Automated L Train Steals My Heart
After having a six year, epic love/hate relationship with the L train, I’m finding myself loving it more and more with the new automated signs and clear, easy to understand announcements. Welcome to the 1990’s MTA! It’s better late than never. And what better way for me to express my love than with haiku?
Back in the day, this is how I felt about the train:
Weekend has arrived
More Service interruptions
Let’s stay in Brooklyn
Oh! The train is down
Seventh weekend in a row
It’s par for the course
Now with the electronic message boards in place, even still in testing mode until April, my train experiences have done a total 180. In the past week I’ve had occasion to ride the train 8 times and each time the boards were accurate and I never had to wait longer than 4 minutes. A few of those rides were off hours and on weekends as well, so that’s really saying something.
Ode to the newly automated train, also in haiku:
Slow, erratic train
Now fully automated
I love you again
Lovely LED
Four minutes is not so long
Thanks for the info
Have you got a haiku about your train riding experiences, positive or negative? If so, post in the comments! Don’t know how to write a haiku? It’s easy…
How To Write a Haiku Poem [Wikihow]
20th Century Technology in the 21st Century [thelexiphane’s Flickr photostream]
Dana,
when I heard about this, I was so happy. It’s frustrating that they’re only “testing” it on the L Train but this is SUCH a great idea. Now, if they’ll also put a sign on the outside of the turnstiles, I’ll know whether or not I should run for a cup of coffee before plunging down into the depths to wait four hours for a train…of course, that’s once they actually implement this idea system-wide! The Japanese do this extremely well in Tokyo on their trains and subways, so get on it, MTA!
I’ve been having Haiku writing contests on my site too. I just love Haiku. It’s such a positive form of expressing yourself. Especially when it relates to the subway. I once wrote a haiku for the LIRR which was not very complimentary.
Eric, Dhaval, thanks for the great responses–but why not in haiku, eh? Dhaval, you should dig up your LIRR one and post it here!