New Year's Warning: Careful What You Wish For

Carries the noise very well

A colleague has spent part of the past decade wishing the subway construction would be over.
Enough with the drilling and the rumbling.

A few days ago, they flicked the switch for the Second Avenue subway.

Her euphoria ended abruptly.

“An all-night test has those of us facing Second Ave. most upset,” she reports. “The long escalators hum and the motion causes a vibration, which is felt even in my apt. (on an upper floor.)  Worst of all we hear the trains rumbling past every six minutes.”

Guess those artistic entrances allow the sound to escape. (As Casey Stengel said about artificial turf in the new St. Louis partk, 1966: "It sure holds the heat well.") 

“The stations look beautiful but we are quite sure the engineers on this project had never worked on a subway,” my colleague adds. “They should have studied the system in Paris. It is QUIET.”

C’est vrai. The tires in the Paris Métro are made of rubber. So are the tires in Montréal.

All right, so Second Ave. is not Paris or Montréal. We already knew that.

But the planners don’t even know north from south.

The sign for one exit:​​

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Unidentified bystander notes geography mistake

"​The exit is at the NE corner,” my colleague said. “I told the mucky-mucks at the preview. They stared at me blankly.”

There is a moral to the story as we try to escape 2016:
New Yorkers used to snicker at the lumbering scam artist with the orange hair in our town. The vast majority of street-smart New Yorkers wished the guy would get a hobby and go practice it elsewhere.
Ha!!! Meantime, Happy New Year.
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But first, a little ditty from 1969: