Some of us in the RU community had been using the Roosevelt Island Tram to commute between the Island and Manhattan. This month, I move onto the Island and when it is running again, I will start using the tram on a regular basis. However, the ride I will never forget happened before I moved in, a month ago.

My mother, me, and two of our rescuers

The tram got stuck, hanging over the East River, for twelve hours with 47 people in it, including me, my parents, my brother, (also a postdoc at RU who lives in Faculty House), and his son. I took this trip to show my family how great it is to live on the Island. I guess I’ll have to try harder to convince them…

This incident was a treat for the newspaper headlines. My four-year-old nephew was a star in many New York newspapers.

The tram has been featured in many motion pictures such as Billy Crystal’s City Slickers and Sylvester Stallone’s Nighthawks. It is currently featured in a popular attraction at Universal Studios Theme Park in Florida where King Kong “attacks” a tram filled with “passengers.”

The crowd in the tram was, just as in the movies, a good example of the New York melting pot: a family of Orthodox Jews with many kids who started praying at sunset; tourists from Israel, who did a good job entertaining the Jewish kids, singing in Hebrew; a shaggy guy with a severe nicotine craving and terrible bad breath who persisted in chatting with everyone; Bellevue nurses who knew how to deal patiently with panic-like behavior; a cranky old lady with a crutch who wanted to beat up the cops during the rescue when they were holding her in the air over the river; a torero-style couple from Madrid who stoically faced the vertigo of the water under the tram as if they were facing a bull; members of the Island’s luxury tennis club that already knew that “it was not a good idea to take public transportation: what if there was a terrorist attack?”; a very talkative French woman, who played the role of the French Resistance informer. She called her many informer friends who were watching us on TV, to keep us informed of what was going on. Of course, we heard nearly nothing from the MTA—the tram’s intercom was broken, as well as the emergency power and the diesel engine that should have worked in case the emergency power fails.

The Swiss-made tram dates from 1976, and there is no engineer in the city capable of maintaining the system. This suggests that there is a woefully inadequate budget being invested for maintenance. The tram is run by Interfac, on behalf of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation of the State of New York (RIOC). RIOC is a state public benefit corporation created in 1984 to run the Island’s services and complete the Island’s development. The MTA has a deal with RIOC to be able to profit from using the tram, and trusts Interfac to keep the tram going. However, Interfac’s motto seems to be “run it until it breaks, and then we’ll see if we can fix it.”

The MTA subscribes to the same philosophy. Two winters ago, the A train stopped running because of a fire. A homeless person used an underground subway room as his winter home. While trying to make it warm, he lit a fire that destroyed electrical outlets required for the proper functioning of the A train. The MTA could not fix it because such outlets were made by factories that were already closed by the 1940s. The MTA announced that it would take more than five years to modernize the A train, one of the most important lines of the NY subway system.

Unless that happens, people will have to put up with continual irregularities in the running of the A train. Modernization can take men to the moon, but it’s not there yet for the people of New York.

But let’s get back to the tram and make a long story short. At the end of too many hours holding primary necessities, we were informed that we would be rescued by hanging metal cages. The rescue operation was improvised by the NYPD emergency team and the Orthodox Jews tested the first trial of the rescuing operation. They had priority because they were the ones with the most kids. It was a success; they arrived alive and safe. Mayor Bloomberg came to the Island, gave them a big hug in front of the cameras, and declared a happy end to the drama that, just as in the movies, featured NYPD and the Fire Department as the main heroes.

The central question that was forgotten in the middle of the media entertainment was “Why weren’t the two backup emergency systems working?” MTA users don’t need Hollywood heroes, they need modernization and decent maintenance of the services they pay for. In other words, MTA users need good use of the money they spend on taxes and fares.