'another day on the buses'

NYC MTA

Malcolm — Wed, 02 May 2012 05:35:18 +0000

That’s the New York City Mass Transit Authority which runs bus and subway services within New York. The bus service operates in all five boroughs of New York City, employing over 4300 buses on 219 routes. The subway network is the 7th largest in the world with over 400 stations and 209 miles of routes.

The cost of access to this vast network? $29 (GBP£17.90) for a 7 day unlimited use Metrocard. Of course you don’t have to buy a weekly ticket, individual rides cost $2.25 (GBP£1.39) each and allow transfers between train and buses. Although we were only there for 6 days the weekly ticket offered us the best value even though we didn’t use one day of its validity. Anyway we did our utmost to get full value and probably made a total of around 30-40 subway and bus journeys.

The subway is easy to understand and use, the only slight drawback is that in Manhattan most lines run north south which limits things when you want to cross east west. Although we had a subway station about 5 minutes walk from our hotel in Queens we usually used the bus even though it took a little longer. I think you feel more ‘local’ when you travel by bus :-) A few interesting things about the bus. Firstly drivers handle no money, passengers must either put $2.25 in coins into the hopper (exact amount only) or you feed in a Metrocard which is read and then returned to you. Almost without exception the drivers don’t seem to consider that it’s necessary to say ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’ to anyone. I didn’t let this defeat me and wished every one of them a Good Morning/Afternoon etc and even managed to get a response a couple of times :-) Up to three children can travel free when accompanied by an adult. Interestingly children are not defined by age but must be less than 44 inches (1.12 metres) in height. Certainly easy to administer if you’ve got a 44 inch mark on the bus wall but a bit unfair on those who are naturally tall for their age.

The bus floors have an unusual floor covering in that it looks littered and dirty while actually it’s clean. On my first bus trip I actually tried to move with my foot some of the markings on the floor because I thought they were bits of rubbish. Here’s a picture of the floor.

Many subway stations are decorated with colourful subway ceramic plaques and tile mosaics. Of these, many take the form of signs, identifying the station’s location. Much of this ceramic work was in place when the subway system originally opened on October 27, 1904.

And finally one method of transport not available with a Metrocard, the space shuttle. It was flown into New York on the back of a NASA Boeing 747 where it will become a museum exhibit. This is the best shot I could get of it from the window of a moving bus as we passed JFK Airport.

My birthday

Malcolm — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 19:50:57 +0000

If you look back through this blog you’ll see that we always go away at this time of year to celebrate ny birthday. Well, this year it’s one of those ‘milestone’ birthdays so I thought something a bit special was called for …. in a few hours time we’re off to New York for 6 days!

I’ve been before but this time we intend to do things which we haven’t got round to before like visit Coney Island and Brighton Beach. The High Line has also opened since I was last there and I was unaware of the Roosevelt Island tramway. I’ve stood and stared at the Brooklyn Bridge, this time we’re going to walk it and then explore Brooklyn Heights. A highlight, I hope, will be dinner on Saturday night when we’ve managed to get an invitation to an underground supper club, these are ‘occasional’ restaurants opened up in the host’s home. You hear of them by word of mouth and the location is only disclosed once you’re invited and have accepted. I’ve got the address now and it’s a loft apartment in Brooklyn with catering by an invited chef. More conventionaly lunch on Wednesday is booked at L’Ecole, “Nestled in the heart of SoHo, L’Ecole is the only restaurant of its kind in New York City: a dining experience where tomorrow’s top chefs, currently students at the prestigious French Culinary Institute, serve the very best in classic and contemporary French cuisine. We also hope to get tickets to see Jersey Boys on Broadway. Even though the songs are 50 years old I remember every word, they were great times to be a teenager!

Will report back next week :-)

Chicks

Malcolm — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 19:05:32 +0000

Here are the newest additions to our mini-flock of chickens, they were hatched yesterday! Just have to wait 16 weeks and we’ll get more eggs .. so long as thay are hens. Otherwise it’s coq au vin!

A Rare Conjunction

Malcolm — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 20:35:58 +0000

I’m no amateur astronomer but on Monday night I couldn’t help but notice that things looked different in the western sky. Here’s a picture I took with my mobile ‘phone, click on it to see a larger version with more detail.

Pointing my mobile at the moon using the Google Sky app showed that object nearest to the moon is Venus and the feinter, but still very bright object lower in the sky is Jupiter. More detail here.

