Two more rules of thumb for the New York subway

• Getting a less crowded car. If the trains you are trying to take are persistently crowded, try riding some number of stops in the opposite direction and then switching back to the direction you want to go in. You may be able to get on before the crowds have accumulated. Schematically, this is like applying a function to a hard problem in order to make it easier to solve and then after it has been solved applying the function’s inverse.
• A situation when you should always take a seat. If the train stops unexpectedly between stations for longer than a minute or two, grab any empty seat you can. You may be delayed longer than you planned for, and in such circumstances you may be glad to be able to sit down. You can always give it up to someone in greater need, anyway.

Earlier remarks on NYC transportation.

Two rules of thumb about transportation in New York

• If you take a cab, always get a receipt. It may prove useful later if you find you have lost something or need to remember where you were at a certain time.
• When there is a crowd on the subway platform, don’t try to be the first one into the car. Instead, get behind someone large and aggressive (aggressive is the most important quality), so you can follow them in without having to shove too many people, yourself.

A new kind of noise in the subway

Waiting for subway trains used to be one of the surprisingly quiet pleasures of New York life. Not when a train is nearby, of course, but at other times. The sounds of the street are usually gone or at least made distant. In some stations you can hear trains in motion somewhere else. And there are also the various sounds that human beings make — which are much harder to hear on the street. I find subway platforms reasonably good for reading and proofreading my writing.

But since the new announcement system was installed, within the past couple of years, we have begun to be bombarded with the hyper-amplified human voice about once a minute. It’s a horror and I wonder if it was not set in place by one of the many MTA executives who don’t actually live in New York or take the subway. Some day, something must be done about those people — require them to commute by subway, for a start.

Trying to understand this as an intentional act, I wonder if it is not actually a secret strategy to drive away vagrants who would otherwise try to sleep in isolated places on the platforms.