On Journey, Young Tunisians Need Only a Final Destination

FROM: The New York Times

DATE: 19/04/2011

AUTHOR: Steven Erlanger

VENTIMIGLIA, Italy — In the American Bar, across the square from the train station here, they have had enough. “The Tunisians are everywhere,” the waitress said. “It’s been like this for a month. They sleep in the station and on the streets, and we’ve lost a lot of customers.”

Mara Scasso, an emergency room nurse, said she had never seen so many police officers in this western edge of Italy, on the French border. “Helping the refugees is a moral duty,” she said. “But here we have one of the highest unemployment rates in Italy; it’s a dead zone. I don’t see how we can help them.”

Thirty yards away, about 70 young Tunisian men sat around the lip of a dry fountain in Piazza Battisti, drinking coffee, asking for money and giving interviews. Some of them have been sent between Italy and France several times, and the police and immigration officers carefully monitor the trains and stations on the Riviera tourist route between Nice, Menton and Ventimiglia, stopping every young man who looks Tunisian.These young men — there are no women — are a kind of Ping-Pong ball in a French-Italian political soap opera: economic migrants from a newly free but chaotic Tunisia who have dared the seas to find opportunity in a European Union that does not want them.

Italy has started issuing temporary six-month residence permits to Tunisians who arrived before April 5, saying that European Union rules under the Schengen treaty, which allows passport-free travel, would let them travel into France and elsewhere. The French are turning many of them back if they lack other documentation or sufficient money, or if they simply cannot satisfactorily explain, at least to officials, the nature and duration of their visit. As a French policeman in the Nice train station said of the permits, “The Italians have created a beautiful stupidity.”

But the Italians feel put upon, given their proximity to Tunisia and the arrival of some 25,700 Tunisian refugees this year, and they are worried about an even larger influx from Libya. They are asking for “European solidarity” from a European Union that has no uniform policy on economic migrants, refugees or even political asylum, and some Italian politicians have even threatened, idly, to quit the European Union if it does not help Italy with the influx. But the Italians are most angry with France, which is where most of the Tunisians say they want to go.

As Foreign Minister Franco Frattini told the daily La Repubblica: “The problem of immigration is becoming a bit like the nuclear issue. Everyone wants to say something about it, but no one wants it in their backyard.”

Mohamed Haddaji is a good example. In January, he paid about $2,100 to travel to Lampedusa, an Italian island near Tunisia, on a small boat. Single and 25, he worked in a Tunis bakery, but with the collapse of state authority he took his chance to go to France, where he has family, he said, to have a better life.

The Italian authorities are pleasant, he said; the French are not. “We sleep in the streets in France,” he said. He came with $1,400; he is decently dressed and has various phone cards in his wallet for Tunisia, Italy and France. Like his friend Jalel, 23, he says he wants to earn money and return to Tunisia.

But he has no papers, except for a card with his name and photograph from an Italian charity, and the French police told him to go back to Italy to get some. Even if he gets a six-month residency card and can show the French a valid train ticket from Italy, he may still get sent back, said Francis Lamy, the prefect of France’s Alpes-Maritimes department.

The French police have the right and duty, Mr. Lamy said in an interview in Nice, to ask a foreigner “to justify the reason for his visit and the duration, and to demonstrate the means to pay for this stay,” he said — usually $88 a day. “If the person acts suspicious or the answers are not satisfactory, the state can, under Schengen, send the person back, in this case to Italy, and Italy has an obligation to retake him.”

Mr. Lamy has told police officers under his command — as well as the 240 in three mobile units sent from Paris to help him deal with the Tunisians — “to follow the rules strictly.” Those rules, he said, along with a new French security law passed last month, allow officers within 12 miles of the border to stop people for identity and security checks if they are suspected of violating the law, crossing illegally or smuggling.

The police have arrested 100 human traffickers, Mr. Lamy said. In March alone, he said, French authorities arrested 2,800 foreigners, nearly all Tunisian, of whom 1,700 were expelled from France. Of those, 1,450 were returned to Italy, and some 250 were returned directly to Tunisia. There was not a single woman or application for political asylum, he said, insisting that each case is treated separately and with judicial oversight.

