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Ring! Ring! Bike Coming Through

August 6, 2015 by VIVIAN SHAN

It is no secret that the number of active bikers in Manhattan has increased since Mayor Bloo
mberg’s implementation of CitiBikes in 2013, but what is it really like to ride between the chaos of New York City traffic?

Shawn Jones, a 24 year old bike courier, can give one a good idea of what it’s like to travel on two wheels amid New York City’s yellow cabs and black ubers.

The merging of two popular food delivery companies- Seamless and GrubHub- in 2013 has given many individuals easy access to online and mobile ordering. While ordering food may feel as easy as the click of a button, delivering food is a much more complex process when bikes do the job faster than cars.

After almost two years of delivering food to various destinations in Manhattan, Jones has become used to the reckless drivers that he shares the road with. During this time, Jones has stayed out of accidents by riding between cars rather than in bike lanes, which drivers normally don’t pay attention to.

On average, Jones does 15 to 20 deliveries a day, each of which takes around 20 minutes. He finds himself biking around the city for both business and pleasure, because he thinks “it’s nice to stare at all the cars sitting in traffic and think, ‘haha.’” Like many other people who deliver food or parcels on bikes, Jones enjoys not being restricted by traffic while still being able to move through the streets efficiently.

Daryl Williams, a security guard for Credit Suisse Bank on 24th and Madison, says that there are constantly people passing by on bikes, whether they are biking to work, or biking for pleasure. In the years that he’s watched bikers ride through one New York City streets, he hasn’t seen any major accidents occur.

Nonetheless, many bike couriers have said that they’d like to improve the safety of bike-riding in a city as busy as Manhattan. “I think maybe drivers ed should include how to maintain the safety of not only pedestrians but also bikers,” says Jones.

Jones has noticed that with an increase in bikers in NYC, some drivers are being more attentive to bike lanes, while others less so. Citi Bike users have revealed that prior to the implementation of this new bike system, they were skeptical of biking in the big streets where cars are constantly moving around them, but felt safer after knowing that there would be more bike users joining them.

“I feel like Joseph Gordon Levitt in that movie Premium Rush– every moment I’m riding my bike I’m thinking of which way to turn and how to get to my destination in the shortest amount of time,” says Shawn Jones.

Filed Under: Featured, Lifestyles, Manhattan Tagged With: bike, biking, courier, delivery, food, lanes, manhattan, NYC, ordering, riding

The C Doesn’t Stand for Clean

August 4, 2014 by CAMERON SMALL

Most New Yorkers would probably agree that if there was a cleaner alternative to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (MTA) train system, they’d take it in a heartbeat.  Anyone who has taken public transportation in New York have had the experience of riding in a filthy train. Unfortunately, this occurrence is a much greater issue than we thought. And it brings up an important question: Should riders have to pay what they do to ride in unsanitary conditions?

There have been numerous reports of cleanliness decreasing among train lines. According to the Straphangers Campaign’s surveys, 42 percent of trains checked in 2013 were clean, which is a ten percent decrease from the 2011 survey.  The worst of the lines was the D train, where a mere 17 percent of people considered it clean.

The MTA and the Straphangers Campaign both claimed that this was a result of fewer cleaning workers because of budget constraints.  In addition to fewer cleaners, Straphangers Campaign’s field organizer Jason Chin-Fatt believes that lack of cleanliness is due to increased ridership.  When approached by Metro News he said, “When ridership goes up, there’s more opportunities for people to spill coffee and food.”

The D train isn’t the worst of it.  The C train wins the award for worst overall service.  It was ranked last in the 15th annual State of the Subways Report Card.  It doesn’t stop there.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the C train “has finished dead last in the ranking six times since the rankings were first issued, the most of any line in the subway system.” Riders agree as well. “I live closer to the C but I take the Q. It’s faster and less crowded, and it comes more often,” said Roy Gabay, 48 years old, of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, who was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal. The C train service is so terrible that Straphangers Campaign ranked the value of a C-train ride at 85 cents, which is much lower than the $2.50 base fare set by the MTA.

The London Underground is one of the oldest subways in the world, yet it’s regarded as one of the best metro systems to date. Opened in 1863, the London Underground, (also known as “The Tube”) has air-conditioned cars and is fairly cheap in the expensive country.  It also has an 83% approval rating by the Straphangers Campaign compared to the New York Subway, which has a 75% approval rating. If London can keep a great metro system for over a century, why can’t the MTA?

London Underground subway car interior
London Underground subway car interior

The City Council pitched a proposal to fix our stinky subway problems back in 2012. “Let me make a suggestion to the MTA: We grade the restaurants, right? A, B, C. So we should grade all the stations in the MTA system,” said Councilman Peter Koo at a budget hearing.

As it turns out, the MTA does grade the stations on cleanliness, but does not share this information to the public. However, they have stated on their website that they plan on improving cleaning in several stations. According to the 2014-2017 MTA Financial Plan, it lists “Additional improved station cleaning at 10 heavily used stations/complexes in each borough” as one of their service quality improvements. Although its only 50 out of the 468 stations the MTA has in total, it’s a good place to start.

 

Filed Under: Commentary, News Tagged With: MTA, NYC, Transportation

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