Slate.com has a a fun story penned by Julia Turner on yet another reason to dislike Penn Station–impossible-to-follow signs.

Penn Station’s signage got 2.5 stars on Yelp.com (”Without a doubt, one of the poorest and most confusing arrangements for signage and passenger movement that I can imagine”), Turner notes, compared to the 4.5 stars Grand Central got.

Of course, comparing Penn Station to Grand Central is comparing Tad’s Steakhouse to Gramercy Tavern Camryn Manheim to Cameron Diaz.

But Turner does some digging into signmaking and “wayfinding”–the school of thought about how best to get people from Point A to Points B, C and D–and discovers what sort of a conflicting mess the Penn Station signs representing Amtrak, LIRR and NJT make in aggregate.

She writes:

The problem at Penn Station is not that designers skipped these steps. It’s that three sets of designers did them three times. Penn Station is owned by Amtrak, which manages its concourse on the western side of the station. But Amtrak leases the rest of the station out to the two other tenants: New Jersey Transit has the southeast corner, and the LIRR the northeast. (The Metropolitan Transit Authority oversees both the LIRR and New York City Transit, which manages the two adjacent subway stations; their sign systems are similar to the LIRR’s.) The fundamental wayfinding problem at Penn Station lies in the fact that each of these entities manages its own signs, usually without consulting the others. As a result, the station essentially has three different systems of signage.

This is a crazy way to manage information at the biggest railway station in the country. The user experiences Penn Station as one place. But the current system assumes that the user experiences the station as three distinct spaces. In truth, though, as we saw in the slide show above, many journeys require travelers to cross from zone to zone.

It’s a fun read. It’s here.

Frederick Kreuder, charged with taking money from LIRR employees to help them get lucrative disability benefits, was cleared of most, not all, charges by a Long Island judge Friday.

Kreuder reportedly got $1,000 for his services, which the NY Times said included instructing workers “to pay a doctor $1,000 in cash, to save up his vacation time to get a larger pension, and to take physical therapy for documentation.”

In one case, Kreuder accepted a check for $100 toward the teen baseball team he coached, and did not explain where the remaining $900–to be paid once the Railroad Retirement Board green-lighted an applicant’s disability claim–went. Kreuder was a former pension manager with LIRR who then shifted to manager of budget analysis. He was suspended without pay following his arrest in November 2008.

At the time, state attorney general Andrew Cuomo’s office said in a statement:

“Today’s arrest is the first time that someone is being held accountable for the culture of entitlement and systemic abuse that plagued the LIRR and Railroad Retirement Board. Moving forward, this office will continue to pursue criminal charges against any individual who facilitated such unchecked abuse, and will continue working to correct the systemic abuse in the disability benefits program.”

The Nassau County judge saw it differently. Kreuder might’ve committed ethical violations, said the jurist, but for the most part did not commit criminal violations. The charges he was hit with pertained to not paying taxes on the money he made coaching LIRR employees about disability.

Newsday has the link, but it’s only for Cablevision/Newsday subscribers.

Fun little piece in yesterday’s NY Times about the Long Island Railroad lost and found at Penn Station.

Like a time capsule, what’s left on the train is often a good indicator of what the societal trends are at a given time, says lost and found manager Casey Arasa. 

Judging by the number of lost karate gis, interest in the martial arts and being properly uniformed for them is booming in the suburbs. Yoga, too — at least according to all the dropped mats — remains quite popular. But trend spotting gets more difficult when the items are bizarre ones, and there are certainly plenty of those.

One day last month, the lost and found contained: a surfboard, several boogie boards, a Louisville Slugger baseball bat, a set of dentures, a stroller (without the baby), a battered white commodore’s cap and — Mr. Arasa’s favorite — a pair of metal crutches, leading one to envision a poor sprain-kneed commuter hobbling toward the 6:15 to Hicksville.

The lost and found collects 10,000 items a year, with a 50% return rate. My own return rate too is 50%–lost the remote-control car, found the Blackberry.

