Talk Bronx New York

It won’t be ready for the Yankees’ home opener on April 16, but Metro-North Railroad plans to open its station at Yankee Stadium about a month later, on May 23, the railroad announced yesterday.Bronx Bombers fans from the suburbs will first be able to ride Metro-North to a Saturday game against Philadelphia.

“They will have direct, fast, convenient and reliable service to Yankee games so that they don’t have to worry about traffic,” Metro-North President Howard Permut said yesterday, as he and other railroad officials showed the nearly complete stop to the media. “It will be much more comfortable. We think it will be basically a home run for the people of Westchester and Connecticut.” Read more..

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The Metro-North Railroad says service to its new station near Yankee Stadium will begin May 23.

That’s about five weeks after the first official game at the new Bronx stadium.

Metro-North President Howard Permut says the project was completed in two years, faster than any other major station undertaking in the railroad’s history.

The railroad says regular service to the station will be supplemented on game days by a nearly continuous shuttle from Grand Central Terminal.

The new station is on the railroad’s Hudson Line. Some stadium trains also will loop around to stations on the Harlem and New Haven lines.

As many as 10,000 fans are expected to use the trains on game days Read more..

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Daniel Meyers monitoring scanners for the Breaking News Network, a subscription-based service used mainly by news outlets.

A giant crane topples on the East Side of Manhattan and seven people are killed. A steam pipe explodes near Grand Central Terminal, leaving one passer-by dead, injuring dozens of others and forcing a number of businesses to close. A fire rips through a home in the Bronx, killing 10 members of two immigrant families from West Africa.

Most people got news of these major New York stories from television, radio, the newspaper or, more and more, the Web.

But some of the first hints that something big was happening came from a series of transmissions from outside the five boroughs. Those messages came from a strip mall in New Jersey and were sent to pagers and computers in newsrooms in New York City and beyond.

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Subway Delays Rise, and the No. 4 Line Is Slowest

A crowded No. 4 train sits at a Grand Central Terminal subway platform on Monday. Riders holding doors open is cited as the second biggest reason for subway delays, behind track work.

People who hazard the No. 4 subway line each day don’t need the numbers to tell them: It’s slow. Not just slow, it turns out, but of the city’s two dozen or so subway lines, its on-time performance is the poorest and getting worse, according to new statistics released on Monday by New York City Transit.

The figures were among a raft of dismal performance numbers included in a report to the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees the transit agency. They included a 24 percent spike in the number of delays systemwide, measured over the year ending in May, the latest records available.

The indicators come as the authority is considering a second consecutive year of fare increases to help close a budget gap of nearly $900 million. Transit officials said at least some of the performance problems are tied to past budget cuts in subway car maintenance.

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A Bigger Penalty for Riders Who Cheat on the Fare

The bad old days of subway turnstile jumping may be gone, but the fine for trying to sneak a free ride went up on Monday anyway, to $100 from $60 — the first increase in nearly a quarter century.

From Jan. 1 through July 6 this year, transit police issued 41,090 tickets for fare evasion and arrested an additional 8,437 people for not paying the subway fare, according to police data. That is an average of 263 tickets or arrests a day for fare evasion in a subway system with a volume of more than five million rides on an average weekday.

Things were very different in the early 1990s, when the system was in the throes of a fare-beating epidemic.

In the first six months of 1991 the transit police issued 123,773 summonses and made 9,942 arrests for fare evasion, according to a report in The New York Times. That was an average of about 743 tickets and arrests a day, at a time when ridership was much lower.

Just a year earlier, in 1990, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority estimated that more than 200,000 people jumped a subway turnstile every day. By 1997, with stronger enforcement, an improving transit system and the advent of new turnstiles for use with MetroCards (the turnstile barriers are longer and harder to squeeze past), the estimate of farebeaters had fallen to 35,000 a day.

The authority no longer makes such estimates public, but the data on arrests and summonses suggests that while turnstile jumping has not gone the way of the token, it is no longer as common as it was in the early 1990s. But even as fares rose and the subway system improved, the fine for fare beating remained unchanged.

It was set at $60 in 1984 and went into effect the following year, when a special tribunal was set up to handle transit offenses, like turnstile jumping, riding on the outside of a subway car or playing loud music in a station.

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