Fare Hike Up Fair Mountain — New York's MTA to start charging $3 per ride if they cannot meet $800 million deficit. "This whopping increase would likely be coupled with very serious service cuts. In plain English, it could be lots more out of your pocket for the joy of more crowding, longer waits and less reliable service." Time to invest in those bike lines the city has been talking about.

After a fare hike whose implementation saw neither the subway's efficiency increase nor its piss smell decrease, the New York MTA has a plan to drum up some much needed cash to cover next year's $900 million deficit: whole subway cars wrapped in hideous advertising.

Entire cars have been turned into commercials before, but those ads were relegated to the the cars' interior. Now, even the sad bastards just walking past a midtown shuttle full of schmoes off to some other hellish destination in this filthy city will have to face pictures demanding they watch the History Channel.

It's like the graffiti the NYC government worked so hard to combat, just without all the annoying artistry and anti-commercialism.

Have you ever totally known that something was true but still felt strangely validated when you saw your longstanding theory brought to life by a semi-credible print publication?

Well exactly how we felt when we picked up today's New York Post and read the headline: "Pervs Ride The No. 5 Line." Um, obviously! We're just glad someone else finally said it. [NYP]

As if the inevitability of overhearing someone else’s cell phone conversation on the way to work wasn’t exciting enough, soon commuters will have to pay more to do so.

Outside of the MTA, the upcoming 2008 fair hike doesn’t have many fans. Considering another hike is slated for 2010, isn’t a quarter a bit steep? MTA spokesman Jeremy Soffin explains why the fare isn’t going up a dime:

The limitations of technology would make a $2.10 fare extremely costly to implement and would provide a much poorer quality of service

Translation: Giving ninety cents in change would be too costly for the MTA, so New Yorkers have to pay an extra 15 cents a ride. The guy at our bodega uses the same excuse for charging $2 for a bottle of water.

[Daily News via Second Ave. Sagas]

It says a lot about New York that our moment of Zen is on public transit. But now the smell of urine in the subway stations will be accompanied by mindless cellphone chatter.

The MTA signed a deal with Transit Wireless to wire the 277 subway station. At an additional cost, riders will be able to talk underground while waiting for the train, but there will be no service in the tunnels.

The MTA screws up a lot—we’ll just say the L train and leave it at that—but we have to give them props for showing some restraint on this deal. If we get didn’t thirty minutes a day without overhearing someone complain about their relationship or the stock market, we’d really go crazy.

• Funny, we never realized that, in New York, "carrying a 9-mm Magnum is at least something usual." Oh, those crazy (gun-toting) foreign reporters…

• We blame the MTA for screwing us over, not the rain.

• Could it be that American Apparel just became our new favorite store? Nope, wait, turns out they just make boring hoodie sweatshirts, and it was just the gratuitous nudity in their ad campaign distorting our judgment.

• And if the heat, rain, and hordes of walking pedestrians didn't kill Brooklyn residents, maybe this tornado will.

• Oh well, we guess there are worse ways to calm city students than by lining the school halls with chicken blood.

Good news, freelancers! While you're sitting around, waiting to get paid for the 400 words you wrote last fall, rejoice: People with real jobs are totally screwed today. You see, the city is advising them to stay home, which means companies like ours – where, on any given day, half the staff stays home already – are the only ones at full productivity.

A New York City transit official said Wednesday that heavy rains have caused major disruptions in the subway system and urged riders to stay home.

New York Transit official Paul Fleuranges said in an interview with NY 1 that no subway line was unaffected and said "if you can stay home, please do so." Heavy rains overnight tapered off Wednesday morning.

Meanwhile, at a time like this, good luck reaching those city-sponsored cooling stations.

• Drug dealers using Mr. Softee trucks to hock their wares? Please tell us this is just another lame Friday sequel.

• If this woman gets a free MTA pass for life, maybe we should start having babies on buses.

• Getting shot in the park is no picnic.

• A Brooklyn artist thinks he's being nouveau bohemian, but when it comes down to it, he's just a silly tattooed man, living in a yellow submarine.

• Gephyrophobia…it's so now.

• Pretentious Williamsburg artists now throwing dinner parties for their laptops. They're BYOE (as in Bring Your Own Ethernet cable, obvs.)