The digital offerings designed to make commuting life easier continue to increase. There’s the Metro-North timetable app over at StationStops.com that the MTA is not all that excited about, and there’s the crowd-sourcing Clever Commute service, where riders share delays and other abnormalities (actually, on the New Haven Line, they’re known as “normalities”) via group emails.

Clever Commute is taking things a step further with a service that emails you the track you should be headed to in Grand Central–and Penn Station, for Jersey and Long Island types–each evening as you leave work.

Clever Commute CEO Josh Crandall says that product is coming out of beta. We’re excited to see how it works, and we will of course report on how well the service works.

Here’s how you sign up:

1. Go to www.clevercommute.com
2. Click on “Find your line”
3. Toward the top right, change “Select provider type” to “Trains (Track Number)”
4. Select “Metro North Track Number Announcements (Beta)” to select your line
5. Enter your sign-up info just as you did when you first joined Clever Commute.

Some transit-related eavesdroppings from Overheard in New York.

Loud black girl on cell phone: You know where the train station is, where all them homeless people live? Yeah, that’s where I go get my hair done. She doesn’t fuck my hair up, because I told her, “you best not fuck my hair up.” And now she never does. (chuckles)

–LIRR

Mom to son, after looking through his phone: Who is in your phone as b-i-t-c-h?

–M60 Bus

Guy with teardrop tattoo: Dude, moonshine is awesome. It’s 99% alcohol and 1% liquor.

–L Train
 

Conductor: Please stand clear of the closing doors. (pause) Please stand clear of the closing doors. (pause) Station police officer, please apprehend the man holding the doors in the 6th car. (pause, then doors close) Hahaha, that always works.

–B Train

MTA engineer: Please use all exits. For the love of god, people, use all the doors to get out of the train. What the fuck, people, use the doors. Thank you.

–G Train

Conductor: Please stop holding the doors. (people continue to hold doors). I’m already on the clock, I have nowhere to be.

–A Train

Disgruntled subway conductor: Listen up, y’all! This train needs to move! Do not try to hold open the doors! Do not run at closing doors! Do not stick anything in the doors! That includes arms, legs, obnoxiously expensive purses, children, animals, whatever! Let’s go!

–1 Train

Conductor: Please stand clear of the doors or it will bruise yo face.

–C Train

Thirty-something black man to Catholic high school girls: So what’s it take for a couple of black guys to get to play with y’all’s skirts?

–Metro-North

The once-glorious, still scrappy NY Press has an alternately amusing/disturbing essay about a certain family’s predisposition to suicide–no, not the Hemingways or the Plaths–and how the author often sought out trains to expedite her trip to the sweet hereafter.

Dorri Olds claimed the Press’s Summer Non-Fiction contest prize with her essay, “9 Lives for a Weeble.”

She writes:

Later that same year, 1973, I stepped on the third rail of the Long Island Railroad and nothing happened. So I stepped on it again. I was under the impression it would electrocute me instantly.

“Hey, kid,” a station worker called out. “You could get yourself killed.”

I squeezed tight against the wall. Blast of horn and screech of metal blew out my eardrums while manic swirls of grit choked off my breath. After the train passed, I followed the rails to the nearest exit and kept running.

Fox 5 dedicated a lengthy news story last night to the boozy Sunday night ride to the city on a certain Long Island Railroad train. It seems a major beer blowout at the Boardy Barn in Hampton Bays wraps up around 8, then everyone makes their way to the Hampton Bays station for the 8:28 train heading east.

Needless to say, the snooty Amagansett types forced to share the train with the mooks are not happy.

Reporter Andrea Day donned a sturdy pair of Wellies to avoid the vomit at Hampton Bays train station. “You might think you’re in a frat house,” she gasps. “Believe it or not, this is the Long Island Railroad on a Sunday night.”

