InsideTransit

Last night, U.S. President Obama announced that Osama Bin Laden was dead. From the reports I saw on CNN, people took to the streets all across the country singing the songs of this country including the national anthem.

Here’s how a packed NYC subway car full of people reacted to the news of Bin Laden’s death. From the narration at the end of the video, it appears that not only are locals on the train but also people from Poland and Denmark.

Earlier this week I posted a video of a man in a Big Wheel challenging a NYC city bus to a race. At the end of the race, the text on the screen indicated that the bus moved at a speed of 3.8 miles per hour.

Can you imagine a bus traveling at over 150 miles per hour (250km/h)? Developed by Wubbo Ockels in the Netherlands, the Superbus can travel at these speeds. The “bus” (looks more like a huge racecar) can carry 23 passengers in what appears to be first-class comfort.

The Superbus will cost 1 million euros per bus and cost 14 million euros to develop. The narrator in the video below notes that most of the cost of development was paid for by Dutch taxpayers. I still prefer rail any day over this Superbus.

Here’s a video of the prototype of the Superbus at a race track in the Netherlands.
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Ok, here is what might be the funniest transit race video I have ever seen. The video is described as, “Mark Malkoff sets out to race a NYC bus one mile on 42nd Street while on a Big Wheel.” Yep, this comedian uses a Big Wheel racer and rides across 42nd street in Manhattan. I can tell you that I rode the M42 crosstown bus almost daily on the exact race segment and many times I think I could have walked faster.

For those of you who are public transit fans, there are a lot of inconsistencies in the video and pieces of it make me believe it might not have been shot straight through. The images don’t match as he is moving – they show 6th avenue on the bus but he is at Dyer. When they show him at 5th avenue, he is actually crossing 8th avenue. But it is a fun video nevertheless.

When I watched the video below for the first time yesterday, I got chills. It’s one of the most awesome transit videos I have ever seen. The person who shot the video put together a bunch of clips from the various Times Square subway stations. The video is from 1986! It is absolutely amazing to see how far the NYC MTA subway system has come in the last 25 years. In 1986 there was no air conditioning on most of the trains and the cars were full of vandalism in the form of graffiti. Some of my favorite types of NYC subway trains are included in this video in an almost new state! You can also see what it was like to use tokens — way before the Metrocard made its first appearance.

I know it’s cheesy but where are all of those people in the video today? What have they been doing since 1986? The man in the white shirt carrying a couple of suitcases? What about the man in the tie carrying the briefcase? The woman in the white sport coat leaning against a pole carrying her pocketbook?

So take 10 minutes and watch this video and see what it was like to ride the subway in the mid-80s!
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Two years ago I wrote about Casper, a nice cat in the UK who would ride the bus each day and always knew where to get on and off and what time the bus was going to arrive. Today I am back with the story of a dog who was captured on video riding the light rail in Maryland.

I found the video on Subchat and while I am not a pet lover, this is one cute doggie!  The video’s creator is not sure if the dog is lost, a stray or is with a person riding in the light rail car. The dog does appear to get off at the next station with a person but it’s unknown if the person was the dog’s owner.

I have heard that the MTA is looking into to finding the dog to see if it paid its fare – no one is above paying their fare – whether they walk on two legs or four!
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Ok, here’s one you don’t see everyday…two women get into a fight on a subway train in NYC over, “eating etiquette”. The NY Daily News breaks down what you can see in the video below:

“The video clip begins with a woman chowing down on spaghetti while trading barbs with another woman sitting across from her on a subway car. The feud escalates a few minutes in when the middle-aged passenger asks the woman, “What kind of animals eat on the train?” The diner responds, “What kind of fat —- looks like you?”

After the two women battle it out for a few seconds, other passengers get in the middle including a man who apparently got scratched by a piece of al-dente pasta.

I don’t think you are allowed to eat on the subway although everyone does it. My only real question here is, “did the woman who was eating the pasta properly discard of the food carton and utensils?”
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On St. Patrick’s Day at the Sydney Central Train Station, a flash mob gathered to create a huge line of the popular dance, Riverdance. The video summary explains the video below, “Awesome Irish Dancing including members of Riverdance and school children in spectacular Central Station Sydney. Over 100 dancers spread St Patricks Day cheer in Sydney.”

While this was clearly staged, it’s still pretty neat and a nice short break for train travelers. For me, the train station itself is beautiful and so clean!

My friend Keran sent me a link today that is frankly awesome if you are into transit or into maps.  It’s a video created by Chris McDowall which shows you the Auckland, New Zealand public transportation system in real-time (you can watch the video below). Chris notes, “The animation begins at 3am on a typical Monday morning. A pair of blue squiggles depict the Airport buses shuttling late night travellers between the Downtown Ferry Terminal and Auckland International. From 5am, a skeleton service of local buses begins making trips from the outer suburbs to the inner city and the first ferry departs for Waiheke Island. Over the next few hours the volume and frequency of vehicles steadily increases until we reach peak morning rush hour.”

It’s really neat to watch the video below in HD and full-screen. It’s easy to see where Auckland’s downtown business core is located just based on the weight of the movement during the day. It’s also interesting that there seems to be a lot of routes still operating at midnight. Keran says it’s also easy to see where the service gaps are around the city.

Auckland offers three types of public transit: rail, ferry and bus. The system is called Maxx.
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Ya’all need to check this out – seriously it’s the coolest thing related to the NYC subway map I’ve seen in a long time. Check out the full project page to learn more.

I don’t even want to describe this thing because it’s something you need to see. Here’s the overview from the developer, “At www.mta.me, Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop. The visuals are based on Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 diagram.”

The application uses public data from the MTA using their API connection.

You can watch the real-time sounds here and you can see a fast-forward demo below.

If you watch this video, you will probably never sleep on a train ever again (I am not kidding). In the video below, a NYC subway train is traveling from station to station.  It’s interesting to me because I saw a lot more rats in the last year or so in the NYC subway than I have in the previous 10 years. So much of the rat issue is because subway riders just don’t care – they throw crap and food everywhere. Yet in all my decades in NYC, I never saw a rat inside a subway car.

This video, shot on the #4 train, shows a big rat running up and down the subway car. A man is sleeping at the far end of the train. At the end of the video, the rat jumps right up (!) on to the sleeping man. The man pushes the rat off him and the rat races again to the other side of the train.