Just this week, said a worker for the state-financed legal aid group, Forum Réfugiés, Tunisians who first came to her for help a month ago had been told to return to Italy to get papers. When they re-enter France, even with the papers, they are sent back to Italy for not having enough money. “Normally to have an identity check, the police need suspicion of an infraction,” said the worker, Maud, who works in a state detention center in Nice and asked that her last name not be used. “Today there is racial profiling.”


There is significant political pressure on both sets of police from their governments, which loudly denounce illegal immigration and seem less than rigorous in applying European Union regulations that forbid racial profiling, though they deny it.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, unpopular in opinion polls, has taken a strong anti-immigrant stance, personified by his new interior minister, Claude Guéant, who says France also wants to cut legal immigration.

Italy’s coalition government gets support from the Northern League, which runs on an anti-immigration platform, while Mr. Sarkozy “has a similar problem” with the far-right National Front. “And in a moment when presidential elections are looming, he cannot afford to be seen as weak in immigration,” said Marta Dassu, director of Aspen Institute Italia, a research group.

A good example of the tensions and hyperbole over the issue erupted on Sunday, when the French prefect, Mr. Lamy, asked the state railway company to halt trains from Ventimiglia to France because of a planned demonstration supporting the Tunisians. He acted on his own, he said, because he had evidence from his Italian counterpart that the protesters, who had no permit to demonstrate and included a group of “possibly 50 violent activists,” presented “a serious risk to public order.”

Italy reacted angrily, sending its ambassador in Paris to protest what it said was a border closing in violation of European Union laws and principles. In the end, the disruption of train traffic lasted only several hours, and the European Union said France had acted correctly.

But the issue remains hot. Christian Estrosi, the deputy mayor of Nice and a legislator from Mr. Sarkozy’s party, said, “It is a little too easy for Italy to be generous with the territory of others.”

At the dry fountain in Ventimiglia, a young man named Ali was spinning tales about Tunisia, claiming to be the brother of the vegetable seller who immolated himself and set off the Tunisian revolution, and then asking for money. “The Europeans are racist,” he said angrily. “They don’t like the Arabs.”

On BART Trains, the Seats Are Taken (by Bacteria)

FROM: The New York Times

DATE: 05/03/2011

AUTHOR: Zusha Elinson

Carrie Nee prefers to stand during her half-hour commute on BART from San Leandro to downtown San Francisco. Although the trains’ blue fabric seats are plush and comfortable, Ms. Nee refuses to sit on them.

“I would love to sit down, but it just grosses me out. They’re disgusting,” said Ms. Nee, a 26-year-old records clerk.

Riders on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system have long complained about germs in the hard-to-clean cloth seats. As Bob Franklin, the BART board president, acknowledged, “People don’t know what’s in there.”

Now they do.

The Bay Citizen commissioned Darleen Franklin, a supervisor at San Francisco State University’s biology lab, to analyze the bacterial content of a random BART seat. The results may make you want to stand during your trip.

Fecal and skin-borne bacteria resistant to antibiotics were found in a seat on a train headed from Daly City to Dublin/Pleasanton. Further testing on the skin-borne bacteria showed characteristics of methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, the drug-resistant bacterium that causes potentially lethal infections, although Ms. Franklin cautioned that the MRSA findings were preliminary.

High concentrations of at least nine bacteria strains and several types of mold were found on the seat. Even after Ms. Franklin cleaned the cushion with an alcohol wipe, potentially harmful bacteria were found growing in the fabric.

Dr. John Swartzberg, a clinical professor at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, played down the threat of infection from harmful bacteria on a BART seat. “I suspect it’s not a very big problem,” Dr. Swartzberg said. “That said, if there’s another way to do it, where you can clean it better, then you should do it.”

He said the cloth seats most likely allowed bacteria to flourish because they were more difficult to clean and disinfect.

