Like many New Yorkers, I began to keep away from the subway sometime during the pandemic — then stayed away for good.
But on Tuesday afternoon, necessity forced me to become a straphanger once more, and the experience instantly reminded me of why I don’t bother with the underground: The system is broken in a profound way. elevator brand
It’s a national and international embarrassment — and its reality should give second thoughts to American triumphalists.
When COVID crashed on our shores, I soon became a work-from-home guy in my Midtown East apartment. Riding the subway became an increasingly unattractive option as both serious crime and lifestyle nuisances rose.
The post-George Floyd rioting and looting was the last straw: I got a car.
Every year, however, one week impels us to embrace the Metropolitan Transportation Authority when the global gabfest known as the UN General Assembly descends upon Turtle Bay, about 10 blocks north of where my family lives.
As an American and a New Yorker, I’m proud that the Big Apple plays host to the United Nations. It’s one of the symbolic relics of America’s postwar primacy — one that I’m reluctant to surrender.
So each year, I grit my teeth and put up with the fact that an entire lane on Second Avenue has been rendered inaccessible to us mere mortals, so that the prime minister of Djibouti can be shuttled, unobstructed, between his hotel and the UN building.
The bargain we residents make with city and state authorities is that in this week — of all weeks — public transportation systems had better work.
But city and state authorities are by no means prepared to hold up their end of the deal.
On Tuesday, I was tasked with chaperoning our son to his after-school hockey practice in Long Island City. Normally it’s a 10-minute ride by car — but not when His Excellency the prime minister of Djibouti and the other Excellencies are driving by.
There is always the subway, I tell myself, giving in to the happy delusion that a generally dysfunctional system must somehow have improved after a few months’ non-use by me.
So I lug my son’s giant hockey duffel to the station at Third Avenue and 53rd Street, to ride the E or M train for one single stop across the East River to Queens.
Ah, but of course the escalator isn’t working. I lug the duffel and prod the kid down the frozen steps.
Halfway down, the movement of the human mass, normally harried, slows to a crawl. Something is very wrong.
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The crowd is piling up on the Queens-bound side of the platform and people are jockeying for any little spot that might let them get closer to a train of which there is no sign. More people keep arriving on the platform via the broken escalator. Twenty minutes go by.
A voice on the PA system helpfully informs us: “Uh, folks, the E and M trains static-garble-static delay static-garble-static lookin’ at static-garble-static alternative static-garble-static train. Thank you!”
Puzzled straphangers turn to each other to divine the meaning of this pronouncement from the oracles of the MTA temple.
Now Google Maps reposts an MTA alert informing us that the authority is “investigating” why a Queens-bound M train activated its brakes near this station.
OK, investigating, repairing: Whatever the challenge at hand, surely it must be done swiftly, right?
Especially at rush hour. Double-especially when road traffic on this side of the island has been rendered impossible by His Excellency the prime minister of Djibouti.
But no. After about 40 minutes of waiting, an MTA staffer deigns to show up.
“Folks, there will be no Queens-bound trains coming. At all. We’ve got a train stuck in the tunnel here.”
An apology isn’t forthcoming.
So I prod the kid and the hockey duffel onto the up escalator, which mercifully is functioning.
In theory, we could take a 6 train south to Grand Central and then switch to a 7 to Queens — a 30-minute ride under ideal conditions.
In practice, the station is entirely overwhelmed. The human mass has continued to pile up. There are so many people in the station and on the platforms that I worry my son is liable to suffocate or get crushed underfoot.
We drag ourselves home and give up the quest.
American global primacy isn’t something I’d be eager to relinquish. It has all sorts of upsides, for the United States and for the world.
But it rests on a foundation of domestic underinvestment, dysfunction and rot.
My gut tells me America’s status can’t last when this is the state of public transport in our premier commercial city.
brake elevator Sohrab Ahmari is a founder and editor of Compact, from which this column was adapted.