[Info-vax] [off topic] NYC subway - dirty station, but clean train, and no graffiti at all

[AEF]

On Monday, October 7, 2013 12:51:23 AM UTC-4, JF Mezei wrote:
> On 13-10-06 23:20, AEF wrote:
> 
> > Just fulfilling my not-quite-a-promise to VAXMAN about how clean the NYC subway is nowadays
> 
> I remember when Bombardier won its first contract for NYC subway cars.
> The media here covered this quite a bit, and one of the features was
> interior design which reduced space for grafitti on the subway car
> itself (but ads still a target).
> 
> The other aspect is that the old cars were not respected because they
> were in bad shape and already had grafitti which attracted more grafitti.

The old cars also have no graffiti now. It's the prompt cleaning that does 
the trick.

> When you have newer equipment, people have more respect and there is
> 
> less vandalism. NYC has been spending a lot of money to renew its subway

When the new cars first came out there was some graffiti occasionally. Had it 
not been cleaned up, there'd quickly be more and more. The graffiti artists 
have now pretty much given up. 

One thing in favor of your theory, though, is Lincoln Center. Even at the 
height of the graffiti epidemic in New York, the white buildings that 
composed Lincoln Center remained spotless. As a teenager I half-seriously 
suspected that there was a swat team on the roofs that made it so. I guess 
the culture just scares them away. I still find it hard to believe. 

Another thing that works is to not have blank walls, to have a regular artist paint a mural. Graffiti artists rarely mess with those.

> fleet since its near bankruptcy days.

> I suspect that subway cars from other manufacturers that MTA has
> 
> received incorporated similar anti grafitti designs.

It's more than that. Any new graffiti _anywhere_ in the system is cleaned up 
within a day or two. You saw the Bergen St. station in the video. The walls 
are clean not because of anti-graffiti design (those walls look like pretty 
old to me), but because any new graffiti is scrubbed off almost as soon as it 
appears. A true victory for a more civilized city!

AEF