James Allison, a BART spokesman, wrote in an e-mail that the findings were “not surprising,” considering that 330,000 commuters rode the trains daily. Last year, the BART police received 1,051 complaints of smoking, eating and drinking; 245 complaints of urinating or defecating; and 56 reports of spitting.

Mr. Allison encouraged riders to wash their hands and use hand sanitizers available at BART stations.

Hygiene has emerged as a key issue as BART officials determine what kind of seats to install for a new fleet of cars in 2017. In January, system employees were invited to test a variety of seat models at a Hayward warehouse. One employee, Melissa Jordan, filed a report on BART’s Web site about the trade-offs in selecting the new seats.

“Can I live with some type of seat that’s less cushiony — maybe padded vinyl instead of fabric — if it’s easier to keep clean?” Ms. Jordan wrote.

Ms. Franklin’s analysis also revealed that Muni, which uses acrylic plastic seats, appears to be more sanitary.

She tested a seat on the No. 28 bus, a route frequented by college students traveling from San Francisco State to Daly City. Two benign bacteria colonies were found. Unlike the BART seat analysis, Ms. Franklin’s test of the Muni seat after cleaning it with an alcohol wipe detected no bacteria.

Ms. Franklin tested the BART seat at the back of a Dublin/Pleasanton-bound train in the midafternoon. A swab taken from the seat cushion and headrest produced a veritable forest of mold and colorful bacteria.

In two separate tests, Ms. Franklin identified characteristics of the MRSA bacteria growing in the seat. The first test confirmed the presence of staphylococcus aureus, the skin-borne bacteria. A second confirmed that the bacteria, like MRSA, was resistant to the antibiotics methicillin and penicillin. But a third test intended to isolate the MRSA bacteria was negative.

MRSA is known as the “superbug” because it is resistant to antibiotics. It infects people through open wounds, attacking the immune system; 19,000 deaths each year are related to MRSA infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“There’s a probability that it is MRSA, but more tests would need to be done,” Ms. Franklin said. “Somebody probably was wearing shorts and had an infection, and there you go. It is concerning.”

Ms. Franklin identified two other bacteria strains that she said resulted from fecal contamination of the BART seat. Those strains were also resistant to antibiotics. The other bacteria did not appear to be harmful and are found throughout the environment, Ms. Franklin said.

The soft seat is a BART trademark, going back to Sept. 11, 1972, the day the first train rolled down the track. The seat covers are made of 90 percent wool and 10 percent nylon and are filled with foam padding, which was made fire-resistant after a fire in the Transbay Tube in 1979.

A BART brochure proclaimed that the new trains were designed to “lure the commuter out of the comfort of his automobile.” The trains were “almost as wide as a Boeing 707, and every bit as comfortable,” according to the brochure, which was printed in the shape of a BART car.

“BART was an all-new system, and they wanted everything to be different,” said Mike Healey, who was a BART spokesman at the time. “They wanted cushioned seats and rugs on the floors. Comfort was certainly a key selling point for the system.”

The marketing campaign worked. Ridership has grown. And the once-quiet suburban commuter train is now a heavily trafficked line.

“Things have changed,” said Mr. Franklin, the BART board president. “Now you’re no longer guaranteed a parking space. You’re no longer guaranteed a seat. There are 350,000 people traveling every day, as opposed to 50,000.”

BART cleaners go through trains every night and tackle the dirtiest seat cushions. Hard surfaces are wiped down with an industrial disinfectant.

Between 300 and 500 seat covers are removed each week and sent to a third-party vendor to be dry-cleaned and disinfected, Mr. Allison said. But that is a fraction of the 40,000 seats on BART’s 669 cars.

Dry-cleaning costs BART $595,000 a year. When necessary, BART replaces the cloth seats for an entire car — generally about 60 seats — at a cost of about $12,500. The system intends to continue rotating in new cloth seats as it continues to try out seats for the new cars.

