Why New York's new Second Avenue subway changes nothing

I know because I lived on East 87th Street, a block and half from the East River, for several years and often struggled with the overburdened 4-5-6 trains, for which passengers would wait six deep on the platforms.

The new line will be constructed in three phases, eventually running from 125th Street to lower Manhattan; the finished section connects 96th Street and 63rd Street. It's a godsend.

But as lovely as the new stations might be, and advanced as the construction methods may have been, the Second Avenue line fails to address the subway's biggest problem.

The vast network of trains, tunnels, and elevated lines unites the city's boroughs and enables millions of New Yorkers to get around easily and (relatively) cheaply. Alongside the London Tube and the Paris Metro, it's one of the Big Three most-used and most-beloved mass-transit systems on earth.

And the subway is the most unpleasant large-scale public space in America. It's old, hot, loud, smelly, crumbling in places, moderately unreliable, dank, overcrowded, full of garbage, and infested with rats. It's not as bad as it was in the 1970s, when lurching, graffiti-covered trains were the rule, but it hasn't been substantially improved in the decades since New York recovered its affluence.

I rode the subway constantly between 1989 and 2004. I hated every minute of it. When I lived in Los Angeles, I occasionally rode the metro, a much more modern system. I loved every second.

After doing everything I could to avoid the NYC subway, I recently returned to semiregular ridership. The episodes are easily the most depressing part of my entire life.

For a city as big, rich, and ambitious as New York, this is baffling — more baffling than the fact that it took 100 years to get the Second Avenue line, after numerous starts and stops. New York is a city of symbols cast in engineering: the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building, Grand Central Terminal, One World Trade, the High Line.

But the subway overtakes them all — in scale and in a sort of proud and willful embrace of thoroughgoing scuzziness.

I'll admit that there's a bit of throwback allure to this. When you enter the underground realm, you're returning to a less airbrushed and sanitized New York. The New York of the subway is emphatically real.

But I think that's a cop-out. The No. 1 thing that New York could do to make everyone's life better is make the subway a more pleasant environment. Heck, the em>map is considered a masterpiece of graphic design. Just studying it makes you feel better.

The efforts are there. We have more air conditioning. There's cellphone service and Wi-Fi here and there. The stations are somewhat cleaner. The modernized trains make less horrifying noises when they grind into the stations and are graffiti-proof. You can hear the public announcements on and off the trains. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority employees are, in my experience, helpful and professional. The subway is, to my eye, well policed — that sense of omnipresent menace I felt in the late 1980s is gone.

I don't like to attack New York icons. But when it comes to the subway, I think the city is missing an opportunity to undertake a massive aesthetic rehabilitation program. And I don't mean on the art and design front; the Second Avenue line, as well as other new stations throughout the metropolis, look much better than the more weathered quarters of the underground world.

I mean, on the basic quality-of-life stuff, the MTA is moving in the right direction: Earlier this year, it undertook the first two phases of a massive track-cleanup effort. It says two additional phases will improve its ability to remove huge amounts of garbage from the tracks.

But the system is vast, and it's well beyond the capabilities of the MTA to make it a truly marvelous or uplifting environment. That's why the Second Avenue line — which could end up, short-term, being the most obsessively cared-for in the entire system — changes nothing. The subway has always been a beautiful means to an end. But it will never be a beautiful place to spend time.