• Mayor Bloomberg continues to deny that he's campaigning, despite the fact that there's no other plausible explanation for his continued presence in those annoying Midwestern states.

• A disgruntled cabbie equates the city-mandated GPS tracking systems to "an ankle bracelet they put on criminals." Or on fiery redheads with early-onset liver failure.

• We have no problem with Disney renting out NYC subway trains to stave off another fare hike. Unless that means our morning commute will be infiltrated by repeated renditions of the song "It's A Small World After All."

• Turns out Governor Eliot Spitzer just loves full-scale state mandated investigations. Except when they're targeting his own administration.

• We'll agree pay more for a subway the day we don't have to stand with our face pressed against a non-deodorant wearing stranger and our Marc Jacobs bag caught in the closing doors.

• Taxis rumored to go on strike, presumably because they're afraid city will catch crack down on their time-honored policy of ripping off tourists and not picking up black people.

• New Yorker's have ridiculously high Mercury levels, thanks to their ridiculously frequent visits to ridiculously priced restaurants like Sushi Samba. Ridiculous!

• The Sheryll Princess dinner cruise. It's just like Rosie's cruise, except without the unfunny lesbian humor and all the gay people.

CONTINUED »

• Rule of thumb, NYPD: Next time you get a complaint about an illegal fireworks display, try not to blame the woman with Down's Syndrome.

• Remember the good ole' days when Girls Scouts, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Encyclopedia Men came to your door? Now, it's just psychos posing as fireman and drug addicts pretending to be cops.

• New York City male ballet dancer loves the nose candy just as much as the next emaciated coke-head.

• Indian Point is said to have highly trained professional engineers, but we think Homer Simpson's in charge.

• Hurry, Hurry! Get your New York souvenirs, discount clothing, and pirated movies before Fulton Street shuts down.

• Along with publicly endorsing the gays, Governor Spitzer is now said to be embracing the idea of legalizing medical marijuana. Related: NYU students plan gay, pot-smoking celebration.

• Con Ed assures Queens that they won't suffer from any major blackouts this summer. Better luck next year, Bronx!

• New ice-cream flavor, "Staten Island Landfill" is under attack by the borough president, who feels it's misrepresentative of the community. A spokesperson for the ever-accommodating ice cream company suggested the flavor be renamed, "Staten Island: Because The Rent In Astoria, Queens Is Still Too High."

• The MTA hates disabled passengers. Then again, who doesn't?

• Robbers shot and killed a Bodega owner in Queens. presumably in order to get their hands on the early shipment of US Weekly.

• New York to be the first northern state to apologize for slavery. Meanwhile, West Virgina and New Jersey are still "thinking about it."

• Naomi Campbell: bringing saphron traffic-vests back, makes sanitation work fashionable.

• Three Long Islanders were apprehended on the Triborough Bridge with $4000 worth of coke…because they couldn't pay the $4.50 toll.

• Cost of imaginary Second Avenue subway project increases by $54 million real dollars.

• "NYU is poisoning the culture of the Village." Well, obviously.

• Police found 22 pounds of marijuana concealed in a spare tire. More surprising, however, was the 50 grams of coke that was stashed in the love handles/cankle regions.

• VF head honcho Graydon Carter enjoy running around in short shorts, hurling 5-foot rails at construction workers and then joking about it afterwards.

• Kobe Bryant to miss tonight's Knicks game for accidentally-on-purpose elbowing Manu Ginobli in the face; Jossip to miss tonight's Knicks game because we just don't care.

• MTA workers rail against subway map condoms, prefer to keep their work and personal lives separate.

• Whether you ride the "special school bus" or the regular school bus, these new city-wide routes are really frickin' confusing.

• Hells Angels allegedly assaulted a 40 year old woman out of a misguided attempt to prove their gang name was "ironical."

• If you're getting your child-rearing advice from the New York Post and Nanny 911, you're clearly too far gone for this article to be of any help whatsoever.

• A New York-based attorney is suing a luxury London hotel for giving him a case of the creepy-crawlies.

• MTA adding train arrival signs at all L train stations, offering straphangers a crystal clear timetable for the L trains that never come.

• A "Soundproof Window Installation" van blares its horn in Columbus Circle until everyone in hearing distance agrees to purchase its wares.

