Today I get to experience another wonderful New York phenomenon - horribly bad weather that brings the city to a standstill. The remnants of Hurricane Frances has brought the transit system to a standstill all over town. This morning I found out that there was flooding in some station in Queens, and there was no subway service at all.
I went over to the Long Island Railroad, two blocks away, and found a huge line of people waiting for the train. A train soon arrived, but it was way too packed for me to get on. I waited for the next train. After about ten minutes, there was an announcement that trains were running 30 minutes late. I never know what this means when trains arrive ever 15 minutes or so. Does that mean the trip will take the same amount of time, but the train I'm boarding was supposed to be here half an hour ago? If so, who cares?
Anyway, after around 15 to 20 minutes I got onto a train, where all of us passengers were packed like sardines. It went slowly... very slowly. Eventually we stopped in the tunnel to Manhattan. We waited there for about 20 minutes before anyone bothered to make an announcement. Evidently one of the tunnels had closed, and this caused a lot of train congestion. After about 10 more minutes, we finally got moving. Slowly, of course.
As I got out of Penn Station, I thought I would quickly take the subway down to 23rd St, but I saw a huge crowd waiting for the subway, so huge that it went up the stairs and out to the walkway. No way. I walked to work.
Well, it's not as bad as the Subway Ride from Hell, but it was fairly unpleasant. The one good thing is that the train was so packed, no conductor could have possibly asked for tickets, even if they wanted to. So I got this ride for free.
Best quote, from a New York Times article about this:
Christina Chung was trying to get from her Upper West Side home to her job as an architect in the Wall Street area. She had left home at 9 a.m. for what was normally a 35-minute commute, but was standing on a platform reading a magazine at 10:30 a.m. "I prefer this over the Republican National Convention," she said.Posted by ahyatt at September 8, 2004 08:48 AM