Bus Drivers wanted in Corby

Malcolm — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 13:51:39 +0000

It seems that there are at least 12 vacancies following the drivers’ £38m EuroMillions jackpot win on Friday!

Cathy Buckle’s latest letter

Malcolm — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 08:33:39 +0000

It’s some time since I’ve posted a letter from Cathy Buckle. Zimbabwe doesn’t make it into the news so frequently these days so I thought that this may act as a reminder that things are little improved.

Dear Family and Friends,
There’s nothing quite like an ordinary day in Zimbabwe to make you feel pretty sure that you are having a nervous breakdown. Things that immediately spring to mind ave all happened in the last couple of weeks, such as:

Standing in a queue to pay an electricity bill when the electricity is off in the power company’s office, and has been off in homes and business for 16 hours a day, almost every working day, for the past month. While you contemplate this irony you shuffle forward painfully slowly because only one counter is being manned, the receipts are being written by hand and the teller is holding each US dollar bank note up to the sun to see if it is a forgery.

Or there’s the similar and equally absurd situation of standing in a queue at the local Municipal offices to pay your water bill even thought there hasn’t been a drop of water in the town for the last four days. Everywhere you look people are carrying bottles, buckets and even black plastic dustbins full of water from wells and boreholes to their homes and shops.

If those two don’t fit the bill, you could go to the Post Office and collect your letters from the post box, which you pay an annual rental for. When you get there you find that all the boxes have been painted red, including the numbers, so you can’t see which box is yours. You have to go and wait at a ‘window’ which turns out to be a hole in the wall blocked off with a piece of dirty plywood. Finally someone emerges and hands you a pile of wet letters – because the roof leaks, he says, un-apologetically.

Included in the soggy letters is one from the locally based, international bank offering you internet banking . This comes despite the fact you closed your thirty year old bank account there six months ago because they lost a cheque a month after you deposited it and after they had cleared and honoured it. When you told them that wasn’t your fault they put it in writing that if you didn’t get a replacement for the cheque they lost, they would deduct the value from your account. When you then spent half a day and travelled 200 kilometres to get a replacement cheque from the company that issued the first one, the bank refuse to reimburse you for your fuel or time. And now they want you to do internet banking with them – I don’t think so!

If you haven’t completely lost your mind by now, you can go and park your car outside a shop you’ve parked outside for the last twenty years and come back to find your wheels have been clamped. Suddenly this has apparently become a no parking zone. When you ask why there are no signs or yellow lines, authorities say the road markings haven’t been done.

On the way home you pop into a supermarket to pick up a few groceries. You hand over a twenty US dollar note and are given your change in the form of a bubble gum and two suckers – because we use US dollars here, but not the coins that go with them.

Finally you go to the filling station to put petrol in your car. The attendant runs inside to start a petrol driven generator which will power the petrol pump to put petrol in your car.

This is everyday life in Zimbabwe and after yet another 16 hour power cut the only sensible way to end this letter is not with a message saying : Sent from my iPhone or Blackberry, but : “Sent from my solar panel.” Until next time, thanks for reading, love cathy

Any idea about this bus?

Malcolm — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 14:11:04 +0000

Actually there were two of these open top buses being driven north on the M3 this morning.

They were brand new, right-hand drive, all the seats had covers on them and I guess they’d been collected from the port in Southampton.

I did a google on what I presume is a model number (HFF6121GS-3) on the nearside rear of the bus. Google returns a couple of results which are Chinese pages. Google translate doesn’t do too well with them but the words “Export the London HFF6121GS-3 production planning book preparation” can be seen at one point, whatever that means! I guess the Chinese characters on rear offside are the makers name?

Does anyone know anything about these buses and where they’re destined for?

Yet Another Interactive Bus Stop

Malcolm — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 09:13:56 +0000

This one is in Reading where every bus shelter is to be interactive.

Passengers will be able to download discount vouchers, games and video clips while waiting for their bus to arrive

These shelters are Near Field Communication (NFC) and Quick Response Code (QR) enabled, which means people can download items with either a swipe of their mobile phone or by using the camera to scan the QR code.

A bus shelter may, for examples, offer 10 per cent discount on a drink at a coffee shop and feature a QR code. The user would zap the code with their phone, a 10 per cent voucher would be sent to the mobile which could then be used in the store immediately.