Hamptons Subway Fare Price Going Up August 1

SCENE ON THE SUBWAY

Paul McCartney was seen on the Westhampton platform walking with Ringo Starr, a fellow Beatle who apparently had flown in to Westhampton from London to be McCartney’s guest at his house in Amagansett.

FARE INCREASE

We have the sad task of informing the public that the price of a ride on Hamptons Subway will go from $2.75 to $4.25 beginning on Aug. 1, unless President Donald Trump relents.

As you may know, the president has it in for the Hamptons Subway.   He’s tried defunding it – but there are no federal funds to defund because the subway system is privately owned.  He’s tried banning foreign residents from using it, threatening deportation if anyone from a foreign land tries to use it, but the courts have blocked him. And he’s tried to buy it. But Commissioner Bill Aspinall and the rest of the board are not interested.

The president’s latest move, however, will result in a rate increase, and we are unable to stop it. President Trump has announced that since Hamptons Subway is underground it is therefore not part of the United States. As a result, it is apparently some kind of heretofore unknown foreign land, so it can be subject to tariffs. And beginning Aug. 1, unless something is done to mitigate this order, it will be necessary for everyone who uses it to pay a 30% tariff for the privilege. And that is that.

Also, the government will be building an inner turnstile on all the platforms to receive the tariff, just before you get to the regular turnstiles.

Commissioner Aspinall, whose great grandparents emigrated to the United States from Bulgaria in 1901, has requested a meeting with the president to discuss the matter, but so far there has been no offer to have that happen. Aspinall is now trying to buy a meeting with the president, but so far even that seems to be not happening as the president expects those meeting with him to pay a fee and Trump has not been forthcoming with the amount required yet.

THE WATER MAIN FLOOD

A flooding of the subway system that happened during the night between Saturday and Sunday has done Hamptons Subway a big favor.  The subway system closed down for maintenance at 1 a.m. as it usually does and an hour later the flooding was discovered, roaring through everywhere. No one knew what was causing it at first, but soon the break was discovered in a permanently closed men’s room just off the Hampton Bays platform. For the longest time nobody was able to stop it. With that, an alarm went off and everyone down below was ordered out.  By 4 a.m., though, with the flooding finally under control and the water receding, it was found that this flooding had cleaned all the walls, floors, ceilings and fixtures along all the subway platforms and tunnels scrubbed clean as new. The subway interior hasn’t been cleaned this way since the subway was built in 1932 by Ivan Kratz.

The cleaning of the walls like this revealed some astonishing works of art.  There are huge murals on the walls by William Merritt Chase, Jackson Pollock, Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers and by dozens of other famous painters who apparently were commissioned to do something down there.

The value of these works, according to experts, is in the hundreds of millions and even billions, and it is believed by some that if these works can be carefully removed from the walls somehow and sold at auction – it might just be done by carefully replacing the tiles –  all the economic problems of the subway system and even the entire country, whatever country it is, can be solved.

At the present time, Hamptons Subway has reopened and you are welcome to use it, and you will be pleased to see that great museum-grade spotlights have been set up in the ceiling all along the system through the tunnels to highlight this and that, and the trains are traveling at half speed, so what used to be a ten-minute trip from East Hampton to Bridgehampton is now a 20-minute trip.  And nobody seems to mind.

WI-FI PROBLEM

The free Wi-Fi on the Hamptons Subway stopped working on Wednesday and hopefully should be fixed by Monday if technicians can find out the cause of why it stopped. At the present time, the techies are working on a theory that the Wi-Fi might have just gotten very tired during all the jiggling and effort it has been putting out since the service’s founding in 2007. There are symptoms of that – dizziness, a general lethargy, an ability to restart but then crash again. We hope that by giving it a rest for a few days it should restore itself to its prior magnificence. We will keep you informed.

COMMISSIONER BILL ASPINALL’S MESSAGE

We want to thank all our riders and employees for being so patient during the flooding we endured last Sunday night. Employees are to be paid as if these were non-counted sick days, and riders will be reimbursed for ten rides that they did not take, because that is the average number each normally takes as we have determined. This will be paid just as soon as all those artworks are auctioned off and the monies received from the government for the sale are in the bank.