HAPPY 100TH BIRTHDAY MTA!!

Did Willard Scott send his Smuckers birthday greetings to the NYC Subway? I wasn’t watching Today this morning, but he should have. The subways turned 100, and I’m sure it likes strawberry jelly as much as the next elderly person.

As someone who lived in Los Angeles for eight years, four of them (gasp) without a car, I am all too aware of how nice it is to have a good public transportation system. LA’s own MTA may have improved over the past decade, what with the addition of some subway systems and expansion of the bus system, but you still wouldn’t want to live there without a car. My “favorite” LA public transportation horror story dates back to 1992. I was writing for the UCLA Daily Bruin and had to go to a screening at Columbia Pictures, now Sony, on their Culver City lot. Usually I was able to convince some friend with a car to go with me, but this night I had to go alone. I lived right in Westwood, about two blocks from campus, and the Culver City studio was basically directly south. Without even having to get on a freeway, driving shouldn’t take you more than 15 minutes, and if you hit the right lights, 10. In fact, I’m blanking on how I got there, but I remember having to take the bus home at about 10:30 or 11 PM. I had to either wait for a bus or walk down to Sepulveda (a mile? maybe slightly less), then take another bus that would drop me on Wilshire and Gayley. Then I had to walk the rest of the way (another mile probably) to my apartment. The whole thing took over an hour-and-half.

Needless to say, whenever I get really frustrated at the NYC subway, I think back to the few times I couldn’t escape taking the LA buses. Yeah, they sometimes take forever and if you’re going to far west Chelsea or the far Upper East Side (why would you?), they’re not exactly convenient. And I definitely get annoyed when traveling home to the Upper West Side very late at night from the EV or LES because that can actually take forever sometimes too, but on a daily basis (unless it does something weird like, I don’t know, rain), the MTA takes care of my needs.

Gothamist has a great overview of the birthday with tons of interesting links, especially the great site nycsubway.org which has basically everything you could want to know about the system. And you should already be reading Thighs Wide Shut on a daily basis, but if you’re not, definitely go today to check-out the Thigh Master’s excellent tribute “Cellie-Bratin’ The Subway’s Cent-Tennyul.” He and I obviously share an appreciation for, and occasional recurring nightmares from, Walter Hill’s classic The Warriors!

1906 IRT map courtesy of nycsubway.org