop. Continue reading