Mr. Allison said that a major concern in designing the new cars was cleaner, more comfortable seating. BART plans to let the public test different types of seats in demonstration cars and then comment on their suitability.

Mr. Allison said that the choices for new seat models included hard plastic and padded vinyl.

Ms. Nee, the BART rider, said she would prefer hard plastic, especially after hearing the results of the bacteria analysis.

“I would seriously sacrifice my comfort for a more sanitary surrounding,” she said. “Granted, you’re going to be comfortable with the seats they have now, but I think your health is much more important than having your butt hurt for half an hour.”

On Train, a Fight Between Silent and Merely Quiet

FROM: The New York Times

DATE: 09/01/2011

AUTHOR: Vincent M. Mallozzi

MATAWAN, N.J. — Last Monday morning, Robert Arbeeny and two friends boarded a train bound for Manhattan and began chatting about the holidays.

“Excuse me,” said the woman sitting across from them, raising her reading glasses, and then her voice. “This is the quiet car.”

Mr. Arbeeny apologized and began whispering, which caused further agitation. The woman put down her book and summoned a conductor.

“They are not supposed to be talking,” she said, wagging her index finger at the group.

The conductor tried stepping quietly between both parties.

“They do have a right to talk,” he said in a soft voice, “they just have to speak in a very quiet manner.”

As other passengers began looking on, the woman shot back: “What kind of sense does that make! Why would you allow them to have a sustained conversation in a quiet car, and why are you taking their side over mine!”

Similar scenes have been playing out since last Monday, when New Jersey Transitexpanded its so-called quiet commute program — with the first and last cars designated as quiet during weekday peak-hour trains — on many of its highly traveled lines.

As a result, a yearning for quiet has sparked an inevitable war of very loud words. The quiet cars have now become some of the noisiest, as passengers trying to read or sleep are constantly hushing and shushing others.

Caught in the cross-fire are the conductors, who are acting as referees, trying to explain the new rules to passengers on both sides of the “quiet” platform. All conductors have been told to issue business cards to noisy passengers in much the same way that soccer referees issue yellow or red conduct cards to unruly players. The cards show a hand with an extended index finger placed over a pair of bright red lips, with the words “Quiet Commute” written underneath.

The rules for the quiet cars ask riders to refrain from cellphone use, disable the sound on laptops and other devices, and maintain low volume on headphones.

New Jersey Transit’s literature concerning the quiet cars, which has been available on trains for the past week, states that “conversations should be conducted in subdued voices,” but many riders are demanding complete silence.

“I think the whole concept of quiet cars is ridiculous,” said Mr. Arbeeny, 44, of Manalapan, N.J. “People are going to talk, it’s human nature. Many passengers, like the woman who told me to be quiet, are misinterpreting the new rules, and it is having the reverse effect in the quiet cars, creating tension instead of quiet.”

Patrick F. Reilly, the chairman of the United Transportation Union Local 60, which represents New Jersey Transit’s conductors, said Wednesday that the sounds of angry silence in the quiet cars would surely dissipate as passengers settled into more chat-free routines.

“Like anything else that’s new, this will take some time to get used to,” Mr. Reilly said. “Give it some time.”

By Thursday, that time had not yet arrived.

Annemarie Whitney, a 30-year-old accountant from Manalapan who works in Brooklyn, was sitting in a quiet car watching as fellow passengers angrily stared down a man talking on his cellphone. A nearby conductor who was made aware of the situation by several passengers reached into his pocket for a quiet card, but the man hung up before it could be delivered.

“Cellphones are one thing, but people are getting the wrong impression about these cars,” Ms. Whitney said. “They are quiet cars, not silent cars. Subdued and silent are two different words, and as long as there are misconceptions out here, there are going to be disputes.”

And bizarre requests.

On Friday, one passenger asked a conductor if he could disable the automated announcements, which inform riders of impending stops, as well as the conductor’s work radio, which he needed to stay in contact with the train’s engineer. “It’s unnecessary noise,” the passenger said.

