Having said that...all those people saying there are elderly people with only a couple of days worth of food in their homes..well, haven't they been in snowstorms before? Or in winters in New York before? Why didn't they put in a stock of at least two weeks of food at the beginning of the winter season?
Transit complaints about MTA, Bloomberg keep piling up in aftermath of Christmas Day blizzard
Bus and subway riders were stranded or delayed again Tuesday as significant parts of the transit system remained bogged down by snow and ice.
More than two dozen bus routes in Brooklyn had no service at all, and nearly a dozen in Queens were lumbering along modified routes due to snow-clogged streets, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Commuters along five bus routes on Staten Island also had no hope of catching a ride.
The MTA decided to suspend or scale back service in areas where road conditions were the worst after hundreds of buses got stranded in the snow Monday. But that was little comfort to cold commuters.
About 30 people waited for a B44 bus at Nostrand Ave. and Fulton St. in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, unaware the MTA wasn't sending buses their way.
With no snowplows in sight, stranded passengers vented their rage at Mayor Bloomberg.
"He should have gotten those plows out here," said Cynthia Jones, 43, a nurse unable to get to work. "The mayor may not need his paycheck, but we need ours. I lost two days' pay."
Sharon Tahir, 40, shivered at Archer Ave. and Sutphin Blvd. in Jamaica, Queens, because her Q60 bus route was shortened before her normal stop. The home health aide was waiting for her son to pick her up.
"It's too cold to walk the rest of the way," she said. "Many sidewalks aren't shoveled. My feet are cold."
Transit executives also expressed frustration with the city's street-clearing efforts.
"I've never seen it this bad," one executive said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "They left us in the lurch."
MTA Chairman Jay Walder said the agency would do a full review of how it handled the blizzard. Officials want to probe why heavier hybrid buses struggled in the snow, whether buses had appropriate tires and whether more tires should have been covered in chains.
"We're not satisfied with the number of stuck buses. We will be looking back at the tires, the question of chains and all the things like that," he said.
Two subway lines and two shuttles were still shut down through much of the day, as were open-air stretches of the L, D and N lines in Brooklyn. Transit workers were still digging out some trains, MTA spokeswoman Deirdre Parker said.
"It's difficult to get to these trains because of the snowdrifts," she said. "We have to shovel them out, in many cases by hand."
As of last night, service was restored on all but the B and Q lines, the N line in Brooklyn, the Franklin Ave. shuttle and the Rockaway Park shuttle. The L line was operating in two segments, with transfers required at Broadway Junction.
Transit officials hoped more service would be restored for this morning's rush hour.
The Long Island Rail Road expects to operate near-normal rush-hour service this morning, and Metro-North is planning a full weekday schedule.
Mayor Bloomberg said the MTA did the right thing trying to keep service going as long as possible.
"We could have stopped, or Jay could have stopped, providing bus service earlier," Bloomberg said. "There would have been a lot fewer buses. ... You try to transport as many people as you can until you can't do it anymore, and you're probably better off if you didn't do anybody."
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