A few months ago, I ended a newsletter with the line, “it’s pretty easy to predict which issues will keep occurring in a country that never learns from its mistakes.” It is in that spirit that I am publishing a feature story on the intractable problem of homelessness in transit systems just two days after a homeless man was strangled to death by another rider on the subway.
I started reporting this feature about two months ago, for reasons that essentially amounted to my own curiosity. I realized I had never read a really good story on what transit systems have tried to do about homelessness in the past and what they’re doing about it now. Are there any success stories? What’s working? What doesn’t? What does success even look like?
To be honest, we did put some pep in our step, editorially, to get the story published this week. But not because it was suddenly timely. We did it because it was almost done and I’m on vacation next week. But it turned out that it is, now, somewhat timely, but only because the same issues keep occurring in a country that never learns from its mistakes. The homelessness issue, particularly on transit systems, very much fits that paradigm. I hope you’ll take the time to read about it.
My subway navigation strategy
For a brief period it looked like the MTA was no longer going to post service updates to Twitter because Elon Musk did things, but now it seems he is undoing those things and they might go back to posting Twitter alerts. Each and every day I am more grateful I left Twitter long ago.
In any event, don’t rely on the MTA’s Twitter updates. Here is how to navigate the subway’s endless service alerts and changes without it. Shoutout to developer extraordinaire Sunny Ng.
I didn’t publish much else in recent weeks. You may have heard the company I work for is undergoing some…difficulties…which has affected production and morale. Despite it all, I somehow still have a job, for now, and it is a job I love. So I’m going to take a much-needed week off and get back to it. In the meantime, I’ve got some biking and birdwatching to do.