The conductor gave the passenger the silent treatment, moving away from him and whispering to no one in particular, “Why don’t I just get this guy a pair of pajamas and a pillow.”

Dan Stessel, a spokesman for New Jersey Transit, said that he had not received any customer complaints and that “the overall response across the board, as it relates to quiet commuting, has been overwhelmingly positive.”

Quiet cars were introduced in September as part of a three-month pilot program on 29 express trains running between Trenton and Manhattan. (Amtrak began using quiet cars in 1999.) The quiet cars are now on all New Jersey Transit weekday trains arriving in New York between 6 and 10 a.m. and departing New York between 4 and 8 p.m.

“Many people have had the same commuting patterns for years, and this does require some adaptation on their part in terms of behavior and possibly shifting around to other areas of the train,” Mr. Stessel added. “Two weeks after we started this project in September, everybody was with the program.”

Steven Heite, a 48-year-old brokerage professional from Matawan who works in Manhattan and occasionally rides in the quiet cars, said New Jersey Transit should not have the authority to dictate such behavior.

“Legislating behavior policy to people who pay monthly ticket fees and often deal with train delays is not a very good idea,” Mr. Heite said. “These are not rowdy train-riders returning from ballgames, but hard-working professionals trying to earn a living.

“That being said,” he added, “if a particular car is too loud or intrusive, you can always move to another car.”

A Subway Trip Back in Time

FROM: The New York Times

DATE: 06/12/2010

AUTHOR: Emily S. Rueb

Passengers waiting on the downtown F train platform at the Broadway-Lafayette station on Sunday were stunned when the train approached. Instead of the silver bullet that they expected, an ancient-looking, olive-drab metal box lumbered into the station. When it ground to a halt and the doors opened, men dressed in orange reflective vests hopped out to announce that this was the F train, making all local stops.

The cars on the train — model R1 through R9, for you rail fanatics out there — date back to the 1930s.

In what is now an annual holiday treat from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, they are hauled out of storage at the Transit Museum and at rail yards around the city and given a little bit of exercise on Sundays from Thanksgiving to Christmas to keep them in working order.

“It’s like an automobile,” said Greg Gil, a retired engineer who was one of several volunteers answering confused and curious passengers’ questions. “You have to keep running it.” The R1 through R9 trains ran on the Independent Line and last saw regular service in 1977, the transportation authority said.

As the eight-car train sat at the Second Avenue stop before turning around for the journey to Queens Plaza, passengers walked through the cars, holding onto the triangular grips and pointing out the period advertisements, which included a poster for S&W coffee and a did-you-know backgrounder on the Port of New York Authority, then in its relative infancy.

One woman, like many others, chose to linger on the rattan benches. “I could have transferred to another train, but I chose to stay on this one instead,” she said to Mr. Gil.

But not everyone on the platform was surprised to see the vintage train. One man, dressed in a black jacket and porkpie hat, a matching maroon bow tie and trousers, sat still on a red vinyl bench as his companion crouched uncomfortably on the floor across the way, trying to get the perfect shot.

Constantino Diaz-Duran, a freelance writer, knew that the trains would provide the perfect backdrop for a leisurely photo shoot, so he dressed up for the occasion. His companion, Chris Kilmer, who works at ABC News, was trying to get a handle on a pricey new digital SLR camera.

“We have to come up with reasons to justify its expense,” he said. (Mr. Diaz-Duran has graciously shared his photo set with us on his Facebook page).

If you want to catch one of the trains next Sunday, the M.T.A. has posted the departure schedule. The train will make all local stops.

The Secret New York Minute: Trains Late by Design

TESTATA: The New York Times
DATA: 16/10/2009
AUTORE: Michael M. Grynbaum

Commuters who think they have caught their trains in the nick of time actually had a minute’s grace to get aboard. The delayed departures from Manhattan have long been a railroading secret.

For a commuter rushing to catch a train, a minute can mean the difference between dinner with the family and leftovers in the microwave.

What most passengers do not realize is that their minute is already there.

