NYC24: Connections: Straphangers

Sporting a Misfits pin and a lip-piercing, Borg, 16, clutches a clipboard and listens intently to announcements as she rides on a Broadway uptown local train.

Today, she’s written “1 & 3” — the trains she’ll be riding — on her left hand. Every day, after school, she rides the subway looking out for delays and garbled announcements.

When her train skips two stops to 14th Street, she clicks her pen and notes down the infraction on a yellow form.

A high-school junior who hopes to study music at UC Berkeley, Borg is a volunteer with the Straphangers Campaign, a public transportation advocacy group. She joined in the wake of last year’s 50-cent fare increase and after once missing her curfew because of a late F train.

In a city with 4 million daily subway riders, the Straphangers Campaign is an important presence. In the past month alone, Straphangers has made the newsstands for everything from its survey of subway trains with the worst announcements — the J and Z line — to campaign coordinator Neysa Pranger’s assessment of the best lines for subway surfing — the A, C, 4, 5 and 6 lines — in the Feb. 14 issue of New York magazine.

The Straphangers Campaign was founded a quarter century ago by the New York City Public Interest Research Group, or NYPIRG. Then, the city’s public transportation system “was really on the verge of collapse,” says Michael Hernandez, the Straphangers’ field organizer.

Subways and buses “became very symbolic of the decline of the city itself” during that period, says Hernandez, a 28-year-old graduate of Hunter College. Businesses that couldn’t rely on mass transit to move their workers and customers hightailed it from the city, while track fires, derailing trains and graffiti came to symbolize the city’s ailing infrastructure and rocketing crime rate.

In 1979, NYPIRG, founded in the late 1960s by students from different college campuses who combined their activity fees to hire lawyers, lobbyists and researchers, decided to address the problem and the Straphangers Campaign was born.

“Straphangers has been really a key player over the past 25 years because of its ability to highlight needs” and “connect the dots between daily issues and policymaking,” said Bruce Schaller, an urban transit consultant who’s worked on three studies for the group.

Straphangers has three full-time staffers and an e-mail list with more than 30,000 subscribers. Hernandez, Pranger and staff lawyer Gene Russianoff share an office in lower Manhattan with NYPIRG, whose board of directors consists of 18- to 25-year-olds. Their office has a casual and young feel, with boxes of papers strewn about, stacks of old books lying in the waiting area, press clippings from old Straphangers projects tacked to a large bulletin board, and NYPIRG posters taped to the walls.

Straphangers celebrated its 25th anniversary last fall, just as New York City’s subway turned 100. Hernandez says the city’s public transportation “is twenty times more reliable” than it was two decades ago, and he credits the organization’s activism with injecting over $30 billion of investments into the system.

Three years ago, Straphangers battled with the MTA over its plan to raise the subway fare from $1.50 to $2. That decision, Hernandez remembers, was based on a “skewed” presentation of the MTA’s finances. Not only had the MTA failed to consider different revenue sources, but it also tweaked its accounting in an attempt to justify the increase.

The city’s comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., found that the MTA had overstated its operating expenses by more than $850 million. In April of 2003, Straphangers teamed up with New York State Senate Minority Leader David A. Paterson and several transit riders to sue the Metropolitan Transit Authority, or MTA.