The NYC Morning Commute: Subway Cruising

I'm reminded of the various inconsequential things I love about NYC during mornings when I commute on the 6 train down to my company's office: All the jostling, herding, and vigilance we as NYC subway riders are expected to endure and participate in is overshadowed by my love of watching hot dudes during their own morning commutes.

Subway Sketch

 by Patrick

When you’ve spent even a short amount of time riding the NYC subway, you quickly become immured against all the vendors, buskers, preachers and panhandlers you encounter there. It’s not long before you’ve seen every acrobatic dance, every noise-making trinket, every bootlegged DVD, before you’ve heard every a capella gospel number, every mariachi band, every joke (‘smile, it won’t mess up your hair’) and exhortation (‘God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve’). It’s easy to become cynical about the panhandlers in particular.

Happy Holidays from the MTA!!

By Maurice Michaane

So this past Saturday I had dinner with Father Tony and his partner at Vatan Indian restaurant in Gramercy. We set 6:30pm as the meeting time! Low and behold, this high-maintenance queen was waiting, and it wasn’t until 6:55pm that they arrived.

Why where they late? The 1-2-3 (the red line for you out of town folk) was having extreme delays. It’s the holiday season, and the MTA can’t even function the mass-transit efficiently during one of the busiest seasons of the year. As a life long New Yorker, I have wondered for years how the greatest city in the world can have such a dysfunctional and poorly managed mass-transit system. The MTA 2010 budget is upwards of $11billion according to a recent NYTimes article.

Headline after headline, the public is constantly reminded how the MTA spends our money frivolously. According to a recent report by NYS Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, “inefficiencies and redundancies in the process have cost the agency approximately $2.9 billion in unnecessary spending”. Want another example of out of control spending? The TWU (Transit Union) as part of their contract has 100% of the health care costs paid for. Most people in this country are “hire-at-will”, meaning they can be let-go at anytime, and do not have a “union contract”. Furthermore, most people pay a weekly/bi-weekly co-pay of their healthcare premium that their employer provides. Before returning to graduate school, I paid $30 every two weeks for my healthcare as part of my employee benefits. Lastly, after 25 or 30 years in the system, a transit union employee can retire with full benefits and a pension for life. And if it couldn’t get worse, the cash strapped MTA by judicial fiat is now forced to provide the 35,000 transit union workers a series of huge raises, costing somewhere around $100million to the taxpayer.

(Psst: Father Tony here, after the jump and the rest of Maurice's commentary, I've supplied a photo of Maurice at Vatan without his approval. He's so cute!)