Adds Day on her blog:

I went out east and pulled up to the station to see what the 8:28 was all about. Can I tell you — it was scary! Even buying a ticket on the platform was tough because people in line were totally out of control. They were yelling, pushing, some passed out. I even had to dodge piles of vomit.

Here’s the video:

First of all, I can’t believe the Boardy Barn is still around. I remember commercials on WBAB back in the early ’80s, those cheesy homemade spots with some dirtball who once sang for the Good Rats singing “Rock…in the Eighties! Boardy Baaarrrnnn!”. I remember thinking what a ridiculous name it was — what the f*** is a Boardy Barn, and what sort of loser would ever drink there?

That 8:28 is a double-decker train. I’ve been on that train for long spells–jaunts from the city to Montauk and back with The Missus before we were saddled with offspring. I remember that the bathroom situation is awful–there were maybe two for the entire train, and the double-deckers are gigantuan. Add to the mix 20-something airheads who’ve consumed four tallboys from Penn Station to Ronkonkoma, and you’re suddenly thinking if it’s possible to pee out the door when the train pulls into Quogue. (Editor’s Note: Ronkonkona…Quoque…Long Island has funny names.]

Day asks for viewer comments on her blog, and most seem to defend the Boardy Barn boozers.

One writes:

Most of your parents went to The Barn. Its a happy place where people have a great deal of fun. It is controlled with no problems as all the employees are great. I commend the people that don’t drive drunk and get on the train instead. Sure some people drank more than their share of beer but that’s happened at Yankee, Jets, Giants and whatever other games people may take a train for. Fox 5 decided to broadcast a place where young, middle aged and old come to spend their Sunday afternoons in the summer.

Since it’s the season of beach trips and the like, reader Harvey shares a fun beach getaway on the train for people who don’t like the beach.

He writes:

It’s the LIRR Sunken Forest package, which combines an interesting train trip on a comfy two-seater double-decker (east of Jamaica) with a great half-hour ferry ride on the Great South Bay.  Then you can split your time on Fire Island among an exploration of the boardwalk trail through the Sunken Forest, a short stint on the relatively clean, uncrowded beach, and a half-mile walk over to ever-so-cool Cherry Grove for some (not-so-copious) alcohol consumption at a cafe overlooking the bay. 

One trick we just noticed (too late to try it out, so we don’t know if it works) is that the return ferry tickets are marked with the date but not the route, so you might get away with returning directly from Cherry Grove instead of walking back to Sunken Forest. 

Best part: no soul-crushing traffic, except watching it as you roll over the Wantagh and Meadowbrook Parkways if the dispatchers happen to route you via the crossover and main line rather than the Babylon branch.

Both an LIRR engineer and a civilian face reckless endangerment charges after the engineer, Ronald Cabrera, allegedly let the rider, William Kutsch, operate the train July 2.

And since Kutsch apparently would not get enough of a kick out of driving a typical Long Island Railroad train, Cabrera let him drive the 500-pound double-decker.

City Room has the scoop.

Both men, who surrendered to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority Police Department on Wednesday, have been charged with reckless endangerment in the second degree, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail. Mr. Cabrera has also been charged with official misconduct, also a misdemeanor. The two men were to be arraigned later Wednesday, in Hempstead.

The two men created “a substantial risk of serious physical injury” to those on the train and in the communities around the tracks, the charges state.

Kutsch allegedly drove from Hicksville to Hunter’s Point, reaching 80 miles an hour and passing through several car and pedestrian crossings.

Oil and water. Hatfields and McCoys.

Jon and Kate.

Metro-North and Long Island Railroad?

An ambitious proposal to overhaul our transit system was put forth yesterday by Mayor Bloomberg. Among the proposals are making crosstown buses free because they’re so slow, reports the NY Times, and merging the management of the railroads serving Long Island and Westchester/The Nutmeg State.

Mayor Mike also announced that he’d secured almost $47 million in federal funding to fix up our city’s ferries and piers.