The view from Third Avenue in Brooklyn toward the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on Wednesday morning. With most mass transit out of service, many commuters had no choice but to drive.
With commutes that took hours, half-mile lines at suburban gas stations and city buses stuffed beyond capacity, the transportation systems in most of the region slowed to a crawl on Wednesday, amid promises that some subway and commuter rail services would be restored by the Thursday morning commute.
On Wednesday night, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo declared a transportation emergency and said all fares on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s commuter trains, subways and buses would be waived on Thursday and Friday.
Beginning at 6 a.m., some service will resume on 14 of the city’s 23 subway lines, but several critical lines — the No. 3 and 7 trains and the B, C, E, G and Q trains — remain entirely dark. Many trains will have gaps in their routes, including the No. 4 train, which will have no service between 42nd Street in Manhattan and Borough Hall in Brooklyn.
And if New Yorkers want to try their luck at driving into Manhattan on Thursday, most will require company: Beginning at 6 a.m., the city planned to bar private vehicles carrying fewer than three people from entering Manhattan over most major bridges, like the Robert F. Kennedy, Manhattan, Brooklyn and Williamsburg Bridges.
But on Wednesday, as many businesses resumed normal operations for the first time since the storm, commutes were a mess.
“I left at 8:30 this morning and got here at 11:30,” said Eddie Malae, 29, who drove from Forest Hills, Queens, to the salon on Lexington Avenue near 77th Street where he is a stylist. “And I did tricks, shortcuts.”
Mr. Cuomo said that the goal of the fare waiver was to help alleviate the kind of traffic that clogged city streets on Wednesday.
“The gridlock was dangerous, frankly,” Mr. Cuomo said.
Joseph Lhota, the chairman of the M.T.A., said that roughly half of the commuters who take Metro-North trains would see regular service starting Thursday morning. The Harlem and the New Haven lines will both be running normal schedules to Grand Central Station, he said.
The storm damage had a synergy of its own. Efforts to pump floodwaters from subway and automobile tunnels were slowed by electrical shortages. Hastily arranged car pools became bogged down on highways and city streets clogged with other commuters. Many gas stations, without power to operate their pumps, could not open for business, eerily evoking the fuel crisis of the 1970s.
Only bicycles seemed to be rolling.
The delays were “the equivalent of a subway strike with several of our major tunnels closed,” said Samuel I. Schwartz, a former city traffic commissioner known as Gridlock Sam, who said he could only recall one instance — when there was a powerful storm during a transit strike in 1980 — when traffic had been as bad.
City buses, the only piece of the mass transit network operating in earnest on Wednesday, often bypassed waiting commuters, unable to take on more passengers. Those who did make it on board often got off well before their stop, reasoning that they could walk faster.
“Maybe when it turns green, people will start moving,” Abraham Riesman, 26, said as he rode an M10 bus stopped at a red light along Central Park West. Then the light turned.
“Nope.”
Eric Bourne, 27, waited 30 minutes for the M4 bus at 138th Street and Broadway before he realized there was a path of less resistance: walking to his job at Parsons Dance in Times Square, where he is a modern dancer. Woe was to the less fit.
Parking garages filled early, with lines of cars in front of some gates before they opened near dawn. Diego Trilleras, the manager at a Manhattan Parking Group garage at East 56th Street, said he had not seen such a business boom since before the economic downturn. Some customers, he said, would probably have to wait an hour to get their cars out again. “They understand,” he said hopefully.
With no underground route from Queens to Manhattan and car traffic stalled, some crossed the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge on bike or foot. One Twitter user described cycling over the bridge as “escaping zombie apocalypse.”
Others attempted cab sharing, the delicate art of piling into a yellow taxi with strangers. Some cabs declined. At a red light at 86th Street and Broadway, one man approached several cabs that already had passengers at a red light, and the drivers refused to open their doors. Finally, one cabby rolled down his window. There were three passengers already in the back, but the man persuaded the driver to let him sit in the passenger seat, before the car began staggering downtown.
At 102nd Street and Lexington Avenue, a passenger happily waited as Khandoker Ahmed, a driver with his off-duty lights on, took a bathroom break. As he drove to Fifth Avenue, car flow was quickly outpaced by pedestrians walking their dogs.
As power returned to some areas of the city, wildcat entrepreneurial spirit flourished. Nail salons in darkened parts of Manhattan offered mani-pedis by dim natural light, and outside the Old Homestead Steakhouse in the meatpacking district, Louis Moreta cooked steaks on sidewalk barbecue grills and waved them to the cars on Ninth Avenue, generating a line that stretched down the block. In Lower Manhattan, where the traffic lights still were not working, pedestrians dodged in between cars or crossed with their eyes forward, daring the cars to hit them. Most of the time, both sides played nice. Kerry Beauchemin, an antique dealer, excepted one car, whose driver provided a hostile arm gesture as Mr. Beauchemin crossed First Avenue at 12th Street, seeking a place to charge his cellphone. “I don’t know why there are so many cars.”
As usual, a special strain of misery troubled travelers at the area’s airports. La Guardia Airport remained closed on Wednesday because of flooding, while some flights resumed at Kennedy International and Newark Liberty Airports, though they were operating well below their usual volume. All three airports were expected to be open on Thursday.
On the Long Island Rail Road, shuttle service was available between Jamaica and Atlantic Terminal around 2 p.m. on Wednesday. The transportation authority said it was cautiously optimistic about restoring service from Jamaica to Pennsylvania Station on Thursday.
On the Metro-North Railroad, the New Haven line was expected to resume service on a nearly normal schedule from Stamford, Conn., to Manhattan. The Harlem line was scheduled to run from Mount Kisco to New York City. Service on the Hudson line remained suspended, as did most service for New Jersey Transit’s rail operations. Gov. Chris Christie said Tuesday that he expected PATH trains to be unavailable for at least 7 to 10 days.
Subway riders should expect delays because of work on the seven tunnels beneath the East River that were flooded. The city planned to set up dedicated bus lanes between Brooklyn and Manhattan. The Brooklyn-Battery, Queens-Midtown and Holland Tunnels remain closed.
Even where partial services were returned, for most people there remained the slog of coping. The loss of everyday essentials — elevators, lights, cellphone service, Wi-Fi, refrigeration, hot showers — created conditions of subacute stress around the city.
Food, prescription drugs, home health assistance, surprise houseguests, restless children home from school — all became nodes of anxiety that most likely will loom larger as the days wear on.
In New Jersey it was the half-mile lines at the few gas stations open. The Police Department in Morristown sent out a text alert that the town was out of gas, and people should not come looking for it.
In the East Village in Manhattan, where power remained out, it was the frustrating hunt for a working pay phone or a cellular hot spot. Crowds with laptops or tablets huddled around the W hotel on Union Square, where doormen kept them out of the lobby.
Other New Yorkers hunkered down for another night without power, without certainty of what would happen to their homes.
Marie Clausen, who was ordered to evacuate her building in Battery Park City on Sunday, went first to a friend’s on the Lower East Side, which also lost power. By Wednesday morning, she made her way north to a friend’s house on the Upper East Side to shower, still not sure of the fate of her home downtown. “My nerves are frayed because they said the repairs could take a month,” said Ms. Clausen, an executive in the music industry.
“We are allowed to enter the building to collect our belongings today from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. but were told to bring a flashlight,” she said. “People are looking into hotels. But for a month?”
Mr. Malae, the stylist who had the three-hour commute, said that on Thursday morning, he would consider driving “to the Queensboro Bridge and walk or take a cab from there.”
“But tonight,” he added, gesturing around the salon, “I might sleep here.”
Source: NYTimes