InsideTransit

Found via SubChat, can you name all of the subway stations in Manhattan? Sporcle has put together a quiz which provides you with 15 minutes to name all of the 127 stations. I was able to get all of the right answers in 9:58. Leave your scores and times in the comments.

Good luck! May the Chambers St. be with you! Now if they put together a Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens or Staten Island quiz – those would be MUCH harder!

There’s nothing cooler than transit data in a visual form. If you are like me, you will love the site I have for you today. It was created by Sha and takes NYC subway ridership data from 2006 and displays it on a map. You can check out each station and see how many people began their travels at that station. The thicker the line, the more people paid their fare at that station. You can also see the data as dots instead of lines.

As one might imagine, Times Square leads the pack. Other interesting notes:

• 17 million people started at the Main Street station in Flushing
• Beach 105st in the Rockaways only had 80,000 people use the station
• 17 million people also used the 86th street Lexington IRT station

We need more visualizations and frankly more transit data usage to both understand more about how the system works and to help passengers more effectively utilize the system.

It would be interesting to overlay 2008 data as I am sure many of the stations in Long Island City and parts of Brooklyn will probably feature much thicker lines. Imagine a global transit usage directory!

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the MTA going after application developers who use transit schedule data in their apps. It’s still a shock to me that any public agency would have an issue with outsiders trying to help them help their customers (many times for free). I wonder what Bloomberg thinks of this with all of his ads about how he is going to fix the MTA.

David Turner and Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock have put together a meetup for tomorrow evening (Tuesday) to discuss how the MTA and the developer community can best collaborate. You can find all of the details here about the event including a variety of comments about whether Google gets current data for their Maps and Transit products.

I won’t be able to make the event due to scheduling concerns and am very hopeful the group can come out with some good learnings and next steps. If the MTA wants to fix the MTA, talking to the “Internet” could be the first step.

Earlier this week, bricks and tiles fell from the ceiling of the 181th street subway station in NYC. Work has been ongoing 24 hours a day to get the line open again and I am hearing that the line should be open on Monday.  The MTA has been posting photos from the work site at 181st – I’ve posted a few of them below.

This is a perfect example of why the MTA should have a blog – to humanize the conversation of events like this ceiling collapse. Posting images on Twitter is meaningless for the majority of transit riders who would be interested in viewing the work progress. Give me a call MTA – let’s talk. Instead of a blog, we get silly television commercials telling us how Bloomberg wants to fix the MTA – how come now he wants to do it – why not any of the other years? Oh yea, it’s an election year

Here a work crane is on the tracks on the right and a meeting is being held on the right platform:

Here is a photo showing bricks from the ceiling being removed – probably to be saved:

There have been loads of people who have created alternative NYC subway maps over the years.  Kriston Lewis has put together one of the best looking and functional maps I’ve seen to-date. The lines are clearly noted, bus transfers are included on the main points, and it’s easier to follow than the current MTA subway map.

Click the graphic below to download the map – note that it’s a PDF file and is 80″x80″ in size.

Over my years riding the subway, I’ve spent countless hours studying where to wait for a NYC subway to make sure I get off at the closest point to where I need to be at my destination. Most NYC subway stations have multiple exits and multiple transfer options and knowing where to wait can mean a couple of minutes savings each day. If you are waiting for a train, why not align yourself before getting onto the train to save time at the exit?

For example, if you are on the #1 northbound and plan to get off at 50th street, there’s only one exit at the back end of the train. Moving down from the front to the back can save time when getting off.

But what happens if you are going to a new station or aren’t sure where is the best place for transferring from one line to another?

A new mobile application has launched to help with this issue. It’s called Exit Strategy NYC and is available for most mobile platforms including the iPhone, Android, Blackberry and even the Amazon Kindle. The price ranges from $2-5 depending on your device. And the Exit Strategy application doesn’t need to have Internet access to be used – this means you can use it in the tunnels of NYC.

Brother and sister team Jonathan and Ashley Wegener created the application and call their idea “platform strategy”. It took two months to grab all of the data and get it into their application. The MTA should integrate Exit Strategy NYC into the official MTA web site.

Now if they can just create an application so I know which subway lines and cars are most likely to have single women that meet my criteria – I’d pay for that!

Seriously, sometimes I wonder what is going on here in NYC. Are they putting something wacky in our water? Here we have a person (I assume it’s a person) dressed up like a bird bouncing on a seat in the NYC subway. I think it’s a bird because of the beak. From what I understand this is on the L line — I’d love to see the bird on the 7 sometime!

You know what’s funny about this is that sometimes you just need to smile and laugh – and that’s what this bird did for me today. I’d go for a bouncy ride if I saw the bird.

I found a new blog today called, “People Who Sit In The Disability Seats When I’m Standing On My Crutches”. No seriously that’s the name. And I’d like each of you to click the blog link and go look at the photos. It’s the same story as people who park in handicapped parking spots because they will only be in Starbucks a minute. On this new blog the person says they are currently using crutches and when he/she gets on the subway trains, people don’t move out of the handicapped seats to allow the person to sit.

The blogger says they only take photos when no other seats are available. The signs that are above the seats have always been meaningless to me- they are way too high and do no good for someone already sitting down. Most of these people should know to get up but perhaps the new technology trains could be built with some sort of shock buzzer system where if the seat is needed a light bit of electricity races through the seats to wake them up.

When I was a little kid, my mother would take sis and me on the bus and subway all the time. If we didn’t get up when someone got on the bus who needed to sit, we would immediately get mom’s eye that said with no words “get up now or your butt will be so red when we get home that you won’t sit for a week!” and we got up. Today parents will slap their 4 kids into the handicapped seats without thinking about it. It’s so disappointing….

Get up. I weigh more than anyone and I always get up. If I can, so can you. And teach your kids to get up.

The Newsday is reporting that U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer has reached out to the Long Island Rail Road to get WiFi access for passengers noting, “”make commuting more productive and pleasant.” Apparently Obama’s stimulus funds can be used to pay for the $1,000 per train fee to get the access installed.

Considering that airlines including Virgin America now offer wifi up in the sky, the LIRR along with all of the other suburban railroads should offer WiFi as well.

Now let’s get some tables on the LIRR or even a dedicated car with long tables to stand and work – that’d be hot.

No word on whether passengers will have to pay for the access on each trip.

Between 1941 and 1976 NYC held the “Miss Subways pageant” where a woman would be crowned Miss Subways for a year. My guess is that there was less drama with Miss Subways than there is with Miss USA!

The Infrastructurist has a good recap of the yearly event and they note, “The Miss Subways contest, sponsored by the New York Subways Advertising agency, was designed to draw more attention to ads in subway cars. Pictures of the reigning Miss Subways along with a short description of her interests and aspirations were posted among the ads.”

Meet Miss Subways is on display through May 30, 2009 at Rush Art Galleries in Manhattan. The gallery is located on 23rd street between 10th and 11th avenues. I am going to try to head over there before the gallery is removed.