With commutes that took hours, half-mile lines at suburban gas stations and city buses stuffed beyond capacity, the transportation systems in most of the region slowed to a crawl on Wednesday, amid promises that some subway and commuter rail services would be restored by the Thursday morning commute.
On Wednesday night, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo declared a transportation emergency and said all fares on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s commuter trains, subways and buses would be waived on Thursday and Friday.
Beginning at 6 a.m., some service will resume on 14 of the city’s 23 subway lines, but several critical lines — the No. 3 and 7 trains and the B, C, E, G and Q trains — remain entirely dark. Many trains will have gaps in their routes, including the No. 4 train, which will have no service between 42nd Street in Manhattan and Borough Hall in Brooklyn.
And if New Yorkers want to try their luck at driving into Manhattan on Thursday, most will require company: Beginning at 6 a.m., the city planned to bar private vehicles carrying fewer than three people from entering Manhattan over most major bridges, like the Robert F. Kennedy, Manhattan, Brooklyn and Williamsburg Bridges.
But on Wednesday, as many businesses resumed normal operations for the first time since the storm, commutes were a mess. City buses, the only piece of the mass transit network operating in earnest on Wednesday, often bypassed waiting commuters, unable to take on more passengers. Those who did make it on board often got off well before their stop, reasoning that they could walk faster.
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| Flood waters reached the corner of Canal and Hudson Streets.[Monday night] |
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| People waited for the bus on Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan |
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| Cars were piled up at the entrance to a garage in Lower Manhattan. |
New York City public schools will remain closed through the rest of the week, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said Wednesday, creating an enormous scheduling headache for harried parents.
The mayor said he expected almost all schools to reopen on Monday
Parking garages filled early, with lines of cars in front of some gates before they opened near dawn. Diego Trilleras, the manager at a Manhattan Parking Group garage at East 56th Street, said he had not seen such a business boom since before the economic downturn. Some customers, he said, would probably have to wait an hour to get their cars out again. “They understand,” he said hopefully.
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New Jersey was reeling on Wednesday from the impact of Hurricane Sandy, which has caused catastrophic flooding here in Hoboken and in other New York City suburbs, destroyed entire neighborhoods across the state and wiped out iconic boardwalks in shore towns that had enchanted generations of vacationgoers. It has become increasingly apparent that New Jersey took the brunt of it. Officials estimated that the state suffered many billions of dollars in property damage. About a quarter of the state’s population — more than two million people — remained without power on Wednesday .