• New York city property value jumped 19% in 2006, yielding a tidy profit for your landlord and a rent increase for you.

• Mayor Bloomberg admits the alarming gassy smell is unpleasant, but says there is "no indication" it will eventually kill us all.

• Memo to the NYT: The first rule of ultimate fighting is you do not talk about ultimate fighting.

• Boy killed by LIRR; Subway Hero blasted for "dropping the ball."

• Many subway lines now support cell phone service; constant, annoying jabbering should make for pleasant distraction from Crazy-Eyed Homeless Guy.

• Abracadabra! With a sweep of their arms, subway planners magically transform a pretty, glass dome into an ugly, stainless steel cube.

• Ironically, the new, free NYC condoms to take after the various subways that never come when you want them to.

Yes, how very interested we were to learn that when your suit pants pocket tears on the armrest of a certain LIRR or Metro-North car, it's the MTA that foots the bill for repairs. Over $100k has been dished out over the last four years to mend fabric and sew tears.

But for some, the ripping sound is only the beginning.

“I felt they were a little nickel-and-diming me,” said Philip Horowitz, who tried to get reimbursed for $130, the amount he remembered paying for a pair of silk Tommy Bahama slacks. In response, a claims agent for the railroad said she had found the pants advertised online for $125.

But that was not the amount that the railroad offered Mr. Horowitz, a repeat victim of the armrest. It paid him $80, reasoning that the pants had depreciated in value in the year he owned them before they were torn.

Silly Philip Horowitz. Everybody knows that Tommy Bahama gear depreciates in value like Ralph Lauren, while Armani and Jil Sander goes up. You could've had the MTA reimbursing you $1,400 for the pants you spent only $1,000 on.

• The NYT sees Jane Pauley's lawsuit and raises her "You knew you were doing an interview for an ad supplement. Or at least your flack did." Will she call? [WSJ]

• Tara Reid did Us Weekly last week, and the Today show today. Then there's co-hosting The View tomorrow, and The Tyra Banks Show next week. So many plastic surgery tales, so little time. [Planet Gossip]

• The only diet advice we trust is diet advice that comes from a restaurant critic. [Grub Street]

• The blogger fights didn't end with Perez Hilton. Last night at the MTVu Awards, a small brawl broke out between actor-cum-music hack Jared Leto and Stereogum blogger Scott Lapatine. [BWE, Stereogum]

• You're expected to report back to us on whether Judith Miller's thank you notes are scented. [WaPo]

• The Second Avenue subway line – staring down Moynihan Station for title of "most talked about, never seen transportation development" &ndahs; will be called the T line, for no better reason than the MTA's superintendant likes the letter. [DI]

That little subway flood back in '04 that brought trains to a halt and commuters to a rage? Blame those freebie newspapers, the MTA says. Flooding on the tracks isn't an explicit result of poor drainage, you see; it's the fault of am New York and Metro, whose stacks of leftover papers often wind up on the tracks, increasing the chances of fires as well as floods. While the official MTA report isn't being released to the public (security concerns and all), it cites the launch of the freebie papers three years ago as the cause of a sudden spike in problems. The publishers, meanwhile, have been quick to react, pointing out that they don't distribute their bite-size news on MTA property. But what about the likes of Rupert and Mort's rags?

[MTA board member Barry] Feinstein acknowledged that purchased newspapers were also found on the tracks, but not at the same volume as free papers. "People are paying for those newspapers and they take them with them to work. They're not leaving them on the subway, they're not tossing them on the tracks," he said.

Well, except for those sponsored copies of the Daily News wrapped in J&R advertisements. It makes perfect sense how they make their way from seat covers on the R train to drain covers on the tracks.

Free Newspapers Blamed for Subway Flooding [Annie Karni, New York Sun]

• The Iranians are coming, the Iranians are coming! Hide your children! They eat babies! [NYP]

• Why are the explosive vapor things never in Williamsburg instead of Greenpoint? [Gothamist]

• Oprah spending an hour with a gay guy can only be described by the Daily News as "creepy." That's totally what Jim McGreevey's mission is all about. [NYDN]

• SNL officially axes Horatio Sanz. Which means maybe New York will regain a trace of cool. [ETP]

• So much for those new N trains. [NYT]