Photograph of commuters walking across the Brooklyn Bridge on December 20, 2005 by Jake Dobkin The Daily News reports that the MTA has been meeting with the Transit Workers Union, "holding secret negotiations to hammer out a contract months ahead of schedule - and without the usual rancor." Nice, as we all remember what rancor and a lack of a contract meant last time: A three-day transit strike without subway and bus service--the exercise......

A lawsuit against the MTA is about to go to trial surrounding the rape of a woman on a G train platform in Queens three years ago. And the victim, now 25, told the Daily News this weekend that she forgives her attacker ("I know he was sick in the head"), but not the token booth clerk at the 21st Street station, "I can't forgive those five seconds when I stared into his eyes, screaming......

Yesterday, Gothamist attended the 34th annual Atlantic Antic along Atlantic Avenue between Hicks Street and Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn. For the uninitiated, this not your typical New York "tube sock" street fair. Sure there are some of the typical food vendors (gyros, roasted corn and Mozzarepas, natch). But unlike most other street fairs, there is a strong neighborhood presence in both food (including freebees from the new kid on the block Trader Joe’s) and vendors,......

Photos via the MTA and the History Channel. Behold! This morning the MTA unveiled the first "full advertising wrap of the exterior and interior of a New York City subway." Synergy alert! The ad is for the History Channel's Cities of the Underworld, which follows urban explorer Don Wildman on his adventures beneath major cities. Adventures happening ever further down from the ones New Yorkers experience on the 42nd Street Shuttle. The underground ad......

Design by Grimshaw Billings Jackson with Systra/HNTB, photo courtesy MTA/Rob Wilson.. It's prototypelooza today! First ten possible prototype back racks of the future were revealed, and now the MTA has upstaged the DOT with their own street furniture prototype, installed in front of 151 West Broadway between Worth and Thomas Streets. The second of three multi-purpose prototypes, it's designed to prevent subway flooding while ventilating the subway system AND providing benches to sit on AND......

A pilot program to keep subway stations cleaner on the No. 7 and L lines was a success, but transit officials are balking at the cost of implementing it citywide, which would be approximately $100 million. The test run increased the number of cleaners at all stations on two subway lines, providing round the clock service; an MTA analysis found that those stations had heavy litter just 10% of the time, down from 33% before......

Ah, the Second Avenue subway project—that mythical, subterranean Chimera that mayors and governors have spun tales about since time immemorial—is once again in danger of abandonment. With all the talk of service cutbacks as the MTA stares down the barrel of a $1 billion budged deficit, some are wondering if the transit authority should really be spending an estimated $3,000 every minute of every day to dig under Second Avenue at this particular juncture. Even......

Yesterday the MTA board voted to revoke the free E-ZPasses for city employees, 7 votes to 6. According to NY1, the plan, which the Bloomberg administration opposed, was also "narrowly approved" by the MTA's finance committee. The move will force police, fire and other city agencies to get E-ZPass accounts for the MTA's bridge and tunnel crossings. City budget director Mark Page said, "The bookkeeping management argument and ill will arising from this proposal is......

Get ready for primal screams across the region, if the MTA decides to cut subway, bus, and rail service as it faces its nearly $1 billion-deficit next year. The Daily News reports that MTA CFO Gary Dellaverson said the agency "recently told its divisions to detail ways to cut spending by about 4.5% in the event the economy deteriorates beyond the MTA's latest budget projections - or if city and state funding isn't increased to......

For the past ten months, the MTA has been experimenting with a new management structure on the L and 7 lines that officials hope will improve subway service. But has anyone noticed? Most passengers stopped by the Times say they've seen little change, though one woman believes the L has been slightly less mobbed when it pulls into Lorimer Street during rush hour. The experiment calls for a general manager to take charge of each......

After the NY Times' sprawling investigation showing many Long Island Rail Road employees apply for--and get--disability payments after reaching the retirement age of 50, Governor David Paterson is asking Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to investigate the situation. The Times found that LIRRemployees have received $250 million in federal disability payments since 2000, while the MTA's other commuter railroad, Metro-North, has nowhere near those numbers of disability claims. Paterson said, "At a time when our state......

Google might have some geniuses at their desks, but the MTA is likely to somehow foil their goal of accuracy on their Transit maps. You may recall that earlier this year the company hadn't quite figured out the city's public transit system, but word is that this week they'll be announcing that their Transit option is now NYC-friendly, with full maps integration and a partnership with MTA (the feature has actually launched already). We......

The NY Time has a huge, front page article on the curious "disability epidemic among" Long Island Rail Road retirees. In a nutshell, the article points out how many LIRR employees apply for disability after retiring...and they end up getting those federal payments. Back in 2004, 97% of employees who retired after the age of 50, applied for and received disability. The article starts off at the Sunken Meadow golf course, citing how dozens of......

As the MTA looks for any possible source of revenue, it has made a bold suggestion: The agency wants city departments to pay tolls over MTA bridge and tunnel crossings. As WCBS 2 puts it, that includes "firefighters and police responding to emergencies or calls to service." Currently, those city departments are using about 11,000 free E-ZPass tags, so if the MTA gets its way, then the city would need to pay for the approximate......

At a hearing about how the MTA could address its budget problems, some old and new ideas were tossed around. One notable suggestion, from former city transportation commissioner Luicius Riccio, was, per the NY Sun, "that the city should consider selling the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges for $1 to the MTA, which could then charge tolls on commuters and use the revenue to finance mass transit improvements." Theodore Kheel, of Nurture New York's Nature (and......

