It is yugely necessary.
So I’ve heard.
Lots of things could happen.
Which do you think is a better call, in the grand scheme of things?
Should the healthcare workers stay home, to protect themselves - or should they go into work and man the 71 hospitals within the city of New York?
Ummm.
New York is actually really big.
Who said anything about staying at home? If they put themselves at risk then they can catch it too. Do they then still go to work? There was one story in NJ where a bus driver died days after complaining about a coughing rider. 6 other drivers caught it as well.
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For a large percentage of healthcare workers (as well as every other type of worker in NYC), the subway is the only way they have to get to work.
My mom’s neighbor is a doctor who works at a hospital in Manhattan. Granted, shes an oncologist, so personally she’s not relevant to the COVID crisis, but she is representative. She works at Sloan Kettering, and takes the subway to work every day, it takes her about 45 minutes.
Without the subway, she would have two options in getting to work - either leave her house 3 hours before her shift, and walk 9 miles, or she could pay $40 for a taxi.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand. But those are still choices we make depending on the situation. If she gets sick how does she then get to work? I live not too far from NYC, why whenever I had to go someplace I never had to use mass transit or a cab? But I guess there’s a reason NY’s infection rate continues to climb. It shows no sign of slowing down.
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You live in Jersey, right?
When you come into the city, I assume you’re usually going somewhere in midtown? Maybe PATH to 23/34th?
NYC is much more than midtown Manhattan.
When I was in high school, as some sort of statement, I once walked from my girlfriend at the time’s dad’s house in the Bronx back to my house in Brooklyn. I left around midnight, and got home as the sun came up.
Google Maps, as I check right now, says I walked 18 miles that night.
Maybe it’s time to consider setting limits on population and enterprise density. If there are limits to the number of persons and businesses that can occupy a single city, congestion and the over-whelming of infrastructure can be managed as population growth is spread amongst many more centres at once.
I usually take my car and pay for parking. Definitely not 18 miles, but I did do a lot of walking. No other choice.
To put it simpler:
The nurses working in hospitals in Manhattan can’t afford to live anywhere near where they work.
So they all live in the outerbouroughs, and commute on the subway.
Shut down the subway, and you shut down everything.
Short of a suspension of Habeus Corpus and declaration of Martial law the fed’s cannot shut down mass transit other than in DC and Amtrak along with the airlines under existing regulatory authority.
It takes the 2 train about 6 minutes to go from 125th street to 63rd street.
There are always choices.
I’m not suggesting shutting down the subway. But have some rules in place that don’t have them crowded like sardines with everyone from everywhere going anywhere they want. You’re just asking to spread it further.
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Sounds about right. An average walking pace is 3 MPH.
From what my family members tell me, the subway is almost completely abandoned these days.
What rules should be in place? How would you enforce them?
6’ rule, Trasit cops.
This is something talked about earlier in the thread. Lots of places have actually cut back on mass transit, which is only forcing ridership to concentrate in the remaining runs.
In the Kansas church thread, the suggestion was made that churches could still hold services and facilitate social distancing guidelines by offering more services on Sundays so that congregation densities could be reduced. (Not my suggestion, for the record. I endorse closures for now.)
But urban transportation is a necessity, especially in places like NYC. To facilitate reduced ridership density, more frequent routes would be needed.
It might sound good on paper, but would NYC have double the available subway cars to double the subway frequency? Ditto buses? And with COVID depleting the driver and conductor ranks, would they even have the personnel to pull it off, assuming they had the vehicles to put on the roads/rails?
Seems to me they’re in a bad way, and stuck with an unsolvable problem.
That contradicts all the news articles posted early in the thread.
Yet, I tend to believe the man on the ground more than I do the media nowadays. Likewise media were reporting waiting lines at hospital entrances, but other non-media sources showing nobody at the doors.
Hard to discern truth in all this.
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40% of businesses are shut down with a corresponding lack of need of workers so that isn’t the issue or shouldn’t be.
Just like the KS churches they can still run the subways with fewer passengers. It might require people getting up earlier and staying later but it can be done.