Every commuter train that departs from New York City — about 900 a day — leaves a minute later than scheduled. If the timetable says 8:14, the train will actually leave at 8:15. The 12:48 is really the 12:49.

In other words, if you think you have only a minute to get that train — well, relax. You have two.

The phantom minute, in place for decades and published only in private timetables for employees, is meant as a grace period for stragglers who need the extra time to scramble off the platform and onto the train.

“If everyone knows they get an extra minute, they’re going to lollygag,” explained Marjorie Anders, a spokeswoman for the Metro-North Railroad. Told of this article, Ms. Anders laughed. “Don’t blow our cover!” she said.

Entirely hidden from the riding public, the secret minute is an odd departure from the railroad culture of down-to-the-second accuracy.

The railroad industry literally helped invent the concept of standard time, and time zones were established in the United States in the 1880s, 35 years before they were written into law.

And most commuters know their train by the precise minute it departs; John Cheever, chronicler of the Grand Central commuter set, titled one memorable short story “The Five-Forty-Eight.” (Turns out it was the 5:49.)

The trains quickly make up the minute: at all other stops, the public timetable prevails.

The courtesy minute does not exist at commuter railroads in Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, or San Francisco.

But in New York, railroad enthusiasts said, the secret minute dates back decades.

“That’s been done forever, from my knowledge,” said Jack Swanberg, 70, an unofficial historian of Metro-North who once oversaw departures at Grand Central Terminal. “I was the trainmaster starting in 1970, and it was the case then. I’m sure it’s been the case since 1870 for all I know.”

At Grand Central, no rider should consider the minute a guarantee. Train conductors have the discretion to depart at the publicly posted time, as long as the platform is clear and no customers are rushing down the ramp.

But an unscientific survey of 20 trains leaving at rush hour on a recent weekday evening found that, on average, the trains left about 58 seconds past their listed departure time.

No schedules or signs in the terminal suggest the minute exists. At each train’s posted departure time, the schedule billboard announces, “Departed,” even as the train idles at the platform, receiving its last cargo of stumbling, out-of-breath passengers.

A worker in the central information booth, asked if a train was leaving a minute late, emphatically shook his head. “If it says 7:14, it leaves at 7:14,” he said gravely.

Not exactly.

More than half the trains surveyed this week waited the full minute or longer. The tardiest train waited at the platform for 81 seconds, while one train bound for Connecticut pushed off after just 32 seconds.

Still, the delay allowed at least one passenger, already running late, to buy three beers from a nearby concession stand before jogging down the platform to make it onboard.

“It makes me look like I’m a nice guy,” Jason Macaluso, a conductor on Metro-North for 12 years, said with a laugh.

The minute was originally known as “gate time,” dating to the days when gates were used to block off the ramps that lead down to the platforms. (The gates are still occasionally used at Grand Central.)

At the publicly posted departure time, the gates would be closed; those who had already made it through would have a minute to climb onto the train.

The practice gradually extended to trains to Long Island and New Jersey that start in Pennsylvania Station and the Long Island Rail Road’s Brooklyn terminal.

Railroad officials seemed somewhat cagey when asked about the minute.

An Amtrak spokesman admitted that a few of his railroad’s trains in major cities wait 60 seconds after the listed time, but he did not specify exactly which trains or which cities.

Riders told of the tacit 60-second reprieve were by turns amazed and grateful.

“I was surprised the train was still there, to tell you the truth,” said Christian Riddle, 28, slightly out of breath and looking more than a little relieved, as he leaned into a leather seat on a Brewster-bound local at Grand Central the other day.

According to the departure board, his train had left at 8:22 p.m., just as the timetable promised.

But Mr. Riddle, a carpenter headed home to Hawthorne, N.Y., ran anyway, hopping into the rear car just as the clock ticked 8:23. Ten more seconds passed before the doors slid shut.

Missing the train would have meant a half-hour wait for Mr. Riddle, who deemed the secret minute policy “pretty cool.”

“But I’d still try to get there on time,” he added. “You never know.”