Take the A Train

Taking it just got a LOT harder. Apparently a homeless person, trying to stay warm, lit a fire near the north end of the Chambers Street platform which ended up causing massive damage to electrical relays and switches--and partially or totally stopping service on the A and C lines:

Until Wednesday, there will be no service between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. at Spring, Canal and Chambers Streets and at the Broadway-Nassau station, to allow workers to perform critical repairs. During those hours, the A will operate on the F track between West Fourth Street in Manhattan and Jay Street in Brooklyn.

In a statement, the transit agency said there were "no plans for the restoration of C service in the near future." The V line, which usually runs from Forest Hills, in Queens, to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, will be extended to Euclid Avenue, Brooklyn, which is the normal terminus for the C...

In the meantime, long waits and erratic service are likely to be the norm on the A and C lines, which have a combined average weekday ridership of 580,000 passengers. Riders from the Upper West Side of Manhattan and the Brooklyn neighborhoods of East New York and Ocean Hill-Brownsville will probably ride in very crowded trains.

Ouch. The New York City subway isn't pretty or glamorous, but it gets you--and THOUSANDS of others--where you want to go, and relatively cheaply (IIRC, I paid $21 bucks for a seven day unlimited ride pass last fall, and it was worth it).

Unfortunately, this fire underscores a big problem--the country's all hyped up about potential terrorism--yet, by ignoring the issue of the homeless, a disaster "described as the worst damage to subway infrastructure since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001" happened.

Subway officials are reasonably certain whoever set the fire had no intention of causing damage on such a scale. And, I'll add that if a decent network of social services were in place, it might never have happened.