The MTA's new double decker bus prototype made its maiden voyage this morning, and the Daily News was on board to get the awe-inspired reactions from riders. Staten Island's Chris Maffeo doesn't seem to get out much: "This is unbelievable. Wow—look at the people down there. They look so far away." And 38-year-old Laura Liamero practically swooned: "This seat is first class—front row—the orchestra seat!" One drawback, though, is the cramped second deck, which is......

Ain't she a beaut? Making good on their promise last May, today New York City Transit officials unveiled their hotly-anticipated double-decker bus, the first municipal double-decker bus to cruise the streets since 1953. According to a press release, the 13-foot tall, high-capacity coach will run for the next 30 days along selected local and express bus routes in order to test its suitability for service. Howard H. Roberts Jr., president of New York City......

Reader Raphael sent us this photograph of a subway rider getting pretty comfy on the subway. Now, it's nice to stretch your toes and all, but...shudder. One of the MTA's state violations is placing "one's foot on the seat of a subway, bus, or platform bench" (it could mean a $50 fine). Besides you have no idea what's been on that seat before--it could be something like this. Which is why many people like to......

Photo via Jay Parkinson. Yesterday there was some chatter about the Hello Health subway ad campaign, mainly how its empty word bubble design (unsurprisingly) acted as a magnet for vandals! AnimalNY mentioned that the MTA was responsible for pulling the ad campaign, which launched when Hello Health opened its doors in Williamsburg. Today, however, they uncovered that there was a little bit of finger pointing going on, and it was actually "CBS Outdoor, the......

More details have emerged in that “magic MetroCard machine” story the Post broke yesterday. Turns out it that it wasn’t a MetroCard machine, but a LIRR ticket machine (which also dispenses MetroCards). And make that machines; the Times reports that from 2004 until last May, countless people have unwittingly used the machines to get free tickets and MetroCards, exploiting a software glitch that let riders with insufficient funds on their debit card or credit card......

Your evening commute might be somewhat worse today, because of signal issues at Franklin Avenue that are affecting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 lines. The MTA says to expect delays on that line, and also reminds people that the "ongoing police investigation at West 42nd Street and 6th Avenue" (from the falling glass at the Bank of America building), the M42 and M104 buses are being re-routed.......

Though the 35 new "sleep-mode" escalators to save $2000/year per escalator) at select subway stations were supposed to start working yesterday, only some were actually working. Some were working with sleep mode functionality, but others weren't. CityRoom found out only 22 "were working as intended," due to technical glitches, and detailed how some of the working ones were confusing, like to the man who started walking down a sleeping up escalator: "As he walked down,......

A trio of grifters allegedly bilked the MTA out of $800,000 over the past three years by exploiting a software glitch in a single MetroCard machine in Penn Station. According to the Post, police have arrested a Roosevelt, Long Island resident named Cary Grant (ha), his wife Lisa Foster Jordan, and their friend Christopher Clemente, a former student at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School whose scholastic career ended in 1990 when he was convicted......

Eric Davis, the twenty-year-old man who fell through a broken sidewalk subway grate in Bed-Stuy on Friday morning has told his story to the Daily News from the confines of his bed at Kings County Hospital, where he's convalescing after plummeting ten feet into a filthy shaft: "I don't feel like it's bad luck ...because I survived. The one thing I did [was] I made sure I didn't bump my head. The lady paramedic made......

The MTA's problems with current escalators aside, the agency has just introduced new escalators that go into a "sleep mode" when they aren't being used. The pilot program includes escalators at 34th Street-Herald Square, Roosevelt Island; Jamaica-Van Wyck and Parsons/Archer. MTA hopes to save almost $2,000 (per each escalator) in energy costs annually. While some riders are wary, one found the glass half full, telling NY1, "It's much better than them not working at all!......

Underground there are shootings and stabbings and the subway stations may just generally be in a state of disaster, but at least the MTA can guarantee you a cool ride on its city buses. A study conducted by Transit Workers just released shows that New York City buses stay cooler on a more consistent basis than many other cities. The study showed that buses did not have working A/C less than 4 percent of the......

While police are investigating an earlier shooting a the 5th Avenue Station, there is no No. 7 train service in both directions between the Queensboro Plaza Station and the Times Square-42nd Street Station. As an alternate, customers are advised to take the nearby "N," "R" and "W" trains to and from Manhattan. Update: A reader wrote in that they saw 6 teenage males being detained by police at the 5th Avenue Station. There were sure......

Photograph of a West 72nd Street subway stair hairball by Joe Schumacher on Flickr; the hairball has been there for 3 years and counting. Okay, maybe it's not a news flash, but New York City Transit Riders Council has put it on paper--61 pages to be exact (PDF)--as it reported that many stations are in need of a lot of cleaning and care. The NY Times noted that the worst conditions at some included......

Headed to a subway next month: New SubTalk posters that remind straphangers groping is a crime and encourage any victims to report incidents to an MTA employee or a police officer. Last month, it was rumored NYC Transit didn't want to run the campaign, due to concerns it would actually increase the number of unwanted gropings (you know, the way the anti-littering ads increase littering). Now the NY Post reports "the first 2,000 posters......

LoveItMadly's Flickr. How has the summer been treating straphangers underground? Allegedly, the subway system's air conditioning is cooling everyone off...everyone except those taking the E train. The Daily News reports that "subway riders on the E line have the highest chance of getting stuck on a sweltering subway car because of faulty air conditioning." But their score, the lowest of them all, was still pretty good on paper--coming in at 83.3%, meaning that 16.7%......