Communication is not exactly the MTA’s forte. Between their signature garbled announcements (what’s the next stop?) to the impossibility of communicating across the vast gulf between the MTA booth worker and the puzzled tourist yelling helplessly at the glass, when they do communicate something (anything!) well, it’s cause for some serious celebration. Even the notoriously goofy advertisements on the trains (Dr. Zizmore joke, anyone?) serve as continual reminders of botched opportunities to reach the diverse train-riding audience while making substantial revenue– how many times have you seen empty ad space on our broken-down subway cars?
To make matters worse, the MTA has also been slightly slow on the uptake when it comes to wielding technology to the best of their advantage, which is why it’s perhaps no surprise that their latest stab—the new digital screens in some updated subway cars—already seem to be malfunctioning perfectly (according to my own admittedly informal survey of new train cars, that is).
And which is also why it’s interesting that something so simple manages to communicate so much: the train lines & representative letters themselves have incredible expressive power for many New Yawkers. Initially, when someone forwarded me the recent article in the Observer about the perceived changing desirability of certain train lines, I had to let out a small groan; anyone who’s interested in the brand-ification of NY neighborhoods has seen and been frustrated by this kind of article before– a few random quotes from random folks strung together to try to create a coherent snapshot of a neighborhood in supposedly wild flux.
The biggest problem I see with most of these articles is that their discussion of New York history seems to cover on average about three years, give or take a few months. As some irate comments to the article noted, New Yorkers who can recall when the Q wasn’t the Q or the R wasn’t the R look upon this obsession with particular train lines with bemusement. I grew up listening to my parents refer to subway lines by their old-school avenues, which I always found odd-sounding: “Did you take the IRT there?” “Doesn’t the 7th Avenue line stop there?” (Whaaa?) The Observer article engages in its own short-sighted historicism, looking all the way back to the roaring ‘00s to declare the Q the new L; eh?
I wonder if coveting a Chosen Train Line with static, starry-eyed love serves to cut down on the level of advocacy for better and more functioning trains across the board, or if it instead creates a neighbor more rooted in and concerned about where they live. The urge to want a transportation arrangement that is convenient, safe, and reliable is natural, but there seems to be something else at play here. What is it about the process of attributing status to certain subway letters/lines that feels like another lame fetish of the me-me-me-and-also-me generation?
I’ve sat through numerous student presentations (often by international students) who are shocked to discover upon arriving that our subway system looks like the old, neglected bohemoth that it is. A comparative analysis of the Hong Kong subway system, say, or the St. Petersburg subway, versus ours, is an embarrassing enterprise to be sure. I have the impulse to be protective of our train stations, to defend the long history that has made them what they are, and yet there’s something in the logic of these presentations that I can’t argue with. I sat in a shiny new Q car the other day, and couldn’t stop staring up at the broken screen above me that was promising that 34th Street would be the next stop– after we had already past 34th Street twenty minutes before and were hurtling towards Coney Island. Indeed, the MTA has given the very fabulous Q very fabulous new train cars and yet still can’t figure out where we’re headed.
Thanks, Hillary, for opening up a new field of communication analysis: public transportation! My favorite NYC subway story occured a few months ago. I was sitting in the second-to-last car of the N train. While glancing up from my reading, my eye caught the sight of a group of people in the last car pressed against the window of the door between cars clearly signaling that they were stuck in that car. The rest of my car (with every seat filled, but not enough people to block sight of the last car) were not responding. At least half of them in my judgment were pretending to be so engulfed in their iPods or Sudoku puzzles that they couldn’t have a clue that a car-full of people were furiously waving for their attention. In order to communicate this problem to the subway operator, I had to go back to the locked door between cars, do some crude on-the-fly sign language with trapped group to learn that their intercom was out and the doors not opening. They pulled the emergency stop cable in the next station, and I jogged up to the middle of the train to tell the crew person. He then came back to open the doors and unleash a car full of angry New Yorkers who had overshot their stop by as much as 4 stops, because apparently they had been waving for 3 stops before I got on). In this age of fiber optics, this story demonstrates some slow communication indeed.
On a more academic note, I particularly enjoyed the article on brand-ification, and Hillary’s reading of it with respect to NYC history. I look forward to sharing the article and commentary with students in my urban history course at Baruch.
Reply to Tom
One thing the New York City MTA does not communicate very well is what makes the Subway so fundamentally New York and that is that it is the only 24 hour public transportation system in the world. Yes, it is loud, dirty, broken, but it never stops, and as the history of this city goes so goes it’s subway. How’s that for branding.
And if I remember my childhood legends there is an old and very big wine cellar that is connected to the tunnel of the “old’ Q line. Tom any information on that…?
Reply to Suzanne
Thanks for the comments, Tom! And great point, Suzanne, about the very thing that makes our subway so unique. It’s so true– and anyone who’s been stranded after-hours in a city where the trains halt at 9:30 can attest to just how easy it is to forget about how well a subway runs when it stops running!
Reply to Hillary
I’ve found that the subway is a great place to send students to do field work and observe non-verbal communication. When I teach Intro to Sociology, one of my students’ favorite assignments (or so they tell me) is to ride the subway with all of their senses open. That means no iPods, no New York Posts, no fiddling with their cell phones. The goal is to be a discreet observer of human interaction: what are the myriad ways that people on the subway communicate with each other? Rather than eavesdrop on conversations, what I ask my students to observe is how people communicate without words. They write up lovely field notes about how people’s posture, gestures, tones of voice, fidgeting, eye contact and so on communicate romance, disgust, boredom, and anxiety to the other passengers on the train. Clearly the oblivious passengers in Tom’s story above would have failed this assignment. Also, please note that the author cited in the brandification article is a graduate of CUNY!
Reply to Lauren