More well placed signage.  Thank you, MTA, for again making my trip just a bit more unnecessarily inconvenient.

We were leaving a party in Brooklyn and saw a subway just steps from the apartment.  From the sidewalk, all looks fine.  Oh but wait, you have to walk all the way down the two flights of stairs and up to the turnstile to see the little sign that says “No F Trains Running”.

F, in this case, does not mean Fudge Brownies.  More like “FML, I made the mistake of thinking the subway was going to get me home in less than an hour…”

You know what place that sign would have been more useful to anyone interested in riding the F train?  Let’s see… pasted on the far end of the platform, next to an advertisement?  No.  Tucked beneath the third rail?  No.  Crumpled up and thrown in a nearby trash can?  Maybe.  Hmmm.  Possibly somewhere on the stairwell?  Getting closer…

Put the signs on the street level, MTA!  Seriously, what’s wrong with you guys?  These things upset me the most because they are so exceptionally easy to correct and yet are incredulously put in the most inconvenient places.

MTA, say it with me: I will put my out of service signs into convenient places, so they are visible from the street, before people try to swipe their card.

Also, just a note about the MTA’s casual way of saying “take the G instead”.  I wish I had some clear data to show this, but when it’s late night on the subway, taking an extra train will literally add 30 minutes to your trip, possibly more.  In this station, taking the G train (which only runs in Brooklyn!) would have taken us just a single stop away, where we’d need to transfer to the A.  So we walked it.  I don’t take the G at all but I’m going to assume that at midnight, it’s probably running once every 20-30 min, tops.  So when the MTA’s signs (or brain splitting announcements) tell you to simply transfer at the whatever stop for the whatever train, keep in mind that a transfer will turn your normally ridiculous 1 hour trip into 1.5+ hrs.  I try not to think about the distance I could be covering in other modes of transportation in all that time I get to wait.