🚀 go-pugleaf

[crosspost to ba.transportation for last paragraph re signals]

nospammalibu@interport.net (YO) writes:

> Hello fellow train lovers :>
> 
> i have been out of nyc for a lil over a year and have not riden on
> trains since then.. lemme tell ya what i see :>
> 
> 1.  People (mostly black and latino) playing their walkman as loud
> as it can be. I dont think it was ever like this before.  When you
> are going to work last thing you want to do is hear music you dont
> like. Or coming home, you are tired.  Its a personal walkman not for
> the entire train.  It also is pretty sad that no one will say
> anything to the people.

I never mind, since I like music, and love studying their expressions,
either making fun of them or appreciating them or thinking nothing of
them, but also it rarely happens to me so perhaps it bugs me less.  I
think the reason for this is that I look like a police man, despite
all attempts to the contrary (I'm even in the black market, goddamnit!
Just kidding).  The one place where I have trouble is in those stinky
long cars where you can't move from one to the next because the door
is locked.  Some prozac mentally ill bitch always seems to want to
come on and start smoking or something, or a stinky homeless person
stink up the place.  Then I have to wait until the next station,
dashing to the next car, which works ok mostly.  Maybe the prozac
mentally ill bitches and stinky homeless people actually have enough
depth of mind to realize I'm not a cop, whereas the ghetto fasion kids
are too illogical and unfeeling to figure it out.  Opposite of how I
would want or think it, really.  Or perhaps the kids have more depth
of mind to be afraid but not enough to not be.  Or have more to loose.

> 2.  Garbage - People are throwing things on the floor with no
> thought.  I was on a 5 train the other day and at church ave these 2
> young kids threw a bag on the platform.  Everyone looked around, no
> one said anything.  Why do people throw their garbage on the floor??
> and the worst is the cigarette papers, it really is a discrace.

I think the latest trend in kids these days is to throw garbage
everywhere they can.  I'm not sure why.  I have seen this ever since
growing up in California (Aptos, Santa Cruz, Stockton, San Luis
Obispo, San Jose, San Francisco, Los Angeles) and simply absolutely
detested it.  I never understood why.  I was ecstatic that in NYC
people are very responsible about putting their trash where it is
supposed to go and it showed.  Things are so much cleaner here, than
in San Francisco or most the rest of California.  Yuppies are one of
the first sets to break this trend in my view, with their dog shit,
and as well small little kids terrorizing other neighborhoods, which I
also don't understand.  I think it may be the media that comes from
California that has finally seeped into the minds of the locals, which
is a very sad thing indeed.  I've noticed two sets of people who
litter: those who don't mind living in a shithole, who basically
litter in their own bed, and those who have a beautiful place to go
home to and don't care what happens to the rest of the world.  I'd
love to do litter correlation studies to recycling studies.  I was
absolutely amazed to read that immigrants and `ethnic' people are less
likely to recycle, since I thought they would be part of the people
sensitive to issues such as these, but then I must have really grown
up in a different part of the world (Santa Cruz and Aptos, California)
to see how wrong I was.  Now I've looked at it again, and see quite
the opposite: white people have finally learned from the
environmentalists and hippies to care about mother earth and
recycling, as indeed it is an issue of accounting (it's just nature
doing the banking for us), whereas `minorities' see it as more laws
and rules imposed upon them by the `they' of society.  Furthermore,
they most likely have had much less training and information on
recycling, and have fewer resources to dedicate to it due to less
extra money available.  That doesn't seem to explain all of it though:
in attempting to look like they're rich, caring, literate, or
educated, they might *like* to show *off* that they're recycling, and
then it spread like a wildfire fad.  So there must be some cultural
thing about it too.  My theories have been just that, theories: the
catholic "if you're not caught, you didn't do it"; the classist "of
all the things in the world they do wrong, now they are doing this one
thing right?"; a view of richness in being able to not care: throwing
things out makes them feel rich, rather than having to recycle it like
a dirt-poor person (hmm, never thought of that before!  This probably
is it.)  As someone who grew up in a society with high standards, I
have assumed that recycling is a high-tech operation (to meet the
standards) worthy of a rich society; perhaps poor people with lower
standards coming from poorer areas have a view of recycling as a sign
of the poorest of the poor.  Anyway, all those probably are the
reasons that add up to a lot of people not recycling, and I wonder if
it has any relevence whatsoever to the trashiness of everything:
probably only partially.  This is almost an nyc.general topic, but I'm
afraid to crosspost.  Anyway, trash to me is a societal issue that I
think NYC is much better at but has been losing it a bit lately.

> 3.  Seating - I being a lil overweight guy, find it horrid to find a
> seat on the d/q type lines.  i cant sit on a 3 seater cause i wont
> fit.  the 2 sticking out seats i can fit on it if i turn my body
> towards the center of the train.  Why is it that in nyc, capital of
> the world, we say we dont discriminate, but its ok to do to to
> overweight people??? And who the good lord, designed these trains???

I prefer the older trains in this respect, where you can sit in
comfort in ANY position (lying down, sitting straight up, sitting
sideways), regardless of other conditions.  Even the gray is better to
see spilled things: in the bucket seats, those yellow camaflage many
dirty things, as well as rolling it to the smack middle of the seat.

(Also, with the older trains being faster, quieter, smelling better
usually and with the ability to move to a better car, and more windows
to see out of, they are highly preferable to most newer trains, in my
experience and opinion.)

> btw a metro north q-
> flashing green???? :>  is it go as fast as you want??

I want to know too!  They try their damnedest to tip those trains over
around corners a lot by going too fast, and I usually correlated that
to the flashing greens.  Is that the same thing as a two-green in the
NYC subway?  That's not a bad idea, really ... flash as fast as you
are allowed to go, and that way you have more signals with almost the
same equipment.  One day, though, on Metro North, the signal system
was probably running on Windows 95, because it crashed and had to be
rebooted.  We were there for five minutes with all the lights off,
then they came on in this sort of whacky initialization state, I
forget what it showed, something like a red light.  Finally it flicked
to something sane, and the train operator did its bidding.  I bugged
out.

Oblig signal system question: what ever happened to the triangulating
in-train no-light signalling system they were going to install for
BART?  I should ask on that channel really (ba.transportation) ...
headways between trains would have been reducable there, and
supposedly here, with such a system ... *AND* here's some of the big
features: centralized ability to locate any train instantly, and tell
it what to do (in BART land, the trains are usually on full autopilot,
with the operator only pushing the door "close" button); installation
and maintenance costs a small fraction of that for a traditional
signal system, as well as much less disruptive to maintain.