New York City MTA helps commuters lie to bosses

by Mike Barish on

There are lots of valid excuses for being late to work. Your power was out so your alarm clock failed to go off. Your kid was sick and you had to take him to the doctor. You passed out at the brothel and didn’t have money for a cab. The problem with all of those excuses is that you have no way to prove to your boss that you’re telling the truth. But validating your tardiness just got simpler if you take the subway in New York City.

According to the New York Post, the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is going to start emailing commuters notes to provide to their bosses to verify subway delays that may have caused late arrivals. The New York City Transit division has long provided notes to commuters but required individuals to call a customer service number and then wait upwards of two weeks to receive a letter in the mail. These notes detail what lines the commuter claimed to have been using and any reported delays during the specified times.

In an effort to modernize, the MTA will soon allow commuters who were inconvenienced by subway delays to submit an online form and then receive an expedited email response. They hope to have the online system up and running by mid-2009. Currently, 34,000 people per year contact the MTA for notes to prove that they didn’t simply oversleep due to the heavy drinking that they rely on to help them cope with their mind-numbingly droll lives.

As a NYC resident who relies on the oft-delayed subway system, I’m looking forward to the ease of use of this new online system. Granted, my habitual tardiness can only been blamed on pathological use of the snooze button and a penchant for long morning showers that involve a good cathartic cry. But all my boss needs to know is that the F train got held up because of sick passenger. Everyone’s just more comfortable with that story.

Britons Bring Bowel Bacteria Onto Buses

by Mike Barish on

I’ve never been much of a germaphobe. I don’t carry Purell with me. I don’t wash my hands obsessively. And I don’t walk around with a mask on. But then I come across a story like this one on the BBC News website and I start to question whether I should live in a bubble. A recent recent study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (is there a better location for the study of tropical medicine?) has discovered that more than one in four commuters in the UK has bacteria associated with fecal matter on their hands.

Dr. Val Curtis, director of the Hygiene Center at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said, “If any of these people had been suffering from a diarrhoeal disease, the potential for it to be passed around would be greatly increased by their failure to wash their hands after going to the toilet.” That, quite frankly, is more than I need from my daily commute. I’m just looking to get from Point A to Point B. Point D(iarrhea) is not part of my plan.

I ride the New York City subways to work everyday and I will admit that I avoid holding onto the bars/poles in the trains as much as possible. If I have to hold on, I typically wrap my arm around the pole so as to keep my hands clean. But sometimes you just have to grab on. However, I’m fairly certain that I don’t have fecal matter all over my hands. Because I wash them after I use the toilet. It’s everyone else who is apparently wiping their asses barehanded and then touching everything.

So, as we approach cold and flu season, perhaps it’s time to remind ourselves to wash our hands often. And use toilet paper instead of just our hands. It’s a great big world out there but it’s the tiny bacteria that will kill you. Or at least ravage your GI tract. Be sure to wave at me when I pass by in my bubble.

NYC subway fan arrested for 26th time, shows true dedication

by David Breisch on

I’ll admit that I enjoy learning about mass transit, and I am probably what you might classify as a “rail enthusiast.” This, however, is a trifle extreme. 43-year-old Darius McCollumn was arrested in New York’s Penn Station Sunday night for “impersonating a transit employee.” That was, indeed, his 26th arrest by transit police, the first of which occurred when he was 15 years old and involved him taking an E-line train full of passengers for a 6-stop joyride. More recently, in 2004 he was found by Long Island Rail Road police in its Jamaica, NY rail yards carrying several official transit keys and an employee uniform, while just earlier this year he was arrested for attempting to enter a restricted area in Columbus Circle, wearing another employee uniform.

Defenders of the man claim that he suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, though this has never been conclusively proven. He’s never been jailed for long because, despite trespassing and other minor crimes, he’s never hurt or put anyone in real danger. Meanwhile, in a story for the New York Daily News, McCollumn’s mother (whom he lives with in North Carolina) says that she isn’t surprised that he got arrested again, and that he went to New York on his own despite her warnings not to. See, now that’s dedication.

NYC subways are slow… and getting slower

by David Breisch on

That’s according to the latest NYC Transit data, at least, which covers the past three years of service. The New York Post points out that while the days of broken-down cars and graffiti-filled stations, at least, is long gone, there is a significant trend downwards in the quality and reliability in subway services. Through June this year, the average number of delayed trains is up 24% from last year, and a whopping 71% from two years ago. Meanwhile, the average distance that rail cars travel between break-downs is down 7% from last year and 17% from two years ago.

NYC Transit blames the issues on more track work, rising ridership and decreasing income from federal and state sources. Unfortunately, none of those problems really seem to be going away – and NYC Transit is not the only organization battling the dangerous forces of system troubles. As gas prices increase, ridership on mass transit systems around the world is going up. Also, subway systems are not getting any younger. Many of the world’s oldest transit networks have already passed the 100-year mark – some by a lot (London’s Underground, the oldest subway system in the world, started service in 1863). Without adequate funding and support from the traveling public, mass transit systems will just keep getting less and less reliable.

(Via Gothamist)

Hack your local subway

by Grant Martin on

Frequent travelers on any metropolitan subway system know that the two major means for fare tracking and billing are via magnetic strip and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). And every nerd and his RPG character know that those systems can be both readable and exploitable.

To see how secure the Boston subway system was, several MIT students decided to run an analysis on the security of the infrastructure; what they found was a little disturbing. By simply wandering into unlocked doors, opening unlocked cabinets and peering around they were able to find keys to the system, get access to network hardware and find and copy employee identification.

On looking into the security of the magnetic and RFID systems, they were able to reverse engineer the code on the magnetic stripes and reconfigure the data to post $653 to a subway card. Similarly, the group analyzed the RFID contents and were able to disassemble the code.

The students point out that numerous transportation systems around the globe use these systems and technology.

Naturally, all of this quite illegal — the students were just illustrating a point to the MBTA that there are security vulnerabilities in the system that can fairly easily be exploited. Hopefully, they and the company that makes subway infrastructures perks up and makes some serious security changes as a result of this reserach.

Check out the full 87 page presentation on the execution hosted at MIT.